Confidence in College

Many posts have discussed economic and educational inequality. 

 Daniel Cox at the Survey Center on American Life:

Most people believe there is a problem with higher education. In the last 10 years, confidence in college has collapsed among the public. Gallup found that only 38 percent of Americans report having a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in higher education, a nearly 20-point drop from 2015. Politics is an obvious culprit for the country’s diminished confidence. Republicans have experienced a more precipitous slide in support than Democrats, widening a modest partisan divide in views of higher education into a chasm. But there is another issue that looms even larger over higher education. Its cost. A Pew poll asked all Americans what they saw as the biggest problem in higher education and found the nearly universal issue was lack of affordability. Most Americans say that colleges are doing a lousy job of preparing students to find well-paying jobs. Fewer, but still a substantial number, say schools are failing to expose students to diverse perspectives. However, cost almost always tops the list of complaints. Even Americans who are the most dissatisfied with the direction of higher education—a group that is more right-leaning—are as likely to say it has to do with cost as politics.

This is a very predictable result of the massive increase in the cost of four years of college. Public and private universities have both seen dramatic price increases over the last few decades. The average cost of a college education in the early 70s hovered around $13k. Now, it is over $30k a year. The price tag at many small liberal arts schools, like Bates, can approach $100,000 per year. Students routinely graduate with loans that reach the six-figure territory and take years, or even decades, to pay off.\

The ideological battles being fought on many campuses are almost exclusively waged among elites. Debates over DEI initiatives, Gaza, antisemitism, and transgender rights dominate public attention rather than conversations about what can be done to make colleges work for the working class. The students who need the most. When public support for higher education wanes, the biggest losers are those who need them to work—not as bastions of progressive thought, but as drivers of economic opportunity, civic responsibility, and social solidarity. It’s no coincidence that some of the fiercest critics of higher education are found among those who have amassed considerable wealth and influence.

Why Has Violent Crime Dropped?

  Many posts have discussed crime in the United States.

Mike Allen at Axios:

By the numbers: The U.S. violent-crime rate plunged 9.7% in 2025, the largest annual decline since FBI national estimates began 90 years ago.The murder rate fell 18.5% to 4.1 per 100,000 people, tying 1955 and 1956 for the lowest since national estimates began.
And the decline hasn't stopped: An Axios analysis shows violent crime in big cities fell again in the first half of 2026.

Criminologists describe a complicated picture of why crime is down. No one's sure, but several overlapping forces seem to be driving the drop: 

• Vice consumption cooled: Pandemic-era spikes in alcohol consumption, illicit drug use and firearm purchases — three factors linked to the 2020–2021 homicide surge — have receded.
• Return to routine: COVID lockdowns disrupted community guardrails and displaced young men and teens. Employment and social routines have since stabilized.
• Law enforcement tech boom: Police departments are using more AI tools, predictive analytics and platforms such as Palantir's Gotham to deploy resources and identify crime hotspots.

 Under-the-radar demographic and health trends are also quietly reshaping public safety:The proportion of young people in America is declining, shrinking the demographic most historically linked to street crime. In a fascinating medical twist, the explosion of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs (like Ozempic) has been clinically linked to decreased alcohol abuse and improved impulse control — two major factors in violent offenses.

"An Outsourced Staff" --Cicero Institute and Homelessness Policy

A number of posts have discussed the conservative movement.

Ellen Barry and Jason DeParle at NYT:

A team from the Cicero Institute, an upstart think tank, flew to Indiana this year to help make it a crime for homeless people to sleep on the street.

It was their third attempt. Even in the conservative state, previous efforts to ban street camping had failed. Catholic leaders said the measure would hurt the poor, and sheriffs had warned that arrests would crowd the jails. “We’re Hoosiers — we’re better than that,” a Republican state senator, Ron Alting, said last year, urging a more caring approach.

But much had changed since the group, founded by Joe Lonsdale, a billionaire ally of President Trump’s, had made its initial efforts. Mr. Trump had issued an executive order on homelessness that so fully reflected Cicero’s agenda it was hard to tell 
where the group stopped and White House policy began. The sponsor of the Indiana law was fresh from a Cicero conference, Cicero lobbyists worked the bill, and three Cicero analysts testified that the threat of arrests would push homeless people into treatment for mental illness or addiction.

The ban passed just before the legislature adjourned.

...

With few rival groups working on homelessness, the institute had its lane. After Texas passed a statewide camping ban in 2021, Cicero made it into a model bill to take to other states.

Cicero was too small to matter in Washington, but about two dozen states had Republican control of the legislature and governorship. For harried legislators frustrated by encampments, Cicero’s bill offered a stance. And with no housing or services included, it required no spending.

“In most states, state legislators don’t even have policy staff,” explained Jared Meyer, an early Cicero recruit, on Mr. Lonsdale’s podcast. “The best thing you can do is be an outsourced staff.”

Race and Refugees

Many posts have discussed immigration and asylum.  Critics suggest that race might just possibly influence administration decisions on asylum.

Shifra Dayak at Pew:

The number of refugees admitted to the United States has fallen significantly during President Donald Trump’s second term in office and could hit its lowest level on record this fiscal year, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. State Department data.

The federal government has admitted 10,258 refugees through the first 10 months of fiscal year 2026, which ends on Sept. 30. That’s down from 38,102 refugees in fiscal 2025 and 100,034 in fiscal 2024. (President Joe Biden was in office for part of fiscal 2025 and all of fiscal 2024.)

...

Refugees from South Africa make up almost all the refugees to the U.S. so far in fiscal 2026. Before this fiscal year, South Africans never appeared among the top origin groups. In fact, fiscal 2025 was the first year that the U.S. admitted more than just one or two South African refugees.

