October 16, 2026

Photo credit: Apu Gomes / Contributor / Getty Images News via Getty Images

A new Manhattan Institute survey of likely voters in Los Angeles finds that Californians are ready for change. They recognize their government’s failures with homelessness, unions, infrastructure, and waste removal, with just 32 percent believing that California is headed in a better direction than other states.

But this awareness doesn’t mean voters are ready to put Republicans in power. In our survey, Xavier Becerra leads Steve Hilton in the gubernatorial contest by 55 percent to 38 percent. And Independents prefer Becerra to Hilton by 48 percent to 39 percent.

“The resulting political vacuum is consequential,” Jesse Arm writes. “A lethargic Democratic establishment can continue winning without delivering much. And where voters do demand an alternative, the organized far Left is positioned to supply it.”

Read more about the poll’s findings here.

Ed Vogel is one of today’s most prominent anti-Flock activists. He is a member of DeFlock, a group that provides trainings to would-be activists and offers access to an app that lets users track automated license plate readers (ALPRs).

But Vogel’s history indicates that the group’s purpose is broader than that, Stu Smith argues. After 2020, Vogel’s organizing shifted from racial justice to police abolition. He became active in the Coalition to Cancel the ShotSpotter Contract in Chicago, claiming that gunshot-detection technology “exacerbate[d] existing issues of racist policing.” By 2022, he had become involved with the Lucy Parsons Lab, a think tank focused on how “technological advancements are increasingly used to exploit Black, brown, and low-income communities.” And in 2025, he co-founded Southerners Against Surveillance Systems and Infrastructure.

“This idea of police technology as ‘counterinsurgency’ is central to Vogel’s worldview,” Smith writes. “This attitude is evident in Vogel and friends’ work against ALPRs, against police training centers, and against gunshot-detection technology like ShotSpotter. And after the surprising wave of support for their work on Flock, Vogel and fellow radicals are looking to scale up this activism.”

Read more about Vogel and other activists in the anti-Flock movement—and their next targets.

Next week, New York City Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels will attend a forum on school integration, which Samuels has referred to as his “top priority.” As a Brooklyn superintendent during the 2020-2021 school year, he merged a mostly white school with a majority-black one, replaced gifted programs with International Baccalaureate courses open to all students, and set aside a share of middle school seats in his district for low-income students. He referred to the merged school as “a model and an example for the rest of the city.”

Samuels is missing the point, Jennifer Weber argues. For one thing, any integration plan will face limits due to the demographics of New York City. More importantly, though, segregation isn’t the source of district schools’ dysfunction. The city’s charter schools are not “integrated”—nearly nine in ten students are black or Hispanic. Yet, on state math tests last spring, 69 percent of black charter students and 66 percent of Hispanic charter students were proficient. Just 43 percent of black and Hispanic students in district schools met that target.

Charter schools credit teacher feedback, tutoring, data-driven instruction, and a focus on academic achievement for students’ success. “The things the city tends to spend money on, like smaller classes and teachers with advanced certifications, weren’t associated with students learning more,” Weber explains.

Read more about how the city can help students excel.