May 29, 2026

Photo credit: Kevin Carter / Contributor / Getty Images News via Getty Images

California’s Tribal Wildfire Resilience program has awarded $24 million to tribal groups and nonprofits for “cultural burns,” “food sovereignty,” and owl counting. The tribes use traditional fire techniques—an elderberry fire stick to ignite a flame, for instance—to clear brush and preserve their “close kinship” with plants and animals.

“While some of the ‘resiliency’ funding has gone toward what appear to be legitimate fire-management projects,” Christopher F. Rufo and Austen Hufford write, “a careful examination of the state grant information reveals that much of the program operates as a slush fund for the tribes.”

One grant allowed a tribe to provide “forest-themed ingredients” to tribe-owned restaurants; another helped a tribe renovate land for use as a Native American summer camp; others went to help tribes observe owl nests and support “food sovereignty.”

“While any group is entitled to preserve its heritage, taxpayers are not obligated to subsidize it,” Rufo and Hufford write.

Read more.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is surprisingly praising Stuart Bell, the finalist for the University of Florida’s presidency. Given that Bell supported DEI initiatives as president of the University of Alabama, he is not a good fit for this position, argues Manhattan Institute Director of Higher Education Policy John D. Sailer.

Bell is “exactly the sort of careerist figure who has calmly presided over American higher education’s decline, ever willing to cede ground to the worst academic trends,” Sailer observes. At Alabama, Bell made diversity initiatives a “key pillar” and hired the university’s first vice president for DEI. He even bragged about integrating DEI into more than one-third of the undergraduate curriculum.

The University of Florida deserves a better president. Trustees “should look for candidates with a record of reform and a determination to reverse the academic rot in our universities,” Sailer writes.

Read more here.

In a new paper, Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman try to make the case for California’s proposed “one-time” 5 percent wealth tax on billionaires. But in doing so, argues Jared Walczak, they may have helped doom the tax in the courts.

As currently proposed, the wealth tax applies to anyone who officially resided in California before January 1, 2026. Saez and Zucman’s paper explains that the initiative’s drafters (Saez was one) added this provision to keep people from moving to avoid the tax. That admission may leave the measure open to legal challenge, says Walczak, since courts typically take a dim view of retroactive taxes and laws designed to restrict freedom of movement.

Read why Walczak believes the wealth tax will push innovators and entrepreneurs to look elsewhere “rather than making a long-term bet on a tarnished Golden State.”