A great meme occasionally pops up on X, and it's actually an X post itself. It says that much of leftist discourse is the Left feigning ignorance to make discourse impossible. I've rarely read something so succinct and accurate.
It's amazing how much leftist discourse is just them pretending not to understand things, thus making discourse impossible.
— Millennial Woes (@MillennialWoes) February 22, 2025
With that in mind, I come back to the infuriating story of Nikole Hannah-Jones and her daughter, Najya. Hannah-Jones had the wealth and clout to send Najya to a good school in New York. She chose not to. Why? Because her politics told her it wasn't fair. Instead, Hannah-Jones sent her daughter to a failing school — that managed to spend $50,000 per student anyway — where her daughter didn't know how to do math or write, despite getting As on her report card.
Enter Nathan J. Robinson, Editor-in-Chief of Current Affairs, who played dumb on why Hannah-Jones' critics haven't answer a question that they've actually answered multiple times: Why should her daughter go to a better school than other people's kids just because she works for the New York Times?
I notice none of Nikole Hannah-Jones' critics try to answer to the basic question she wrestled with, which is: Why should my daughter get to go to a better school than other people's kids just because I work for the New York Times?
— Nathan J Robinson (@NathanJRobinson) September 21, 2026
See what that post means about pretending not to understand things? Yeah, that.
There is this sick mentality on the Left. They call it "equity," but it's really collectivism, and it's destructive. It's also nothing new.
In 2015, professor Adam Swift said that while he wouldn't ban the reading of bedtime stories, parents who take time to read to their children should feel guilty about it.
"I don’t think parents reading their children bedtime stories should constantly have in their minds the way that they are unfairly disadvantaging other people’s children, but I think they should have that thought occasionally," he said. Swift also said that parents who try to give their kids the best education possible, including sending them to private schools, "cannot be justified" in any way.
In 2024, WaPo columnist Megan McArdle wrote on X "At a social level, it is not good to allow parents to do everything possible to advantage their children over the children of others."
Excuse me?
That is literally your one job as a parent. But let's marvel for a moment at the willful ignorance of the Left before we take his line of thinking to its logical conclusion.
Why should my sons get to eat dinner every night when other people's kids are going hungry? Why should my sons get access to healthy food when other people's kids eat junk? Why should my sons get access to clean water and medical care when other people's kids don't have access to one or both? Some kids can't go to the dentist, so my sons should just deal with that abscess and cavities. It's only fair, right? Other people's kids have cancer. Should I poison my sons with radium so they're the same as other people's kids? Some people abuse their kids. Should I beat my sons every now and then to remind them they're no better?
See where this leads?
It all sounds insane, because it is. No sane parent would do any of those things to their children.
Yet somehow, putting a child in a failing public school — when you have every opportunity to do otherwise — is a noble thing.
But I'll also point something else out: notice how the guys like Nathan J. Robinson and Nikole Hannah-Jones are never the ones making the sacrifices? No one is calling on Hannah-Jones to quit her job at the NYT to go flip burgers at McDonald's, or to give up her swanky $1.5 million brownstone because there are homeless people. Nor does anyone call on Hannah-Jones to forgo her speaking fees — which range from $20,000 to $50,000 a pop. She can make more in a month by working once a week than most Americans make in a year.
The Left believes that our societal standard must be no higher than our lowest common denominator. It explains so much, of course, about how they approach education, work, and life in general. Being successful takes hard work, discipline, and sacrifice — all things anathema to the Left. The kind of collectivism spouted by Nikole Hannah-Jones, Adam Swift, and Megan McArdle creates a permission structure by which to be lazy, mediocre, and perpetually aggrieved.
But only for other people's children, and sometimes even their own.
Hannah-Jones’ experience should have prompted a very different question: Why are we still funding, defending, and propping up a system in which parents have to be wealthy or well-connected to escape a school that fails their children? We need to answer that, and sooner rather than later.
But in the short term, the answer to Robinson’s question is simple: Hannah-Jones’ daughter deserved the best education her mother could provide because she was her daughter. Just because another parent has fewer resources or another child has fewer opportunities does not excuse intentionally harming your child's education and future. A parent's duty is not to make her child equally disadvantaged; it is to give him every reasonable opportunity to flourish. The injustice of one child attending a failing school is not remedied by deliberately sending another child there, too. "An eye for an eye makes everyone blind," and all that.
