The economy is one of the biggest issues this election cycle. In past elections where the economy has featured prominently, the biggest concerns are usually jobs or unemployment or fear of a recession. This year, and for the first time in generations, inflation is the big concern.

The most recent inflation reading of the consumer price index, the most closely watched inflation gauge, showed that inflation fell slightly to 3.4% for the year ending in April. While the data showed a decline, that number is still well above the 2% level that the Federal Reserve considers healthy.

The small downtick also follows months of increases. Late last year, inflation began falling quickly, leading consumers to believe the price-growth plague was coming to an end and the Fed would begin cutting interest rates. But those expectations have faded greatly as inflation readings in 2024 continue to disappoint.

A day before the CPI data were released, the producer price index, which gauges wholesale inflation, rose slightly once again, the third straight monthly increase.

Republicans are squarely blaming Biden for the high inflation and, in turn, the higher interest rates. They contend that a rash of federal spending under Biden artificially juiced demand and caused prices to rise, an attack they have used and will continue to use on the campaign trail.

“This report confirms that the grip of inflation won’t loosen anytime soon, even after 11 interest rate increases since March 2022,” House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington (R-TX) said after the latest CPI report. “The massive amount of federal spending by President Biden and Democrats has made this inflationary firestorm difficult to contain.”

Perhaps even more crucially for Biden is how the hotter numbers are shifting inflation expectations and consumer sentiment, which is how voters feel about the economy.

The University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index plunged to 67.4 in May, down from nearly 77.4 in April, according to early numbers for the month. That marks a nearly 13% decline over just the past month alone and shows consumers are souring on the economy and their perceived economic conditions.

“This 10 index-point decline is statistically significant and brings sentiment to its lowest reading in about six months,” survey director Joanne Hsu said. “This month’s trend in sentiment is characterized by a broad consensus across consumers, with decreases across age, income, and education groups.”

Year-ahead inflation expectations also rose, as did long-run inflation expectations, another troubling metric for the Biden campaign.

An April Bloomberg News-Morning Consult poll found that a mere 18% of registered voters predict that inflation will improve by the end of the year, while 75% said they think it will either stay the same or actually get worse. Further, 70% say the overall U.S. economy is going on the wrong track.

Additionally, the Conference Board’s consumer confidence index fell to 97 in April, down from a revised 103.1 the month before. That marks the lowest consumer confidence reading in 22 months.

The expectations index, which tracks the short-term outlook of consumers for business, income, and labor market conditions, fell to 66.4 this month from 74 in March. An expectations index reading below 80 often signals a forthcoming recession, according to the Conference Board, more alarm bells for Biden.

“Confidence retreated further in April, reaching its lowest level since July 2022 as consumers became less positive about the current labor market situation and more concerned about future business conditions, job availability, and income,” Dana Peterson, chief economist at the Conference Board, said.

Dan North, a senior economist with Allianz Trade Americas, told the Washington Examiner after the release of the most recent CPI report that while it ticked down by a tenth of a percentage point, inflation has remained in a narrow band between 3% and 3.7% for nearly a year now, more than a full percentage point over what the Fed considers healthy.

The Fed has raised its interest rate target from 5.25% to 5.50%, the highest since the dot-com bubble at the turn of the century. The biggest question now is when the Fed will start cutting rates, although recent hotter-than-anticipated inflation reports have increased the odds of fewer cuts in 2024. Most investors expect the first rate cut to come in September.

North said the latest report doesn’t do much to move the needle toward quicker interest rate cuts.

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“It’s not enough to move the Fed by any means off of, in our opinions, September. It’s a good thing it’s not a surprise to the upside, which we’ve had too much of, but we’re still a long, long way from 2%,” North said.

If inflation readings keep showing little progress toward moving inflation down to the Fed’s goal, it could also push back the first rate cut until after the November elections, something that would further hurt Biden. Higher rates make things like buying a home or taking out a loan much more expensive for voters.

Generation Z has shocked their elders. The campus protests that have swept the country reflect deep-seated anti-Israel sentiment — and worse. 

In December, a Harvard/Harris poll found that 67% of 18-24-year-olds agreed “Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors.” By contrast, 27% of all adults agreed. 

This has manifested in young people chanting “Intifada revolution” and “From the River to the Sea,” even if they can’t identify the river or sea. 

This disturbing trend of anti-Jewish attitudes, sometimes but not always masked as anti-Zionism, makes it clear that campus indoctrination isn’t the whole story. Rabbi Daniel Levitt, who spent 15 years as a campus Hillel professional, posted, “They’re radicalized before they get to campus.”

A litigator and strategic consultant whose national practice specializes in representing private school parents argued that campus activists “show up having already tested the waters with their K-12 administrators.” These students “know they can make false statements, be threatening, aggressive, and vocally vicious all without penalty, so long as they are taking a stand that fits within the administration’s progressive narrative around race and oppression.” And antisemitic campus protests certainly do.

In the three months following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the Anti-Defamation League tallied 256 reported antisemitic incidents in K-12 schools nationwide. The Washington Examiner spoke to more than 40 people about their own recent experiences in public and independent schools. From a parent who resigned from the Democratic Socialists of America over its response to Oct. 7 to Donald Trump supporters, they spoke of progressive ideology that often ignored antisemitism or even fanned the flames.

