You can also look at the voucher school movement as an investment in maintaining power, even in maintaining the sort of minority rule that's eating at our democracy now.

The Fox News & Co information bubble is great for getting out the older vote, but young people have an irritating tendency to think for themselves. The solution? "Train them up in the way they should go."

Voucher schools are in many ways an inevitable continuation and extension of the Evangelical Christian private schools that got their big kick start during desegregation. Evangelical families didn't worship with black people, and they didn't want their kids in school with black kids. So they started their own schools. I went to two different ones in the early 1970s.

The schools were and remain remarkably effective at turning out religiously indoctrinated students, and coincidentally effective at turning out loyal Republican voters. Which, if you are an oligarch, those voters are money in the bank.

But private schools have always been expensive to run, especially if you have to live up to pesky state education standards. The oligarchs aren't interested in interfering with those standards too much, because they do need educated workers who can science and math.

So what's the answer? How do you affordably set up many more private schools that turn out voters who will loyally vote for the politicians who support the oligarchs?

You get the taxpayer to foot the bill, of course. It's going on in Florida now, and it's genius. Taxpayers all over the Sunshine State are paying for families to send their little darlings to Evangelical madrasas where they learn the values of guns, God, and hating gays. Oh, and voting for DeSantis when they graduate, obviously.

It really is genius, and it's going on in plain sight. DeSantis wants to be president, and what better way to achieve that than on the backs of taxpayer-funded Christian soldiers, marching on to war?