LBJ DIDN’T BUILD A GREAT SOCIETY. HE BUILT A TRAP. And the cruelest part? The data proving it was right in front of them the whole time.

Hat tip to @MajoretteC, who laid out the Baltimore story in painful thread-by-thread detail — the crumbling towers, the wasted money, the women who were FIGHTING to climb out while the system was engineered to hold them in. This article exists because of her thread. And it is for every person she worked alongside.

— THE NUMBER THEY WILL NEVER SHOW YOU IN A HISTORY CLASS —

I am a science teacher. So before we do anything else, we are going to look at the actual data. Because the data DESTROYS the entire narrative.

Black poverty in America fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent in 1960. That is FORTY POINTS in twenty years. Before the Great Society. Before Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. Before a single dollar of the $22 trillion the federal government has spent on poverty programs since 1965. The free market, economic growth, and an intact family culture did that — forty points — in two decades.

Now watch what the Great Society did.

In the twenty years AFTER 1960 — the period of the Great Society programs, the War on Poverty, the housing projects, all of it — Black poverty fell eighteen points.

Eighteen. Not forty. Eighteen.

The trend didn’t just slow down. It was CUT IN HALF. Thomas Sowell, Nobel Prize-winning economist, said it plainly: ‘The trend was there before them. The trend did not even accelerate after 1960.’ Think about what that means. The government declared an unconditional war on poverty, spent $22 trillion — and produced WORSE results than doing nothing had. And yet here we are, sixty years later, being told the Great Society was a success.

Quinn’s First Law of Liberalism: ‘Liberalism always generates the exact opposite of its stated intent.’

A science teacher does not ignore data like that. Not even when the conclusion is uncomfortable.

— LYNDON JOHNSON WAS NOT A HERO. SHELBY STEELE SAID IT BETTER THAN I CAN. —

Here is what nobody will tell you about LBJ. He was not an idealist. He was a machine politician from Texas who stole a 1948 Senate race with ballots cast in alphabetical order by voters who were, inconveniently, dead. His own aides documented the racial slurs he used so casually it became background noise. And when Kennedy was assassinated, LBJ did not grieve. He spent the nation’s grief like money in someone else’s wallet.

But the most powerful indictment of the Great Society does not come from me. It comes from a Black man named Shelby Steele, who lived it. And I am going to let his words sit here, because they should haunt you:

‘What whites did was literally steal away from Black people agency over their own fate, over their own lives. LBJ said put your life in my hands… I am the agent of your uplift. Not you. You are nothing but a cipher for my innocence. We Blacks, not quite knowing how to handle freedom yet, bought into that and sold our soul away.’

Read that again. SOLD OUR SOUL AWAY. Steele goes on:

‘What should we have said to Lyndon Johnson? Thank you but no thanks. You worry about your innocence. We will worry about our development.’

That is the wound nobody names. The Great Society did not just waste money. It offered Black America a devil’s bargain — we will give you programs, but in exchange, you give up the one thing no government can replace. AGENCY. The ability to control your own fate. The belief that your effort matters.

When in all of human history has that deal ever worked?

— HARLEM IN 1948 VS. HARLEM TODAY. STAY WITH ME. —

Thomas Sowell grew up in Harlem. He left home at seventeen in 1948. And years later he wrote something that should be read in every classroom in America:

‘It is painful for me to realize that youngsters growing up in the same places in Harlem, where I grew up more than 60 years ago, have far less chance of rising economically, educationally, or otherwise.’

Let that land.

In 1948, Black teenager unemployment was 9.4 percent. White teenager unemployment was 10.2 percent. Essentially IDENTICAL. Young men in Harlem could get a job if they wanted one. Sowell himself worked as a Western Union messenger at sixty-five cents an hour — above the minimum wage, which had been effectively erased by wartime inflation. No barrier. No cage.

He slept on the fire escape on hot summer nights. He said, ‘I would defy anybody to do that in any part of New York City today.’ Milton Friedman, as a graduate student at Columbia, went dancing at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem with his future wife. No fear of being mugged or accosted. In the twenties and thirties, white celebrities — George Gershwin among them — walked into private Harlem homes for parties. Because it was safe. Because there was a community.

That world did not end because of racism. Racism was WORSE in 1948 than in 1985.

