Wednesday • November 19 • 2025
Vol.XVII • No.XLVII
Manchester, N.H.
It can be difficult to look at the political left and ascertain just what is going on in their minds. Much of what they say they are about involves looking out for the oppressed, leveling the economic playing field, teaching people to be more tolerant of those outside of the norm, and helping children learn and feel more safe, among other things.
On their face, each of these seems to be worthwhile and even virtuous positions to take, and they are politically speaking. However, there is another reality that follows the political left as well – their results.
Looking at the apparent “oppressed” championed by the left, such as the BIPOC community, the LGTBQ+ community, women, teens, and the poor, one simply needs to look at the data, empirical and anecdotal, to see if their efforts are having the desired effect. Perhaps the most obvious group to consider is teens, given that the vast majority of teachers align politically to the left. Here are the numbers:
Though the hard sciences and math see more Republican than Democrat teachers, it’s the social and soft sciences where the preponderance of teachers are left, even far left, in their ideological leanings. How far left? Enough to brag about sexualizing and indoctrinating your children on social media.
If our teens are overwhelmingly taught by Democrats and Progressive left ideologues, are there any studies that can tell us how they’re affecting our children?
There are, and they’re not good.
As of April 2022, the CDC reports that 44% of teens report feeling “persistently sad and hopeless,” up from 37% in 2019. Though one might be quick to blame the pandemic for this rise, the likelier root cause was two-fold: the handling of the pandemic and the change in schooling during that time. The handling of the pandemic likewise came down to how the left took action versus the right. Left-run states like New York and California were tyrannical in lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and doomsday messaging. Right-leaning states like Florida and Texas were quick to eschew lockdowns, mandates, and fear-mongering. As a result, students from K through 12 either suffered or thrived under these measures. However, overall, the effect on children was negative by looking at the numbers.
CNN reports youth depression and anxiety doubled during the pandemic and no doubt this wasn’t isolated to states with certain political leanings. Despite the left’s attempts to treat students like adults by including early childhood sex education and year-round LGBTQ++ programming, the kids don’t seem to feel comforted by either when they’re told to wear masks militantly, see their parents get laid off for matters of personal health autonomy, and 24/7 panic messaging regarding COVID, souring race relations and climate change:
The study’s findings are consistent with what Jenna Glover, a child clinical psychologist and director of psychology training at Children’s Hospital Colorado, said she is seeing on the ground. She was not involved in the study.
“The disruption to their routines and consistency is very damaging for a child’s mental health,” Glover said. “They thrive on predictability, which has been absent for over a year.”
The chronic stress and instability children are experiencing can lead to feelings of hopelessness, which is one of the top predictors of suicide ideation, she added.
However, it’s not just the children and teens who are trending downward. Gallup notes global levels of unhappiness have been on the rise for more than ten years. They attribute this less to simple economic discrepancies than to a sense of well-being. Though the number of people reporting living a “great life” has more than doubled, those stating they’re living their “worst life” has more than quadrupled. The factors include job satisfaction, financial stress, community life, physical health, and loved ones they can turn to for help.
The pandemic saw a massive flight from left-governed states to those governed by conservatives. California and New York again saw record numbers of migration to states like Florida, South Carolina, and Texas. Meanwhile, teens were left to wonder about this “new normal” governors like Andrew Cuomo, Gretchen Whitmer, and Gavin Newsom were saying we’d just begun.
Herbert Marcuse, with communist fist raiseEnter Herbert Marcuse, author of three critical writings from the 1960s. Marcuse, a German expatriate, came to the United States from the Frankfurt School, known for its Marxist thinkers, such as Theodor Adorno and Gyorgy Lucaks. Marcuse, after a short stint with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA, wrote “Essay on Liberation,” “Repressive Tolerance,” and “Eros and Civilization.”
Disenchanted with the failings of the working class revolution begun by Marx, where capitalism had satisfied the needs of the workers, namely those associated by Gallup with well-being, Marcuse looked out at America in search of revolutionary energy.
In the third chapter of Essay on Liberation, titled “Subverting Forces…in Transition,” he said the revolutionary energy would be found in the “ghetto population” as well as those now labeled LGBTQ+. They could be roused to see their marginalization and thus be made activists against the capitalist forces in
America. Marcuse and his protégé, Angela Davis, would champion these ideas to black Americans, alongside the Black Panther Party and Huey Newton. Some sixty years later, we can see his plan still working with BLM, Antifa, and their supporters. In fact, Marcuse is credited with the ideology behind Antifa.
