“Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Party’s newly minted candidate to be the next mayor of New York City, found himself in some hot water last week after The New York Times reported that he claimed to be both “Asian” and “Black or African American” on his college application to Columbia University in 2009.
Mamdani holds U.S. citizenship, but was born in Uganda to Indian parents. He is African, and he is American, but he is definitely not black, which is what the term “African American” implies.”
…
“Mamdani told the Times that his options were suboptimal and that he subsequently wrote in “Ugandan” to add clarity.
“Even though these boxes are constraining, I wanted my college application to reflect who I was,” said Mamdani.”
…
“If you want to be mad at someone, be mad at colleges that incentivize applicants to be misleading about their skin pigmentation because false value is assigned to it—a practice that majorities of American voters and the Supreme Court wisely hold in disdain.”
https://reason.com/2025/07/07/colleges-created-a-diversity-box-ticking-game-zohran-mamdani-just-played-it/
“In 2024, Congress passed the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which prohibited operating or hosting “a foreign adversary controlled application (e.g., TikTok)” within the United States. The law required TikTok to find a buyer by January 19, 2025, or else shut down operations within the United States.
Ultimately, neither happened…Trump issued the executive order on his first day, “instructing the Attorney General not to take any action to enforce the Act for a period of 75 days from today.” He has since issued two additional orders further extending the deadline
…
“But no president has the authority to simply postpone the enforcement of a law passed by Congress. The fact that Congress seems content to let Trump decline to enforce it does not obviate the law itself. And for that reason, if Congress will not repeal the law, then it should insist Trump enforce it.”
https://reason.com/2025/07/07/either-repeal-or-enforce-but-ideally-repeal-the-tiktok-ban/
“”Due process is the most foundational legal principle protecting individual liberty in Western civilization. It dates back to the Magna Carta,” Bolick observed. Yet “we have seen the words due process appear in quotes repeatedly, as if this concept was created by rogue liberal judges to help illegal immigrants stay in the country.””
…
“Bolick is a principled legal thinker and one of the genuine good guys in American law. If he is worried about the health of our constitutional order, we should all pay heed.”
https://reason.com/2025/07/08/the-republican-appointed-judge-decrying-trumps-deeply-disturbing-attacks-on-the-rule-of-law/
“Our findings indicate that individuals from
both political affiliations are prone to believing and disseminating politically aligned fake news via social media. Despite
employing a stronger reflection manipulation in contrast to past research, we failed to replicate the mitigating effect of
the reflection on the acceptance of fake news. We observed that reflection reduced Democrats’ willingness to spread fake
news, yet it did not affect Republicans.”
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s12144-025-07578-5.pdf
“So why are birth rates falling all over the world? The authors knock down the conventional hypothesis that rising monetary costs are to blame. The real costs of children, they argue, are the opportunity costs: “what a potential parent would be ready to give up to have an extra child.” The seductions of the modern world include higher paying work, longer vacations, restaurant meals, sports, video games, innumerable on-demand entertainment options, and so forth. “Once we see that costs include opportunity costs, as life becomes richer and more rewarding, children cost more,” they say. “Even if we eliminated every dimension of social inequality and unfairness between women and men, the opportunity cost of having a child would still be greater in the richer, freer, better-entertained future than it was in the past.” And as demographic history shows, fewer and fewer people are willing to pay those costs.”
https://reason.com/2025/07/08/the-depopulation-bomb/
“One of the supposed goals of the Trump administration’s trade policies is to protect and promote American-made products.
Greg Shugar, who owns a business that does make things right here in America, has a hard time seeing it that way.
“I’m charging more and I’m making less,” says Shugar, owner of Beau Ties of Vermont, which manufactures neckties, socks, pocket squares, and other fashion accoutrements.
While the vast majority of American clothes and accessories are imported these days, Shugar’s company, which employs 18 people, is one of the few that are cutting and sewing those products here in the United States. He told Reason last week that the tariffs have not been a boost for his business. Quite the opposite, in fact, since his products depend on silk jacquard and other materials that are imported from overseas—mostly from China but also from Italy.
Silk jacquard, Shugar explained, is made “from a very specific type of looming machine where they weave silk and it creates more of a stiffer silk, which is what you wear on your ties.”
…
Shugar’s business is a lot like many other American-based manufacturers. More than half the imports to the U.S. are raw materials, intermediate parts, or equipment—the stuff that manufacturing firms need to make things, including the silk jacquard that goes into Shugar’s ties—rather than finished goods. Tariffs are making those imports more expensive, which in turn makes manufacturing anything in the United States more expensive.”
https://reason.com/2025/07/08/the-only-winner-is-the-government-says-american-bow-tie-ceo-facing-higher-tariff-costs/
“As Trump has acknowledged, he is torn between the economic concerns of business owners, including many of his own supporters, and the demands of hardliners like White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. That tension is apparent in the contrast between the administration’s immigration rhetoric, which emphasizes the removal of dangerous criminals, and workplace raids that target peaceful, productive people with strong, longstanding ties to the United States. And it reflects the general public’s mixed attitude toward immigration enforcement, which includes an openness to legal pathways that would allow people in the latter category to remain in the country.
“In 2020–22,” the U.S. Department of Agriculture reports, “32 percent of crop farmworkers were U.S. born, 7 percent were immigrants who had obtained U.S. citizenship, 19 percent were other authorized immigrants (primarily permanent residents or green-card holders), and the remaining 42 percent held no work authorization.” But as Trump tells it, he was not aware of how his deportation campaign might affect U.S. farmers until Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, who attended the Des Moines rally, brought the issue to his attention. “You were the one that brought this whole situation up,” he said to her at the rally. “Brooke Rollins brought it up, and she said, ‘So we have a little problem. The farmers are losing a lot of people.'”
