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Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen! Are you tired of winning yet?

In an identically titled article, I noted that the federal workforce in the Philadelphia metropolitan area had significantly through now-former employees voluntarily leaving on their own. At least some of them wouldn’t have left if Kamala Harris Emhoff had won the election, but it is nevertheless great news:

Since January 2025, the federal government has cut -12% of its headcount, or -345,000 jobs.

Federal jobs now account for 1.68% of total employment, the lowest percentage since at least the 1930s.

Meanwhile, the federal job openings rate fell -0.5 percentage points in March, to 2.7%, the 2nd-lowest since the 2020 pandemic low.

And guess what? The great news is continuing!

Record number of immigration cases now ending in voluntary departure, report says

The number of migrants receiving “voluntary departure” decisions is way up.

By Laura Romero | Tuesday, May 12, 2026 | 7:40 PM

Immigrants are giving up their claims in immigration court and opting to voluntarily leave the U.S. in exponentially higher numbers under the current Trump administration’s immigration crackdown than at any time previously, according to a new report based on federal data.

The report by the Vera Institute of Justice shows that the number of people in removal proceedings receiving “voluntary departure” decisions has risen dramatically — particularly among those held in federal detention.

That, of course, is the whole point of immigration detention: make the illegals realize that they aren’t going to simply be released, so they just give up and go home. By voluntarily leaving, they don’t have a deportation on their records, so they could apply for legal immigration in the future.

“This is widespread across the United States,” said Jacquelyn Pavilon, one of the authors of the report. “In three-quarters of U.S. states and territories, the number of voluntary departure decisions increased more than fivefold since the end of Biden’s term.”

I don’t know about you, but I’m not tired of winning yet.

Voluntary departures in immigration court — in which a formal request to depart the country is approved by a judge, assuming the requester is legally permitted to leave — is different from self-deportations arranged through the Department of Homeland Security, in which migrants inform DHS they’re leaving the country in order to avoid potential detention or removal.

The report’s co-author told ABC News that while the number of voluntary departures is rising, it does not necessarily mean people want to leave the U.S.

No, of course, they don’t really want to leave, but we American citizens want them to leave, and 77,302,580 of us voted for them to leave.

“Many of those people may have legal avenues to remain in the United States,” Pavilon said. “Voluntary departure decisions do not mean that you do not have legal rights to remain. People are under harsh conditions and making very difficult decisions.”

According to the report, voluntary departures surged from roughly 800 per month at the end of the Biden administration to more than 8,800 by February 2026.

By those numbers, Donald Trump is an eleven times better President than Joe Biden, but that’s an admittedly low bar to surpass.

Alejandro Mayorkas, the Secretary of Homeland Security under President Biden, finally admitted that that Administration should have ramped up border controls sooner:

In an interview at the POLITICO Security Summit, former Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who became a lightning rod of Republican criticism for the Biden administration’s alleged mishandling of a historic wave of migration to the United States, placed most of the blame on a “broken immigration system” that set a “low bar” for admission to the country for those with “credible fear of persecution.”

Asked if earlier steps from the Biden administration on border security — including raising the bar for migrants claiming “credible fear” of returning to their home country — would have prevented President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, Mayorkas replied: “I am not in a position to speculate, but I will tell you that I would be far more better rested and less punched.”

Mayorkas, who was impeached by the House in 2024 on claims that he intentionally did not enforce U.S. immigration laws, also emphasized that the Biden administration did, eventually, act to address the migrant influx at the border.

“I was very pleased that in June of 2024, we took executive action that, I thought, made reforms that were sensible and that proved successful,” Mayorkas said. “Our tougher border stance in June of ‘24 was coupled with an increased focus on providing lawful pathways for people to arrive at the United States outside the hands of smugglers — more secure and more humanitarian. Those two combined — our numbers dropped 70, 75 percent.”

The rare comments from Mayorkas, who has only spoken publicly a handful of times since leaving DHS in January 2025, speak to the tensions that existed within the Biden administration about what balance to strike between enforcing U.S. immigration laws amid a major influx of migrants to U.S. ports of entry after the Covid-19 pandemic and adopting a humane posture toward people fleeing genuine hardship and plights around the world.