The large increase in South African refugees reflects an executive order Trump signed in 2025 that said the federal government would prioritize resettling Afrikaners – an ethnic group descended from mainly Dutch, German and French colonial settlers in South Africa. The executive order said the group faced “government-sponsored race-based discrimination” in South Africa, including the government seizure of farms owned by White South Africans. Those claims have been disputed.

The influx of refugees from South Africa marks a major change in the makeup of refugees to the U.S.
\
People from the Democratic Republic of the Congo made up the largest share of refugees to the U.S. every year from fiscal 2016 through fiscal 2024. The nation has seen ongoing fighting and internal displacement that’s peaked in recent years. So far in fiscal 2026, the federal government has not admitted any refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Ticking Debt Bomb

 Many posts have discussed federal deficits and the federal debt.

Zachary Basu at Axios:

Zoom in: President Trump said in 2016 that he could eliminate what was then roughly $19 trillion in national debt within eight years. On Tuesday, the debt crossed $40 trillion, after growing by $3 trillion in the past year alone.About $32 trillion is owed to investors and other outside holders. The rest is debt the government owes to its own accounts, including Social Security and other federal trust funds.

Treasury must refinance $9.7 trillion in debt coming due this fiscal year while covering a deficit the Congressional Budget Office now projects at roughly $2.1 trillion.

That creates a punishing cycle: Old debt comes due, Washington replaces it with more expensive debt, and the resulting interest bill feeds future deficits.CBO projects annual deficits will average $2.4 trillion through 2036, pushing debt held by the public to 120% of GDP — above the record set after World War II.
...

The big picture: America's debt burden is approaching the point where it starts reshaping household finances, presidential politics and the country's economic choices.Long-term Treasury yields have climbed to their highest levels since 2007, raising borrowing costs across the economy — from mortgages to business loans — and making Washington's own debt more expensive to refinance.

Social Security's retirement trust fund is projected to run dry in late 2032, during the final months of the next president's first term.

Medicare's hospital trust fund follows in the second quarter of 2033.

Between the lines: Trump and Elon Musk promised to break Washington's addiction to debt without forcing Americans to swallow painful sacrifices.Musk launched DOGE with ambitions of cutting as much as $2 trillion from federal spending. Its final public tally claimed just $215 billion in savings — barely a tenth of that goal.

A federal audit released this month found billions in unsupported or inaccurate savings claims, including $27.4 billion tied to contracts that were still active.

Dark Days at DHS

Many posts have discussed immigration. 

Vanessa Romo at NPR:

One of the last remaining checks on Immigration and Customs Enforcement and private-prison contractors running immigration detention centers has all but collapsed, leaving thousands of people trapped in a system with nearly nonexistent oversight, according to an NPR review.

The grievance system in immigration detention is designed to offer a safe channel to report violations of detention standards and seek redress, without fear of retaliation. It's often the only recourse for people to submit complaints about detention issues, including mistreatment, unsanitary conditions, medical neglect and sexual assault. But an NPR review of documents, available data and interviews with experts has found the system — which in the best of times was a complex patchwork — barely operates and even at times backfires for those using it. It is one of the few remaining safeguards for immigrants in federal custody after the Trump administration effectively dismantled other oversight offices.

...

Trying to enforce the rules of the grievance system has always been challenging, Chris Brundage, the former deputy of the now-closed Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, told NPR.

That's partly because it's not one single set of standards that all operators must follow, Brundage said. "It's a patchwork system that has never worked as intended," he said, explaining that there are at least three different sets of detention standards that operators are working under, depending on when they signed their contracts. (Some operators are following guidelines established in 2011. Others, an updated version from 2016, and those with new contracts are following 2019 standards.)

...

The Office of Detention Oversight, created by Congress to conduct internal inspections, and the Immigration Detention Ombudsman's office tasked with investigating detainee deaths and other issues have had their budgets gutted and suffered massive layoffs. Both agencies sit within DHS. In the case of the ombudsman's office, one of the only places that detainees could turn to to challenge a grievance denial outside of the immediate detention facility, it was fully shuttered in May.

Another office whose budget has been slashed is the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, Brundage noted. In 2025, the administration slashed the CRCL staff from roughly 150 employees down to just a handful, effectively halting operations. The Government Accountability Project reported more than 500 active civil rights and detention-abuse complaints — including allegations of medical neglect, sexual abuse and dangerous conditions in immigration detention — were frozen or left uninvestigated.

...

"I think what happened when these offices were effectively gutted and shut down, you lost that … legitimacy. And legitimacy means that they're following the laws, regulations. But what happens if you don't have transparency into the process and you don't have accountability? Without those two things, that legitimacy erodes, " Brundage said.

You Have a Right to Record the Cops

Many posts have discussed freedom of speech and the press.

 C.J. Ciaramella at Reason:

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit issued a landmark ruling Monday that a Connecticut man had a First Amendment right to film a police station from a public sidewalk, but it also ruled that the officers who arrested the man are immune from his lawsuit.

A three-judge panel of the 2nd Circuit held that Keith Massimino, a self-described "First Amendment auditing hobbyist," had a constitutional right to film the exterior of a police department in Waterbury, Connecticut, on an October evening in 2018.

"When the government wants to preserve its privacy, it may build a fence or close a door—but not ban speech," U.S. Circuit Judge Myrna Pérez wrote for the majority.

The panel's opinion creates binding precedent in Connecticut, New York, and Vermont, and, according to the opinion, it makes the 2nd Circuit the ninth federal circuit to agree on the issue. Although the Supreme Court has not ruled on the matter, every circuit court that has considered the issue has found an unambiguous First Amendment right to record and monitor the police, so long as one isn't physically interfering with or obstructing an officer.