250

Many posts have discussed patriotism.

 Josephine Walker at Axios:

Dueling events for America's 250th birthday are creating confusion as celebrations ramp up across the U.S.

Why it matters: The disconnect made headlines last week when a group of performers withdrew from on the National Mall, prompting President Trump to step in.

Those concerts were organized by Freedom 250, a White House-established initiative. America 250, a separate, Congress-approved missive, has planned events nationwide in the run-up to Independence Day.

The intrigue: Several of the performers who canceled cited being misled about the event.Country singer Martina McBride said on Instagram that she "was assured this was a nonpartisan event that was meant to celebrate ALL 50 states. ...Yesterday things started changing and what we were told is, in fact, not what is happening."

...

Freedom 250 is planning events that reflect Trump's flair for spectacle.

That includes a UFC fight on the White House South Lawn, an IndyCar race through downtown Washington, D.C., a FIFA World Cup fan zone and the Great American State Fair — both to be held on the National Mall.

Jemar Tisby at The Bulwark:

The issue is not hosting a sporting event, it’s the one they chose and what it says.

If the White House wanted to host a sporting event commemorating the nation’s 250th anniversary, they could have chosen “America’s Pastime”—baseball.

And they could have held it at a stadium dedicated to the purpose, not spent tens of millions constructing a temporary arena that may leave scars on the landscape for a long time to come.

Instead they chose cage fighting, the most visceral expression of violence for sport.

What does it mean to normalize blood sport at that address?

Whatever your personal opinion of MMA as a sport, this is a deliberate choice about what power looks like, what celebration looks like, and what America is supposed to mean.

Yet it’s not a departure from this regime’s ethos; it’s right in line with their performance of masculinity.

The Streets of Los Angeles

Many posts have discussed failures of governance in California.

Constance Sommer at LA Reported:

Following this winter’s heavy rains, L.A. motorists reported 6,700 potholes in January, a 49% jump from the previous month. In the past, L.A.’s Bureau of Street Services, also known as StreetsLA, used to try to “repair every pothole within the next business day,” according to a former version of the bureau’s “How Do We Fix Potholes?” page. The current page doesn’t mention repair times at all.

L.A.’s streets are falling apart. At public hearings city workers complain that they can barely keep up with even the most basic street services. Hundreds of street staff were laid off last year. Trucks remain parked at city lots because there aren’t enough people to use them to perform major repairs. Since last July, the city has made do with stopgap measures like plugging potholes and laying down rectangular asphalt patches that stop short of a full resurfacing of the road.

According to the city’s own measurements, 60% of its streets were in good condition a year ago. Now it’s 53%.

Religion and Education

Many posts have discussed the role of religion in American life.

 

The richest and most highly educated religious traditions?

Jews
Hindus
Mainline Protestants

Those in the bottom left?
It's lots of churches in the charismatic and/or Black Church traditions. pic.twitter.com/EUkQqAaALe

— Ryan Burge 📊 (@ryanburge) May 30, 2026

Faculty Ideology and Campaign Contributions

Many posts have discussed the politics of colleges and universities in the United States.

A release from FIRE:

A new study commissioned by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression indicates that donations from faculty at top universities have become increasingly one-sided, with the range of opinion becoming concentrated on the left.

“Free speech is not just the right to speak, it is the condition that lets universities test ideas through real disagreement,” FIRE Vice President of Research Angela Erickson said. “Our findings suggest politically active faculty are clustered within a narrow ideological band, which raises serious concerns about whether students and scholars are getting the full benefit of the open inquiry universities promise.”

FIRE provided University of Rochester Professor David Primo with a list of more than 100,000 faculty members at 55 universities that was first compiled for use in the 2024 FIRE Faculty Survey Report. Primo then analyzed a dataset created by cross-referencing those names with a database of over 850 million state and federal campaign contributions compiled by a Stanford University professor. Faculty members who could be matched with donations were assigned a “CFscore,” a measure used by researchers to estimate a person’s political ideology based on who they donate to.

“Studying faculty campaign contributors provides a unique window into the views of politically active professors,” Primo said. “These data allow us to systematically measure viewpoint diversity at top universities and lay a foundation for strengthening discourse, teaching, and research on college campuses.”

By relying on contribution data rather than voter registration data, Primo was able to measure professors’ ideology instead of just their party affiliation. A Republican professor who gives exclusively to Maine Sen. Susan Collins (CFscore: 0.70) would score differently than a Republican professor giving exclusively to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (CFscore: 1.52), for example.

The average ideology score of faculty donors in the 55-school sample was -1.02. That’s only slightly less left-leaning than some of the most left-wing members of the U.S. Senate, such as Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who are tied with CFscores of -1.14. Notably, there was no equivalent critical mass of donations on the Republican side.