77,302,580 of us said that we were not at all interested in a “humane posture” toward the wave of immigrants. What we want is for them to improve their lives in their home countries. Our immigration policies should be based on admitting people who will benefit the United States, not just feel sorry for them. Far, far, far too many of the illegal immigrants have been a huge burden on our government and our communities, and a major factor in street crime as well.

Had Secretary Mayorkas and President Biden and “border tsarina” Kamala Harris Emhoff done their f(ornicating) jobs and enforced our immigration laws, an enforcement system that was working and which they inherited from President Trump’s first term, we wouldn’t have had the huge problem Mr Trump inherited in his second term, and be having to be as aggressive to solve the problem. If the Biden Administration had done its job, there wouldn’t be two stupid Minnesotans who are now stone-cold graveyard dead for interference with law enforcement, all because leftist thinking didn’t have their brains working Pretti Good.

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Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen, Federal employees are leaving, which is an unambiguously good thing

One thing is certain: that Donald Trump guy sure is an evil genius! He wanted to reduce the size of the federal government, and he’s gotten a lot of government employees to leave voluntarily!

From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Trump’s administration planned mass layoffs. Instead, thousands of Philly-area federal workers left on their own.

Thousands in the Philadelphia region left federal jobs last year, but only 2% of them were laid off.

by Joe Yerardi and Ariana Perez-Castells | Wednesday, May 13, 2026 | 5:01 AM EDT

Early last year, federal workers braced for layoffs after President Donald Trump took office. But as his administration’s threat loomed, many in the Philadelphia region opted to leave on their own instead, recent data suggest.

In 2025, roughly 4,700 federal employees in the Philadelphia metro area — an 11-county region spanning Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland — left their jobs. That is more than in the two previous years combined.

But only 2% of them were laid off, according to an Inquirer analysis of data from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, the government’s human resources arm.

The vast majority of workers who left their positions chose to do so. They opted to retire, quit, or take a government incentive — the Trump administration’s deferred resignation program — that allowed federal employees to resign and continue to be paid for months.

There’s a lot more at the original, detailing how the departures were made, and that’s good reporting.

Some left because they saw their agency’s mission change, said Richard Gennetti, a national AFGE representative in Pennsylvania.

He heard from Environmental Protection Agency employees, for instance, who told him, “‘I’m not doing this. I came to protect the environment, not water down all the rules. I came to provide services. I didn’t come to destroy them,’” Gennetti recalled.

Hey, if they can’t stand to implement the policies of the government, they should leave rather than linger on, trying to subvert the policies of our elected leadership.

Regardless of their motives, and regardless of the manner in which they left, they all helped the President’s goal of reducing the federal workforce, and that’s a good thing.

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You in a heap o’ trouble, boy! As Leroy Jethro Gibbs once said, "Believe me, son, you will not do well in prison."

Timothy Shay, mugshot by Bucks County District Attorney’s Office, via NBC Channel 10.

I have previously noted that the credentialed media frequently conceal the sex of the victims of child molestation, something which makes me believe that this is being done to hide the frequency with which the molestation is homosexual in nature. This time, The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Vinny Vella put it right out in front for us.

A Bucks County music teacher and serial molester of 18 boys sentenced to decades in prison

Timothy Shay was sentenced to 18 to 54 years in state prison on Tuesday for molesting 18 students over the course of three decades.

by Vinny Vella | Tuesday, May 12, 2026 | 2:59 PM EDT

Over three decades, in music shop backrooms and, sometimes, his own home, Timothy Shay molested 18 boys whose parents trusted him to teach them piano and saxophone lessons.

On Tuesday, as Shay, 50, was sentenced to 18 to 54 years in state prison, Bucks County Court Judge Stephen Corr expressed outrage over his crimes.

“You stole from these boys their childhoods, you stole from them their love of music, you stole from them their ability to love, and you stole from them their adulthood, because they are still living with this,” Corr said.

