But Platner is also the Democratic nominee for a competitive U.S. Senate seat, and his top competition has dropped out. That made every conservative reader skeptical that the Times would actually publish anything to make him look bad. The follow-up to the Times story, published this week by Politico, seemed to confirm that skepticism.

When the Times published a lengthy piece a month ago airing three ex-girlfriends’ allegations against Platner, it smelled to conservatives like something of a “catch-and-kill.” That’s the term for when reporters dig up a story and then bury the most important parts, protecting the target.

Why did the Times focus most of the story on just one girlfriend, Lyndsey Fifield, and spend 250 words describing how conservative she was?

Why did the Times reporters, according to Fifield, make her believe that the story wouldn’t focus on her, but on the other girlfriends?

Also, why did the Times decline to contact three of the sources Fifield said could corroborate her account, and then write “The Times could not independently corroborate Ms. Fifield’s account of the altercations”?

Whatever the reporters’ intent in writing the story they did, the pro-Platner effect was obvious in its aftermath.

First, leading Democratic politicians and liberal reporters dismissed the accusations as partisan attacks or minor personal foibles.

“Seems like a lot of nothing,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) declared. “I mean, the only one who had anything to say that seemed ‘unsettling’ was a woman who works for right-wing political operations.”

Whitehouse was echoing the standard liberal response on Twitter: The only accusations come from Fifield, who’s a right-winger.

New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor, a chronicler of the #MeToo moment, argued on CNN that Platner’s offenses didn’t meet the threshold of the sort of sexual misconduct she tracks.

“They’re not about a boss and a young female employee being subjected to sexual advances,” Kantor explained. “They were mostly made in the context of consensual relationships… There are these, like, very sensational texts about sex. There are allegations from former girlfriends that are not — the way my colleagues reported them were not like classic abuse allegations.”

Here’s another way to judge the Times piece. Jenny Racicot, one of Platner’s other ex-girlfriends, felt compelled by the Times story to go to two reporters at Politico to get out her full story.

Here are the relevant passages from the Politico piece:

Racicot previously described “reckless” and “unsettling” behavior by Platner to The New York Times, but says she didn’t go public with the specific assault claim because she didn’t want to be known as a rape victim.

Racicot said she later felt compelled to go public about her experience because the reaction to the Times story was dominated by controversy about another woman, Lyndsey Fifield, who alleged Platner mistreated her and faced attacks because of her ties to the Republican Party. (Contacted by POLITICO, Fifield stood by the allegations she made to the Times and declined to comment further.)

“My part of the story was just a read-over,” Racicot said in an interview. “And the story was Lyndsey, and the accusations of her being politically motivated.”

Three key points here:

First, Racicot felt that the Times story downplayed her experience at Platner’s hands.

Second, Racicot felt that the Times led readers to disregard Fifield’s account as politically motivated.

Third, Racicot apparently didn’t give the Times her full story on the record. She first went on the record with the sexual assault story with Politico.

That last point is important. It doesn’t mean the Times coverage was fine. It doesn’t mean the Times reporters never misled Fifield and failed to corroborate what they could have corroborated.

It just suggests that there wasn’t exactly a catch-and-kill here — the Times never killed Racicot’s story of being raped by Platner, because the Times didn’t have it on the record.

This is corroborated by the Times story: “Ms. Racicot also said that in 2021 he arrived at her house drunk, after she had asked him not to come over. She declined to elaborate, but said she cut off contact soon after that episode and found his behavior ‘reckless’ and ‘unsettling.’”

A key phrase there is “she declined to elaborate.”

When I asked the Times questions about this story, a spokesman sent me a wordy answer, with a helpful phrase or two peppered in there: “The article … provided readers with context about what the women were and were not willing to share at the time… Politico advanced this public understanding with even more information that they independently reported.”

So I’ll read between the lines, and lay out what I believe most likely happened:

The Times reporters knew that Racicot said Platner raped her, and intended to build their story around that. Racicot declined to give them her account on the record, and so the reporters shifted the focus to Fifield, who had spoken at length on the record about Platner’s violence.