Tariffs Are Taxes

 Many posts have dealt with tariffs and trade. 

 Kyle Pomerleau at EconoFact:

Tariffs are a tax on imported goods. Tariffs are collected when the tariffed goods enter the United States. Tariffs can be levied either as a fixed percent of the value of an import, a fixed dollar value per imported good, or as a tariff-rate quota, which applies tax when the value of certain imports exceeds a certain threshold (Pomerleau and York 2025).

Like all taxes, tariffs affect the price and quantity of goods on which they are levied. An excise tax increases the price paid by consumers and decreases the price received by sellers of the product. An important issue with any tax is its incidence – by how much do consumer prices rise and by how much does the price received by producers fall? In the case of tariffs, the consumers are domestic residents while the producers are foreign, which has implications for whether the costs of tariffs are borne by American consumers or foreign sellers. The extent to which a tariff is paid by domestic residents is called its pass-through – for example if a 10% tariff results in an increase in the price of domestic goods by 6% then the pass-through is 60%. Research suggests that tariffs are primarily passed through to U.S. importers as higher import prices (Amiti et al 2019) and the extent of price pass-through rises over time. Evidence on the latest round of tariffs suggests that the pass-through is almost 100%, that is, United States consumers are bearing the full costs of tariffs (Gopinath and Neiman 2026). Between March 2025 and May 2026, The price of imported goods rose by 6.8 percent relative to a pre-tariff price trend between March 2025 and May 2026, as measured by a study that tracks the online prices of over 350,000 products sold at five large U.S. retailers. The largest price increases observed were in carpets and other floor coverings (54 percent), other articles of clothing and clothing accessories (24 percent) coffee, tea, and cocoa (16 percent), and fish and seafood (16 percent) (Cavallo, Llamas, and Vazquez, 2025b).

Tariffs that raise the price of imported goods can also result in rising prices of domestically produced goods that compete with those imports. When the price of an imported good rises due to a tariff (or for other reasons), domestic producers who sell goods that compete with those imports raise the price of their goods as well since they have less competitive price pressure from foreign goods (Cavallo, Llamas, and Vazquez, 2025a). Experience from President Trump’s first term suggests that even untaxed complimentary goods can face price increases due to tariffs. For example, the price of clothes dryers rose after tariffs were applied to imported washing machines in 2019. Importantly, the increase in the price of domestically-produced goods generates no tariff revenue for the government.

The burden of tariffs is shared broadly. Research shows that while tariffs burden households of all income levels, they tend to be regressive taxes – that is, they fall proportionally more heavily on lower-income households, who devote a larger share of their income to consumption of goods that are either subject to tariffs or that compete with tariffed imports (Tax Policy Center 2024). As an example, the Tax Policy Center estimated that if the tariffs in place as of December 2025 stayed in place during 2026, they would reduce household after-tax income by 2 percent for the bottom 95 percent of households. At the same time, this tax would reduce after-tax income for the top 1 percent and top 0.1 percent by 1.7 and 1.5 percent, respectively.

Problems with Scholarly Journals

Many posts have discussed the politics of colleges and universities in the United States.

Robert Maranto at AEI:

In their current state, scholarly journals are beset with mediocre research, shoddy in its execution and biased in its choice of topics. In the infamous case of the “nudge” studies that affected public policy in multiple countries, Duke University Professor Dan Ariely and Harvard University Professor Francesca Gino (at the time one of the five highest paid Harvard employees) spent nearly a decade faking data, duping both the public and dozens of coauthors.2 Such outright fraud is likely rare, but as Harvard Business School professor and former Gino collaborator Max Bazerman argues, sloppiness and questionable practices like p hacking (stopping data collection and analyses the instant desired findings are found) are common.3 Moreover, as Alvaro de Menard reports in “What’s Wrong with Social Science and How to Fix It,” scholarly studies are rarely replicated, and when they are, the original findings often turn out to be questionable or outright wrong.4

Even worse, in many fields leftist bias in scholarly publication is practically ubiquitous. For example, Richard Kahlenberg and Lief Lin detail how over a three-year period, the leading American studies scholarly journal, American Quarterly, published 77 essays and articles fundamentally critical of America, 19 neutral pieces, and zero America-positive manuscripts.5

Similarly, in a rare bit of investigative reporting, Goldwater Institute political scientist Timothy Minella finds that the American Political Science Association (APSA) governing council in 2020 selected a group calling itself “the Feminist Collective” to edit the APSA’s flagship journal, American Political Science Review (APSR).6 This group declared its intent to “actively dismantle the institutionalized racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, and settler colonialism that continue to characterize and structure [political science].”7 As any editor knows, most manuscripts are “desk rejected” by editors rather than sent out for anonymous peer review by scholars in the field. To fight alleged bias favoring heteronormative white males, the Feminist Collective promised in its application to edit APSR that only submissions by the privileged (i.e., heteronormative white males) would face desk rejections. Articles by others enjoyed automatic peer review, an obvious display of discrimination.