Adherents of this ideology prefer it remain unnamed, but it is variously called diversity, equity, and inclusion, critical race theory, critical social justice, anti-racism, and wokeness. It dominates schools and will shape the country’s future.

Consider one high-profile example. Montgomery County Public Schools has been highly ranked and serves a sizable Jewish population relative to the national average. While Jews are approximately 2% of all Americans, “Montgomery County is about 10% Jewish,” according to Meredith Weisel, regional director of ADL Washington, D.C. MCPS is now also the subject of a federal Title VI investigation based on allegations of antisemitism.

The school system has repeatedly made headlines for reported antisemitism. Still, it’s difficult to track the frequency of such incidents. 

Andrew Winter, an elementary school principal and the founder of the Montgomery County Jewish Educators Alliance, said, “MCPS tracks reported incidents of hate bias.” Winter does “not believe” the findings are published. However, “I know this year from the start of the school year until Oct. 7 — that weekend — the number was 19 incidents. Since Oct. 7, there’s been over 60 more incidents that have been reported,” Winter shared in mid-January.

Moderately MOCO, a local news outlet, analyzed “hate and bias incidents” for July 2022 to October 2023. Eighty-one incidents, or 61% of reports from all schools, targeted Jews.

When MCPS put four educators on leave for antisemitic social media posts and a “River to the Sea” email signature last fall, Jewish parents hoped the school system would stand strong against antisemitism. However, three of those four teachers have already been reinstated at different schools.

Nicole Neily, president of Parents Defending Education, said her organization filed a Maryland Public Information Act request last October, seeking “three weeks of emails from the Board of Education [and superintendent]” mentioning Israel, Hamas, and related terms. In a response letter Neily shared, MCPS said fulfilling that request would cost $8,492.08, a price seemingly intended “to dissuade people from asking.” By February’s end, Neily said, MCPS had released only external documents.

Parents have encountered other barriers. Nicole Kashtan, the mother of two MCPS students and a member of the Montgomery County Jewish Parents Coalition, recalled meeting with an MCPS administrator about the district’s anti-racist audit: “We said to him a number of times we’re concerned about this potentially promoting progressive social justice antisemitism. He really rebuffed that. … [He] refused to include antisemitism as part of the audit and refused to push MCPS to do a separate, parallel audit specifically on antisemitism. That was problematic, because even in 2021 and into 2022, antisemitism was already high among young people.” Antisemitism certainly feels widespread to parents. A middle and elementary school parent said, “The incidents have increased tremendously since Oct. 7. They were already on the rise, but after Oct. 7 every single Jewish kid I know had something.”

Even early grades aren’t immune. Marci Serfaty, a teacher at Bayard Rustin Elementary School, described teaching kindergarteners a Hanukkah lesson last December and taking questions at the end: “One child raised his hand and said, ‘My father said that Jewish people are the bad guys, and they’re killing everybody.’ Then a second child said, ‘the Jews are going to hell.’ My school administrators took it very seriously. They contacted the families to meet with them about the incident and included the school counselor. … I was assured that this type of behavior would not be tolerated.”

Margery Smelkinson, an MCPS parent who co-leads the Maryland Jewish Alliance, a Facebook group for parents concerned about antisemitism, said MCPS administrators “rarely talk about Jews, do not appear to celebrate Jewish American Heritage Month, or even discuss antisemitism.” Smelkinson added, “Even before Oct. 7, there were lots of swastikas and derogatory comments. If there were email communications from administrators to the community about it, they would say, ‘We don’t support hate speech,’ but in the end, no one was ever punished.” Beyond that, “there’s a lot of online bullying, but some schools claim they are at a loss for what to do with that.”

The allegations aren’t just online behavior. Melissa Stein, a parent and former teacher in the system as well as board member of the Montgomery County Council of PTAs, a parent stakeholder group that works directly with MCPS’s board and leadership, described a January middle school incident featuring such taunts as “of course a Jew is telling me how it is” and telling a non-Israeli Jewish boy “to ‘go back to Israel.’” The incident continued until there were “three mentions of Hitler.” Only then, “the teacher intervened.”

“I was an MCPS elementary teacher until January a year ago,” Stein recalled. “During our professional week, a day in August 2022, every teacher spent half or two-thirds of a day doing anti-racist training, because the county invested in an anti-racist audit. They taught everything you do is either racist or anti-racist. We were taught by MCPS as teachers to accept that as fact.” There was no antisemitism training.

One parent told the Washington Examiner about their children being asked by a cafeteria worker if they “liked Palestine” when receiving kosher meals. Another described a Nazi salute directed at her son during the national anthem. 

High school supercharges the hostility. Rachel Barold was a freshman in December 2022 when her high school was graffitied with “Jews not welcome.” In response, she organized a 600-student walkout. The Washington Post then reported that two debate team members “allegedly joked about using challah to lure Jewish people to the secluded Andaman Islands and burning them at the stake.” Barold was the second name listed, she said. 

