December 22, 2025

Now, on to the news…

Last week, 20 conservative young adults joined us for a focus group in Nashville to talk about Donald Trump, the economy, health care, foreign policy, and the state of the country.

“Their views on family, illegal immigration, and social order largely align with those of mainstream Republicans,” Jesse Arm writes. “But they are not demanding doctrinal or programmatic rigor. They want a politics that feels less uptight and more charismatic—one that can make them laugh as well as make them better off.”

Read the conversation.

Last week, President Trump directed the Department of Justice to finalize the process of reclassifying marijuana, which would put it on the same level as Tylenol and other drugs considered low-risk.

This is a mistake, Patrick T. Brown argues. “In reality, the purported medical benefits of marijuana are limited,” he writes, “while the personal and public health costs of increasingly prevalent and potent pot continue to rise.”

Read his take.

In 1963, the Supreme Court ruled in Brady v. Maryland that prosecutors had to disclose potentially exculpatory evidence to the defense. While the decision was meant to ensure transparency and due process, it “has been twisted to target and tarnish police officers, offering them fewer rights than criminal defendants,” Jason Johnson writes.

Read more about the decision, some of the officers it has affected, and what Johnson suggests states should do to protect due process for police officers.

The Manhattan Institute is proud to serve as the Principal Institutional Partner for the Sun Valley Policy Forum’s 2026 Winter Summit in the iconic resort town of Sun Valley, Idaho on February 11, 2026.

We are thrilled to join Joe Lonsdale and MI senior fellow Christopher F. Rufo for an evening on principled leadership and the future of American institutions in an AI-driven era. Please click here to learn more about the Sun Valley Policy Forum and our partnership and to purchase tickets at a discounted rate for friends of the Manhattan Institute.

In Rogue Justice, Yonatan Green writes about Israel’s Supreme Court, covering everything from the process behind judicial appointments to the dynamics that enabled the Court to become so powerful. Ilya Shapiro writes that American readers should draw a lesson from Green’s book about their own courts: “the rule of law ultimately depends not on robed guardians, but on a political culture that insists that the most consequential questions be resolved by the people themselves, under law they can recognize as their own.”

Read his review.

“In health care, the question is always who holds the bag of risk for a decision. The reason all radiology has to be read by a human is that a human can be sued.

Interconnecting systems and maximizing the availability of decision-support tools is a constant process. Machine learning will become a larger part of that.

However, the reason we teach children how to do long division is so that they know what the calculator is doing. Medical training must resist overreliance on decision-support tools.

The computer does not understand human gestalt in the way a human does. The computers aren’t magic, they’re just math; there are things in the world that aren’t quantifiable.”

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LaotianDave, commenting on AI in health care

Photo credit: LOGAN CYRUS / Contributor / AFP via Getty Images