THE TOP 10 PEOPLE WHO DEBASED THEMSELVES DEFENDING GRAHAM PLATNER

Also, re-read that Times piece and you may detect what I detect: The 250-word essay about Fifield being a right-winger seems tacked on — maybe by editors after a call from the Platner campaign.

The Times, I believe, did not cover up Racicot’s rape allegations — again, both Politico and the Times report that she declined to go on the record about it. But the Times did mishandle this story in a way that temporarily helped Platner, made Fifield into a target, and convinced Racicot she needed to say more. And she did.

I don’t second-guess the court on this. Judging by the divisions on the court, the legal question seems pretty difficult, and my own reading of the text leaves the majority’s decision plausible.

But this is obviously bad law. It makes no sense that every child born to an illegal immigrant is automatically a U.S. citizen. Our current policy is not that some children born to some illegal immigrants can become citizens. It’s automatic.

So if you sneak across the border to have a baby, that baby is a citizen. If a shady Chinese billionaire hires a dozen surrogates to have babies in Los Angeles, those babies are all citizens. If someone gets a tourist visa and times her visit for her due date, that baby is automatically a U.S. citizen. And in any of these cases, it seems there is nothing that Congress or ICE can do about it.

It is totally reasonable that Congress should be allowed to pass laws declaring which illegal immigrants’ children and which tourists’ children get citizenship. To give Congress that power, we would, it is now clear, have to amend the Constitution.

I suggested as much on social media, and this was somehow received as an extremist or racist proposition.

Again, it makes me automatically unreasonable to posit that Congress should have the power to determine citizenship laws for children of illegal immigrants and children of birth tourists.

One college professor actually accused me of being a “white nationalist” for endorsing the possibility of an immigration system that a vast majority of Americans would prefer, and which almost every country in the world has: One where the children of non-citizens do not automatically get citizenship.

This is obviously nuts, because I am proposing a moderate position, and that’s my main point here: There is lots of middle-ground on immigration where our politicians and journalists seem unwilling to step.

I would be open to birthright citizenship for every child of a permanent resident, and maybe most Americans would be, as well. I would propose an easy path to citizenship for children of illegal immigrants who lived here for a long time and never broke the rules. These are political questions which could be hashed out in a congressional debate.

REPUBLICANS DIVIDED ON BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP RULING

The position of my liberal critics is that it would be racist to even consider such a debate, as if I was proposing a debate over slavery.

Part of the reason Democrats lost in 2024 and a huge part of the reason Trump steamrolled the GOP establishment in 2016 is that too many of our elites refuse to tolerate any suggestion that our immigration laws are too loose. But we ought to have this debate, because part of having a democracy is giving the people a voice in who gets to join us.

Korean fans shocked the world with how they cleaned up after themselves. The rest of the world isn’t so fastidious.

Americans shocked the world with how welcoming and friendly we were. Most of the world isn’t so welcoming and kind.

European fans impress Americans with how enthusiastic they are and with the camaraderie they show. American fans are a bit envious.

But now the flap over an unwarranted red card and a suspended suspension has brought another cultural difference to the fore.

American striker Folarin Balogun was wrongly given a red card in the Round of 32. The U.S., playing a man down, nevertheless held on to and expanded its lead, defeating Bosnia and Herzegovina. The red card meant Balogun would be suspended for the Round of 16, though, perpetuating the injustice. FIFA has since suspended the suspension, allowing Balogun to play against Belgium in the Round of 16.

A wrong was righted, and now both the U.S. and Belgium can play at full strength. Belgian soccer leadership is responding by complaining.

This is startling to American fans, even those of us who think Trump shouldn’t have made the phone call to FIFA officials about Balogun’s suspension.

The Belgians don’t believe that Balogun is dangerous — they just want him suspended. This is at odds with the American view.

