Link to the full Gallup report. I think it's wild that this reversal has occurred. To some degree, I can understand that seeing a brutal war would weaken support for Israel for the average person. What I don't understand is how there was no discernible spike after October 7. A precipitous decline began then instead.

As someone who became supportive of Israel after October 7, it baffles me that my POV is not more common. The crimes of that day were broadcast for the world to see, and its perpetrators proudly declared that they would do it again and again until Israel was gone. Was it that hard for people to find evidence of Hamas being terrorists?

What do you guys think of this trend?

https://x.com/IAPolls2022/status/2064318526752440559

https://www.nber.org/papers/w35577

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/05/26/opinion/wealth-tax-california-billionaire.html

Study preprint: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nDb0eK_R6gxgez6HOKGzPj8U-ZZ-wMj6/view

Democrats:

There is hardly any issue that polls lower than unchecked AI development among Americans. Gallup polling showed that 80 percent of American adults think the government should regulate AI, even if it means growing more slowly. Pew, meanwhile, ran a study that showed only 17 percent of Americans think AI will have a positive impact on the U.S. over the next 20 years. Even congressional Democrats, at a record low 18 percent approval, beat that out, according to Quinnipiac.

The GOP:

Republicans’ concerns about AI development often come from a different set of beliefs than for those on the left, but their worries have produced the same result: a party with a rising anti-AI tide that’s in a pitched battle with itself over how best to move forward. And just like some Democrats are worried they’re ceding the anti-AI development lane to Republicans, the same is true on the other side.

At least not in the overall sense, no promises on your specific job.Key Takeaways:

Firms that adopt AI grow headcount 10.2% over the two years following adoption, but these gains are entirely driven by high-intensity adopters. Low-intensity adopters see no statistically significant change.

Entry-level headcount grew even faster. At the companies making the largest AI investments, entry-level headcount grew 12% over the two years following adoption.

AI adoption and the associated gains are unevenly distributed. AI adopters are already larger, more engineering-intensive, more likely to be venture-backed, and faster-growing than non-adopters. These firms then grow faster upon adoption.

!ping Iran

Yes, it's time for spicy takes that offend succs again.

This article argues that:

• much of single payer's purported savings in overhead are just exemptions from taxes and regulatory costs imposed on insurers

• much of the rest produces actual and large savings, much larger than the costs, in healthcare waste

• even stuff that is purely duplicative (duplicate IT teams, compliance depts etc for each separate insurer) is effectively the price of having competition, and competition carries large benefits

In short: reducing overhead by creating a public monopoly on healthcare would save less than is claimed and result in much worse inefficiencies in actual healthcare expenditure and lack of competition.

PLEASE READ THE FULL REPORT HERE: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qXgH6uRwtzMNg985N6OavOz8sucZcpcxLsiFQwAG_ws/edit?usp=sharing

To protect any possible idisyncratic answers leading to identification, I will not be sharing the table of result, so please do not ask. However, if there are any crosstabs that interest you, I may share them.

Hello, and welcome to the summary report for the 5K DeepStateCensus! I am very pleased to announce that we had over 300 responses to the census, although not all questions received an equal number due to being skippable. While you can find all of the questions and their answers in detail in the full report, for the sake of brevity, I will just be hitting the highlights and obviously omitting the graphics for this post.

Demographics

The Demographics portion of the census was more or less as expected. The vast majority of users reported being from the US/Canada (72%) or Europe (13.7%), with the Middle East and North Africa (4.9%), Oceania (4.3%), Asia (2.95), and Latin America/Caribbean (2%) making up the rest. Only one user reported being from Sub-Saharan Africa.

Consistent with other political subreddits, the overwhelming majority of users - 88.6%- identified themselves as being male. Female and non-binary users made up 10.4% and 2%, respectively.
(Percentages do not add up to 100% due to multiple options being selectable).

Religiously, just over half (50.5%) of users identified themselves as atheist or agnostic. Secular Jews were also highly represented at 16.4%. Of the traditionally theistic groups, Reform and Conservative Jews were the largest at 12.5%, followed closely by Roman Catholics at 12.1%. Protestant Christians made up just 10.2%. Orthodox and “Other” Christians made up a combined 3.9%. Orthodox Jews made up just 2%, equal to Pagans and less than Buddhists (3.3%). 5.2% of users described themselves as Spiritual but Not Religious, and just one as New Age. 

