Gores truth aged badly, a disastrous discipline reform and other commentary

Al Gore’s alarmist documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” 20 years ago triggered the “inculcation” in “millions of Americans” of the belief that “climate change poses an existential crisis” to humanity, fumes Juan Davis Rojas at UnHerd.Yet his “alarmist claims” of “imminent apocalypse” were always “wildly inaccurate.” Climate change is real, but with no real threat of a “terminal risk to humanity.” “Rational, commonsense measures” can “mitigate the negative consequences” of warming, including the “expansion” of “wind, solar, geothermal, and nuclear power.” “Climate fundamentalists” may shrug at “progress,” the world’s made “great strides” in emission reduction since 2006.

“Anthropogenic climate change is quite real,” but Al Gore’s “fundamentalist successors” had best note how their obstinacy has “contributed to their own discredit.”Claims in 2003 that “suspensions and expulsions” were “disproportionately” targeting students with disabilities and boys from Black and Latino communities, effectively pushing them “into the justice system” (called “the “school-to-prison pipeline”) changed “how schools discipline children”— with terrible results, explain Jennifer Weber & Carolyn D.Gorman at City Journal.

Districts began “reducing suspensions and replacing them with mental health-oriented approaches like ‘restorative justice,’ social-emotional learning, and ‘trauma-informed’ practices” — of which only encourages “acting out.” No! Effective discipline that’s tied to “behavior is the only approach that keeps a student in school engaged — and engagement is what keeps him out of the justice system.” The best way to keep kids out of prison “is a school that teaches rules, expectations, and how to belong.”The Democratic National Committee just “set up a challenge for the DSA” with its schedule of the first six 2028 primaries, notes Jim Geragh...