Antifa logo next to pedophile group NAMBLAHowever, it’s the first chapter, titled “A Biological Foundation for Socialism?” where he suggests the movement requires a fundamental change to man’s biology, which he believes can be accomplished:
“The rebellion would then have taken root in the very nature, the “biology” of the individual, and on these new grounds, the rebels would redefine the objectives and the strategy of the political struggle, in which alone the concrete goals of liberation can be determined. Is such a change in the “nature” of man conceivable? I believe so, because technical progress has reached a stage in which reality no longer need be defined by the debilitating competition for social survival and advancement.” (p. 10)
However, Marcuse doesn’t see this nature changing naturally but by manipulating man’s desires via subversion:
“We would have to conclude that liberation would mean subversion against the will and against the prevailing interests of the great majority of the people.” (p. 18)
If you read that to say Marxists will defy the free will of the majority of Americans and their chosen interests by subversion, that is exactly what he is saying. This is the arrogance of the Marxist left – they believe they are better and they know better than you and I, so much so they can justify subverting your will.
How they don’t see this as crypto-oppression is beyond me.
In part 2, we look at the following arguments Marcuse makes that aim at destabilizing the minds of children as well as the mentally ill influencers from whom he draws his theories.
The post The Left and Teenage Mental Illness: Bug or Feature? (Part 1) appeared first on Granite Grok.
This is not the first time Rep. Jim White has proposed this legislation, but it is back after the Lewiston, Maine, shooting. The bill would make property owners of gun-free zones liable if disarmed individuals were harmed as a result of that restriction.
Do you agree?
Gun-free zones appear statistically to be the more significant threat to public safety. Shooters, regardless of their grasp of reality, always seem capable of choosing locations where people are known to be disarmed. Making these areas less common can only limit victim-rich environments and, by extension, (perhaps) the incidents themselves.
A simple public safety measure opposed by public safety advocates, which Rep White is trying to get around.
White’s bill is similar to one that came before the Legislature in 2017 and was opposed by the Maine Gun Safety Coalition and the Retail Association of Maine. It was voted down in committee and didn’t get a vote by the full Legislature.
The idea has virtually no chance of winning the support of the Democratic controlled Legislature, which this year easily rejected efforts to allow guns in schools based on some of the same arguments.
But the bill highlights an ongoing national debate about the impact of gun-free zones, especially in communities that have been hit hard by gun violence.
“I think the situation in Lewiston might bring to light the necessity of this,” said White, who owns J. White Gunsmithing, a firearms shop in Guilford. “The most vulnerable among us are put in a more vulnerable situation because of these gun-free zones.”
We might feel inclined to say something like, how can you embrace the idea of the government adding another layer of enforcement upon property owners? The answer, I think, is that we’re not. We’re removing it. The Constitution is clear about the right to keep and bear arms. Principally, this is a defense against tyranny, specifically from your government. But there is no way to know precisely where, when, or how tyranny may present itself or through what machination. We uphold that right by prohibiting you from being disarmed anywhere you have a right to be (or have been invited).
As for tyrannous plots and intrigues (aside from the ones where we might think the government set up and triggered a shooter), many of the gunmen, after the fact, are revealed to be people known to the government (police, mental or public health, locals) who needed attention the State increasingly claims it is best suited to provide then does not—individuals who should trigger so-called safeguards that disarm others but never them.
The courts (also the government) have made it clear they (the government) have no obligation to protect you, so we presume this would include failing to prevent crimes whose scope rises as the result of laws that disarm us when it is clearly up to us to defend ourselves.
Rep, White’s law increasingly makes sense when confronted with all of that nonsense, but again, not in a state like Maine where Democrats increasingly control the government. Places where mass shootings will likely increase as a result of these facts. They will disarm you. They will allow others to disarm you. No one is or will be held responsible for what happens to you. Perhaps not even the shooter, who will likely end up dead, which is what many of them wanted or expected. Something an armed citizen could have provided much sooner with less injury and loss of life if permitted to exercise their natural right to defend themselves.
The post Should Owners of Gun-Free Zones Be Liable if Disarmed Citizens Are Shot or Killed? appeared first on Granite Grok.
Two new reports on Vermont’s Renewable Energy Standard, one by the Department of Public Service and Sustainable Energy Advantage and the other by an organization called Brattle, confirm what we’ve been pointing out for a long time – Vermont’s so-called green energy mandates are all cost and no benefit for the Vermonters who get stuck paying the bills.