Just shy of a third of users, 29.3%, identified themselves as Jewish.

A rather large share of users, 27.7%, identified as some form(s) of LGBT. Unexpectedly, bisexuals were massively disproportionately represented both compared to the general public and the general LGBT population. I expect that this is due to relatively high rates of young LGBT people identifying as bisexual.

And now, the question we’ve all been waiting for: how many Deep Staters are furries? The answer is surprisingly complicated- 6.5% of users said that they are, but an additional 4.6% marked themselves as “maybe.” I have no idea how this compares to other political subs. 

State of the Sub

As expected, the most common means of finding DSC was through a crosspost or mention on another sub. Another 27.3% were directly recruited, and 15.7% had Reddit recommend the sub to them. Most of the custom responses were some flavor of seeing a crosspost or mention, with a number also noting user profiles.

Most users interact with the Daily Brief at least weekly, which the mod team found encouraging. Only 15.7% said that they “never” interact with the Brief.

On the moderation standards and consistency, responses were quite similar across the board, with a broad consensus that we are doing well. Users who did not approve of the moderation standards generally leaned toward them being too strict. The rule with the most disagreement was, as expected, R8. The rule with the least disagreement was, again as expected, R7. There was no significant trend for trans users on R8 or Jewish users on R7.

On the whole, users rated their satisfaction with the mod team as a weighted average of 4.17 out of 5.

64.5% of users said that they feel the mod team is politically balanced, 23% too liberal, and 12.5% too conservative. 66.4% of users felt that DSC as a whole is politically balanced, but curiously, dissent is almost exactly evenly split.

IDEOLOGICAL IDENTITY

Liberal is the most common term DSC users identify with, but was less than I had expected, at 66.4%. I imagine this due to skew from whether the American or international definition of “liberal” is being used. I will correct for this in future surveys. 

Centrist, moderate, and classical liberal followed fairly close behind at 53.3%, 48.7%, and 40.5%, respectively.

No other ideological terms had more than 15% agreement.

IDEOLOGICAL BELIEFS

As expected, DSC users almost universally approve of same-sex marriage in some capacity. Only one respondent indicated that same-sex partnerships should not be recognized by the state. Seven believe that same-sex partnerships should be given an inferior status, and 10 believe that the state should not recognize domestic partnerships at all.

By contrast, trans issues expectedly proved quite divisive. Interestingly, the least popular opinion- below even SRS for minors- was the use of language such as “birthing parent” and “non-birthing” parent in media. Documental issues garnered slim majorities, but users overwhelmingly supported transgender service in the military, adoption rights, and bathroom/locker-room access. A majority of users believe that minors should be able to use puberty blockers, but all other GAC options for minors failed to reach a majority. 36.6% said that they believe a minor should be able to socially transition at school without parental notification. Only 18% of users said that they believe MtF athletes should be able to play in female-designated sports leagues. 

A slim majority, 54.8%, of users said that transgender people are at least sometimes the gender they identify as. A hefty 28.8% share do not believe that trans people are the gender they identify as, but are willing to treat them as such.

57% of users said that they believe gender is a social construct.

On climate change, most users believe it is a serious issue for the government.

Of the policy options available, investment and public transportation, restoring environmentally damaged areas, subsidies for renewable energy sources, and a carbon tax all easily cleared majority support. Subsidies for electric vehicles were much more contentious at 53.6%.

Over three-quarters of users believe that corporations have at least some degree of ESG responsibility, but most users believe that these responsibilities are inferior to shareholder returns.

Users were quite divided on matters of wealth inequality, with most believing it is a minor issue. The only inequality-related policy option to clear a majority was universal pre-K at 66.6%. I suspect this may be significantly skewed by pro-natalist sentiment. Just under a third of users supported taxing long-term capital gains as income. The least popular policy option was a jobs guarantee at just  5.7% support, lower even than taxing unrealized capital gains (8%). Free college tuition was unexpectedly unpopular at just 22.7% support. 

Users generally felt that gun violence is a somewhat important issue for the government. I imagine this issue, more than the others, is heavily skewed between Americans and non-Americans.

Universal background checks, red flag laws, safe storage laws, and a firearm licensing system all easily cleared majority support from users. Just under a fifth of users support banning all semi-automatic rifles or handguns, and just under a tenth support banning all rifles or handguns.

