Good morning, and welcome to Broad + Liberty's Weekly Reads.

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1. Delaware County conceals budget details for year, refuses transparency before election

By Todd Shepherd
 

Delaware County and its five members of the county council are continuing a year-long campaign of concealing elements of the budget and the budget process from the view of citizens and the media in the wake of last year’s 23.7 percent tax increase that sparked widespread outcry.

Most importantly to those who will vote in a week, the county is being coy about whether it will publicly produce the first draft of the budget before Election Day, a move that would deny voters an understanding of just how large the next tax increase could be. One council member has already conceded taxes will increase for the third straight year.

Why It Matters. For calendar year 2024, the council raised taxes by five percent. For 2025, it raised taxes 24 percent. In 2026, taxes will likely go up again, the only question is: by how much?

It’s not a question voters will have the answer to before going to the polls. That’s a big problem.
Voters have to choose their representatives based on something — past performance, future promises, party platforms — and providing the voter with more information makes for a well-informed electorate.

When the Democrats on county council refuse to give the voters information on the most important issue in their power — the county budget — they’re weakening the democratic process and depriving the voters of the tools they need to make an informed choice.

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2. Pandemic policies sparked a transgender spike — and the reversal has begun

By Beth Ann Rosica
 

According to a recent study, transgender social contagion appears to be on the decline with numbers closer to pre-pandemic levels. For those of us who fought against extended school closures and lockdowns, this data comes as no surprise.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) in partnership with College Pulse conducts an annual survey of college students to rank schools based on free speech. The study includes questions related to gender and sexual orientation, and historical results show a peak in 2023 for students who identify as gender non-conforming and those who list their sexual orientation as bi-sexual, queer, questioning and other.

Why It Matters. In 2023 on the third anniversary of school closures, I wrote about the exponential rise of gender ideology in K-12 schools. At the time, I spoke with a local school psychologist who asked to remain anonymous, and he told me that over the course of 20 years prior to Covid, he would see one to two students who identified differently from their biological sex. When returning to the classroom post-Covid, that number rose exponentially to about 20 to 25 percent of all kids, and now has come back down to closer to five percent.

His assertions in 2023 are consistent with the FIRE data, as less than four percent of college students identified as gender non-conforming in 2025.

For those who doubted the extended school closures and lockdowns did not contribute or cause the significant rise of transgenderism, the data is clear. Children and young people suffered greatly as the result of draconian policies and political maneuvering by groups like the national teachers’ unions. Adolescent mental health plummeted during this time, and several studies have shown a strong correlation between gender dysphoria and other mental health issues.

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3. Lightning Round

• Christine Flowers: Blame for violence continuing in Philadelphia lies at DA’s doorstep

• Martina White: Larry Krasner’s masked hypocrisy

• Guy Ciarrocchi: Most families already have school choice. What about the rest?

• Paul Davis: The thorn in Krasner’s side — my interview with Ralph Cipriano

• Ben Mannes: How Philly’s justice system failed Ellen Greenberg

• Frank Ryan: Pennsylvania and New Jersey’s race to the bottom

• Thom Nickels: Harvard’s atheist chaplain

4. What we're reading

At Compact last week, Helen Andrews wrote an essay that caused some considerable stir around the internet. In “The Great Feminization,” Andrews describes the rise of the woke movement as linked inextricably with the rise of female empowerment in the American workplace. 

It’s a bold take, one that was met with both agreement and disagreement elsewhere — see, for example, Matt Yglesias’s take on the essay, or Tiana Lowe Doescher’s at the Washington Examiner. Reasonable minds may disagree — they certainly did at our office — but it’s all worth reading and being a part of the conversation.