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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 14h

Modern pro sports are just Rollerball.

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Reposted by Tom Nichols

Craig @craighennigan.bsky.social · 18h

Never forget what an absolute loser Tom is

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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

I’m just telling you that your assumptions about me and my life are wrong.

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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

I think one difference between us is that I factor in a lot more things than my own lived experience.

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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Your assumptions are wrong all the way around

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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

I spent a lot of years thinking about the things I talk about here, Peter, and one of the reasons that I find it difficult to engage with you is that I don’t think you’ve done that yourself.

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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

“Well spent” is a massive load-bearing phrase here

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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Because the voters could see it with their own eyes.

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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

That last sentence is the key. And there's an argument that more money backfires, because it can get spent on bloating administrative rolls and faddish programs, but sure, *as a general idea*, adding money (for desks, books, etc) can move the needle, but not in the way liberals hope.

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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

We can do better, but it would involve doing things that would likely appall liberals, and no, I'm not going to list them. We had this debate in the 70s/80s, and conservatives lost. (Their answer: Exit the schools and set up their own, mostly white, alternatives.) I am deeply pessimistic on this.

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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Tell it to the people here who insist that "spending = success" I think it's a stupid idea, but it's a stupid idea that refuses to die no matter how much money we've lit on fire over the past 60 years

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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

No. I'm going to take some time to fight as well with people who think they should be able to direct my activities on social media

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Reposted by Tom Nichols

David Gustof @dgustof1966.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

I’ll say it again. The largest influence/indicator of student achievement is parental involvement.

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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Where I lived (Willimansett), people could see new housing being built in the 70s in Holyoke that was nicer than the apartments they were living in, and then watched them become slums again that gangs burned down within a decade. It is impossible to explain this to people who did not experience it.

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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

I am not at all disinclined to government spending - depending on where the taxes to get the money is levied, and what it's spent on. I'm disinclined to the post-60s trick of spreading the costs around nationally so that tax/spend becomes a foggy matter of a million small bites.

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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

I guess I should say this out loud. What works? Sometimes, the sad answer is: nothing. All you can do is spend enough and do what you can to mitigate the damage, but 60 years of experiments should tell us that sometimes, life is unfair and you can't fix everything.

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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

I FED YOU AND YOU WENT TO LAW SCHOOL AND YOU TURNED INTO AN UNGRATEFUL DAUGHTER AND THAT'S WHY FEEDING KIDS IS BAD

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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

New York has some seriously uneven public school outcomes. New York City spends *even more than the state average*, and yet NYC outcomes lag the state, the region, and the national average. By the "spending = success" reasoning, NYC should be at the top of the heap for outcomes. It isn't.

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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

We talk about money because we don't want to talk about culture.

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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

And they underestimate the impact on people who were crowded into three rooms in rickety three-deckers seeing brand new housing being built for people on public assistance. In my neighborhood, this was a HUGE deal in the 70s and the source of a lot of anger about government spending.

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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

"Nobody sensible" is doing a lot of work there

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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

And the reaction was: "On what? The same stuff you were doing in the 70s?" Too many folks here just don't understand the impact of the 70s on the 80s

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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

If this were true, New York and DC would have the best educational outcomes in the country

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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

The problem is that when one fix doesn't work, we keep adding new fixes. Feed hungry kids. That's a good thing to do. But don't expect that it's going to transform the school, their homes, or their neighborhoods.

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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Honest question: Were you alive in 1980 and voting?

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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

And the assault he led on government programs was so unpopular that he barely squeaked back into office in 1984

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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Yeah, sometimes I realize that on Bluesky, you're talking to people who think the Obama administration was "a long time ago"

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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Well-fed kids have a hard time learning when their home life does not support learning.

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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

It wasn't relentless in the 60s and 70s. Like most people here, you're determined to reverse cause and effect: The assault on those programs was because they'd failed. They didn't fail because they were under political assault.

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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Ray, in my case, some of it was pure luck. One arrest or some other screwup and I might have been an excellent jailhouse writer :) One thing I'll credit: Parental love, even when they were a mess, a good church, and a few teachers who challenged me to stay on the path. But it was close.

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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

I'm in favor of free lunches and breakfast for poor kids as a matter of basic decency. But that's not really an educational issue, imo. They still have to go home at the end of the day.

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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

I was on the road today doing stuff and it was pretty funny to hear Wink Martindale sitting in for Casey. Peak mid-70s.

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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

You're confusing cause and effect. The voters in 1980 had already made that decision. They didn't elect Reagan to give the social programs of the 70s a fair shake, they elected him to dismantle them.

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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

I have no hope that I will ever change the mind of someone like you; my only goal is to get people like you to advocate for candidates who can win elections and not to scare the normals into the arms of those reactionaries, but getting between the left and its self-love is a Sisyphean task.

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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Yeah, I "demand a detail explanation from you" gets the look you see in my profile pic

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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Some inner city schools do well. Some don't. Some rural schools do well. Others don't. Money - and this we learned the hard way - cannot really influence outcomes. Culture, environment, parents - they matter more. I feel like I'm talking to people who missed the last 60 years of US history :) /4x

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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

What you don't realize is how much of that was tried, and failed. There's a reason a lot of the Great Society programs were junked: They didn't work. "We'll just make every town like Chevy Chase!" is a great, and stupidly impractical, idea. /3

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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

"If only we spent more on social welfare, schools would be better!" Well, maybe, as long as the kids aren't living in a dysfunctional culture with bad parents. What most of you seem unable to grasp is that you're wishcasting that all places become like a nice suburb full of good parents. /2

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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

I have to dial back the sarcasm, because people aren't getting it. Yes, better housing, nutritious food, nicer streets, low crime - all of these will help grades! But many of you are basically unreconstructed 70s liberals who *just don't get it* that you can't make that magically happen. /1

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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Let's just make the State your parents. State housing, State food, and State education. Skip the "taxed a bit more" and just go to the full nanny state.

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Tom Nichols @radiofreetom.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Occasionally, I interact with my family and watch television and do things beside answer annoying people who demand full treatises on government at the snap of their fingers.

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