“Quite frankly, if someone hadn’t spoken up and given these men the courage to speak up, you might still be out there perpetrating your crime on other victims,” he added.

No, of course the Inquirer didn’t publish the malefactor’s mugshot, though one photo shows it in the background, enough to show that he’s white, but not really enough to make him recognizable. Fortunately NBC Channel 10 in Philly also carried the story, and television being a visually-oriented medium, used the mugshot.

Shay, of Middletown Township, pleaded no contest in September to corruption of minors and related crimes in connection with the assaults, which began in the late 1990s and ended only with his arrest in February 2025, prosecutors said. That arrest came after one victim, decades after his abuse occurred, filed a police report.

So, he got away with it for a long, long time.

The details of his sometimes-slow grooming of his young victims can be found at the embedded link; I will not repeat it here. But I will suggest that, as Mark Harmon playing Leroy Jethro Gibbs in NCIS once said while interrogating a young punk, he will not do well in prison. Sentenced to 18 to 54 years, unless something changes, he won’t get out of prison until he’s in his late sixties at the earliest, and could very well only leave prison feet-first.

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Some common sense concerning the Louisiana v Callais decision. This might not be quite the result for which Republicans hoped

The two pages of the Congressionally-signed original of the Fourteenth Amendment in the National Archives, written with iron gall ink on parchment. It was last publicly displayed in 2013. As of 2025, it is stored in the research wing of the archives inside a boxed book of Acts of Congress from its 39th session.

Our good friends on the left, who have been so supportive of the Fourteenth Amendment’s provision that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside” must grant automatic citizenship to the “anchor babies” of people in our country illegally, they have not been nearly as thrilled with the Equal Protection Clause, “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” when that clause says, essentially and throughout dozens of decisions, that Americans may not be treated differently based upon their race. Oh, the left certainly doesn’t want white Americans to be given a legal advantage, but legal “remedies” to “past discrimination” to assist black Americans meet with their approval.

After a Supreme Court ruling that was an affront to history, some states can’t wait to turn back the clock on voting rights | Editorial

After long ago overcoming racist efforts to dilute the power of voters of color, the conservative justices have unreasonably made it more difficult to challenge discriminatory legislative maps.

by The Editorial Board | Monday, May 11, 2026 | 5:01 AM EDT

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. — George Santayana

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the U.S. Supreme Court giving its seal of approval to Republican attempts to turn back the clock on voting rights in America is that, after long ago overcoming racist efforts to dilute the power of voters of color, we now see similar vipers slithering past the corroded gates of hell that were supposed to hold them in check.

The court defied reason with an opinion that, in essence, neutered the 1965 Voting Rights Act by ruling government efforts to remedy past racism, which tipped the scales in favor of white political candidates, are also racist — unless those remedies can be tied to specific acts of past discrimination that made them necessary.

The decision has opened the door for states to attempt to invalidate any congressional district lines drawn to favor candidates of color.

Note what appalls The Editorial Board, that they might lose “congressional district lines drawn to favor candidates of color.” The Board are specifically asking for districts which favor non-white candidates. This would be the same Editorial Board which wrote last January:

The president has also successfully lobbied some Republican-controlled states to remake congressional maps to favor the GOP, regardless of their potential illegality. In Texas, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed 2025 redistricting maps to be used for the upcoming election, even as a legal challenge moves forward over racial gerrymandering.

It seems that the Board approve of racial gerrymandering, an attempt to create, again in their words, “congressional district lines drawn to favor candidates of color,” but are diametrically opposed to district boundaries which favor Republicans.

There is a strong bias on the part of the Board. It would seem that black Americans, in their view, can only be represented by black representatives, but if anyone were to suggest that black representatives cannot represent white Americans, they’d be among the first to scream that’s racist. If someone stated that only a white candidate could reasonably represent a majority white district, they’d also claim such was racist.