For instance, during the NBA Finals, Knicks fans thought Spurs star Victor Wembanyama should have been called for a foul, even a flagrant foul, for assaulting Knicks’ star Jalen Brunson. But we knew one obstacle to such a call: The NBA rules would have required Wemby be suspended for a game if he were assessed another flagrant foul.

A flagrant foul would have been the right call, but suspending Wemby would have sucked. If the Knicks had beaten the Spurs when the Spurs lacked their best player because of a debatable call by a ref and an ill-considered NBA rule, that would have placed something of an asterisk on the Knicks’ win.

We want to beat the other team at full strength. Belgians are different, it appears.

This difference shouldn’t be shocking: You want to beat their best team is a cultural attitude. Our attitudes about competition are different.

Interestingly, another Belgian attitude I learned about in a different soccer tournament almost cuts in the opposite direction: Rooting for the favorite.

My older brother lived in Brussels more than 20 years ago. He was in a bar during some match that didn’t affect Belgium. Maybe it was Spain vs. Korea in the 2002 World Cup. Maybe it was Spain vs. Georgia in the 2004 Euro Cup. Whatever the matchup, there was a clear favorite and a clear underdog.

My brother, being an American, was rooting for the underdog. All the Belgians in the pub were rooting for the favorite because they were the favorite. They wanted the better team to win because that would mean better matchups in subsequent rounds. Who doesn’t want to see higher-level soccer?

You can see the logic to this Belgian position, but if you’re an American, it just grates on your sensibilities. We tend to root for the underdogs.

You can argue about which view makes more sense, but such arguments won’t be very productive. These are not really logical propositions, but cultural sensibilities. Cultural sensibilities are inherited, even absorbed throughout one’s life. It never even occurred to me that I should make an argument for rooting for the underdog.

Similarly, it seems obvious that you don’t try to disqualify your opponents’ starting players unless you really think that player did something egregiously wrong.

HOP ON THE KNICKS BANDWAGON

A final point: I have played sports or coached youth sports my entire life. The most embarrassing losses my teams have suffered often came after we hoped or tried for some sort of lame or cheap advantage. A couple of times, the other team was late, and we started counting on a forfeit win. We thought the other team’s ace pitcher had hit his pitch count, but we were mistaken, and so we sat around waiting for the reliever. We had a rain delay while leading, and we hoped the game wouldn’t restart. In these cases, our coaches tried to prevent this anti-competitive mindset from taking hold, because it’s a loser mentality.

Belgium now has that loser attitude. They have an excuse to lose, and they convinced themselves that playing against a full-strength U.S. team is not a fair match. I think this helps the Americans.

When former Oregon Republican Sen. Bob Packwood died earlier this month, the newspaper obituaries described him as a self-contradictory figure.

On the one hand, many women accused Packwood of sexually harassing them, and his own diaries seemed to confirm his lechery. On the other hand, he supported legal abortion and federal funding of contraception.

The purported contradiction here is illusory and based on ignoring Packwood’s record.

Packwood’s support for abortion and birth control should not be understood as an effort to liberate women. It was, instead, an effort to control the size of the human population, which he saw as destructive to the planet.

Packwood, in the tradition of his state of Oregon, was an environmentalist. For him, defending the environment required curbing human births. This meant more abortion, more sterilization, and more birth control.

Today, with birth rates well below replacement level and falling, overpopulation talk has slipped into the shadows. But as the abortion debates continue apace, it’s useful to recall how much Packwood-style green-tinted population control informed the pro-choice movement in its early days.

Bob Packwood, feminist?

For the left-wing media, Packwood was a study in contrasts. The Washington Post’s obituary put it this way: “As a legislator, he advocated women’s reproductive rights, spoke in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment and advanced the careers of female staffers on Capitol Hill. … But women’s groups that earlier lionized him denounced him after the Washington Post uncovered his long record of inappropriate sexual overtures.”

The New York Times used a similar framing: “Bob Packwood, a moderate Republican senator from Oregon who championed women’s rights but was forced to resign in 1995 after his fellow senators threatened to expel him for making aggressive sexual advances toward more than 20 women.”