And those costs are huge.
The DPS report focuses primarily on what the impact of the Renewable Energy Standard does to electric costs and ratepayers’ bills, and that will be the focus of this article. Brattle touches on this as well but also delves into the overall economic impact of the policy, which I will save for another time. (Spoiler alert: it’s all bad.)
The most important aspect of these two analyses is that they put the lie to the advocates’ talking point that the benefits of decarbonizing our economy and electrifying everything outweigh the costs. Nope.
The “big benefits” claim is based on a fiction wrapped in a fib called the “Social Cost of Carbon.” The Social Cost of Carbon is a mostly made-up calculation that attempts to affix a price to the negative economic impacts of releasing a ton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. It is highly subjective. Under the last three administrations, it has been officially pegged at $43 a ton (Obama), $3 to $5 a ton (Trump), and $51 a ton (Biden).
If you’re a fan of The Office, think of the Social Cost of Carbon as like Kevin’s magical accounting number, keleven, defined wonderfully by the Urban Dictionary as “a fictitious number used by an incompetent or corrupt individual to balance accounting books.” So, when the costs of your ideological “green” boondoggle are going to cost voters $2 billion, likely upsetting them, just add your $2.2 billion social cost of carbon keleven to the ledger, and presto, you’re back in the black!
A year ago, I wrote an in-depth article on the Social Cost of Carbon; the Climate plan’s costs are real. Savings, not so much, if you want more on this topic. But the short version of the gimmick is that while the costs of green energy policies are born entirely by Vermonters, any benefits are spread thinly across the globe. This means that only an infinitesimally minuscule, undetectable amount of any benefit from Vermonters’ “investment” actually accrues to Vermonters.
As explained by Dean Murphy of Brattle, “The increment of global carbon emissions or the decrement to global carbon emissions from Vermont going from its current RES (Renewable Energy Standard) to 100 percent will be very, very small. And the impact that will be felt globally will be very, very small because Vermont is a very small part of the world. And those increments to those costs in Vermont of flooding, climate change, changes in temperature, etcetera, because Vermont’s own contribution to the global climate is very small, the effects that you feel in Vermont are very small. You’ll feel much more impact from what happens in China and India than you will from what you did in Vermont.”
What’s happening in China and India is not carbon reduction—quite the opposite. The same goes for Russia and most if not all of the developing world in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In other words, Vermont will see no benefits – cost-wise or trauma-wise — from reduced flooding or other impacts from severe weather in the future as a result of our renewable energy policy. The money we waste on these policies, however, is money we won’t have to prepare for any future natural disasters caused by the two new Chinese coal-fired power plants that come online every week. Or just Mother Nature doing her thing?
So, when advocates for these policies say, yes, we may be throwing hundreds of millions of your dollars at this, but we have to balance the cost of paying for these policies with the cost of floods, etc, you are free and encouraged to go ahead and point and shout “liar, liar, pants on fire.” There is no balance. In fact, we get stuck paying for both the cost of “going green” and any natural disaster that might have been prevented if we used that money to adapt to cope with evolving weather patterns.
Now, exactly how much money are we pouring into this hole of no return? According to TJ Poor of the Department of Public Service, if we continue with our current “business as usual” Renewable Energy Standard policy it will cost Vermont ratepayers about $130 million a year extra on our electric bills. If we adjust the Renewable Energy Standard along the lines of what is currently being proposed by the Renewable Energy Standard Working Group, that increases by another $50 million per year to $190 million per year.
Think of this a “Green Virtue Signaling Tax.” We get almost no material benefit for this otherwise unnecessary expense at a tremendous opportunity cost.
As Poor concludes, Vermont’s Renewable Energy policy “is not cost-effective for Vermont ratepayers…. And so those are the tradeoffs that we need to evaluate… how much Vermont ratepayers should pay for societal benefits.” I can tell you that our elected so-called representatives have a very different idea about what that number should be than do the people who are sticking with the bill.
Rob Roper is a freelance writer with 20 years of experience in Vermont politics, including three years of service as chair of the Vermont Republican Party and nine years as President of the Ethan Allen Institute, Vermont’s free-market think tank. He is also a regular contributor to VermontGrok.
The post Two New Studies Show Renewable Energy Policy Is All Cost/No Benefit for Ratepayers appeared first on Granite Grok.