The President’s Budget request was released last week. With just $29.8 billion in new spending, about a 40.8 percent increase, for education. In this climate, that’s practically a cut. I’m sure we can come up with a baseline to make the case. And complaints are already emerging about particular accounts.

This is a crazy graf, but bear with me, it’s an education story:

An Army veteran and former police chief of La Habra, Calif., Mr. Hostetter was known around San Clemente as a yoga guru — his specialty is “sound healing” with gongs, Tibetan bowls and Aboriginal didgeridoos — until the pandemic turned him into a self-declared “patriotic warrior.” He gave up yoga and founded the American Phoenix Project, which says it arose as a result of “the fear-based tyranny of 2020 caused by manipulative officials at the highest levels of our government.”

My speciality is not “sound healing.” But I can do thought experiments, here’s one: Let’s say there is a public school teacher who is good at their job and effective and went to the rally on January 6 in D.C., but just the rally, they did not enter the Capitol. So peaceful protest. Should that person lose their job? And if the answer is yes, then what are the downstream consequences? What is the limiting principle(s)?

Here’s one very on brand California take from the article about how this issue is playing out:

“Frankly, it’s hard to get stoked about sending flowers and birthday cards to a classroom teacher who appears to align herself with a conspiratorial social movement and embraces the racist values of QAnon,” one mother wrote in an email to other parents.

In the words of another Californian, “What are you people, on dope?”