How exactly did Packwood “champion women’s rights”?

“He was an early and vocal supporter of abortion rights,” the New York Times explains. “He introduced a bill to legalize abortion nationally in 1970, three years before the Supreme Court did so in Roe v. Wade, and he vigorously opposed Republicans who proposed anti-abortion measures.”

“I cannot reconcile these two views of him,” said Kate Michelman, president of the pro-abortion group NARAL in 1992, when a parade of women came accusing Packwood of groping, grabbing, and unwanted kissing. “He was an absolute champion of the issues we cared about, and I had never heard anything but that he was a very respectful, collegial person.”

The New York Times obituary adds this telling detail: “His efforts won him the Margaret Sanger Award from the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1979….”

Margaret Sanger was the mother of 20th-century family planning and the founder of Planned Parenthood, now the nation’s leading abortion provider. She was also a racist and a leading champion of eugenics.

Packwood was not a eugenicist like Sanger, but his interest in abortion and birth control overlapped with Sanger’s: He thought there were too many people in the world, and he wanted to reduce the birth rate.

The most prominent population-controlling anti-natalist abortion champion of the 20th century was Paul Ehrlich, who also died earlier this year.

Ehrlich praised Packwood in his bestselling 1968 book The Population Bomb: “Two bills oriented to population control have been introduced into both houses of Congress by Senator Robert Packwood and Congressman Paul McCloskey. One of them is a revision of income-tax laws to allow deductions for no more than two children per family. The other would completely legalize abortion.”

Ehrlich touted Packwood repeatedly throughout the book, celebrating that Packwood’s tax proposals would make “the plush life … difficult to attain for those with large families — which is as it should be, since they are getting their pleasure from their children, who are being supported in part by more responsible members of society.”

That is, Packwood wanted to use the tax code to coerce women to have fewer children than they wanted.

“Without smaller families, we are lost,” Packwood declared.

Packwood preached population control constantly. When he got an audience with 450 high school students, he used it to sell his “three-part program for population stabilization,” according to a contemporaneous article in the Associated Press.

“Packwood said overpopulation could be controlled with wider dissemination of information on contraception and family planning, elimination of abortion restrictions, and granting of tax breaks to small families,” the Associated Press reported.

Again, feminism wasn’t the motivation. This was part of Packwood’s Earth Week celebrations.

When Packwood touted his tax bill on the Senate floor, he aligned himself with extremist anti-natalist organizations. “There is an organization called Zero Population Growth, whose basic postulate is to attempt to limit the population of this country to its present size, and they encourage people not to have more than two children.”

Now that the U.S. birth rate is 1.6 babies per woman — well below the level at which a population maintains itself — the organization, with its roots in the eugenics movement, has changed its name to Negative Population Growth.

Packwood bragged that “six of the eight members of the Eugene, Ore., city council … and the mayor have signed a personal pledge that none of them would have more than two natural children, or, if they already exceeded two natural children, they would have no more.”

This thirst for controlling the human population was Packwood’s prime motivator for supporting abortion. This makes it less baffling that Packwood could support abortion while treating women as objects. What is perhaps more surprising is that the abortion groups tolerated Packwood’s predations because he defended abortion.

Mary Heffernan, for instance, was an abortion lobbyist in the 1980s, working for NARAL, when Packwood grabbed her and forcefully kissed her. She made sure never to tell anyone until after his 1992 reelection and after other victims went public. Why? Because it could have imperiled the cause of abortion: “I was a lobbyist on an issue I cared very deeply about and he had a great deal of power,” she said, to explain her silence.

NARAL, while Heffernan was their lobbyist, continued to support Packwood.

NARAL’s Larry Lader

NARAL was originally the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws and later was the National Abortion Rights Action League. Now, after a couple more name changes, it calls itself Reproductive Freedom for All.

It was founded not by feminists, but by men interested in curbing the population.