That world ended because of policy. The welfare architecture that came after 1965 financially punished fathers for staying, rewarded single parenthood, and replaced family structure with government checks. The result was not liberation. It was devastation.

Sowell again, and I want you to hear this:

‘Liberals have wrought more havoc on Blacks than the supposed legacy of slavery they talk about.’

He did not say that hyperbolically. He meant it literally. And the numbers back him up.

— THE NUMBERS THEY NEVER PUT SIDE BY SIDE —

In 1960 — almost one hundred years after slavery ended — 22 percent of Black children were being raised by a single parent. Four out of five had both parents home. This was a community that had survived slavery, the Black Codes, Jim Crow, redlining, and systematic economic exclusion. STILL 78 percent two-parent households.

Thirty years of the Great Society welfare architecture later?

That number TRIPLED.

Out-of-wedlock birth rates went from 24 percent in 1965 to over 70 percent today. Not because of racism — racism was more severe in 1960 and the family was MORE intact. Because of POLICY. Specific, documented, Democratic policy with marriage penalties BUILT IN: benefits that evaporated the moment a single mother wed, rules that made government dependency more rational than an intact family.

And here is the education data Sowell cited that I want you to sit with. Stuyvesant High School in New York — you get in only by passing a very tough exam. In 2012, the percentage of Black students admitted was LESS THAN ONE TENTH of what it was 33 years earlier. Dunbar High School in Washington, an elite Black high school — in 1993, the number of graduates going on to college was LESS than it was during the Great Depression. Not less than the Civil Rights era. Less than the DEPRESSION.

The Great Society made things WORSE. Not better. And the people who built it knew it. Even their own funded studies showed that guaranteed income broke up families. They proceeded anyway.

— MAJORETTE COVFEFE DESCRIBED BALTIMORE. LET ME ADD THE DETAILS THEY LEFT OUT. —

Majorette Covfefe walked you through the human cost in her thread — the towers, the failing schools, the crumbling concrete, the Baltimore boy who was struck and killed by falling debris from a government housing tower in the 1980s. A building the government built. A building the government failed to maintain. A child who died because the government called that structure his HOME.

Here is what she could not have known about Pruitt-Igoe, the massive St. Louis housing project that became the national symbol of Great Society failure. The ARCHITECT — Minoru Yamasaki, who you may know better as the designer of the World Trade Center — later said, ‘It is a job I wish I had never done.’ The man who designed the towers that became America’s greatest symbol of resilience looked back at this government housing project and wished his name was not on it.

But here is the detail that stopped me cold when I found it.

The rules for welfare at Pruitt-Igoe — Aid to Families with Dependent Children — required that no able-bodied man be present in the household. Social workers literally patrolled the buildings AT NIGHT hunting for fathers. Dads who snuck in to be with their families hid in the closet. Children were coached to lie: ‘I don’t have a dad.’ The government structurally engineered the removal of fathers from those families and called it a safety net.

Milton Friedman, the Nobel economist, described what the welfare system actually does:

‘What the welfare system and other kinds of governmental programs are doing is paying people to fail. Insofar as they fail they receive the money. Insofar as they succeed even to a moderate extent, the money is taken away.’

The architecture of dependency. Built by the party that claims to care about the communities it has been managing into the ground for sixty years.

Majorette Covfefe mentioned a Johns Hopkins magazine that argued fathers should NOT pay child support so they would feel more comfortable visiting. A flagship academic institution. In a majority-Black city. Publishing the argument that the solution to fatherless homes was to make departure frictionless. Not fix the policy that drove them out. Make it easier to leave.

At some point you have to stop calling this incompetence.

— DETROIT. THE SHORTEST SECTION, BECAUSE THE DATA IS SHORT. —

Richest city in America per capita in 1950. Largest municipal bankruptcy in American history in 2013. Democratic mayors exclusively since 1962.

Not one Republican. Not one. Sixty-three years.

Quinn’s Third Law: ‘The amount of wealth in any given area is inversely proportional to the number of Democrats running it.’ That is not an opinion. That is a ZIP code.

— JANUARY 10, 1963: CONGRESSIONAL RECORD, READ INTO THE RECORD —

Two years before the Great Society programs hit full force, Congressman Albert Herlong stood on the House floor and read a list of 45 Communist Goals for America. Primary source. Congressional Record. Look it up yourself.