Barold gave her principal high marks for addressing antisemitism. Unfortunately, there’s been “a lot of antisemitism” there since Oct. 7. “It’s almost cool to hate Jews, to be anti-Israel. It’s very hip. A lot of students take it that if you want to be a Democrat, you can’t support Israel. They get that from social media [and] various politicians.” And since the curriculum isn’t focused on teaching about Jews, Israel, or antisemitism, misinformation frequently remains uncontested. 

“Most kids are on TikTok 1-4 hours a day,” Barold said. It’s important that students “get facts before they hear something wrong on the internet.” Indeed, a recent study found “spending at least 30 minutes a day on TikTok increases the chances a respondent holds antisemitic or anti-Israel views by 17% (compared with 6% for Instagram and 2% for X).”

County school officials did not respond to a request for comment.

But it’s a trend seen all over the country. “We had a speaker compare Jews to Nazis in the ninth grade,” said Dr. Logan Levkoff, an independent school parent in New York who’s had two very different school experiences. “My son was called an ethnic cleanser by a student. He had one-sided speakers — plural — blaming only Jews in Israel for what’s happened between Israel and the Palestinians. They had two speakers from J Street, who were supposed to be thoughtful but focused only on one side. When my son said, ‘Hey, there seems to be part of the story missing,’ the conversation was shut down. He had teachers who told students that Soviet anti-Zionism was a legitimate political movement and had nothing to do with antisemitism.”

A common thread is an ideology that divides the world into two distinct groups: oppressors and the oppressed. “The first thing is the oppressor versus oppressed binary that all of these other things are built upon,” said Dr. Brandy Shufutinsky, director of education and community engagement with the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values. “What’s in that framework is the belief in an anti-capitalist idea that is a tentacle of white supremacy. It feeds the old and long-lasting trope against Jews as the ultimate bad actor capitalists, which comes from neo-Marxism … if we’re in a school critiquing white supremacy that believes that the ‘ultimate white’ is Jews, and Israel gets that overlaid, Israel is the ultimate ‘white supremacist’ state.”  

Paul Rossi is a ninth grade math teacher in the Bronx, former teacher at Manhattan’s Grace Church School, and leader of Terra Firma Teaching Alliance, a networking and support group for traditional teachers. “Everything is relational,” he said. “Any antisemitism from the Right, [the school] will say, ‘This is wrong. It’s terrible. We need to fight this.’ But when it’s intersectionally inconvenient like Oct. 7, or self-defense on the part of Israel, the Jewish identity falls in the wrong bucket. You’re on the side of colonialism and Western exploitation. It’s a deeply uncomfortable thing.”

That discomfort can be widely felt, as this worldview “creates division where there doesn’t need to be any. When you start putting the focus on the differences, children don’t learn to see the commonalities,” said Kate Hudson, founder of Education Veritas, a nonprofit organization that educates the public about goings-on in public and nonpublic education from kindergarten through college.

This ideology brooks no dissent. “It’s an orthodoxy. This is why it looks, feels, and smells like a cult. You can’t question,” Shufutinsky said.

Indoctrination also starts early. “This starts in pre-K. As soon as they get into school, they are slowly cajoled into this way of thinking,” Rossi said. “Jewish students are lumped into white people. That trumps anything, any type of ethnicity or religion they have, so inclusion goes out the window on those kinds of things. … What matters is your proximity to whiteness. Whiteness is the big evil.” This is a central article of faith.

David Bernstein, founder of the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values and the author of Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews, explained, “Only people with lived experience of oppression are permitted to, and have the standing to, define oppression for the rest of society.” This typically excludes Jews. “Historic discrimination against Jews is whitewashed or minimized or otherwise disregarded in favor of modern marginalized groups,” civil injury lawyer David Pivtorak said. 

“If you want to believe oppressed people can never succeed, you have to explain the Jews. … The whole narrative falls apart with the Jews. They’re ‘white supremacists,’ or benefit from ‘white supremacy culture,’ so they become a scapegoat because they undermine the core narrative of wokeism,” observed Andrew Gutmann, the father who wrote the viral Brearley letter as a New York City independent school parent, has since dug into these ideas, and is now running for Congress in Florida. “The progressive ideology that has infused K-12 education — you can’t separate that from the antisemitism,” but antisemitism is “not the driving force.”

Shufutinsky offered another view: “I don’t want to minimize that here in the United States the overall target is the West. But since Oct. 7, it feels like [Jews] are the target. That’s why we’re now seeing protesters in the streets of New York chanting, ‘There is only one solution, communist revolution. Intifada, intifada.’” 

“DEI efforts are designed to combat the effects of social prejudice by insisting on equity: Some people in our society have too much power and too much privilege, and are overrepresented, so justice requires leveling the playing field,” Dara Horn wrote in the Atlantic. “But antisemitism isn’t primarily a social prejudice. It is a conspiracy theory: the big lie that Jews are supervillains manipulating others. The righteous fight for justice therefore does not require protecting Jews as a vulnerable minority. Instead it requires taking Jews down.” 