Conservatives have long fought against the reverse racism which has been used, but electorally, the Louisiana v Callais decision might not be the win they think. Blacks are the Democrats most loyal voting Demographic, frequently giving 90% of their ballots to Democrats. Creating majority black districts had the effect of making neighboring districts safer for Republican candidates. If those majority black districts are phased out, spreading heavily black areas back into other districts, Republican candidates might fare more poorly, and close races more likely to elect the Democratic candidates. The Editorial Board might be appalled if fewer black Democrats were elected, but I’m sure that they’d trade black Democrats for white Democrats if it meant fewer Republicans of any color were in office.

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The journolism of NBC News Can you trust anything from NBC News these days?

That’s not a typographical error in the headline! The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.

Though I spent two years writing for the Kentucky Kernel, I was not actually a journalism student; my degree is not in journalism. But I do know enough to recognize thoroughly biased ‘reporting’ when I see it.

So here you go: from NBC News:

Kyle Rittenhouse hospitalized following bite from venomous spider

“The communists couldn’t take me out and i’ll be damned if I let a brown recluse take me out,” said the gunman who opened fire in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Aug. 5, 2020.

By David K. Li | Thursday, May 7, 2026 | 10:42 AM EDT | Updated” 11:44 AM EDT

Kyle Rittenhouse, who gained fame for opening fire at a 2020 civil rights rally in Wisconsin, was hospitalized after a venomous spider bit him, the noted firearms enthusiast said Wednesday.

Did you catch that? In both the subtitle and the first paragraph, reporter David K Li used the description “opened fire” and “opening fire,” as though Mr Rittenhouse stood on top of a platform, put his weapon on spray and pray, and raked a (peaceful?) crowd indiscriminately, like a Philadelphia gang-banger.

Rittenhouse, 23, told his 100,000 followers on X that he fell victim to a brown recluse, posting pictures of himself in a hospital bed strapped to monitors with one close-up shot of the bite mark.

“The spider, like the commies, also thought it was a good idea to come after me while I was armed,” Rittenhouse posted. “He did not survive.”

Rittenhouse appeared to be in good spirits, joking that his only disappointment was that “I’m not Spider-Man now.”

He did not say exactly when or where the spider attack happened.

Rittenhouse’s post, predictably, drew thousands of responses — a mix of support and mockery.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., was among the first and highest-profile well-wishers, telling Rittenhouse “you got this.”

“Thank you, Senator,” Rittenhouse responded Thursday.

Others came at him with body-shaming ridicule, which the shirtless, stout Rittenhouse didn’t appear to respond to.

Rittenhouse became a household name in late summer 2020 after he fatally shot two men and wounded a third during civil unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

There’s more at the original, and though Mr Li did note that Mr Rittenhouse was tried for “killing Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber and wounding paramedic Gaige Grosskreutz during the melee”, there is absolutely no mention made that Mr Rittenhouse was backing away when he was attacked by Messrs Rosenbaum, Huber, and Grosskreutz. The article did note that he testified in his own defense, claimed the men were shot in self-defense, and that the jury acquitted him on all charges.

Mr Li added hyperlinks to three of his previous articles, plus a fourth, all in the paragraph above, in which he declined to note that Mr Rosenbaum had mental issues and had spent most of his adult life in prison for sexually molesting underaged boys, Mr Huber “had spent time in prison twice, first for violating probation after strangling his brother and again for kicking his sister,” same link, and Mr Grosskreutz was pointing a firearm at Mr Rittenhouse as he was shot, again, same link. The link is to an article by National Public Radio, not some evil, reich-wing source.

If Mr Li’s article was your only source of information, you might be inclined to think that yes, Mr Rittenhouse was the a perched on a platform, mowing down mostly peaceful protesters. That’s journolism, not real journalism.

Mr Li covered the trial and most of the story for NBC News, and was absolutely aware that Mr Rittenhouse was thrice attacked, in succession, by the three men, two of whom were previously convicted felons, and the third armed and pointing his weapon at the defendant at the time he was shot, but he chose not to tell his readers that. His article was not something limited by the old 750-word limit, but had the freedom of the twenty-first century, and virtually unlimited bandwidth.