Socialist activist Larry Lader and abortionist Bernard Nathanson were the key founders of NARAL. Lader came to NARAL from running the Hugh Moore Fund, a nonprofit organization dedicated exclusively to controlling the human population. While Lader was the chairman of NARAL’s executive committee, he wrote Breeding Ourselves to Death, with a foreword by Paul Ehrlich.

Lader, like Packwood, saw population control as the aim and abortion as the means. He convinced feminist leaders, such as Betty Friedan, to take up the cause of abortion.

When Lader organized the first national conference on legalizing abortion, Hugh Moore — the patron of the population control movement — funded it.

Eugenics was part of Lader’s campaign. “Above all,” Lader would write, “society must grasp the grim relationship between unwanted children and the violent rebellion of minority groups.”

According to Nathanson, who later repented of his abortion advocacy and became a pro-life leader, Lader’s reasoning was this: “If we’re going to move abortion out of the books and into the streets, we’re going to have to recruit the feminists. Friedan has got to put her troops into the thing — while she still has control of them.”

Lader’s work was cited in Roe v. Wade, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg would later note that population control was part of the motivation of the court’s majority: “The ruling surprised me,” Ginsburg would later say. “At the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”

PAUL EHRLICH 1932-2026

Curbing the population wasn’t Lader’s only aim in advancing abortion. He also championed the overthrow of traditional sexual morality. Abortion, Lader said, “struck at the whole system of sexual morality to which the middle class gave lip service.”

Certainly, Packwood, NARAL’s favorite Republican, joined Lader in rejecting that whole system of sexual morality.

Birth rates have been falling for more than 18 years, but the desire for babies has been steady. To date, the Baby Bust has been about unmet desire for family.

That’s about to change.

High school seniors are less and less interested in getting married and having children, and this trend has been ongoing for a few years. That means the young men and young women leaving college these days, and entering their mid-20s in the coming years, have less interest in tying the knot and having children.

“Monitoring the Future” is a study of high school kids conducted by the University of Michigan since the 1970s. From 2012 to 2022, seniors became less confident that they would get married and have children. The percentage of high school seniors who said they expect to ever get married fell by 7 points among men and 14 points among women.

Likewise, when asked how many children they want to have, a significant number are now saying none. This never used to happen. The op-ed pages of the New York Times are not representative: Almost no American women or men say they ideally would be childless. Gen Z is different.

Gen. Z women are more liberal than earlier generations, and liberal women and men are turning against family.

High school students who call themselves conservative are holding steady, where about 90% say they want children, with most of the remainder saying they are unsure. For self-described moderates, the number only recently fell from 90% to 82%. For liberal high school seniors, the desire for children is plummeting: Nearly 90% a decade ago wanted at least one child, but in the 2021 to 2024 surveys, only 67% do.

Why? There are a dozen possible culprits.

If you believe the oil companies have already poisoned the climate, why would you bring children into that world? More to the point, if you believe “we are the virus” — that humans are destroying the planet — why would you make more of us?

The boogeymen of systemic racism and the patriarchy play a role here.

Becoming a wife and mother sounds like subservience to a women’s study major. And what good male feminist would bolster a system of oppression such as heterosexual marriage and the nuclear family?

THE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT IMPOSES A TWIN PENALTY

And if you believe that America is fundamentally racist, then either you’re producing more racist white babies or more babies of color who will never be treated as humans.

It probably goes deeper, though. Liberals are less likely to believe in God. So when a liberal 18-year-old comes face to face with his own fallen nature, he concludes that he is bad, and not seeing the possibility of redemption, he decides the noble thing is to end his bloodline.

Good for you. You’re not a bandwagon-hopper. But please give some love to those of us who just tuned in recently. Americans have enough to divide us — the last thing we need is a fight among people rooting for the same team or following the same tournament.

The New York Knicks’ playoff run this year attracted far more attention than the ordinary championship campaign. That was partly because it was New York, the most populous city in the U.S., and the capital of American media. Another reason for the undue attention was the drought: The Knicks hadn’t won a championship since 1973, meaning that most NBA fans and most New Yorkers had never seen a Knicks title.