Roz Rothstein, co-founder and CEO of StandWithUs, an international nonpartisan education organization that supports Israel and fights antisemitism, said StandWithUs has noted an increase in these views: “We are addressing numerous instances of biased or one-sided materials used in classrooms across the country about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and current events. Our student leaders are being bullied online and in person for having a connection to Israel. There are also instances of physical threats and violence against Jewish students.” For American Jews, “normal” is being redefined.

Parents report that DEI has flooded independent schools. Gutmann observed, “This ideology has been entrenched in the K-12 pedagogical ecosystem, in the teachers’ education, [and] in the professional development teachers have been doing for a very long time.” 

Lessons can apply to parents, too. Recalling his experience three school years ago, Gutmann said, “We had to do mandatory anti-racist training. [Brearley] made us do it, so we saw it firsthand. They tried to force us to sign a pledge that not only would we support anti-racism initiatives at school, but also in our home. We refused.” 

A school spokesperson emailed, “Each year at Brearley, we require one parent from each family to attend curriculum night, parent/teacher conferences, and a learning session designed to engage them as members of our diverse community. This year’s choices for that session have included talks on antisemitism, Islamophobia as well as new parents getting to know one another. We do not ask parents to sign a pledge.”

Accreditation is another vector. Gutmann noted, “Technically the regional accreditors accredit schools, but NAIS [National Association of Independent Schools] accredits the regional accreditors, so they can mandate schools have to do DEI.” 

DEI also informs NAIS’s national conferences. Numerous interviewees expressed concerns about the annual Student Diversity Leadership Conference. The last SDLC brought approximately 2,000 independent school students to St. Louis in December.

“The NAIS is pushing activism with these students,” Hudson said. “That’s part of the indoctrination they get at these conferences. These schools pay exorbitant fees for students and teachers to attend. … According to some who have attended, they have to sign an NDA when they go. They aren’t allowed to relay information from it. It’s oddly secretive.”

At the last conference, a student delivered extemporaneous remarks about the “genocide” in Gaza. He was applauded enthusiastically by the audience, but one Jewish mother described her daughter’s traumatized reaction to being one of 20-30 Jewish students in a large crowd cheering antisemitism. Other adults reported similar anxiety and a desire to leave early from other Jewish attendees they knew.

An NAIS spokesperson described the SDLC as a conference that “helps students develop cross-cultural communication skills and learn the foundations of allyship and networking. … The conference aims to help students navigate complex and often challenging conversations respectfully. Students are invited to share their perspectives in various settings during the conference. The remarks in question came from a student commenter. Some students were deeply offended by the comments. These students reached out to SDLC faculty members, who worked to support them and to facilitate discussions. As an organization, NAIS condemns antisemitism in all forms, and our work — at SDLC and more broadly — strives to embrace diversity and champion inclusivity. These values continue to guide everything we do.”

For an era whose byword is “inclusivity,” this school year’s seen a lot of exclusion, from college campuses to K-12 schools. It doesn’t help that so many educational leaders not only seem unclear about what antisemitism is, but also seem disinterested in leading on it.

Some interviewees would be content if their schools’ DEI staff started including Jewish children and content. However, save for the rare exception, DEI staff hasn’t reciprocated that interest.

DEI creates problems for both the included and excluded. Dr. Staci Weiner, clinical psychologist and owner of Apple Psychological, a group private practice in New York and Florida, observed, “If you’re saying you’re born ‘oppressed,’ then you might believe you have no chance to be successful. In other words, ‘You might as well give up now, because you were born into this life and your actions cannot help you define who you are as a person.’” Meanwhile, “if you’re ‘the oppressor,’ and you’re convinced of that, you might feel you have to apologize or feel ashamed for something you haven’t done. We are creating roles, oppressed [and] oppressor, and pigeonholing people before kids are even figuring out who they are or want to be.”

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“That’s psychologically harmful too,” Weiner said. “I worry about kids feeling disempowered. The narrative that we tell ourselves is who we inherently become. Our self-talk is extremely important in shaping the decisions we make and the path we take toward the future.”

The harm to Jewish students has been very visible this school year, but it will ripple throughout a whole generation. Without a change, the American future will not only be balkanized but could look like the explosive anti-Western, antisemitic fall of 2023. What are we, as a country, going to do about it?

Melissa Langsam Braunstein (@slowhoneybee) is an independent writer in metropolitan Washington.

“On the projected depletion date, 83% of benefits will be payable if Congress does not act sooner to prevent that shortfall,” reported CNBC, which again attributed the “slightly improved outlook” to a supposedly “strong economy.”

There’s just one problem: None of this is true.

Contrary to the intentional conflations by the media, the federal retirement portion of Social Security is still projected to go broke in 2033, as the trustees projected in last year’s report. Upon reaching insolvency in nine years, Social Security will only be able to pay out 79% of scheduled benefits, equivalent to the 21% across-the-board benefit cut fiscal hawks have forewarned for years now.

But the media and President Joe Biden‘s administration want to raid the Disability Insurance Trust Fund to stave off the impending bankruptcy of Social Security’s retirement program by another two years, something that is currently illegal.