Other critical theorists took over the prestigious Review of Educational Research (RER), a journal sponsored by the 110-year-old American Educational Research Association (AERA). The new editors of this hitherto rigorous quantitative journal, devoted to testing hypotheses and presenting research through systematic meta-analyses, announced in their inaugural essay that they would deign to allow quantitative articles, but only from scholars who “apply critical race theory to quantitative data” or “draw their scholarly genealogy from the conflict theory tradition of sociology that centers class conflict.”8 AERA’s critical theory fetish ignores the concerns of classroom teachers, who surveys show focus on student behavior, mental health, and technology use rather than leftist political activism.9

2.Frederick M. Hess, “What If Social Science Is a Scam?,” Education Next, September 30, 2025, https://www.educationnext.org/what-if-social-science-is-a-scam/.
3 Max H. Bazerman, Inside an Academic Scandal: A Story of Fraud and Betrayal (MIT Press, 2025).
4.Alvaro de Menard, “What’s Wrong with Social Science and How to Fix It: Reflections After Reading 2578 Papers,” Fantastic Anachronism, September 11, 2020, https://www.fantasticanachronism.com/p/whats-wrong-with-social-science-and-how-to-fix-it. Perhaps due to its relative ideological diversity, which enables researchers to ask a range of questions, economics does somewhat better than other fields with respect to work quality and bias. Interestingly, colleges and universities led by economists are overrepresented among high performers on the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression campus free speech rankings. Robert Maranto and Martha Bradley-Dorsey, “Yelling FIRE on Campus: Higher Education Free Speech Leaders and Laggards,” Academic Questions 36, no. 1 (2023): 23–33, https://academicquestions.org/yelling-fire-on-campus-free-speech-leaders-and-laggards/.
5 Richard D. Kahlenberg and Lief Lin, The Distortion of American Studies: How the Field’s Leading Journal Has Embraced a Worldview as Slanted as Donald Trump’s, Progressive Policy Institute, January 22, 2026, https://www.progressivepolicy.org/the-distortion-of-american-studies/.
6Timothy K. Minella, Peer Review Gone Wild: Flagship Political Science Journal Shows How Academic Gatekeepers Promote Ideology over Scholarship, Goldwater Institute, December 2, 2025, https://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/peer-review-gone-wild/.
7 Minella, Peer Review Gone Wild.
8 Mildred Boveda et al., “Editorial Vision 2022–2025,” Review of Educational Research 93, no. 5 (2023): 638–40, https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543231170179.
9 David T. Marshall et al., “Teacher and Research Priorities: To What Extent Do They Align?” (working paper, SocArXiv, December 20, 2025), https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/h82rk_v1.

 

The Pope on Slavery

Many posts have discussed the legacy of slavery.

The first American Pope is very much aware of it.

ENCYCLICAL LETTER

MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS

OF HIS HOLINESS

POPE LEO XIV

ON SAFEGUARDING THE HUMAN PERSON

IN THE TIME OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

176. In the development of her doctrine, the Church has gradually come to a deeper awareness of the gravity of these issues. It is true that past events cannot be judged anachronistically, as though the moral criteria that matured over time had always been available. Yet neither can we deny or diminish the delay with which both society and the Church came to denounce the scourge of slavery. In antiquity and the Middle Ages many individuals and even ecclesiastical institutions had slaves. Already in the early modern period, the Apostolic See of Rome, responding to requests from Sovereigns, intervened several times in order to regulate and legitimize forms of subjugation, and, in certain cases, the enslavement of “infidels.” [174] It was only in the nineteenth century that a formal, absolute and universal condemnation of slavery was clearly articulated, notably under Pope Leo XIII. [175] This development offers a clear example of the Church’s growth in understanding the perennial truths of Revelation that she safeguards. Although there was not always consistency in practice — given that slavery was long tolerated before being unequivocally condemned — there has been a continuous affirmation throughout history of the dignity of every human being, created in the image of God, even if it took eighteen centuries for its full incompatibility with slavery to be explicitly recognized. This constitutes a wound in Christian memory, one from which we cannot consider ourselves detached. [176] It is impossible not to feel deep sorrow when contemplating the immense suffering and humiliation endured by so many in stark contrast to their immeasurable dignity as persons infinitely loved by the Lord. For this, in the name of the Church, I sincerely ask for pardon.