The 2026 Knicks also won in fantastic fashion. In May, they won all eight games they played. While sweeping the Eastern Conference finals, they once came back from down 20 points against the Cleveland Cavaliers and ended up winning that game by 11 points in overtime. Despite this consistent dominance and outscoring their opponents by a record-high 14.9 points a game, basketball commentators kept talking them down.

So when the Knicks arrived in the NBA Finals, the nation’s eyes were on them. The two games at the majestic Madison Square Garden were filled with every New York celebrity imaginable, from former real estate developer Donald Trump down to former mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Some Knicks fans and commentators found these new fans obnoxious and complained about it online. Jennifer Lopez, during the playoffs, went after all transplants to New York City, insisting they have no right to call themselves “New Yorkers.”

Die-hard fans often resent fair-weather fans because those fair-weather fans get the joy of winning without going through the pain of losing.

If you are a dedicated Knicks fan of a certain age, you suffered through John Starks going 2-for-18 in Game 7, you suffered through Patrick Ewing’s finger roll, and you suffered through Reggie Miller. Then you suffered through 27 years of being awful.

Timothee Chalamet and Kylie Jenner don’t instinctively wince at Reggie’s name or the mention of Charles Smith, and yet they sat front row for this victorious run.

But in their defense, the Finals provided its own miniature purgatory for every Knicks fan. In every game, the Knicks trailed by double digits. After dropping Game 3, the Knicks trailed the Spurs by 29 early in the second half of Game 4. Anyone who didn’t leave the arena early that night earned some “real fan” points.

More importantly, old fans should always welcome new fans. Chalamet and Jenner have a good excuse for not following the old Knicks: Chalamet was four years old, and Jenner was not yet two when Ewing last donned the blue and orange. And frankly, they have a fine excuse for not caring about the Knicks until recent years: The Knicks were mostly awful.

As a kid in the 1990s, I watched many regular-season Knicks games and every second of the playoffs, but then I tuned out. I moved to D.C., got a job, bought a house, got married, and had kids. I rarely watched any NBA except for the Finals, and not even every game of the Finals. I only tuned back into the Knicks two years ago during the playoffs when my high school friend texted me, “Yo, Carney, you gotta catch this team.”

So I will cede my place at the table to anyone who actually sat through the Andrea Bargnani days, but I don’t feel bad loving these Knicks all May and June.

Likewise, I don’t feel self-conscious joining the World Cup bandwagon, and neither should anyone else.

In 2002, hipsterism was at its peak, and nothing was more embarrassing than getting into something only after it got big. But that summer, a baseball teammate told me proudly, “I only follow soccer during the World Cup. It’s awesome.”

This shook the last bit of hipster-snobbery out of me, and it made me a World Cup fan for life.

Once every four years, some soccer die-hard at a bar (usually some guy from the Boston suburbs who roots for FC Bayern Munich) tries to shame me for not knowing all the rules, or for thinking “penalty” refers to a penalty rather than a penalty kick. But most serious soccer fans appreciate my brief interest in their obsession.

YES, OBAMA GOVERNED AS A LIBERAL

Modern life is busy. Following the Premier League or the Euro Cup (I’m just guessing that’s a thing) consumes attention that the rational sports fan might need to allocate to mowing his lawn, potty-training his kid, or smoking various meats. Similarly, you might have had something better to do in the 2010s than trying to like Carmelo Anthony.

So to the year-round fans of soccer, thank you for explaining the “new” rules that have been in place for years. And to the new fans of the Knicks, welcome. Just do yourself a favor and never Google the words “Reggie Miller.”

“The only reason people think he’s a liberal is because he’s black,” Todd declared on a podcast with Chris Cillizza.

Todd asked, “What policy was he liberal on?”

There are a thousand possibilities, but here are four policies that were certainly liberal, which Todd either forgot about or doesn’t believe are liberal.