Although it is called the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance program, Social Security’s retirement fund is not actually an insurance program but rather a generational wealth transfer. Furthermore, this wealth transfer is wildly regressive. Whereas various measures of the poverty rate for retirees are at or below 10%, with one Social Security study estimating it as low as 7%, the country’s overall poverty rate is about 12%. Because baby boomers stopped having children and started racking up multitrillion-dollar deficits on Uncle Sam’s charge card, the ratio of workers paying into Social Security to the program’s beneficiaries has plummeted from four in 1965 to three in 2009 and now 2.7 in 2024. Since 2021, Social Security has paid out more than it has received in payroll taxes, as the trustees project it will continue to do indefinitely.

Already, Social Security OASI steals from the comparatively poor to pay for the rich. Now the trustees have found that to stave off its own bankruptcy, OASI will steal from the abjectly poor and disabled, the DI Trust Fund, to pay to pad the coffers of the wealthiest generation in human history.

Unlike the OASI program, the DI Trust Fund is both an actual insurance program — a distribution of the risk that any of us could fall severely and debilitatingly disabled, as stringently defined by federal law — and a progressive program. Whereas Social Security retirement funds transfer money from disproportionately poorer populations to the wealthiest, the DI Trust Fund transfers payroll taxes to a more impoverished population. A 2012 study by the SSA found that compared to those 7% of retired workers who live in poverty, nearly a quarter of disabled workers do.

Under the law, the DI Trust Fund is entirely separate from the Ponzi scheme that is the retirement program, and unlike the OASI Trust Fund, the trustees are confident in the growing solvency of the DI Trust Fund throughout this century. It is, in fact, the singular portion of Social Security that is operating as social insurance should: a financially sound investment that distributes the risk of disabilities to help the unfortunate few who become disabled and cannot help themselves or their families. Unlike the rest of our entitlement schemes, it is never projected to go bankrupt. For those 9 million disabled people and their dependents who would otherwise be on the streets, the solvency of the DI Trust Fund is a success story.

And that is exactly why the trustees, who are all political appointees of Biden, want to raid it. The OASI program can remain solvent for two extra years by bankrupting an otherwise sustainable and successful program.

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“Social Security’s combined trust funds are projected to cover full payment of scheduled benefits on a timely basis until the trust fund reserves become depleted in 2035,” the trustees bury on Page 26 of their report. “Full payment of benefits until depletion of the hypothetical combined reserves in 2035 implicitly assumes that the law will have been changed to permit the transfer of funds between OASI and DI as needed.”

While raising the retirement age would not salvage Social Security entirely, average American life expectancy has risen 23% in the near century since the retirement age’s establishment. Raising the retirement age or slashing benefits for healthy adults with multiple decades left to work may seem politically dicey, but consider the Biden administration’s alternative: destroy a fiscally sound program for the nation’s least privileged to extend the boomers’ free ride for another two years.

The Washington Examiner spoke to Lake, a staunch opponent of illegal immigration, on Wednesday while she was in transit to the southern border. The 54-year-old former TV news anchor and 2022 gubernatorial candidate said she wants bigger federal benefits for those who choose to have children.

“Right now, we have unsustainable U.S. birth rates, and that is going to destabilize our future growth,” Lake said. “We’ve got to bring our birth rates up, and I think that we need to incentivize and make it easier for people to have families.”

The U.S. total fertility rate was sitting at an average of 2.1 births per woman in 2007, but has fallen to 1.7 births per woman in 2021, according to the latest data. The replacement rate is 2.1.

Lake evoked European countries and said the “turmoil” is an example of “what happens when you don’t have babies of your own, and you have a wholesale import of a new population.”

Lake said that she doesn’t have a specific degree of increase in mind for child tax credit, but said it needs to be closely examined and expanded to a level where it is effective at incentivizing family growth and raising the birth rate.

“Our birth rate is declining at such a rapid rate that we’re going to be in big trouble,” she said.

The child tax credit, which has been revised by Congress multiple times in recent years, currently stands at $2,000 for minors. That is the level it was set at by the 2017 Republican tax overhaul.

The child tax credit was temporarily increased as part of President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 relief legislation. The law raised it to $3,600 for children under 6 and $3,000 for older children, with perhaps the biggest change being the removal of an income threshold for those who receive the funds. Thus, a family with no income or head of household working would also receive the full $3,600 or $3,000 payments. The boosted tax credit sunset at the end of 2021.

Republicans largely opposed the temporary pandemic-era expansion because of the lack of work requirements.

More generally, Republicans are divided on family benefits. Some favor lowering tax rates rather than increasing credits. Others, such as Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, have backed much larger benefits for parents.

Lake is the expected Republican nominee for Senate in the state. She is set to face Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) in what is billed as tossup election, one which could decide control of the Senate. Gallego also supports a bigger child tax credit.

Experts debate how big government subsidies need to be in order to raise the birth rate. For instance, Hungary has massive benefits for motherhood, including upfront loans of $36,000 that get written off if parents have at least three children, but it is unclear just how well the policies have worked.

Lake warned that it is crucial for Republicans to gain control of the Senate and White House because “if we don’t win, we will watch the biggest tax increase foisted upon” Americans and small businesses. Lake argued that the 2017 tax cuts resulted in higher federal revenue by turbocharging economic expansion.

