Good morning:
An extensive new report by Zach Goldberg surveys the data on the decline in young Americans’ mental health and confirms that young women and self-identified liberals have taken the biggest hit. Goldberg finds that Americans with “psychologically vulnerable” personalities are especially open to the destabilizing effect of new technologies and a cultural climate hyper-fixated on “wokeness,” injustice, and identity.
While young progressives may be particularly vulnerable to emotional distress, all of us suffer when some progressive goals are codified into public policy, particularly criminal justice policy.
Hannah E. Meyers, the director of the policing and public safety initiative at MI, builds on her years-long research into New York’s criminal justice “reforms” in a column for the New York Post. Meyers writes that while NY’s radical “Raise the Age” legislation and statewide restrictions on bail pose a significant threat to public safety, discovery laws—which create excessively high burdens on prosecutors and force them to triage their caseload—are explicitly aimed at removing consequences for misdemeanors. New Yorkers must confront the fact that those “small” crimes do matter. Low-level offenses harm victims, reduce trust, and lead to more dangerous offending.
Unfortunately, many progressive New York lawmakers continue to make the state more dangerous. In City Journal, Rafael A. Mangual and Naomi Schaefer Riley take on mayoral candidate and socialist state assemblyman Zohran Mamdani’s record of supporting policies that would endanger infants and children in NYC’s child-welfare system. He has cosponsored legislation to ban routine drug screens of mothers and newborns, to prohibit anonymous reports of suspected child abuse and neglect, and to require child-welfare workers to inform guardians of the various ways they can refuse to cooperate with investigators. Thankfully, his ideas have failed to catch on more broadly, but New Yorkers must be careful that those ideas do not become mainstream.
The Trump administration must also be vigilant that its campaign against DEI ideology in colleges and universities is more than a symbolic victory. Heather Mac Donald writes in City Journal that replacing a race-conscious worldview with a meritocratic one in so short a time was never going to be easy, especially if the administration relies merely on executive orders. The administration’s tools are limited, and professional antiracists in academic bureaucracies can easily rebrand themselves. Those of us who favor meritocracy must be as creative in rooting out the DEI ideologues over the long term as they are in hunkering down.
Public-sector unions in Wisconsin appear to have excelled in playing the long game, as their preferred candidate won the state’s supreme court election earlier this week. In the New York Post, MI’s newest fellow, Ken Girardin, argues that the race was actually a proxy fight over former governor Scott Walker’s 2011 reforms that overhauled the privileges of public unions. Now, these public-sector unions have a state supreme court that may help them recover lost ground.
Finally, MI continues to release more video content highlighting key findings from our scholars. This newsletter includes senior fellow Douglas Murray on his important new book about Israel, Hamas, and Western civilization, as well as legal fellow Tal Fortgang on why deporting former Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil is not a free speech issue. Both these videos are included below.
Continue reading for all these insights and more.
Kelsey Bloom
Editorial Director
