August 11, 2026

Photo credit: Joe Giddens/PA IMages via Alamy

In his Ph.D. dissertation, Jason Arday says that racism is something that black scholars must constantly deal with; in his presentations, his manner suggests that no just person could possibly disagree with him. Nothing in his work suggests that he engaged with data. Rather, he became a professor at Cambridge University by interviewing his acquaintances about the racism they experienced.

Arday resigned after it was revealed that he plagiarized others’ work, that he had no original ideas, that he reportedly wouldn’t supervise students’ work, and that he couldn’t teach.

“Even worse than Arday’s work displaying no actual excellence is the consequence that characters like him wind up passing the torch to the next generation of black scholars,” John H. McWhorter writes. “When eager young black students gravitate to people like Arday, they learn that, for black academics, their race is more important than having anything to say. Sadly, white colleagues reinforce this by treating black academics this way at conferences and in hiring.”

As home values and local government spending across the country have risen, so have property taxes—and homeowners’ frustrations.

From 2019 through 2023, the median bill grew by 23 percent; in 2024, it increased another 8 percent. A decade ago, states and municipalities collected about $460 billion in property taxes. In 2024, that number soared to almost $800 billion. During that period, the U.S. population grew by just 7 percent.

“In some places, advocates defend these steep rates by arguing that they fund better services, including stronger schools,” Steven Malanga writes. “But it’s also clear that mismanagement and the politicization of local services sometimes drive a significant share of spending—and the higher property taxes that follow.”

Now, homeowners are pushing back, and more than a dozen states are currently debating reforms. Read about some of their efforts, and how Malanga suggests they might make their systems fairer.

In Imperialism and Fascism in Uganda (published in 1983), Mahmood Mamdani, father of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, writes about Idi Amin’s rule in Uganda from 1971 to 1979.

Under Amin, an estimated 300,000 people—3 percent of the Ugandan population—were murdered. Mamdani’s book makes no mention of this. Instead, he criticizes all previous writing about Amin’s reign, calling it sensationalist and referring to the authors as “mindless computers.”

Mamdani claims to be on the side of the oppressed, but he also fails to mention that the Arusha Declaration led to the forced expulsion of 80 to 90 percent of Tanzania’s rural population into collectivized villages.

“One might have hoped that a man who was twice exiled from his country by two regimes, Amin’s and then that of Milton Obote’s second presidency, each responsible for the deaths of between 100,000 and 500,000 people; and who had been present in another country while many millions were removed by force from where they were living (the main perpetrator of which disaster the Catholic Church wants to canonize) would have developed a less Manichaean view of life,” Theodore Dalrymple writes, “but Mamdani had failed to do so by 1983, at least, when he was 37.”

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When progressives talk about anti-Indian racism, they tend to fixate on isolated incidents of bigotry occurring on the far Right while ignoring the more entrenched forms of discrimination that implicate their own ideology and policies.

For instance, when the New York Times's Lydia Polgreen discussed the issue last year, she made no mention of affirmative action’s role in institutionalizing resentment toward higher-achieving students, especially Indian Americans. And earlier this summer, Ezra Klein failed to acknowledge how progressive racial ideology has long contributed to discrimination against Indian Americans. “In both cases, progressives treat anti-Indian racism as a new development and avoid recognizing its pervasiveness in practices that they have long defended,” Rohit Goyal writes. “Concern about institutional discrimination should not be used to sweep cruder forms of prejudice under the rug. But nor should fringe episodes of such prejudice be magnified to divert attention from pervasive, longstanding institutional discrimination.”

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