Trump has repeatedly promised to execute “the largest deportation program in American history”—a goal that he reiterated in Des Moines. Yet he sounded surprisingly sympathetic toward at least some of the people affected by that crackdown. “These people…work so hard,” he said. “They bend over all day. We don’t have too many people [who] can do that.” He added that “some of the farmers…cry when they see [immigration raids] happen.” He alluded to “cases where…people have worked for a farmer on a farm for 14, 15 years” and “then they get thrown out, pretty viciously.” His conclusion: “We can’t do it. We’ve got to work with the farmers and people that have hotels and leisure properties.”
If the agricultural sector’s reliance on undocumented workers somehow was news to Trump even after he served as president for four years, he should have been intimately familiar from his own businesses with the potential impact of immigration enforcement on the hospitality industry. In 2023, the American Immigration Council estimated, U.S. hotels and restaurants employed 1.1 million unauthorized workers, 7.6 percent of the total work force.
Trump did not mention construction. But last September, the National Immigration Forum estimated that undocumented workers accounted for “almost a quarter” of employees in that industry.
It was completely predictable, in other words, that a broad crackdown on unauthorized U.S. residents that included workplace raids would have an outsized impact on several kinds of businesses”
…
“a Pew Research Center survey conducted in early June, 54 percent of respondents opposed “more raids where people in the U.S. illegally may be working,” and 65 percent thought “there should be a way for undocumented immigrants to stay in the country legally, if requirements are met.” Despite Trump’s rhetorical emphasis on deporting criminals, 57 percent of respondents anticipated that his immigration policies would have “no impact” on crime or lead to “more crime.” A plurality (46 percent) thought those policies would make the U.S. economy “weaker,” while just 34 percent said they would make it “stronger.””
https://reason.com/2025/07/08/trump-reiterates-his-promise-to-protect-farm-and-hospitality-workers-from-pretty-vicious-deportation/
“Trump administration argues that its policy of arresting, detaining, and deporting international students for expressing anti-Israel opinions “does not exist.” The government’s lawyers also maintain that the supposedly nonexistent policy is perfectly consistent with the First Amendment—a less laughable argument that nevertheless is hard to reconcile with Supreme Court precedent, especially as applied by several lower courts.
President Donald Trump and his underlings, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Department of Homeland Security officials, have made it clear that they are determined to expel students, including legal permanent residents as well as visa holders, who have engaged in protests or other forms of advocacy that the government views as “pro-Hamas” or “anti-Semitic.” Rubio says those activities, even when “otherwise lawful,” justify removal from the United States because they threaten to undermine U.S. foreign policy interests.
The Trump administration claims it is targeting “aid or support” for “designated terrorist groups” and “unlawful anti-Semitic harassment and violence,” neither of which is constitutionally protected. That defense is hard to take seriously, since the government avers that even writing an anti-Israel op-ed piece or peacefully participating in pro-Palestinian protests falls into those categories.”
https://reason.com/2025/07/09/the-trump-administration-says-its-speech-based-deportation-policy-does-not-exist/
“A couple years ago, the Teamsters demanded more pay from UPS. It seemed like UPS could easily afford it. The company made almost $13 billion in 2021.
UPS used some of that money to hire more union workers. Then it offered them raises.
But Teamster boss Sean O’Brien wanted more. He threatened a strike.
UPS gave in…
Today, full-time drivers make $170,000 a year.
Good for them—for those who still have jobs.
But paying for the new Teamster contract meant UPS wasn’t as competitive as before. It raised some prices and lost business to other shippers.
Profit dropped.
In 2024, UPS laid off 12,000 workers. The next year, 20,000.
It wasn’t just the wage hikes; it’s also the work rules.
The Teamsters agreement includes hundreds of pages—limits on subcontracting, bans on employees working long hours, etc….many of which made it hard for a company to adapt and cut costs.
“These headline-grabbing union deals are delivering short-run sugar highs with long-run hangovers,” says Mercatus Center economist Liya Palagashvili. “UPS is just one example of this.”
Another was Yellow Corp—once one of the largest freight carriers in America.
Then the Teamsters threatened to strike, demanding faster payments of health care and pension benefits.
The company warned that a strike could bankrupt it.
But O’Brien kept pushing, saying, “The company has two more days to fulfill its obligations, or we will strike. Teamsters at Yellow are furious and ready to act!”
Yellow gave in. The strike was averted.
Days later, the trucking company shut down for good.
Thirty thousand people lost their jobs.
…” [Yellow Corp] was having a lot of financial issues. But if you’re on the verge of collapse, the last thing you need is a Teamsters Labor Union contract that says you have to increase labor costs.”
…
“The same year Yellow went bankrupt, United Auto Workers went on strike against Stellantis, the company that owns Chrysler. Stellantis gave in, giving the UAW a pay raise and promising to open a new plant.
But then Stellantis started laying off workers: 1,340 during the strike and 2,450 more the next year.
In 2024, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers walked off the job demanding better pay from Boeing. Boeing gave in.
One month later, Boeing announced a 10 percent work force cut.”
…
“Palagashvili says, “It wasn’t trade that killed the Rust Belt. It was labor unions. Unions in the Rust Belt were striking. Companies said, ‘Higher labor costs, tons of strikes, productivity isn’t going up, we’re going to relocate,’ and they did.”
Unions help some workers. But they hurt many more.”
https://reason.com/2025/07/09/how-the-teamsters-cost-30000-people-their-jobs/
A common Republican response to a school shooting is mental health is the problem. A few years ago, members of both parties passed a mental health bill and school therapists were paid for. The Trump administration cut that funding because of a line about diversity hiring; Republicans who voted for this funding are silent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyW2WuuK0G4