What MAHA Is Missing

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement has made youth mental health a priority. But it hasn’t focused on serious mental illness, which affects an estimated 4 percent to 6 percent of the population, Carolyn Gorman points out. Unless Kennedy does so, “he will have no answer to the inevitable questions that arise when problems can’t be solved by diet or exercise,” she writes. “What, for example, is MAHA’s position on medication for adults who are clearly psychotic and dangerous?”

The Network Contagion Research Institute recently released a report on groups of social-media bots driving a wedge into Donald Trump’s political coalition. Zack Dulberg of NCRI unpacks the report’s findings and argues that what he calls “fake MAGA” accounts and their unwitting collaborators are boosting conspiracy theories—particularly about Israel and acts of domestic terrorism.

“Our research has identified a group of ostensibly conservative influencers, who, at pivotal moments of nearly every crisis, use false-flag claims to sow doubt about the origins of acts of domestic terrorism,” Dulberg writes. “While these influencers may not knowingly coordinate with bot networks, they benefit from them nonetheless.”

Dulberg argues that this activity represents a form of “information warfare” that Americans should take seriously.

Former longtime City Journal writer and contributing editor Sol Stern has died at 89. Advocating for rigorous curricula, school choice, and accountability in public schools, Stern was “one of the country’s sharpest critics of education orthodoxy,” as City Journal editor Brian Anderson observes. “His reporting brought readers inside classrooms, and forcefully made the case, again and again, that education reform was the civil rights struggle of our time.” Read Anderson’s tribute here.

Most of the units offered through New York City’s housing lottery require that applicants earn incomes above those of working class people. While the rents are considered “affordable,” they still often eat up a large chunk of tenants’ paychecks.

Blame it on the lack of new construction, which owes to stringent zoning laws and environmental reviews. “Developers must navigate a maze of restrictions, community board approvals, and political horse-trading just to break ground,” Tim Rosenberger and Vilda Westh Blanc write.

Dallas, meanwhile, has been able to keep rents affordable thanks to its pro-growth and pro-housing policies, and the city is now a premier destination for many ambitious Americans. New York City could learn a thing or two, Rosenberger and Blanc argue.

In 2024, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled in Commonwealth v. Mattis that sentences of life without parole are unconstitutional for young adults between the ages of 18 and 20. Since December, the parole board has granted parole to 21 out of 24 murderers within that age range. “Massachusetts’s current system is an injustice to victims and their families and a hazard to the public,” Tim Cruz writes. He looks at how the state might reform the parole board to help achieve a balance between mercy and justice.

Rafael Mangual, John Ketcham, Neetu Arnold, and Jesse Arm discuss President Trump’s influence on universities, the future of conservatism, and who should lead a conservative center at Harvard.

“Every innovation brings about change that ultimately results in additional jobs, jobs that were not imaginable before the innovation.

It will be the same with ubiquitous AI.”

Photo credits: Eric lee/The New York Times