The Party of “Weak and Woke”

California congressman Ro Khanna is often seen as a rising star of the Democratic Party, a leader who can bridge divides and articulate a clear vision.

But during a recent exchange with Lawrence Jones on Fox News, his limitations were on full display: he denied that his party had become too woke.

Khanna is clearly unwilling to challenge his own party, instead embracing “a kind of performative discomfort with the Left’s excesses that stops short of real confrontation,” Jesse Arm writes. Until Khanna confronts the reality that many Democrats are culturally out of touch, he’ll remain “a gifted spokesperson for a crumbling coalition.”  

“The truth is,” Arm writes, “no Democratic candidate can break from the party’s past without saying plainly what many voters already believe: that the party is ‘weak and woke’ and needs to change.”

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.

On Wednesday night, nine Democratic New York City mayoral candidates debated a host of issues, from crime and anti-Semitism to housing costs and Donald Trump.

Even so, the debate isn’t likely to change many voters’ minds, John Ketcham argues. “No longshot stood out enough to signal the rise of a new contender.”

Read his takeaways here.

Vice President J. D. Vance recently praised the arrival of AI-backed autonomous trucking. As Jordan McGillis argues, he is right to do so.

AI “improves performance on important safety and efficiency metrics, while also freeing human laborers from tasks that are at best tedious and at worst detrimental to their wellbeing,” McGillis writes. “AI is complementary to human work, not a substitute for it.”

Earlier this year, Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt issued an executive order that instructs state agencies to make clear that religious and secular organizations alike may access public funds, licenses, and programs on equal terms. This means that religious schools can now apply for education grants, and churches can help administer after-school services without being forced to silence their beliefs. “That’s not ‘theocracy,’ as some activist groups allege—it’s basic fairness,” Nicole Stelle Garnett and Tim Rosenberger write.

Charles Fain Lehman, Daniel Di Martino, Tal Fortgang, and Renu Mukherjee discuss the revised travel ban, the Democratic Party’s struggles with young men, and renting vs. owning.

“I don’t really understand how anyone thought that AI, drawing on the written products of a particular culture, could avoid exhibiting that culture’s biases. Every culture has biases, in the sense of valuing some things more than others.

Even if it were desirable to eliminate them all in AI, how would that be accomplished? Formal logic? Formal logic can only evaluate based on the premises given it.

Is it desirable to eliminate all cultural bias? The essence of culture is what is valued and what is not (and what it disdains or punishes).”

Photo credits: Drew Angerer / Staff / Getty Images News via Getty Images