Good morning:
This week, fellow Carolyn Gorman delivers a much-needed reality check to the trend of positive media coverage on so-called “alternative relationships,” including homewrecking, polyamory, non-spousal crushes, and other non-monogamous forms of partnering up and splitting apart. These quiet attacks on marriage come at time when young Americans increasingly say monogamy is not important in life. Writing in UnHerd, Gorman warns that these alternative relationship types are sophisticated status symbols which, the evidence shows, hollows out some of the most important relationships in life. Believing that we can maintain a stable and decent society while rejecting monogamy as the norm is wishful thinking.
Another reoccurring fantasy for many on the left is utilizing the 25th Amendment to remove President Trump from office. In The Daily Wire, director of Constitutional Studies Ilya Shapiro lays out how the president’s critics refuse to accept that the 25th Amendment is a serious constitutional mechanism for dealing with presidents who physically cannot function—think Woodrow Wilson as president in name only after his debilitating stroke—not those whose personalities or political agendas provoke opposition.
Often that opposition is misplaced. Take fellow Heather Mac Donald’s analysis of the media’s reaction to a social media post by President Trump highlighting the danger of unlawful immigration. The president posted a video in which an unlawful Haitian immigrant, who was granted Temporary Protected Status (TPS) by the Biden administration and who overstayed his TPS grant after its expiration, brutally murdered a woman. Judging by the media coverage, calling attention to the attack is racist and a behavior worse than murder.
Closer to home, senior fellow Eric Kober analyzes New York City’s disappointing slowdown in private-sector job growth in 2025. Writing in City Journal, Kober warns that politics-as-usual continues to obscure the straightforward solutions to employment stagnation in MI’s hometown. A major solution is housing construction. Making the Big Apple more affordable for residents would allow both the population and the labor force to grow.
Relatedly, check out fellow Ken Girardin’s new video on “Fix Tier 6,” a policy that would undo the 2012 pension reform that saved New York taxpayers tens of billions of dollars. Public employee unions are pushing for what is in effect a retroactive giveaway to increase their pensions.
Finally, senior fellow Andy Smarick published a new paper today illustrating the importance of governors for reformers interested in supporting free speech and inquiry in public higher education. Nearly two-thirds of the nation’s public-college students are in states won by President Trump in 2024, and governors control who sits on the boards of public colleges in many of those states. Therefore, governors have a significant opportunity to shape and improve the future of American education.
Continue reading for all these insights and more.
Kelsey Bloom
Editorial Director
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The Power of Governors in Public Higher-Education Reform
By Andy Smarick | Manhattan Institute | Photo by Ryan Herron/iStock/Getty Images Plus
American are increasingly frustrated over institutions of higher education and would-be reformers have invested significant resources of time, energy, and money against campuses with troubling track records. But, in a new paper for the Manhattan Institute, senior fellow Andy Smarick suggests reformers will get a higher return on their efforts by focusing on large public institutions rather than smaller, elite ones:
First, elect reform-minded governors. Governors have majority control of 112 of 134 public institutions of higher education boards in states won by President Trump in 2024; by simply winning those offices, Republican governors could have majority control of the boards of schools representing 53% of undergraduates in public institutions.
Next, help these governors appoint reform-minded individuals to boards. Identify people who are aligned with the agenda, willing to serve, and qualified to sit on the boards.
If this process were to succeed, a majority of public-IHE undergraduates could be attending schools that support free speech and inquiry, that have greater ideological diversity among faculty and staff, and that are committed to holding down costs and ensuring every degree’s return on investment.
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No, Trump Can’t Be Removed Under The 25th Amendment
By Ilya Shapiro | Daily Wire | Photo by Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
“Calls to invoke the 25th Amendment have become a kind of political reflex. … [But] the text is clear: the concern is inability and incapacity, not unpopularity or controversy. It’s a mechanism for dealing with presidents who cannot function, not those whose personalities provoke opposition. …
“Trump’s critics often claim that he’s erratic or mentally unstable. But these are political assertions, not medical diagnoses. …. The contrast with genuinely incapacitated presidents is stark. Wilson was physically and neurologically impaired to the point of being unable to govern. More recently, Biden’s cognitive decline prompted debate precisely because it raised questions about whether he could perform the job’s demands. Those are the kinds of situations the 25th Amendment is meant to address: actual inability, not partisan disgust.
“To stretch the amendment to cover unconventional leadership would be to weaponize it, turning a safeguard for emergencies into a tool for political maneuvering.”
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Why Is the Media Promoting Polyamory?
By Carolyn D. Gorman | UnHerd | Photo by Ana Maria Serrano via Getty Images
“For all the cultural enthusiasm, the data on what non-monogamous relationships mean for women and children is sobering. A 2021 review, drawing on 24 studies, found that women in polygamous marriages are more than twice as likely to experience depression as those in monogamous ones. Children in polygamous households show significantly worse emotional and educational outcomes. Meanwhile, children raised by two married biological parents consistently do better across health, education, and economic measures than those in any other family arrangement. …
“Marriage isn’t perfect. But, on average, it remains the most successful long-term relationship structure. … Normalizing other models, meanwhile, is a status-signaling game for the elite, whose wealth and options mean they can avoid the negative consequences for everyone else. Most women already face a serious shortage of marriageable men. Calling it ‘liberation’ that women can have multiple partners simply means men face less obligation.”
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Illegal Immigrant Bludgeons Victim—Blame Trump
By Heather Mac Donald | City Journal | \Photo by Alex Brandon-Pool/Getty Images
“Trump was right to post the video and right to publicize the murder. His determination to speak out about individual crimes is a notable departure from usual presidential practice. The media keep Americans in the dark about urban and immigrant crime. Reading a sanitized description of the murder is no substitute for seeing its heinousness.
“Nowhere else in the modern Western world are people routinely and sometimes lethally assaulted by vagrants; nowhere else have streets been allowed to disintegrate into such squalor, filth, and threat. Those conditions are the result of policy choices, not of uncontrollable economic or social forces.
“Yet to the liberal commentariat (often disguised as ‘news reporters’), crime and disorder are not the main problem afflicting the U.S.—racism is. Racism has become the cardinal sin for elite Western policy and opinion makers.”
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New York City’s Job Slowdown
By Eric Kober | City Journal | Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
“Newly released employment data from April show that New York City’s private-sector growth slowed in 2025, especially toward the year’s end. This slowdown signals declining opportunities for New Yorkers and threatens to worsen fiscal problems for both the city and state governments. …
“The city’s private sector added an average of only 13,000 jobs in 2025, bringing the employment total to just over 4.2 million—a sharp decline from 2024, when the city gained over 95,000 jobs. …
“With the state budget and related legislation still under negotiation, the new jobs data highlight the potential negative effects of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s proposed city tax increase. Even Mamdani acknowledges that slow job growth is a problem, though he has yet to propose any steps to remedy it. New York City is not immune to the effects of a hostile business environment, and growth cannot be taken for granted.”
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New York’s $100 Billion Pension Plan
By Ken Girardin | Manhattan Institute
“If ‘Fix Tier 6’ is enacted, Mayor Mamdani is going to have a much harder time balancing the budget because the City of New York will be hit with billions of dollars of pension costs and Upstate and Long Island homeowners and businesses will be slammed with the largest property tax increase in state history.”
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Photo Credits: adamkaz/E+/Getty Images; Noah Berger/AP Photo; Anadolu/Getty Images; Wong Yu Liang/Getty Images; Catherine McQueen/Getty Images; Probal Rashid/LightRocket/Getty Images
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