Both the reporter and his editor — there are editors at NBC, right? — had to have known the article was biased, and had to have known that the case was famous enough that [insert plural slang term for the anus here] like me would notice it, but apparently they just didn’t care. One thing is certain: you cannot trust Mr Li to tell the whole truth in any of his reporting, and NBC News itself must be suspect. The days of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley are in the distant past for NBC News.

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When seconds count, the police are only minutes away!

The article from the New York Post doesn’t tell us whether the “suspect” was in the United States illegally, but it no longer matters, because he is stone-cold graveyard dead.

Texas dad fatally shoots carjacker who tried stealing his car with his family inside

By Richard Pollina | Wednesday, May 6, 2026 | 1:39 AM EDT

A Texas father fatally shot a would-be carjacker who tried stealing his car — with his family, including his young children, still inside — after the suspect fled the scene of a multi-vehicle crash across the street.

The chaos began Sunday afternoon when a driver slammed into two cars along Highway 66, about 18 miles outside downtown Dallas, around 3:30 p.m., according to the Garland Police Department.

The driver, whose name has not been released by police, then fled to a nearby gas station, where he was accused of trying to “take several vehicles by force.”

Surveillance footage obtained by Fox 4 showed the suspect approach the victim’s white Impala in the parking lot of a shopping center across the street.

The erratic suspect walked up to the driver’s side of the Impala, immediately prompting the father to jump out of the car.

The father had several children and two adult women in the car during the violent encounter, police said.

The suspected carjacker tried to yank the father away from the vehicle, which triggered a struggle as a young boy and the rest of the family bolted from the car.

Police said the father “produced a firearm” and fired more than 10 rounds at the suspect.

So, what would have happened had the father not taken strong action, if the father had meekly surrendered to the “suspect”? By struggling, he gave the rest of the family the time to get out of the car, possibly saving their lives. Had the “suspect” quickly gained the vehicle, and taken off with kids inside, there’s no telling what could have happened, but none of the possibilities had good outcomes. If he had waited for the police to arrive, the “suspect” could have been off and driving down the highway, putting other, innocent people in jeopardy.

Fortunately, if this had to happen, it happened outside of Dallas, Texas, and the police do not expect any charges to be files against the father. But what if it had happened in Seattle?

‘Clueless’ socialist Mayor Katie Wilson in hot seat after video of 77-year-old beaten in downtown Seattle goes viral

By Andrew Mark Miller, Fox News | Tuesday, Cinco de Mayo, 2026 | 10:14 PM EDT

Seattle’s socialist Mayor Katie Wilson is facing fierce blowback on social media after a 77-year-old man was seen on video being beaten by two individuals in a crime that was captured by closed-circuit television cameras, a tool that Wilson has denounced in the past as something that makes the community feel unsafe and “vulnerable.”

The elderly man was walking down the street in downtown Seattle last month when two men walking by him stopped, without any provocation, shoved him to the ground and beat him, KOMO News reported.

Ahmed Abdullahi Osman, 29, was later arrested and charged with second-degree assault, and police are looking for the second suspect. Osman was reportedly booked into jail the night of the assault and then released back onto the streets before a bail hearing.

“Turning on more cameras won’t magically make our neighborhoods safer, but it will certainly make our neighborhoods more vulnerable,” Wilson said in 2025 after Seattle City Council’s approval of expanding the Real Time Crime Center (RTCC) CCTV pilot program, the program used to capture the video of this specific crime, according to KOMO News.

The Mayor doesn’t really want Seattle’s criminal class found and punished, and the fact that the assailant is named Ahmed Abdullahi Osman would certainly contribute to that. The beautiful Seattle, of well-dressed people and good, professional citizens, as depicted in the very liberally-oriented[1]Not only were all of the characters in Grey’s Anatomy bed-hopping frequently, the show also pushed transgenderism and abortion, especially following the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision. Grey’s Anatomy, certainly wouldn’t beat a 77-year-old man, would they, but they were soap opera characters, where Mr Osman is a real person.