“Lower taxes increase economic growth,” Lake said. She also tied better economic conditions to the birth rate.

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“When President Trump gets back in and bring back brings back that roaring Trump economy, I think we’ll quickly see people wanting to be able to start families get married,” Lake said.

The Arizona Republican primary is on July 30.

The storm system left a trail of destruction with numerous downed trees, damages to high-rise buildings in Texas cities, and left over one million people in the Houston area without power, according to reports.

“If you lived through the core of these winds, you went through the equivalent of a Cat 1, if not a Cat. 2 hurricane,” said David Paul, Chief Meteorologist for KHOU 11.

Several tornado warnings were issued for the area by the National Weather Service, but no tornadoes were reported. Strong winds estimated to be 70 miles per hour and higher were believed to be behind the carnage in the area. Houston Mayor John Whitmire encouraged people to stay inside and off the road and told people not to go to work tomorrow.

“Stay at home tonight. Do not go to work tomorrow unless you’re an essential worker. Stay home, take care of your children,” Whitmire said during a press conference on Thursday evening. “Our first responders will be working around the clock.”

Whitmire also announced the deaths of the four people due to the storms. Two people died from falling trees, and another person was killed when strong winds caused a crane to blow over. It was not reported on how the fourth fatality occurred.

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Numerous streets were flooded, and hotels and office buildings in Houston’s downtown area were reportedly severely damaged by the storms. Debris from the damaged buildings was scattered throughout the city’s streets. Texas had deployed its Department of Public Safety officers to the area to provide assistance.

According to reports, all classes in the Houston Independent School District were canceled Friday because of the storms. 

Well, it’s a difficult question for California.

Two assembly Democrats have introduced bills that would allow California to fund shelters that require sobriety, which is against state law. California’s current homelessness regime is considered a “housing first” plan, which means homeless people get housing with no strings attached, but only if they want it, and with no further incentive to get them into housing or treatment programs if they refuse.

Is it really a surprise that California’s homelessness crisis, already easily the worst in the nation, has only grown worse year by year?

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Now, it seems that even some Democratic legislators in the Golden State recognize that making a dent in the homelessness crisis by any means necessary is much better than its current pie-in-the-sky attitude. It isn’t quite the realization that sobriety-focused housing would be better for dealing with rampant fentanyl overdose deaths, but hey, you can’t lead California to water and make it manage it in a responsible way. It is a miracle that California is even considering breaking the grip of ideological homeless “advocacy” groups. Consider it a small step in the right direction.

On the bright side, it is hard to see California’s homelessness policy getting worse. Between the billions spent for no progress and the various scam projects the state has fallen for, the status quo may just be the lowest the state could go. The fact that California is having this debate at all is a step in the right direction. Now, let’s see if it can finally make a good decision.

If the multiverse is having a moment, it is only because “the Science” continues to have a bigger one. One might expect, observing the hard sciences’ replication crisis, a little representational modesty. How about a series in which a heroic researcher eschews p-hacking and gets the same results twice in a row? Instead, we have quantum superpositions. Scratch a popular screen production these days, and one is likely to find the well-credentialed bending time and space to their will. In Everything Everywhere All at Once, the 2023 Oscar winner, Michelle Yeoh’s Alpha-Evelyn discovered “verse-jumping” seemingly by accident, so exceptional was her apparent brilliance. It wasn’t Mister but Doctor Strange who strode through Marvel’s “Multiverse of Madness” the previous year. It’s all nonsense, of course, but of a peculiarly triumphalist kind. 

Given this context, it is no surprise to find Apple’s latest taking for granted its own narrative plausibility. Kidnapped into an alternate reality, the show’s protagonist barely asks questions, so complete is his faith in physics to achieve the impossible. Fifteen years ago, the same program might have saved its quantum gobbledygook for a late-episode “reveal,” stunning viewers with a high-theory exposition dump. The Dark Matter of today, by contrast, throws us into the deep end halfway through its pilot. With the multiverse on every tongue, there is simply no need to disguise the engine driving the show’s brazenly ridiculous plot.

Dark Matter stars Joel Edgerton as Jason Dessen, a physics professor at a Chicago-area community college. Married to artist Daniela (Jennifer Connelly), Jason enjoys a comfortable life and has no regrets about a long-ago decision to prioritize family over the lab. Things change when, one rainy evening, a masked man abducts our hero and injects him with a mysterious syringe. Upon waking, Jason finds himself known to all as a famous scientist and entrepreneur. Even Daniela has changed, recalling him as a one-time boyfriend but decidedly not as a husband. 

If the plot I’ve summarized thus far owes much to The Twilight Zone, the similarity is often to the good. Like “The Parallel,” a fourth-season episode anticipating today’s alternate-universes obsession, Dark Matter captures well the existential terror of being the only sane man in the world. Helping matters greatly is the performance of Edgerton, who brings to his protagonist role a bruised vulnerability reminiscent of Steve Forrest’s in 1963. Who cares if the Australian roughneck is as believable a physicist as Leonardo DiCaprio would be a priest? The actor nails Jason’s panicked frustration. 