• Obamacare: Obama’s signature legislative measure forced Americans to buy health insurance. Defending this position before the Supreme Court, his administration argued that they could force people to eat broccoli. Also, the bill expanded Medicaid massively. The law also socialized the student loan industry.
• Contraception mandate: The Obama administration decided that the Affordable Care Act required nuns to pay for contraception coverage. The law required all employers who offer health insurance to cover 100% of the cost for “Women’s Preventive Care.” Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services interpreted this to include every type of Food and Drug Administration-approved contraception, including morning-after contraception and sterilization. When a family-owned business (Hobby Lobby) objected, the Obama administration tried to narrow the concept of religious liberty, arguing that Americans forfeit their free exercise rights when they enter into commerce. Then the Obama administration also fought the Little Sisters of the Poor on this all the way to the Supreme Court.
• A national policy of boys in girls’ bathrooms: Obama’s Education Department ordered all public schools to allow boys into girls’ bathrooms if those boys identify as girls.
• The $787,000,000,000 stimulus bill: This was big-government liberalism by any definition, and Obama signed it in his first month in office. The media all called the stimulus “historic” because it was so big.

MICHELLE OBAMA RELEASES BEHIND-THE-SCENES FOOTAGE OF PRESIDENTIAL CENTER OPENING

I am sure the reader can come up with plenty more, but these are the ones that come to my mind first.

As with the old law, the Education Department determines a family’s ability to pay, declares the expected parental contribution for the coming school year, and then tries to meet the family’s financial need. Under the new law, though, that expected contribution is multiplied by the number of kids you have in college that year.

If Uncle Sam thinks you can afford $20,000 in tuition while you have two kids in college, you are left on the hook for $40,000 per year — twice what you can afford.

How does anyone justify this change? Here’s the argument from the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators:

“From an equitability standpoint, we must consider that paying for college is not an annual expense. Families finance a postsecondary education by drawing on past earnings (savings), current earnings, and future earnings (loans).”

This sounds plausible on the surface, but it falls apart amid further inspection. I wrote my recent column on the matter and made this point:

“It’s a bit perverse to tell families to borrow to cover the added costs of this new formula because this very formula determines whether the student is eligible for subsidized student loans. Parents can instead take out PLUS loans, whose interest rate is currently set by the Education Department at 9.07%.

“It’s also a bit odd to tell parents they should have saved for college, considering the ability-to-pay formula also counts their savings against them.”

In my column, I compared the fictional Thompson family with twins to the Spaceys, who have two children spaced four years apart. They have identical incomes. I pointed out that the Thompsons would end up paying 25% more for college than the Spaceys because they would have to borrow (at high interest rates) to fund college, while the Spaceys wouldn’t.

In that example, I imagined the Thompson twins were the same age as the Spaceys’ oldest child. What about the opposite? What if the Thompson twins were the same age as the Spaceys’ younger child?

The Education Department’s argument goes like this: In Years 1-4, both families have $20,000 each year that they could spend for tuition, but only the Spaceys are spending it on tuition, which means the Thompsons can be saving that money. Come Year 5, the Thompsons should have $80,000 in savings, from which they can pay one twin’s four years of tuition, while their income each year will allow them to pay the other twin’s tuition.

This sounds sensible until you realize the Education Department is going to hold that savings against the Thompsons, and thus reduce their financial aid.

The FAFSA form expects parents to pay 5.64% of their cash savings each year into tuition. The Spaceys have no cash savings, while the Thompsons start off with $80,000 in savings.

TRUMP ORDERS EDUCATION DEPARTMENT TO SHIFT KEY RESPONSIBILITIES OUT OF AGENCY

Consider Year 5, the first year the Thompson twins are in college: FAFSA expects the Thompsons to pay $20,000 from their income, plus $4,512 from their savings — for each kid. So in that freshman year for the Thompson twins and the Spaceys’ younger child, the Thompsons pay $49,024, while the Spaceys pay $20,000.

