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Sunday, May 31, 2026

My late friend's recollections of student decline

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Several months ago my old lunch companion, Professor Roger Garrison, passed away: Roger was emeritus at Auburn and made important contributions to the Austrian School of economics. He also left us with this story, which says something about where things are:

I used to show up on the first day of class and find a room full of students whose heads were filled with common economic fallacies, and I would have to refute them.

Nowadays they haven't even heard of the fallacies, so now I have to teach them the fallacies and then refute them.


And that reminded me of the seven years I myself spent in front of a classroom.

Students had to take the courses I taught (not necessarily with me, but they had to take the courses themselves), which were American history and Western civilization surveys. So I used to tell them: as long as you're stuck in here, you may as well learn something.

They liked me because I was entertaining and interesting, and not that much older than they were (I was 27 with a fresh Ph.D. when I started). They also liked that I taught them material they would not have encountered anywhere else -- I used to like telling them from time to time that if they were sitting in a Harvard classroom they would never hear a word of what I was about to teach them.

I wrote a lot of reference letters, some of them for students transferring to another school. One such student, who went on to enroll at a school in the State University of New York system, wrote to thank me: I'm the only one in my class who knows anything, he said.


I was very happy that despite not being a pushover in the grade department, I got excellent ratings from students, and a bunch of them even kept in touch with me over the years (I still hear from one from time to time, even though I left academia 20 years ago).

Obviously we need a more efficient system than you have to have Woods as your professor if you're going to learn history, or be prepared to fight logical fallacies, etc. I had a couple of hundred students per semester. Not enough to change the world.

So let's let the burgeoning Tuttle Twins book series -- some are for young children and some for teens -- teach the truth.

American history, logical fallacies, great entrepreneurs, the world's worst ideas, and a dozen of the classic works of our tradition translated for a young audience -- this is only the tip of the iceberg.

The 68% Memorial Day discount expires tonight, so make sure the kiddos don't spend the entire summer glued to a screen:

 
Tom Woods
 






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Friday, May 29, 2026

Not guilty of racism, again

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Earlier this month Harmeet Dhillon, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, posted this: "At Yale Medical School, a black applicant is 29 times more likely to be invited to interview than an Asian with equally strong academics."

A black critic on Twitter responded:

Yale School of Medicine has a total of 553 students across all four classes.

Total Black students: 44. That’s ~10 per class. [He means 11 -- TW.] Total Asian students: 157. That’s ~40 per class.

There are nearly as many Asian students PER CLASS as there are Black students in the entire school.

Black: 14% of America. Only 7% of Yale Med Asian: 7% of America. 28% of Yale Med. Who exactly is getting discriminated against here?


But nothing the critic says is incompatible with what Dhillon said. Notice that the critic says nothing about the test scores and academic preparedness of the two groups. They never do.

Only about 600 black students in the entire country have MCAT scores of at least 510, the bare minimum for an elite school. Meanwhile, there are 200 medical schools competing for that small number. The typical medical school admits 150 people per year. Yale admits only two-thirds of that number (104 students per year) and still has 11 black students entering each year, which is therefore a disproportionately high number of black students.

It boils down to this: the pool of Asian applicants with top-tier MCAT/GPA (say, 520+ and 3.95+) is much larger than the equivalent black pool. To achieve eleven black students per class (and maintain their "diversity" goals), Yale must extend far more interview offers to lower-scoring black applicants than to equally (or higher) scoring Asians. This yields the 29x odds ratio at the interview stage while still yielding more total Asian students enrolled (due to the much deeper Asian applicant pool at high scores and higher overall Asian application volume and qualification rates).

What this means, in short, is that 
Yale actually admits more black students than the raw numbers should lead us to expect.

But people see numbers like the ones from the critic -- black people are 14 percent of America but only 7 percent of Yale Medical School! -- and think: something underhanded must be going on.

In fact, as we saw in this example, outcome disparities like these generally have benign explanations, but the activist class doesn't want to hear them. Their identities revolve around grievance, and around the existence of secret conspiracies to keep their groups down. All disparities everywhere are ipso facto evidence of "discrimination," which is why the whole racket is such a lawyers' paradise.

Naturally we want to raise kids who are capable of spotting the fallacies in claims like these and who don't get swept up in campaigns for "change" that have zero basis in reality. That would be embarrassing for everyone.

The Tuttle Twins series of books for children and teens come in very handy here -- like their guide to logical fallacies, or their book about the world's worst ideas.

May as well pick them up with the extended Memorial Day sale -- 68% off the Family Starter Pack, for example -- still running.

But if you've been thinking this week, "I really need to grab that before it expires," you're getting dangerously close. A 68% discount ain't anything to shake a stick at, so check it out:

 
Tom Woods
 






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Meet the People Behind Centerpointe

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Thursday, May 28, 2026

I ain't showing "proof of vaccination"

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Last night I had to endure something I wouldn't wish on anyone: I had to sit through a Ted Cruz clip.