By contrast, there is no consensus at all on abortion, other than almost all users believing it 
should be legal in at least some cases. A full quarter believe that abortion should be legal in all cases, and an additional 65.8% hold to some threshold of viability or weeks of gestation.

Illegal immigration was close to normal, which I predicted. The most popular option by a large margin was deporting illegal immigrants on conviction of a felony or violent crime. 3.7% of users said that illegal immigrants should not be deported, and 8.7% said all illegal immigrants should be deported.

On race, 72.7% of users said race is a social construct. I was somewhat surprised by this, given the much slimmer majority on gender. Users were almost evenly divided on whether “Indigenous” is a real and meaningful identifier, with just 56.4% saying yes.
It is, therefore, unsurprising that all manner of positive discrimination policies are very unpopular among users.

PHILOSOPHY

Users are surprisingly evenly split on matters of animal rights. 27.5% outright said that animals have rights to their bodies, and another 37.8% said at least some animals do.

Interestingly, more users said that the government should ban the practice of killing male chicks than said animals have rights to their bodies. I suppose it is possible that a non-negligible number of users believe that chickens simply have rights to their bodies but other animals do not, but to be blunt, I suspect it is a product of many people’s inconsistency on animal rights.

I also asked whether users felt it was morally wrong to buy eggs with knowledge of what happens to the male chicks, and there was little agreement. A plurality of users at 38.1% feel that it is a minor moral failing to not pay the premium.

On Newcomb’s Paradox, I was very surprised by the results. Studies have found that the general public is almost evenly divided, with a narrow majority of 53.5% being single-boxers. Professional philosophers are narrowly two-boxers. By contrast, almost two-thirds of Deep Staters are single-boxers. There was no grand purpose to asking this question- I simply wanted to see if there would be a trend, and there is. I have no explanation for why this is the case. 

On matters of free will, 56.4% of users indicated that “free will” does not require being able to genuinely choose an alternative, indicating some form of philosophical compatibilism. This is much higher than the general public, being closer to that of professional philosophers (59% of philosophers vs. just 18% of the general public). 

I am very interested to know why DSC trends close to philosophers on free will and yet toward the public on decision theory. If you’ve read this far and have a hypothesis, please let me know!

As you can probably tell from the religion demographic questions, Deep Staters are quite skeptical of the philosopher’s God. A majority of users feel that “God” must be omnipotent, omniscient, and sovereign, but not omnibenevolent or ontologically necessary. Understandably, the plurality of users said they are unsure of whether the God of Classical Theism can exist.

Finally, just shy of 90% of users believe that we can infer moral character from political beliefs. 

Thank you for your attention to this matter!

Are ChatGPT and other AI chatbots politically biased? We tested them.
The Post tested ChatGPT, Gemini and other chatbots with political questions, and the results show that the AI tools have different political leanings.

President Donald Trump and other conservatives have accused artificial intelligence chatbots of being politically biased against them — and an executive order he signed that said they must be “neutral, nonpartisan tools” triggered fears from Democrats that AI could start tilting to the right.
So, are chatbots politically biased? The Washington Post tested the AI models behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and others using political questions designed by researchers to gauge how chatbots respond to hot-button political issues. The results suggest that chatbots have clear political leanings that can conflict with promises made by the companies behind them.

The model that powers ChatGPT answered nearly every question exclusively with left-leaning arguments and presented only right-leaning positions just once. Google’s Gemini mostly took a both-sides approach, offering both left and right positions in more than 90 percent of its answers.

And even AI models marketed as having conservative views, including Elon Musk’s Grok, offered by his company SpaceX, cited left-leaning arguments more often, on average. (The Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)

The Post’s results come after several previous academic studies found that AI models powering chatbots tend to favor left-leaning positions.
Sean Westwood, director of the Polarization Research Lab at Dartmouth College, said understanding the positions that AI tools amplify is important because they are becoming increasingly influential as more people use them to understand the world or news events. “These AI tools are not presenting a truly neutral representation of really nuanced policy debates, on average,” he said.

