In 2025, government institutions—from D.C. to Idaho—protected their power, punished parents for demanding better schools and healthcare, and forced families to build parallel systems instead.
This editorial ran in the Tuesday 30 December 2025 edition of the Moscow-Pullman Daily News.
If 2025 revealed anything, it wasn’t a new crisis. It revealed a pattern we should have recognized sooner.
Across education, spending, media, welfare, and national security, the same dynamic kept surfacing. Government institutions failed. Instead of correcting course, they protected power and budgets. When citizens pointed to failure, the response wasn’t reform. It was narrative control.
This wasn’t a left-versus-right story. Democrats and Republicans played their roles. What collapsed in 2025 wasn’t policy. It was accountability.
Take Russiagate. Years of “bombshells” ended with the story discredited; the damage was done. Officials used law enforcement and intelligence tools in a political fight, fed leaks to friendly media, and kept the country in a manufactured panic. Watergate was a bungled burglary and a cover-up. Russiagate was far worse: the nation’s intelligence and law-enforcement apparatus turned inward and was weaponized against domestic politics. It backfired—hardening Trump, galvanizing his MAGA supporters, and deepening distrust. Yet, those responsible faced little consequence.
The same instinct showed up closer to home.
When Idaho school districts delivered chronically poor results, Moscow School District sued—blocking school choice, attacking parents as greedy or selfish, and framing exit as “defunding,” even as the data showed systemic failure. At MSD, fewer than two-thirds of students test proficient in math and science despite some of the highest per-pupil spending in the state.
Government oversight of failure is acceptable; parental oversight of better outcomes is illegitimate. The numbers aren’t in dispute; authority is. Worse, districts aren’t just suing the state. They are suing to overturn a law passed by elected legislators and signed by the governor despite broad public support for school choice. When a government institution uses the courts to veto duly enacted law because it dislikes the outcome, that isn’t democracy. It’s institutional tyranny.
Education made the larger conflict of 2025 impossible to ignore: parents versus the state. Families were told to trust systems that couldn’t deliver basic results. When they sought alternatives, that choice was treated as an attack. The reality was simpler and more uncomfortable. Wealthy families always had options. Poor and working-class families did not. School choice didn’t create inequality; it exposed it.
The same logic appeared in health debates. Parents who questioned childhood vaccine schedules weren’t treated as adults exercising judgment; they were treated as threats. Parents who declined the HepB vaccine for newborns—when the mother didn’t have hepatitis—were pressured, shamed, or flagged. Consent became conditional. Questioning policy became “denial.”
The modern state increasingly behaves as if children belong to institutions first and parents second. That belief shows up in some blue states and districts that tell schools to conceal a child’s request to adopt new gender language or begin transitioning. When government schools are ordered to keep secrets from parents, it isn’t about safety. It’s about control.
By the end of the year, one lesson stood out: reform inside broken systems doesn’t work. Accountability now comes from building outside them. Parents did it with education: private schools, homeschool co-ops, and hybrid models. Patients are doing it too, turning to doctors who operate outside insurance, charge flat fees, and answer to patients instead of paperwork.
These parallel systems don’t need permission to exist. They need families willing to walk away and take responsibility for decisions the state insists on monopolizing.
Underlying all of this was money spent freely today and billed to children tomorrow.
Audits exposed trillions in waste, yet spending accelerated. Republicans preached restraint while voting for deficit explosions. Democrats rebranded spending as “investment” while blocking oversight. No one planned to pay the bill. The plan was to die first and stick the debt to our grandchildren.
Inflation did its work. Prices shifted the cost of Washington’s debt onto the middle class through higher food, housing, and borrowing costs. The wealthy rode it out on appreciating assets while families paid at the checkout line. Inflation wasn’t a mistake; it was the hidden tax used to cover federal debt and interest without ever asking voters’ permission.
Welfare programs expanded without limits or outcomes. SNAP subsidized soda and sugar. Medicare and Medicaid paid for the consequences. Obesity rose. Costs followed. The policy failed; the funding continued; and taxpayers were stuck with the bill.
2025 proved self-government won’t run on autopilot. When institutions fail, lie, and sue to protect themselves, citizens must choose: comply or reclaim. Reclaim authority over children, reclaim consent in healthcare, reclaim accountability in spending.
Liberty erodes when we outsource responsibility. In 2026, let’s guard liberty by withdrawing blind trust and rebuilding with honesty, limits, and consequences.