Some of you may have seen me, in fact: I was live on on Liberty Vault, the Dave Benner podcast. There are very few people I would have endured that Cruz ordeal for, but Dave is one of them.

If you don't know Dave, he's been working in the trenches for many years -- he says we met in 2013, but I could have sworn it was earlier. He must have written millions of words by now, and his insights and historical knowledge are top notch -- his biography of Thomas Paine is a genuine pleasure to read.

Well, now he has a YouTube channel with nearly 400,000 subscribers, and it couldn't have happened to a better guy.

We talked about Tulsi Gabbard's resignation, William Jennings Bryan, Joe Kent, Ted Cruz, the Covid fiasco, and what in heaven's name we should be doing now. I think you'll enjoy it:

 
Speaking of Covid, I happened to run into Dave in person in 2021 at an Opeth concert in Nashville, where Dave lives -- I was there because the closest city to me on the tour was Atlanta, and the venue there was requiring masks and "proof of vaccination."

But good ol' Nashville wasn't requiring a thing, so Jenna and I got our tickets for the show there. Knowing Dave was a fan, I texted him during the show to tell him we were there. Turns out he was there, too -- in exactly the same row we were.

I'm such a Dave Benner fan, in fact, that when I had an extra ticket to attend a NHL game in Nashville -- the Predators' home opener -- in a private suite with my Elite Mastermind, I invited Dave to join us.

Dave is the one in the hat. As you can see, Mayor Glenn Jacobs -- the former Kane of the WWE -- also joined us at my invitation. I told you my mastermind does fun things.
As it happens, before we went live on the show last night, Dave told me something: that night he'd gotten to know Paul Counts, who directs the mastermind with me. He said, "Paul has opened up a world of opportunities for me and my brand. I can't thank him enough."

All because he attended a single hockey game with us, as a special one-time guest.

We hear a lot about how "the rich get richer." And usually it's insinuated that they get richer by underhanded means (and indeed in the case of the politically connected ones, they often do).

But a key way the rich get richer, or the well-off grow rich, is by the company they keep.

Keep good company with me, my friend:

 
Tom Woods



 






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Wednesday, May 27, 2026

They lied about the BLM riots

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Americans live in different universes from each other.

One side will say: this happened. Another side will say: that happened. Whatever the event in question is, the truth about it is one hundred percent verifiable. And yet the side believing the opposite of what happened will go on believing the opposite of what happened, no matter what you say.

The most obvious example for people reading this, given what I wrote so much about in 2020 and thereafter, was Covid: there are still people who think the mitigation measures kept people safe, and that California did better than Florida in health outcomes.

California's numbers in terms of excess deaths, as compared to those of Florida, are an easily verified matter of public record, and yet people still believe the literal opposite of the truth.

I would be willing to bet that believing in California's victory over Florida correlates with (1) political ideology and (2) how much a person trusts journalists.

Here's another example:

The View's "Sunny Hostin" says, "
There was very limited destruction of property and violence during the BLM uprising."

As you can see, getting the correct answer to this question is correlated with ideology; people on the left are much more likely to think there was trivial damage:
And the more you trust journalists, the more likely you are to make that error:
Errors like this serve to confirm people's faulty and deranged worldviews.

And they are the kind of errors people make when they get their news by osmosis: simply assuming the press is telling you the truth leads people to think absurd things, as we can see in the chart above.

If we don't want our kiddos to become low-information zombies, we'll need to make an active effort at prevention.

This is where Connor Boyack comes in.

Connor used to be my tech guy. He was great at it. But a talent like Connor being my tech guy is like when Michael McDonald sang backup for Steely Dan.

Watching Connor build an empire -- the good kind of empire -- has been profoundly gratifying.

Just one part of that empire has been the gap he filled for children, from the earliest years through teenagers. People used to ask, "What can my children read?" And with the exceptions of a couple of books here and there, our answer was: pretty much nothing.

From Connor, first we got the Tuttle Twins children's books, each of which takes a classic work in our tradition and conveys its key ideas in a colorful and engaging way suited to young readers.

Then the Choose Your Consequence books, where the reader makes the choices that drive the story.

And then the guidebooks, such as their guides to
  • logical fallacies
  • true conspiracies
  • courageous heroes
  • modern villains
  • inspiring entrepreneurs
  • the world's worst ideas
Then there are their American history books. Really, too much for me to describe!

They've got some bundles on sale so the kiddos can stock up on summer reading -- and 68% off, to boot.

Here's why Connor as my tech guy was an unspeakable waste of incredible talent, and why releasing him to the world is one of the best things I've done.

Inoculate those kids against the madness of the world in 2026:

 
Tom Woods






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