NEW: Opinion: You Can't Restore Merit To University Admissions Without A National Exam

ALSO: New episode of the Sphere Podcast!

In this week's conversation, Sphere Media publisher Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry welcomes Wilfred Reilly, professor at Kentucky State University, author, and podcast host. They talk about his upcoming book about why experts get things so wrong so often, what the "Womanosphere" is and why it's so toxic, and various other issues of the day.

Watch on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.

Subscribe to the Sphere Podcast on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.

The Fight Over The Abortion Pill Heats Up

The fight over the abortion pill is one of the most interesting coalitional dynamics in the Party right now. The pro-life movement is trying to find a new strategy post-Dobbs. Meanwhile, RFK, Jr. is a lifelong liberal Democrat who we can safely assume has few-to-no personal qualms about abortion, while the MAHA movement he leads is much more protean.

The abortion pill is a particularly interesting terrain to fight on, because early abortion is the most popular (or least unpopular kind) and there is very certainly very little constituency to ban it or restrict it at the Federal level. However, the mail-order abortion pill business makes a mockery of red states that choose to ban abortion, and the abortion pill was only recently liberalized by the Biden-Harris administration.

Enter this excellent, bombshell report by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which we've covered before. Using insurance company data, the authors have been able to demonstrate that the abortion pill is much less safe than commonly understood or advertised. "10.93 percent of women experience sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, or another serious adverse event within 45 days following a mifepristone abortion," they find, terrifyingly. Furthermore, "he real-world rate of serious adverse events following mifepristone abortions is at least 22 times as high as the summary figure of 'less than 0.5 percent' in clinical trials reported on the drug label."

Well, do we want to MAHA or not?

Do we want to take on Big Pharma or not?

We're always very happy when a think tank report actually produces impact and it is doing so. RFK, Jr. is thus far, very prudently (we must say), remaining coy on the issue. But now the news comes out that 22 attorneys general from red states have signed onto a letter formally calling on the HHS Secretary and the head of the FDA to re-regulate the abortion pill, explicitly citing the EPPC study. Fox News has the scoop.

"Based on that review, the FDA should consider reinstating safety protocols that it identified as necessary as recently as 2011 in its issuance of a Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS) for mifepristone, but which were removed by the Obama and Biden administrations," the letter says.

"Alternatively, in light of the serious risks to women who are presently being prescribed this drug without crucial safeguards, and in the event the FDA is unable to reinstate the 2011 safety protocols for mifepristone, the FDA should consider withdrawing mifepristone from the market until it completes its review and can decide on a course of action based on objective safety and efficacy criteria," the authors added.

It's a fascinating story, not just because of the policy issue but because of what it says about the coalitional dynamics within the Party, and we will continue tracking it.

Policy News You Need To Know

#TheEconomyStupid — It's official: the US now has $37 trillion in debt.

#America250 — From the Journal: the Trump White House plans to conduct a far-reaching review of Smithsonian museum exhibitions, materials and operations ahead of America's 250th anniversary to ensure the museums align with "Trump's interpretation of American history." This is obviously very good.

#DEI — More good news from the frontlines of the war on DEI. DOJ just sent a new memo to all Federal grant recipients, warning them that "diversity statements" can be seen as unlawful attempts to discriminate on the basis of race. At City Journal, John D. Sailer, who has done excellent work tracking this stuff, has the details. Basically, the memo lists all the euphemisms that universities and other institutions use to discriminate, and lets them know that they're not going to fly.

#GreenNewScam #Sovereignty — Have you heard of the International Maritime Organization? Until today, neither had we. This is a UN agency which is in charge of regulating global shipping. We're sure they do good work, but they should stay in their lane (pun intended). The agency is proposing a "global carbon tax." According to Shuting Pomerlau, Director of Energy and Environmental Policy at the American Action Forum, this would involve "a mechanism that includes a fuel standard and a two-tiered carbon tax at $100 and $380 per metric ton of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions, and awarded, transferable tax credits that can be carried forward to offset a shipping company’s tax liability." We've learned of this because secretaries Rubio and Lutnick spoke out about it on X today. And look, we assume this "proposal" is mostly a press release by this organization to make itself feel good, because it's not just the United States that has an interest in refusing some sort of global carbon tax on shipping. But it's still unnerving that it should be made at all. Taxation is a sovereign government power.

#BLS #Government — Howard Lutnick, who department oversees the Census Bureau and Bureau of Economic Analysis, was asked today by employees there about independence of federal statistics. He said that independence was “nonsense,” and all that matters is accuracy and getting “the right answer,” according to a new report by Eric Katz at GovExec. This will be shocking but it is, to our mind, completely correct. France's statistics office INSEE is not independent and is still widely regarded as one of the best in the world, and nobody doubts their figures. From a democratic and constitutional perspective the idea of "independent" agencies and civil servants is, at best, highly problematic, and public choice theory teaches us that while political leaders have biases, so do putatively independent bureaucrats. In a healthy political culture with an informed citizenry, the government's incentive is to publish accurate numbers so it won't be embarrassed, and the private sector and civil society are perfectly able to provide competing figures. To take the French example again, crime statistics are not published by INSEE but by the Ministry of the Interior and are widely seen as cooked; so several private institutes have produced their own measures of crime which are widely respected and used. Democracy! More to the point, since everyone is losing their minds about the BLS, who can seriously believe that in the United States of America, where battalions of very highly paid high IQ Wall Street analysts spend 80 hours a week poring over every bit of economic data, the US government could fake economic statistics and get away with it?

#Energy — At the Institute for Energy Research, President Thomas J. Pyle has a good article on biofuels. The EPA has come out with new Renewable Fuels Standards, which mandates an increased percentage of biofuels be mixed into transportation fuel. If you're familiar with the policy debate around this (and you should be since it's been going on since the first George W. Bush term), it's very bad policy, but also a political hot potato.

#LiberateDC — At Blaze Media, Delano Squires has a very good piece on DC's crime problem. "Having spent the last year of my 15-year career in D.C. at the city’s Office of Gun Violence Prevention, I spoke with residents desperate for change. One man told me he and his pregnant wife dove to the floor when a bullet smashed through their window. Another woman worked with neighbors to demand more police patrols."

#Immigration — According to DHS, more than 100,000 Americans have applied to join ICE. ICE's recruitment drive follows from the passage of the OBBBA, to build up the infrastructure required to reverse the Bidenwave.

#Economics — Cool new paper by Hanchen Jiang, Luis Quintero, and Xi Yang in the Journal of Urban Economics, asking the question: does rent control drive up unemployment among tenants? Using microdata from NYC, they find that the short answer is yes. "Rent control raises unemployment by 4+ percentage points, especially among tenants with unearned income."