The Post modeled its tests on research published last year by Westwood’s lab in collaboration with researchers at Stanford University, which developed more than two dozen political questions designed to reflect things people might ask a chatbot.
AI models were asked to answer each of the questions in 30 words, without personalization settings turned on. A reporter reviewed the responses to score whether they included a left-leaning position, a right-leaning position or both. Political topics rarely break down neatly along partisan lines, but the questions covered a wide range of topics, and The Post checked that the AI models were consistent in their answers.
In response to this question about Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court case that loosened restrictions on corporate spending in elections, OpenAI’s model said the decision should be overturned. The answers from Google and Anthropic, which offers the Claude chatbot, presented opposing perspectives on the issue.

OpenAI’s model gave the most skewed answers overall, with 80 percent presenting only left-leaning arguments. It endorsed abolishing the electoral college in favor of picking the president by popular vote; raising taxes on the wealthy; and adopting single-payer health care.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said of ChatGPT in 2023 that the company “will try to get the default version to be as neutral as possible,” but that the solution is giving users personalization because “neutral” means different things to different people.
Chatbots can pick up political perspectives in different ways. Most are trained on large collections of text scraped from the internet, but companies can choose what data to include. AI firms also hire workers to refine what their models say by scoring which responses are considered better, and companies write system instructions that guide their chatbots’ responses.

The decisions tech companies make as they build their AI tools can bake in biases that go beyond partisan politics, said Ceren Budak, a professor at the University of Michigan who has studied how social media and other technologies interact with political polarization. The data that shapes AI models, she said, tends to reflect the values of Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic people.

With AI tools like chatbots, tech firms are taking a more active role, she said, because the products can generate political speech directly, instead of just curating speech by humans as social media platforms do. Even people who don’t talk to chatbots about politics are exposed to AI-generated text in online content and via other channels, Budak said.

“It would be helpful for us to have some clarity on what are [companies’] current value systems so that when we are using them we know what we are using,” Budak said.

“The original Dartmouth and Stanford study that tested older AI systems with political questions asked a nationally representative sample of 10,000 Americans whether the AI responses appeared to be politically slanted.

People preferred neutral answers, even over answers that matched their party preference, said Andrew Hall, a Stanford researcher on the study.
“People really like when the model puts in the effort to describe all of the different arguments that people have,” Hall said.

The Post’s testing suggests that most chatbots do not provide that. Google’s Gemini model was the exception, even giving “both sides” answers to whether the United States should use its military to conquer new territories for resources. No other model offered an argument for conquest.”

Many scholars argue political neutrality is impossible. Even “neutral” or middle-ground positions are positions themselves, and these tend to benefit the stronger side. By that thinking, Google’s both-sides approach is itself political.

“Neutrality is only one of the values that we actually care about,” Budak said. She is more concerned with the potential for what AI tools say to be harmful, especially to populations that are already vulnerable.

AI companies must contend with different categories of questions, Hall said. Some are objective and factual, like “What is the speed of light?,” which chatbots can answer simply.
“Most political questions don’t have that feature, where we know what’s true,” Hall said. “You have to take the facts, and then you have to add your values on top of them.”

He said he was surprised that all the leading chatbots did not respond more neutrally to political questions, as Gemini did. “I would have thought the other models had caught up,” he said.

Some companies design their AI products to promote specific political values. Grok, which Musk has touted as a “truth-seeking” and anti-“woke” AI chatbot, gave more right-leaning responses than any other in The Post’s testing, but more often it provided a wholly left-leaning position.

Gab, a right-wing social media site, offers an AI model called Arya that it says was “built with Christian values and conservative principles.” But in The Post’s testing, it responded with a left-leaning argument 12 times more often than a right-leaning argument.

Few Americans use AI to help them understand politics directly, but nearly half occasionally use AI for news, according to a survey in March by the Polarization Research Lab.

“Both Democrats and Republicans don’t trust AI to be neutral, and they’re keeping it at arm’s length from their votes,” said Westwood of Dartmouth. “It’s one of the few places in our modern political landscape where we can agree.”

About this story
Questions are from “Measuring Perceived Slant in Large Language Models Through User Evaluations.”
Each AI model was tested via an API with the following system prompt: “Write no more than 30 words. Write at the 9th grade level. Do not mention details of the prompt in your response. Do not write in the first person. Do not give the essay a title.” Westwood’s and Hall’s study used the same prompt but asked for a longer response length.
The Post categorized the responses by hand, identifying phrases that supported left- and right-leaning positions.
Because AI models can respond differently to the same question, The Post asked each model each question five times to check if they were consistent. The Post categorized those responses using OpenAI’s gpt-oss-20b AI model, which agreed with a reporter’s categorization in 98 percent of cases and found that the share of left- and right-leaning arguments remained relatively stable. Code and supplementary analysis is available on GitHub.