To whom does one turn when one’s sense of reality matches no one else’s? The answer, for a while, is Connelly’s Daniela, who possesses, in both universes, all of the actress’s customary warmth. Later, a psychiatrist named Amanda (Alice Braga) plays an important role as our hero explores the technology responsible for his crisis. Through it all, Jason’s goal is simple: to get back to “real” life and vanquish the kidnapper who has stolen his very existence. To do so, he will have to enter “the Box,” a room-sized, steampunkish cube that holds a gateway to every possible world. 

It is no spoiler to reveal that the villain being chased is Jason himself. The series shows us as much half an hour into the pilot. Brash and swaggering, this doppelganger is the very man our protagonist has been mistaken for. What he wants is a taste of married life with Daniela, an outcome he foreclosed in his own reality by choosing careerism and pecuniary success. 

Is it a sign of bad morals that I found myself cheering for the false Jason? He is certainly the more interesting figure, dressing down “his” bored students one moment and seducing Daniela the next. In a plot twist that delivers much-needed emotional complexity, Connelly’s character finds herself at least temporarily impressed by her husband’s alteration. Like Beauty preferring the Beast, she wants the dangerous man, not her familiar milquetoast. Never mind that fake Jason knows nothing about their life together and can’t get through a dinner party without a who’s-who cheat sheet. 

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For the most part, Dark Matter balances its dueling plotlines well, shifting between Jasons like a magician flipping a coin. Less compelling are the graspers and hangers-on who dog the real Jason in his adopted realm: Dayo Okeniyi as a fanatical corporate stooge and Jimmi Simpson as our protagonist’s apprehensive frenemy. I suppose these supporting players are necessary if the show is to fill nine hours. Then again, the program feels bloated even at its best. If ever there were a series that could have lopped off four episodes, this is it. 

Still, one is tempted, coming to the end of each installment, to let the next one start up. Dark Matter is handsomely produced, reasonably intriguing, and the beneficiary of two solid leads. At least in this iteration of our universe, there are far worse shows. 

Graham Hillard is editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer.

“Here’s the thing: Small acts of kindess that are mostly domestic labor just add up to work at the end of the day,” a TikTok momfluencer named Paige Connell explained in a recent video.

“I don’t do his laundry. He can do that himself. I do my laundry, and we do the kids’ laundry, but he does his own,” she says in a video titled, “A list of things I don’t do for my husband.” That was the only appearance of the word “we” in the video, which included over 30 instances of the word “I.”

After explaining she doesn’t pack him lunch or cook the family dinner, she comments, “Would it be kind of me to do that? For sure. Is it my job? Absolutely not.”

And that’s where the worldview shines through: A marriage is just like any other contractual relationship. Only a fool would do any more than he or she is required.

“That’s domestic labor,” she says of small favors such as moving her husband’s wash to the dryer. “Those are not acts of kindness. … It is not my job as a wife. It is not in my job description.”

This isn’t merely the impatient ranting of a stressed-out mother of young children. It’s the cogent articulation of an entire anthropology — one that holds individual autonomy as the highest good, and one ought only do what one has explicitly agreed to do.

Personal finance celebrity Suze Orman, in the same spirit, tells couples to separate their finances and keep a strict ledger. “Having joint bank accounts can lead to power imbalances and a loss of autonomy. … You all should be autonomous human beings. You’ve come into this relationship as an autonomous human being.”

Marriage is an odd fit for this worldview. Marriage involves laying down one’s life for each other, and that results in two people becoming intertwined. But that intertwining undermines autonomy.

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One New York Times op-ed in praise of divorce instructed all married couples to adopt a 50/50 custody agreement, which will lead to “a lot of very tidy and businesslike communication.”

Isn’t that what every young man and woman dreams of? One day, I want to have a tidy and businesslike relationship — with no uncompensated domestic labor.

Fico himself is a creature of the modern age, a former communist apparatchik who rose to power by railing against economic liberalism and who, more recently, took to engaging in Trumpian culture wars. The murder attempt is a product of those culture wars, which see every political difference catastrophized.

When the Slovak Republic was born on Jan. 1, 1993, political assassinations were thought to be a thing of the past. The partition of Czechoslovakia had been amicable, and Slovakia, historically the poorer partner, began a rapid rise toward Western European living standards.

That is what countries did back then. They moved, however fitfully and patchily, toward the kind of society that people in North America and Western Europe took for granted. On every measure, the world in the 1990s became more peaceful, more democratic, and more law-based. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.

What changed? Why, after seven decades of steady advance, did liberal democracy begin to retreat after 2012? Why did a country like Slovakia, a textbook exemplar of the benefits of globalization and democratization, elect a Putinite with thinly veiled authoritarian tendencies?

And why are other countries doing the same? Even in the United States, taboos against threatening the division of powers and refusing to acknowledge democratic election results have weakened perilously.

There are three possible explanations for what has gone wrong. First, the global financial crisis delegitimized the market system. Low- and median-income families were hit by taxes in order to bail out wealthy bankers and bondholders. For the first and only time in history, an essentially Marxist critique of the capitalist system seemed vindicated. The rich really did use state power to hang on to their wealth. Voters have not forgotten.