Goal 40: ‘Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.’ The out-of-wedlock birth numbers above are your answer. ACHIEVED.

Goal 41: ‘Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents.’ The welfare architecture that hunted dads and handed the government role of provider is your answer. ACHIEVED.

Goal 17: ‘Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism.’ The Dunbar and Stuyvesant numbers above are your answer. Baltimore ranked last in public education for years running, while billions flowed in with zero structural accountability. ACHIEVED.

I am not calling anyone a communist. I am pointing out that the outcomes are a perfect match for a plan read aloud in Congress sixty-two years ago. A man who deals in data does not ignore that match.

— WHAT THE PARTY SWITCH CROWD GETS WRONG —

If you are about to type ‘but the parties switched’ I need you to hear something first: your teacher was wrong. Not from malice. Teachers often transmit errors they inherited from their own teachers. I see it happen. I correct it. But the version of history where the Democratic Party of slavery, the KKK, and the Civil Rights Act filibuster somehow became the Republican Party is not supported by the primary sources.

Senator Robert Byrd. Former KKK RECRUITER. Filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for fourteen hours. Remained a United States Senator until his death in 2010. Eulogized by a Democratic president. As a Democrat. He did not switch.

What changed was not the party. What changed was the mechanism of control. Chains became welfare checks. Plantations became projects. Overseers became social workers. The party that needed a dependent underclass to hold power in the antebellum South built a new dependent underclass in the urban North. Same goal. Different century. Different packaging.

And here is the thing about Majorette Covfefe’s thread that hit me hardest: she mentioned the brilliant, kind, hardworking women she worked alongside, trying to climb out of the system for their children. Those women were not failed by their circumstances. They were failed by a machine DESIGNED to make climbing out as difficult as possible — and by the politicians who kept campaigning on the suffering that machine produced.

— THE COST. BECAUSE SOMEONE HAS TO SAY THE NUMBER. —

The federal government has spent more than $22 trillion on poverty programs since LBJ declared his war. The poverty rate in 1964 was approximately 17 percent. Today it is approximately 12 percent. Twenty-two TRILLION dollars for a five-point drop over nearly sixty years.

Meanwhile, economic growth alone — WITHOUT a single Great Society dollar — dropped the poverty rate from 32 percent to 17 percent in the fifteen years before the programs began.

The free market in fifteen years. The government in sixty.

But as Bill O’Reilly summarized the core failure: poverty persists not because of lack of government spending but because of the out-of-wedlock birth rate. In 1965: 3 percent for whites, 24 percent for Blacks. Today: 28 percent for whites, 70 percent for Blacks. No Great Society can fix that. Because the Great Society CAUSED that.

— SANDTOWN AND CATHOLIC CHARITIES: WHAT ACTUALLY WORKED —

Majorette Covfefe made a point that almost never gets the attention it deserves. When things actually improved in Sandtown, it was not a government program. It was caring police officers. Criminal justice advocates who reached IN personally. Catholic Charities. Howard Street becoming a pillar of employment and training.

People. Not programs.

None of that should surprise anyone who actually reads their Bible, as opposed to cherry-picking it for political ammunition. Jesus did not hand out money. He healed people so they could WORK. He fed the five thousand not as a welfare program but as a lesson to His Apostles — ‘YOU feed them,’ He said. Not Washington. Then He rebuked the crowd when they came back for free food and sent them away. Personal responsibility and human dignity built Sandtown’s revival. They always do.

But what do I know — I am only a science teacher who looked at what happened to two-parent households, teenage unemployment, college attendance, and neighborhood safety BEFORE and AFTER the Great Society, ran the comparison the way any honest researcher would, and arrived at a conclusion the people who spent $22 trillion really do not want you to see.

#MAGA #Veterans #Trump

Mike Borowski is a medically retired Army combat medic with 23 years of service, including a combat deployment to Iraq, and a high school Anatomy and Physics teacher at a high-need Career Technical district in Northeast Ohio — where he also wrote and published the textbooks for both courses. He runs “Bski’s Classroom,” a platform dedicated to cutting through political noise with data, history, and the kind of blunt honesty that comes from someone who has seen both war and the American classroom up close.

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