The Education State & The DOJ’s State of Confusion – July 9th, 2025
Takeaway #1: The Education State
Florida has now ranked first or second in K-college education for three consecutive years, but when most think of the Sunshine State, they still don’t realize that our state is continuing to lead the way educationally. While the initial news of this year’s Florida Assessment progress was impressive, with significant progress in student performance, and improved performance with 56% of K-12 public schools, there’s that much more to the story when you look at a longer view. Governor DeSantis has a lot he can take credit for regarding the outperformance in just about every way of our state, but perhaps nowhere is his personal impact more profound, and will his legacy be greater than what’s happened with public education. In 2018 Ron DeSantis ran a campaign focused on ending the Common Core curriculum in Florida’s public schools and instead sought to implement the B.E.S.T. standards. By February of 2020 – just prior to the impact of the pandemic, the conversion was complete. From there Governor DeSantis fought successfully to implement parental rights in education, beating back the wokeness promoted by teachers' unions that had worked its way into classrooms across the country. Speaking of teachers' unions, there are far fewer union teachers in Florida. There are about 24,000 fewer teachers in a union, teaching in Florida today than in 2018 as well. And what have we seen? Rising graduation rates that have reached record highs, 71% of Florida’s public schools that are now either “A” or “B” schools up from 58% in 2018. There are also now fewer than half of the number of “D” or “F” rated schools as well. These are all contributing reasons as to why Florida has continued to be first or second in education in the country in recent years. So yeah, a focus on teaching the basics as opposed to wokeness, and asserting parental rights as opposed to the AFT and FEA’s agenda, equals consistently better results. Imagine that...it’s a plan that’s come together. The Sunshine State has become the Education State. It’s a great story that continues to get better by the year, and it’s Governor DeSantis’ greatest accomplishment to date.
Takeaway #2: Not buying it
It’s hard to imagine that on July 9th Americans could be more skeptical of what really went down with Jeffrey Epstein and company than say on January 9th. But it appears to be that way. So, as we’ve discussed, on Monday the US Department of Justice in conjunction with the FBI, issued an official memo, leaked through Axios, effectively saying that as far as Epstein stuff goes, there’s nothing more to see here. DOJ’s line is that he really did take his own life, he didn’t actually have a client list, and that effectively as far as Epstein - its case closed. Of course there’s only one (thousand?) problem with this. It's what I referenced to start the show yesterday. It’s not possible to reconcile this with what Attorney General Pam Bondi had already said. It was in a Fox News interview February when in answer to this question by Jon Roberts: The DOJ may be releasing the list of Jeffrey Epstein's clients, will that really happen? Bondi said: It's sitting on my desk right now to review. And now it’s said that the list that Bondi said was on her desk right now never existed? If this were any matter of significant public interest, this contradiction would present, at best, be a credibility problem. When you consider that it involves a matter that was already viewed as a likely conspiracy by many to begin with, the situation becomes that much more problematic. Following the death of Jeffrey Epstein in prison, according to Rasmussen’s polling 52% of Americans believed that Epstein was murdered while only 21% believed the company line that he committed suicide. Now, it’s much worse. Over the past day Sinclair Media polled on this question again. Their question: Do you trust the DOJ/FBI memo? 90% said no. And with that government credibility with the Epstein thing has reached a new low. For Pam Bondi there are two challenges and two things she must address. The first issue is that the memo leaked to Axios in the first place. She’s got a leaker within her ranks. The second issue is, of course, much bigger. If we were to take the memo at face value today, why did she lie about what was “on her desk” in February?
Takeaway #3: People are right to be skeptical
We’ve been misled and the only question is which way. Making the matter worse, in the also released video from the hall outside of Jeffrey Epstein’s cell from the night that he died the video skips from 11:58:58 to exactly midnight. So...what exactly happened in the minute and two seconds in question? Seemingly the DOJ also didn’t think that required an explanation? You may recall that in the immediate aftermath of the fallout between Elon Musk and President Trump Elon posted, without any evidence, that the reason the Epstein client list hadn’t been released was because President Trump was on it. A post he quickly deleted and said he later regretted it. But where did that thought process come from? We’re now in a place with more questions than we even had before. And ample reason for skepticism because now we know we’ve been misled. It’s just a question of which time and in what direction. There’s also a question about whether AG Pam Bondi can survive this situation. There’s a whole lot of explaining to do and even then, many will question what is true.