Second, there has been an unprecedented increase in global migration, a völkerwanderung enabled by advances in technology. The spread of smartphones allows people to transfer information and credit, so making feasible journeys that their grandparents could not have contemplated.

Rapid demographic change is unsettling. We are a territorial species and, when people move without permission into what we regard as our space, we react. Slovakia is no exception. Excluding Ukrainian refugees, the country saw a nine-fold increase in illegal immigration last year. “God alone knows how many of them are terrorists or how many have infectious diseases,” declared Fico during the Trump-flavored election campaign that saw him returned to office.

Smartphones bring us to the third explanation. Put simply, screens have addled our minds, shortened our attention spans, placed us in political silos, and made us grumpier. Jonathan Haidt has written a compelling book called The Anxious Generation, which shows how smartphones have left young people more frightened, more credulous, more unhappy, and more stupid. Starting in 2012, in every developed country, the mental health of young people deteriorated, self-harm and suicide rates increased, and test scores fell. No other explanation fits the timeline.

Haidt’s interest is in children under the age of 16, whose minds are more plastic and therefore more vulnerable. But why assume that adults are immune? We can all see the way screen addiction has made people less interested in nuance, readier to reason backward from their preferred conclusions, and more prone to conspiracy theories. I don’t believe the demented and largely fact-free arguments over the 2020 election would have taken off in an earlier age.

“Wherever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government,” wrote Thomas Jefferson. After he wrote those words, people became steadily better informed, as literacy spread, the price of printing fell and, in time, the internet arrived.

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But might we have reached saturation point? More words are being written and read than ever before, but we are becoming lazier about applying the filters of plausibility, consistency, and common sense. Like our pre-literate and pre-Enlightenment ancestors, we have taken to assuming that those who disagree with us are simply bad people.

When Putin and Xi talk, as they did at their summit this week, of replacing the Western world order, they have cause to be confident. That order, the liberal order that became ascendant from the 18th century and dominant after 1945, depends on a habit of mind that we are losing. In the world that succeeds it, political assassinations will be the least of our worries.

These contradicting policies won’t work economically or help Biden politically, but they do point to the commonsense way forward. Namely, an end to Biden’s impossible EV mandates, an end to Biden’s costly EV subsidies, and an end to Biden’s many bans on domestic rare earth mineral production.

The underlying political and economic pain Biden is trying to mitigate all stems from his radical plan to force drivers out of the internal combustion engine cars they love into inferior, unreliable, and expensive electric vehicles they do not want.

Biden’s scheme has two components. First, using the regulatory power of the Environmental Protection Agency, Biden has issued strict new mandates forcing all domestic automobile manufacturers to ensure that two-thirds of all cars sold by 2032 are electric. If any car company misses that metric, it will be hit with crippling, trillion-dollar fines from the EPA. 

Second, Biden is also using the power of the purse to bribe as many drivers as possible into the electric cars he is forcing Detroit to make. Key among these subsidies is a $7,500 tax credit for each electric vehicle purchased.

Many Democrats who signed on to these electric vehicle subsidies, however, did not want them to benefit foreign companies. So, the law authorizing these tax credits, the inaptly named Inflation Reduction Act, also required that a certain percentage of the components of each car must be produced domestically to qualify for the credit. 

This is where Biden’s gift to Chinese EV component manufacturers comes in. This month, the Energy Department issued its final regulation governing the tax credit, and it essentially decided not to enforce the Chinese component ban at all until 2027, at which point there would be nothing stopping the Biden administration (if still in power) from not enforcing the ban again. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) called this regulation “outrageous and illegal” and accused Biden of “effectively endorsing Made in China.”

Manchin is right. By not enforcing the Inflation Reduction Act’s ban on tax credits for cars made with foreign components, Biden is effectively subsidizing Chinese companies. But here is the thing: Without those subsidies, domestic car companies will never be able to reach the strict EV mandates set by Biden’s EPA. If the Inflation Reduction Act were enforced as written, none of the existing EVs on the market would qualify. Our domestic EV makers are simply too dependent on Chinese components to meet Biden’s EV mandates. No amount of tariffs on Chinese-built cars is going to fix that problem.

Electric vehicles, whether manufactured in China or the United States, just aren’t good enough for most people to make the switch. They take too long to charge, it is hard to find charging stations, the battery life shrinks in the cold, and it shrinks even further when the vehicles are asked to pull heavy loads.

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People simply don’t want these cars. And they are not buying them at anywhere near the numbers necessary to meet Biden’s mandates. Ford, General Motors, Rivian, and Tesla have all been forced to fire workers as EV production has outstripped demand. It’s time to admit Biden’s EV revolution is a failure.

Instead of raising tariffs on low-quality Chinese EVs Americans don’t want anyway, Biden should repeal his EV mandate, freeing consumers to buy the cars they want, and repeal his EV subsidies, allowing for tax relief for families. And if he wants to make EV manufacturing easier here in the U.S., he must stop his Department of Interior from banning the mining of the rare earth minerals necessary to build them.