Source: Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
by Daniel Burnett
“How far can a university stretch the definition of harassment? Far enough to investigate a professor over the phrase ‘word salad,’ apparently. Just ask Richard Himelfarb, a political science professor at Hofstra University. During a Nov. 3, 2025, faculty meeting, Himelfarb thought his colleague, Jewish Studies Chair Santiago Slabodsky, has proposed a Jewish Studies course that contained too little Jewish content. So, during the meeting, Himelfarb described the proposal as rambling ‘word salad.’ In response, Slabodsky filed a harassment complaint, alleging the phrase ‘word salad’ is discriminatory against his accent and Latino identity. But instead of opening a dialogue, the university opened a harassment investigation.” (08/05/26)
“Despite being subjected to one of the most intensive bombing campaigns in modern history, the Islamic Republic of Iran has thus far failed to yield to any of the United States’ demands. There has been no regime change; no compromise on enrichment or the nuclear issue more broadly; no acceptance of conventional disarmament or an end to the so-called ‘axis of resistance;’ and no let-up of Iran’s chokehold over the Strait of Hormuz. … Unfortunately, there are few signs this is winding down.” (08/05/26)
“In an era of political gridlock, at least one clear area of bipartisan common ground continues to exist — the desire for real healthcare price transparency. In fact, a 2025 poll showed 96% of Americans across the political spectrum are in favor of the commonsense idea that you deserve to know the price of healthcare before receiving it. And finally, tangible progress is being made in both chambers of Congress to build upon numerous executive orders and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) rules and make healthcare price transparency the law of the land. … It allows for better, more accurate price signals, empowering patients with key information that allows them to shop for non-emergent healthcare goods and services. It also puts public pressure on care providers to justify prices, which may or may not be reasonable.” (08/05/26)
“Analogies between individual and governmental conduct are no doubt hazardous, and have often been deprecated, for example by the modern monetary theorists, who think they are wiser than Adam Smith when he said: ‘What is prudence in the conduct of every private family, can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.’ Of course, differences spring to mind. The credit of a family is unlikely to extend as far as that of a state …. No one, probably, would continue to lend to a family that had borrowed more than its annual income, mostly to continue to pay its current expenses, but there are large states where this has been the rule for many years. There is also a large difference between the virtues of individuals and the virtues of states.” (08/05/26)
“The mayor of New York City, commie Mamdani, is trying to raise more money to pay for his socialism.
One scheme is to punish owners of a second home by imposing a so-called ‘pied-à-terre tax,’ a tax on the second residence of wealthy New Yorkers above and beyond regular property taxes. Now, the assumption that anybody with a second home, or an expensive second home in an expensive property market, must be rolling in liquid funds is faulty. The notion that if you have more wealth than somebody else it should be taken from you? Also faulty. The new tax bill is going to many New Yorkers with only one home. And the website set up (speaking loosely) to permit challenges of the designation of one’s home as a pied-à-terre is proving nightmarish to navigate.” (08/05/26)
“The Democratic establishment couldn’t get some of its candidates over the line. The party’s rising left wing couldn’t win some key races. Republicans in two red states couldn’t convince voters to change election rules to make their party stronger. Tuesday’s primaries refused to settle into one of the storylines written in the weeks after Colorado’s primaries, where insurgents in both parties wildly overperformed.” (08/05/26)
“Every government institution should periodically be asked a simple question: is it still performing the mission for which Congress created it? That principle has become a hallmark of the Trump administration. Through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the closing of USAID, and the restructuring of federal agencies, the administration has encouraged the reexamination of longstanding institutions to ensure they remain faithful to their original purposes. That question should now be asked of one of Washington’s least scrutinized congressional bodies: the U.S. Helsinki Commission.” (08/05/26)
“Abdul El-Sayed earned a narrow victory in the Michigan Senate primary on Tuesday, coming from third place and withstanding a $62 million onslaught from his main opponent, Haley Stevens. He won a statewide primary in a swing state on a message that prominently featured Medicare for All. And he won despite Stevens’s outside backers using an eight-year-old quote from the most popular politician in the Democratic Party, Barack Obama, praising her for being part of his administration. Those facts and that framing do not necessarily reflect the way a lot of progressives are feeling right now. But if the past two weeks of bad polling had not appeared and the last survey of the race was the mid-July poll showing Stevens up by seven, that mood would be markedly different.” (08/05/26)