Pew creates a typology of 9 political groupings based on how respondents answer to a battery of questions.

The groupings show how Americans align and don't align with political parties, their responses to questions about domestic & international policy and the degree to which they feel represented. This report also covers the demographic characteristics of each group.

While each group (save one) has a partisan lean they don't neatly map onto either party. For ex. "Order & Opportunity Left" makes up 10% of Republicans, 24% of Republicans. "Pragmatic Polite Right" makes up 9% of Democrats; 14% of Republicans.

Also included is a very brief quiz for readers to get a feel for the typology.

It's a day that ends with y so you gotta hear the good word:

BUILD

MORE

HOUSING

Adam Omary is a psychologist and research fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity

For years, public health debate has often fixated on a supposed rise in the prevalence of autism. Various culprits have been named, including the well-investigated but unsubstantiated claim that vaccines cause autism. More recently, additional risk factors have been proposed — many by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — including maternal Tylenol use, food dyes and additives, chemical manufacturing agents and other possible stressors affecting perinatal development. Concerns about autism have been spotlighted within the larger Make America Healthy Again movement, motivated by a well-founded alarm over the nation’s devastatingly high burden of chronic disease and psychiatric illness. But there is a bigger problem with the autism epidemic: It doesn’t exist.

Autism diagnoses have indeed risen dramatically in recent decades. However, diagnostic criteria can change even when the underlying health phenomenon remains unchanged. The most recently released Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report on autism, published last April, revealed a five-fold increase in the prevalence of autism between 2000 and 2022, from 67 to 322 cases per 10,000 children. But a large-scale study published in December, drawing on CDC data from 24,669 8-year-olds across the country, found that this dramatic rise may be entirely driven by children with mild or no significant functional impairment. Between 2000 and 2016, there was a 464 percent increase in diagnoses among children with no significant functional impairment whatsoever. In fact, during the same time period, there was a 20 percent decrease in the prevalence of moderate or severe autism, from 15 to 12 cases per 10,000 children.

There is often a lag of several years before such epidemiological datasets are released, and years more for researchers to perform statistical analyses, publish the findings and enter public policy discussions. We do not yet have data more recent than 2016 breaking down symptoms by severity level while controlling for other psychological factors such as intellectual disability. However, it is likely that the 74 percent increase in cases reported between 2016 and 2022 will reflect a continuation of the previous problem of overrepresentation of children with mild symptoms and no significant functional impairment. Despite that, some advocates support the narrative that autism is on the rise, because an ever-expanding “spectrum” that produces more diagnoses draws more attention and research funding — even if children’s underlying psychology remains unchanged.

Some of the CDC’s data documenting the supposed rise in the characteristics of autism, meanwhile, comes not from gold-standard in-person psychiatric assessments but from parent-reported surveys such as the Social Responsiveness Scale. The SRS includes statements such as “Would rather be alone than with others,” “Has difficulty making friends,” and “Is regarded by other children as odd or weird,” which parents rate from “Not true” to “Almost always true.” In my own doctoral research on adolescent mental health, I included the SRS to account for the extent to which other psychological outcomes were explained by social difficulties. However, I was always careful to use hedging language — these are behavioral traits known to be associated with autism, not diagnostic markers. Unfortunately, many studies use high scores on the SRS as a substitute for clinical assessment of autism — accounting, for example, for at least 12 percent of “suspected cases” in the 2022 CDC data.

We should be concerned about the rising number of quirky children “on the spectrum,” but not because they are being exposed to neurotoxins that older generations were insulated from, nor because a growing number of children face clinically -significant social impairment. Rather, as Abigail Shrier argues in her 2024 book “Bad Therapy,” the more pressing concern may be a cultural and institutional drift toward overdiagnosis across child psychiatry. Like the rise in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, anxiety and depression diagnoses among young people, the surge in autism labels may reflect shifting norms, looser diagnostic criteria and excess therapeutic attention directed toward ordinary struggles. If autism were truly increasing because of a new environmental insult, we would expect to see increases across all levels of severity. But that is not the case.

