May 5, 2026

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In a recent New York Times video, podcaster Hasan Piker and writer Jia Tolentino joined Times  opinion editor Nadja Spiegelman for a discussion about lawbreaking. The prevailing theme: because corporations supposedly steal from customers and employers, stealing from corporations is justified.

“Like self-righteous Western teenagers (that is, people enjoying the highest standard of living in history), they simply assume that any successful business must be doing something immoral,” Heather Mac Donald writes. “Never mind that a firm can earn a profit only by meeting a demand or need.”

The video participants believe that allowing certain lawless acts is compassionate, with Tolentino even suggesting that “blowing up a pipeline” is one such commendable act. Never mind that “it is the blue-collar laborer who will be most hurt by industrial sabotage,” Mac Donald points out.

Read her take.

The Sunrise Movement used to be a youth-led climate advocacy group. But once the Biden administration expressed support for Israel after the October 7 attacks, the organization broke with mainstream Democrats, becoming more radical. Today, its new purpose is “getting rid of the authoritarian government we’re in.”

That revamped mission isn’t entirely surprising, given its recent tactics. Sunrise has been disrupting hotel guests with late-night protests, training students to go head-to-head with college administrators, and pressuring corporations linked to ICE.

“Sunrise’s drift highlights the growing extremism of America’s activist infrastructure—extremism that routinely turns to lawbreaking,” Stu Smith writes. “Indeed, the group’s actions raise questions about whether Sunrise is still operating in a manner consistent with its original nonprofit filing status or has instead become a vehicle for organized disruption that crosses legal and regulatory lines.”

Read more about the group’s strategy and the individuals leading its new mission.

At the start of her tenure as FTC chair in 2021, Lina Khan outlined three priorities: merger enforcement to combat “rampant consolidation,” cracking down on “dominant intermediaries,” and eliminating one-sided contracts like noncompetes.

“Today, much of that agenda lies in ruins,” Brian Albrecht writes. “Courts have blocked or dismantled nearly every major initiative that Khan launched.”

But Khan did manage to put antitrust in the spotlight in a way that no other FTC chair has. “She forced a national debate over whether the consumer-welfare standard remains adequate and showed that a constituency exists for aggressive competition enforcement,” Albrecht observes. The tough-on-corporate-power movement she represents is spreading.

Read more about her tenure.

California’s 5 percent wealth tax hasn’t even made it onto the ballot yet, and eight billionaires have already left the state. Whether they’ll be able to avoid the tax remains to be seen, as the initiative uses a January 1, 2026, snapshot to try to get them to pay before they go. Even so, their departures will be detrimental for other state tax revenues.

Jared Walczak, a senior fellow at the Tax Foundation, did some calculations to estimate the impact. “In my analysis, I model likely billionaire departures and estimate that California’s revenue loss runs between $3.53 billion and $4.49 billion per year,” he writes. “Those losses come out of the state’s income, sales, and other taxes. Even if zero billionaires left the state beyond the eight already publicly identified, California would face a revenue loss of $2.77 billion per year.”

Read more.

President Trump’s Fiscal Year 2027 budget draft proposes the elimination of the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG). Good riddance, Tyler Turman writes. A $3.3 billion program intended to revitalize low- and moderate-income areas, the CDBG does little to help communities in need. States instead use it to finance pet projects.

“Grantees have wide latitude in how they spend the money, but that flexibility, once touted as the program’s greatest virtue, has made it prone to waste and mission creep,” Turman explains. “As a Pew Charitable Trusts study documented, CDBG and other programs ‘designed to direct economic activity to struggling areas frequently end up benefiting wealthier communities.’”

Read more about why the money doesn’t go where it’s supposed to.