“That’s all the bullets we had or we would have shot him more. Quite frankly, we weren’t taking any chances.” — Sheriff Grady Judd

Of course, Her Honor the Mayor would have a difficult decision in the Texas case, because the deceased carjacker is an Hispanic male, while, at least to judge from the not-all-that-clear surveillance photos, is black. Washington state prohibits the sale of magazines which hold more than ten rounds, but does not prohibit the possession of such, and the Texas case indicates that the father “fired more than 10 rounds at the suspect”. The father was clearly not taking any chances with a crazed carjacker where his family were concerned.

In both Garland, Texas and Seattle, Washington, the police were only minutes away; in Garland, the victim was prepared, while in the liberal northwest, he was not.

References

References
↑1 Not only were all of the characters in Grey’s Anatomy bed-hopping frequently, the show also pushed transgenderism and abortion, especially following the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision.
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Common sense and lawfare tend to be two diametrically opposed things.

I used to think that political liberalism encompassed some divergence of views. After all, they can’t all think exactly the same on everything, right? But the more I read the more I see a mental monolith, and it’s a monolith that verges on stupidity.

The Trump administration is investigating Smith College for admitting trans women. Could Bryn Mawr be next?

Bryn Mawr College, like Smith, accepts all individuals who identify as women. The Trump administration says that violates federal discrimination laws, but has not yet gone after Bryn Mawr.

by Susan Snyder | Tuesday, Cinco de Mayo 2026 | 4:52 PM EDT

President Donald Trump’s administration this week opened an investigation into Smith College, one of the oldest women’s colleges in the country, for admitting transgender women.

Both Bryn Mawr College and Moore College of Art & Design — women’s colleges in the Philadelphia area — also admit trans women, opening up questions about whether they could be among the next targets, though Moore already is weighing whether to go coed.

“The college remains focused on our mission and commitment to academic excellence,” Bryn Mawr said in a statement. “We continue to operate in compliance with all federal laws and regulations.”

Full disclosure: I did some concrete work at Bryn Mawr College, in 2004, though it was between semesters, with few people on campus.

Further down:

The 1,370-student Bryn Mawr on its website notes that it accepts all individuals who identify as women, including cisgender and trans women. The school also accepts “intersex people who do not identify as male, individuals assigned female at birth who have not taken medical or legal steps to identify as male, and individuals assigned female at birth who do not identify within the gender binary.”

Bryn Mawr clarified its enrollment practices regarding transgender women in 2015, noting that the school would accept transgender women and “intersex individuals who live and identify as women at the time of application.”

Does that mean Bryn Mawr would have to retain individuals who identified as women at the time of application, but who later decided that they were really men? 🙂

Personally, I do not see the legal issue, unless there are males who applied and were denied because they are male; such men might have a potential discrimination complaint.

I could see a potential privacy issue, as was the case with Brayden Fleming, the male volleyball player calling himself “Blaire” and pretending to be a woman to play on the San José State women’s volleyball team, and who could “pass” well enough that both his teammates and opposing teams did not know he is male. His road trip roommate didn’t realize that he was male. But if Smith and Bryn Mawr colleges were open, and informed other students that a particular student was actually male, giving the other students the opportunity to decide for themselves whether they wished to share a locker room or restroom with the transgender student, it’s difficult to see a legal problem.

Then again, we know how that would work out: any student who decided that no, she did not want to share a bathroom or locker room with a male student would herself be accused of transphobia, and disciplined, possibly to the extent of expulsion. Any student who protested the inclusion of men males in women’s only spaces would face all sorts of problems in Bryn Mawr, because the far-left leadership have decided, against all rationality and all science that boys really can be girls, and that it’s hateful to dispute that cockamamie notion.

So, the colleges have created their own problems, but had they decided that only real women could be admitted, they’d have faced problems under the previous Administration. Common sense and lawfare tend to be two diametrically opposed things.

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Well, of course they did!

A viral video on TikTok made its way to Twitter as well, one in which a student at Preparatory Charter High School in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia asked some of his classmates to read a sentence, and several struggled. One of the sentences was, “She wore a silhouette of clothes that were extraordinary but somewhat gauche,” an odd bit of wording to be sure, but one which any high school student should be able to get through. “Silhouette” might have fooled some people, the “h” being mostly silent, though providing a clue to pronunciation anyway, and “gauche” is an uncommon word, though I have used it thrice on Twitter. But many were also tripped up by “extraordinary,” a very common word.

