July 23, 2026

Photo credit: MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images / Contributor / MediaNews Group via Getty Images

California’s Civil Rights Department (formerly the Department of Fair Employment and Housing) was created in 1980 to enforce nondiscrimination law. It rebranded itself in 2022, expanding its power and more aggressively going after corporations for “civil rights violations.” Over the past few years, it has coerced companies like Microsoft, Riot Games, and Snap Inc. to fork over eight- and nine-figure payments to class-action members, interest groups, and the Civil Rights Department itself.

“The system operates like a mafia,” Christopher Rufo and Kenneth Schrupp write. “Its ‘don,’ Governor Gavin Newsom, sits at the top. His capo, CRD director Kevin Kish, runs the shakedown campaigns. And the state advances the interests of the entire Democratic apparatus: the Civil Rights Department secures settlement cash for radical NGOs, labor leaders can use the cases to create pressure for unionization, and left-wing lawyers ‘cause social change’ at scale.”

Read more about some of the lawsuits.

Last week, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani released a “Rental Ripoff Hearing Report,” which contains 23 housing-related policy recommendations. They include preventing landlords from asking for both income verification and a credit check; expanding the list of violations that would allow a tenant to withhold rent; and encouraging “tenant unions,” which would presumably be allowed to threaten rent strikes if their demands were not met.

Mamdani is playing with fire, Eric Kober argues. “The more a city drives private capital out, the more it damages its financial capacity to step in and manage rental housing,” he writes.

Read more.

Michaela Community School is located in a London borough filled with gang- and drug-related crime. And yet, it’s one of the most famous secondary schools in the country, with excellent academics.

Students recite poetry, address teachers as “Miss” and “Sir,” and sit with their hands folded on their desks. They move in single file from one class to another, and they’re not allowed to speak in the hallways. They’re forbidden from gathering in groups larger than four during free time, which prevents bullying.

“Discipline at Michaela is relaxed over time, as self-discipline becomes second nature,” Theodore Dalrymple writes. “The theory is not that children are born with freedom but that they grow into it; in this way, they gradually learn to use it constructively rather than destructively, for themselves and for society.”

Dalrymple recently visited the school. You can read all about what he saw here.