313 Signatures and a Statewide Op-Ed

This petition is not viral. It is persistent.

The past two weeks were exceptional. This petition has passed 300 verified signatures and now sits at 319. Thank you to everyone who signed and shared Sowell’s ideas.
In that same stretch, my daughter’s letter arrived at the White House. 

I was a caller on the Tim Pool show twice. The petition hit Philadelphia radio and will be featured across a New York podcast network. Later this year I’ll be a guest on a podcast, another first for me. And an op-ed I wrote ran in a Delaware statewide paper that reaches Delaware, southern Pennsylvania, and South Jersey. 

This is my call-in to the Tim Pool show with Nick Freitas on August 24, 2026:
 https://youtu.be/NDxsmZOFotc 

I read and reread that article countless times, changing the wording on every pass. I tried to keep the language free of perceived political bias. That’s why it meant so much when my first-choice paper ran it. I’m a conversationalist. I want real conversations with people who’ve been told we’re political opposites. Even that description is being generous.  

I have vowed to be relentless in getting Sowell’s ideas into the national dialogue. This is about more than giving one man presidential honors. It’s about elevating those ideas and planting seeds of free thought in the minds of millions. The goal is to ignite righteous indignation and give people the reasoning to push back when those in power treat their ideas as morally superior and treat results as optional.

That is why this story belongs here.

Sowell pawned his only suit to eat. He walked out of a Lower East Side pawnshop, bought a knish and an orange soda, and never sat there resenting people eating better elsewhere. Years later he ate at the Waldorf, in Paris, and at the White House. Nothing topped that knish and orange soda. The pain of poverty is what got many people out of poverty—not speeches about easing it.

That is the difference. One set of ideas manages people. The other tells the truth about what actually lifts them.

The above story, with accompanying video clip, was shared by @sowelleconomics on 𝕏.
 https://x.com/sowelleconomics/status/2096560402851057771 

That is why it mattered when this ran:
Good intentions are not enough. Delaware schools need to drive results:
What Thomas Sowell can teach Delaware about its schools
https://www.delawareonline.com/story/opinion/2026/08/27/delaware-schools-education-policy-results/91439833007/ 

This appeared in Delaware Online/The News Journal, a regional paper in the USA TODAY Network. 

The piece is behind a paywall many of you have no reason to subscribe to, so the full text is below. 

Delaware schools and education policy must focus on results
What Thomas Sowell can teach Delaware about its schools
 James Ingrassia
 Aug. 27, 2026 

Delaware keeps spending more on education. Too many students are still being failed. That is not just a policy failure. It is a moral one. 

Look at the numbers without flinching. Over the past two decades, teacher salaries rose about 11%. Spending on support services — mostly administration — rose 49%. Since 2000, the number of students and classroom teachers has grown only modestly. The ranks of principals, assistant principals and administrative staff have swollen far faster. We have built an entrenched adult jobs program. We have not built a better system for children. 

Delaware needs education policy that produces results. 

This keeps happening because we judge policies by how virtuous they sound instead of what they actually produce. The economist Thomas Sowell spent a lifetime exposing this exact habit. His most piercing observation still applies: “The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.” 

When leaders ignore scarcity, they fall into what Sowell called the vision of the anointed, an idealized fantasy of progress built on moral certainty and intellectual superiority. Evidence that contradicts the vision is dismissed. Failures are met with demands for more money, more staff, and more power. The adults in the system are protected. The children are not. 

We see the same pattern when standards are lowered in the name of equity. Good intentions do not make weaker expectations any less harmful. A child who cannot read proficiently is not helped by adults congratulating themselves on their compassion. The child is still unprepared. Pretending otherwise is not kindness. It is abandonment dressed up as virtue. 

Simply removing barriers is not the solution. The real work is equipping children with the tutoring, mentorship, and rigorous instruction they need to overcome those barriers. Lowering the bar does not lift anyone. Developing strength does. 

A recent book by Germinal G. Van, Thomas Sowell: A Misunderstood Economist, lays out these ideas with unusual clarity. Van shows how relentlessly Sowell followed the data even when it offended the preferred narrative. That willingness to face reality is precisely what Delaware education policy has too often refused to do. 

Real improvement requires something harder than new slogans or larger bureaucracies. It requires measuring what actually works: early literacy, regular attendance, effective teaching in the classroom and policies that strengthen families instead of trying to replace them. Expanding the administrative class while student results stagnate is not reform. It is self-deception. 

Sowell’s insistence on results over rhetoric has shaped how I see schooling in our state. It is also why I launched a petition asking President Donald Trump to award him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His ideas remain urgently needed. The petition is at Change.org/AwardSowell. 

Delaware does not need another round of well-intentioned expansions that protect the system while leaving the same children behind. It needs the courage to stop measuring success by intentions and start measuring it by results. Until that shift happens, the gap between what we spend and what students receive will keep widening, and the people who pay the highest price will continue to be the ones with the least power to demand better