The videos were entitled, “Can you read?”, and it was obvious that several of the students actually could not read, at least not at anything close to grade level. So naturally the school had to respond and defend itself. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Philly charter school says student’s viral ‘Can You Read?’ video was ‘misleading and unfair’

One video of Preparatory Charter High School students was viewed more than 15 million times on TikTok.

by Maddie Hanna | Sunday, May 3, 2026 |6:27 PM EDT

A South Philadelphia charter school said Sunday that a student’s widely viewed videos showing classmates struggling to read certain words did not accurately reflect the school’s community.

Preparatory Charter High School, which enrolls students in grades 9 through 12, also said it was not seeking to expel the student who made the videos, contrary to posts circulating on social media.

Well, of course the school said that!

The account that posted the video, @whatthevek, did not respond to an interview request Sunday. The account last week also posted a “Can You Read Pt. 2″ video that was viewed more than 2 million times on TikTok, depicting students reading the sentence: “The colonel asked the choir to accommodate the governor’s schedule.”

The footage drew media attention, and widely circulated social media posts claimed that the student who made the videos was facing expulsion.

On Sunday, Prep Charter’s administration said in a statement that while federal privacy rules barred the school from discussing details of disciplinary action, “the student in question is not facing expulsion.”

The school said the video footage “does not accurately reflect our school community or the values we strive to uphold every day.”

“While some students may have agreed to be filmed, the way the footage was presented lacks important context and has led to a portrayal that is misleading and unfair,” the school said in the statement. “The video titled ‘Can You Read?’ does not represent the character, effort, or abilities of our students as a whole.”

It doesn’t? Here’s education reporter Maddie Hanna’s final paragraph:

On Pennsylvania state assessments in the 2024-25 school year, 46.5% of students scored proficient in English language arts, compared with nearly 50% statewide.

That’s actually worse than the US News and World Report rankings, which had students there scoring 56% at grade level proficiency in reading. The trouble is that the Preparatory Charter School of Mathematics, Science, Technology and Careers had only 21% grade level proficient in mathematics and 18% grade level proficient in science, yet the school has a graduation rate of 95%.

Perhaps someone smarter than me can tell me how that math works out? How does a high school which supposedly focuses on math and science graduate 95% of its students when roughly 80% of its students are not grade level proficient in math and science? What is a diploma from Prep Charter actually worth?

The interesting thing is that the unnamed @whatthevek was making a video on the school’s strongest performing area. What would have happened if he had been asking math of science questions?

He also posted a video entitled, “Are you Smarter than a 5th grader?”

Yes, I’m old, but I’m pretty sure that all of the 78 members of the Mt Sterling High School Class graduating Class of 1971 could actually read. They didn’t all take algebra or trig — I did — but no one would ever think of really asking them if they could read. And we had exactly one teacher who had his Master’s degree. Perhaps there’s something just plain wrong with public education today?

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You in a heap o’ trouble, boy! 11½ years isn't really enough

Criminals are stupid. I often wonder how many criminals would get away with their crimes if they weren’t stupid enough to brag about what they’ve done.

Anthony Michael Souza was proud of what he’d been doing, and while he wasn’t quite as stupid as Philadelphia gang-bangers posting what they’d done on social media, he was still stupid.

While he was not accused of abusing his students, prosecutors said Souza boasted to an undercover agent in 2024 that a 5th-grade boy he was “grooming” appeared “innocent, confused, uncomfortable,” during an exchange via Snapchat, according to court documents.

Yeah, that’s pretty stupid, but perhaps the entitled, savvy New York City boy thought no one would care. From the New York Post:

Sicko NYC theater teacher bragged about grooming kids, caught with trove of sick pics — now he’s headed to prison

By David Spector | Kentucky Derby day, May 2, 2026 | 9:24 AM EDT Continue reading →