“No Kings” Nonsense

The recent anti-Trump rallies—or “No Kings” protests, as they’ve been called—reportedly drew 5 million demonstrators across the U.S. To hear the protesters tell it, President Trump is an authoritarian leader on the cusp of becoming a monarch, and the only way to stop him is to flood the streets and create a sense of hysteria.

Nonsense. Trump is an elected president who is currently working with Congress on the federal budget. And his power isn’t exactly king-like. “District courts have blocked many of his policies down to the most minute detail, sometimes within hours of their adoption,” Christopher F. Rufo points out. “A federal judge even prohibited the administration from removing gender-related content from government websites.”

Read Rufo’s take on the rallies, and what he noticed at a recent one in Oregon, here.

In collaboration with the Sun Valley Policy Forum (SVPF), several luminaries from the Manhattan Institute will speak at this year’s SVPF Summer Institute, on July 1st and 2nd. This two-day conference retreat will be held in the premier mountain town of Sun Valley, Idaho. Reihan Salam (Manhattan Institute President), Jesse Arm (Manhattan Institute Executive Director of External Affairs & Chief of Staff), Heather Mac Donald (Thomas W. Smith Fellow and Contributing Editor of City Journal), and Senior Fellows Jason Riley and Abigail Shrier will be featured in the programming, along with other notable thought leaders. As a benefit to City Journal readers, Reserve ticket bundle registrations will be upgraded to the Bronze pass level, which includes access to a private cocktail party. For more information on the program, go here; to register with MI benefits, go here.

The shootings in Minnesota—killing state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband and wounding state senator John Hoffman and his wife—appear to be the latest horrific incident of political violence in the U.S.

As Charles Fain Lehman writes, leaders from both parties should speak out against these attacks and become “equally ferocious in their suppression” of them. Read his take here.

Arizona’s cities are once again ground zero in the legal fight over America’s homelessness crisis, writes the Cicero Institute’s Devon Kurtz. The state’s Court of Appeals has ruled that Tucson can be held liable for failing to address a homeless encampment deemed a public nuisance, mirroring litigation in Phoenix that ended in a $300,000 settlement.

As lawsuits and consent decrees proliferate nationwide, it’s becoming harder for city officials to dodge accountability for unsafe and unsanitary public spaces. Reformers are combining legal and legislative strategies to force action where political leadership has failed.

There appears to be a shift taking place in education. Blue states like Washington and Oregon have seen math and reading scores plummet, while red states like Mississippi and Louisiana have improved or held steady. What’s going on?

Neetu Arnold points to a series of reforms. While Democrat-led states have reduced academic standards and undermined school discipline in the name of “equity,” Republican states have banned ineffective teaching methods and improved school safety. “The lesson here for Democrats,” Arnold writes, is “any educational approach that prioritizes ideology over evidence will sacrifice student success.”

“If one riots and loots, due to deprivation, the outcome will eventually be more deprivation, because more shops will flee those places where hooligans can loot them with impunity. What’s the point of investing in a place where there’s a high chance of one’s investment getting wiped out in an instant?

Eventually, no one will want to migrate to LA or NYC, if they continue to be no better governed than the dystopian hellholes so many people are fleeing.”

Photo credits: David McNew / Contributor / Getty Images News via Getty Images