Home For The Holidays

One privilege bestowed on me as an accident of birth that I share with few others is that I am the child of genuine, unrepentant Stalinists. And you thought being raised by wolves was tough. I started consuming the Marxist canon at the age of thirteen, and I was, and remain, a quick study. As a result, whenever I’m presented with the thoughts of Andru Volinsky or Hope Damon, I am reminded of my parents and their lifelong struggle against capitalism and individual liberty.

But rarely do I get that “home for the holidays” feeling more than with Volinsky’s recent podcast titled “Open Enrollment Predator Schools: A Christian Perspective.” When Marxists, be they avowed communists, socialists, democratic socialists, or just plain democrats, start lecturing other people about the obligations imposed on them by their religions, you are always in for an entertaining time and, possibly, an all-expense-paid camping experience.

Volinsky regularly decries vouchers as a product of the 1957 Little Rock desegregation battle, when white parents used them to avoid the impact of court-ordered desegregation. He never mentions the many thousands of black children saved by vouchers from failing inner city schools since 1990, as that does not work with the script of his simple morality play.

Of course, racial segregation is not a useful polemical tool when trying to create the New Soviet Man here in New Hampshire, and so he resorts to Play Number One in the Marxist playbook, class envy. He paints the residents of property poor towns as the victims of libertarians, multinational corporations, Christian extremists, out-of-state money, and, of course, the “rich.” He argues that open enrollment and related school choice policies create what he calls “predator schools.” These are districts that accept incoming students from poorer communities. When a student leaves, the funding attached to that child follows them, which he portrays as an injustice to “donor” districts with weak tax bases and high needs. In his telling, poor towns lose money and stability, while better-off districts skim off motivated families and their children. He presents school choice as predatory, unfair to poor districts, driven by dubious ideological forces, and incompatible with Christian moral duty.

If we take those claims seriously, we first have to ask a simple question: What is the primary moral unit here, the system or the child? Any serious ethic, Christian or otherwise, starts with concrete persons, not abstract institutions. Parents are not mere shareholders in a district budget. They are responsible for their children’s safety and development. When a school is unsafe, chaotic, or consistently failing to teach, asking parents to leave their kids in place to “protect the system” is not noble; it is cruel.

Volinsky’s logic treats families, especially poor ones, as instruments of a larger project. When activists like Volinsky call school choice “predatory,” they are, in practice, defending a monopoly that bites hardest in struggling communities. That is not equity; it is protection of elite privilege wrapped in moral language.

Labeling choice schools “predators” also flips the moral narrative. For decades, monopoly districts have consumed enormous sums of money while graduating students who cannot read or do basic math. They face little consequence when violence, bullying, or ideological fads push actual learning aside. Families stuck in those systems have been prey, not predators. Offering them an exit is closer to a rescue mission than a raid. Calling that rescue “predatory” may be emotionally satisfying to defenders of the status quo, but it is morally backwards.

When you strip away the rhetoric, the conflict here is simple. Volinsky’s argument asks families, especially poor ones, to accept a kind of soft collectivism in which the system takes precedence and individual children are treated as tools to sustain it. School choice represents the opposite instinct. It trusts families more than bureaucracies, favors pluralism over uniformity, and treats consent as something schools must earn rather than presume. Whatever Christian language is used to defend the monopoly, the underlying model looks far more like a command economy than a community of free and responsible citizens. School choice is not predation. It is a path out of captivity.

The views expressed in this essay are those of the author and do not represent the policy, program, platform, or views of the Sullivan County Republican Committee