That’s not equity.

If the Thompsons somehow scrimp enough to stretch their $80,000 in savings over four years, they will have paid $182,560 by the end of Year 8, while the Spaceys will have paid $160,000. That 14% penalty for having twins is somehow called “equity.”

That is, Keir Starmer was the man for the U.K.’s dreadful moment.

Starmer is resigning. He had no grand fatal flaw. He was not brought down by any failed undertaking or risky mistake. He was simply utterly charmless. Nobody liked Starmer because there was nothing about him to like. His Labour Party is tossing him for the further-Left Andy Burnham.

But again, Starmer’s political weakness wasn’t being insufficiently Left. It was being nothing.

Consider Starmer’s nearly Soviet assault on opinions that violated the U.K.’s dogma.

Posts that caused distress were enough to land one in jail under Starmer.

But here’s the oddest part: If these opinions were dangerous enough that someone ought to go to jail for holding them, you would think Starmer would have angrily denounced them. But no. Starmer always just calmly and coldly enforced the rules. His heart rate never elevated as he locked up dissidents.

He is the perfect bureaucrat, as described by Hannah Arendt: “In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless, we have a tyranny without a tyrant.”

That was Starmer. He never took the lead on anything. He never bore responsibility for anything. He wasn’t really a tyrant. Starmer was merely the turgid executor of tyrannical rules.

Starmer didn’t make the rules. He merely enforced them. When the rules changed, he changed. When the rules, for instance, stated that a woman can have a penis, Starmer maintained that women sometimes have penises. When that absurdity shriveled up and died, Starmer calmly reversed himself.

Rarely has a great nation been led by such a follower.

KEIR STARMER TO RESIGN AS BRITISH PRIME MINISTER

But again, this was fitting for today’s United Kingdom. When you look at the U.K.’s acceptance of mass immigration, at the state’s cowardly response to Islamic terrorism, and at Starmer’s implicit apologies for Brexit, it’s tempting to accuse the Brits of self-loathing. But “loathing” connotes strong emotion. Something more moribund than self-loathing is dragging the U.K.

The U.K. simply doesn’t believe in itself. That’s why Starmer was its man.

Everybody’s Crazy is the name of the podcast where James took his stance against the single-earner household.

“Just coming home and just seeing somebody just sitting on the couch, every day, just sitting there,” he said. “Just chilling. Like that wouldn’t float for me.”

This clip from the podcast went viral on X, with one post garnering 12 million views in two days. Many of the responses were from peeved stay-at-home mothers, objecting to the portrayal of them as couch potatoes.

Was this misogyny (women can be so lazy!) or feminism (women have so much to contribute to the workforce!)?

In LeBron’s defense, he was speaking just for himself, and his home situation is different from that of the average family. Given LeBron’s unfathomable wealth, the Jameses likely have hired workers to clean the house, to do the shopping, to prepare the meals, and even to organize the logistics. When their children were young, LeBron and his wife, Savannah, were also able to afford as much childcare (and child-chauffering) as they wanted.

Also, LeBron was addressing a counterfactual — what if he were single today, what would he think of a wife without her own full-time job? A filthy-rich 40-year-old celebrity might be on guard against a gold-digger, looking to just live the easy life off of his wealth.

Given the differences, it is no surprise that LeBron is at odds with about half of American parents.

A recent poll from Pew Research Center found that among couples with children and two full-time workers, only 49% say that this has a positive effect on their children’s well-being. The other 51% are split between saying it has no effect and saying it is negative.

A WOMAN’S WORK IS NEVER DONE

By comparison, in breadwinner couples — where dad works for pay and mom doesn’t — a full 85% believe their arrangement is good for the children.

The coincidence of these LeBron remarks with this Pew poll highlights the class split in the United States: Wealthier folks desire the two-full-time-jobs-and-formal-childcare model, while the rest of the country mostly wants to dial back on work so that mom, or dad, can spend more time with the children — even if that means sitting with the kids on the couch.