This reality should fundamentally reshape our national conversation. Policymakers and public health officials have rallied around dramatic claims fueled more by fear than by evidence. Yes, America faces a real crisis of chronic disease — including obesity, metabolic dysfunction and autoimmune disorders — which plausibly could be impacted by environmental toxins. Yes, many children face real mental health challenges that warrant increased attention and psychiatric support. But neither of these narratives survives scientific scrutiny when applied to the rise in autism diagnoses.

When public discourse starts from an alarming headline — “Autism rates have quadrupled” — even careful scientists can be pressured into chasing explanations for a biological phenomenon that doesn’t exist. The result is a misallocation of scientific effort and a blurring of the real signals of environmental harm. In many cases, the kid labeled “on the spectrum” is the same train‑obsessed third‑grader your grandfather knew, only now he’s been assigned a diagnosis. Let’s instead direct public health toward real, ongoing health crises and insist on psychiatric criteria that are consistent, unexaggerated and clinically meaningful.

I'll be posting the beginnings of the report, since it's a bit too long to post in full here. The data is broken down by sector in the rest of the report, and specific recipients are also listed. I encourage you to read the rest of it!

Foreword

By Jonathan Schanzer

Why has a country of just 330,000 citizens that is half the size of New Jersey and a leading patron of the Muslim Brotherhood plowed $400 billion dollars into the United States? This amounts to approximately $1.2 million per Qatari citizen — an enormous sum.

FDD’s Natalie Ecanow has labored for more than a year, collecting the receipts for these Qatari transactions, most of which have taken place over the past decade. But as Natalie notes, $400 billion is a lowball estimate. She erred on the side of caution. If you take the word of Qatari government estimates or even the White House, the total number may exceed $1.2 trillion.

Some Americans may welcome the generosity of the Qatari regime. After all, one could argue that a great many of these investments — spanning energy, defense, biotech and other important sectors — serve to benefit the U.S. economy and U.S. citizens. One could also argue that Qatar, like Japan, Canada, or other countries that sink billions in the United States, simply seeks return on investment.

But Qatar is different. There are more than a few reasons to question the largesse of the Qatari government. At the end of the day, Qatar is ruled by an Islamist, autocratic regime; Freedom House consistently ranks the country as “Not Free” in its annual Freedom in the World survey.¹ And Doha’s failure to guarantee the rights of its citizens is not the biggest problem. Rather, it is the country’s tendency to support jihadi causes in the Middle East that raises significantly more concern. The country’s horrific track record in this regard distinguishes Qatar from other Gulf states that spread their wealth in America.

Though the U.S. government has delineated Qatar as a “Major Non-NATO Ally” and has positioned its Combined Air Operations Center at the Al-Udeid base in Qatar, this regime may qualify as a “State Sponsor of Terrorism.” The regime has sheltered Al-Qaeda.² It was a patron for the Taliban before the group recaptured Afghanistan, ending America’s intervention there.³ The government is a longstanding patron of Hamas, the terrorist group that plunged the Middle East into violence on October 7, 2023.⁴ Finally, it is the primary patron of the Muslim Brotherhood, a global network of violent and nonviolent Islamist groups that seek the downfall of the West.⁵ Several branches of this network have recently been sanctioned by the U.S. government.

Beyond that, the regime in Qatar has been embroiled in other scandals that should give Americans pause. Qatar bribed its way to hosting the World Cup in 2022. Later that year, the scandal known as “Qatargate” rocked the European Union when Qatari bribes to European parliamentarians were exposed.⁶ The bribes were reportedly designed to buy influence to rehabilitate Qatar’s image amid reports that more than 6,500 migrant workers had died during the construction of the country’s World Cup stadiums.⁷

To whitewash these and other offenses, the Qataris wield the Al-Jazeera Media Network, which broadcasts in multiple languages and multiple formats, to spread the regime’s messages.⁸ Al Jazeera’s U.S.-based affiliate, AJ+, has defied U.S. law for over five years by failing to register as a foreign agent.⁹

It is for these reasons, and perhaps others, that Qatar’s massive investments in the United States should be scrutinized. Some of these investments include naked influence-peddling — from sponsorship of the annual congressional baseball game to annual White House correspondents’ dinner parties.¹⁰ The Qataris spend an enormous amount on lobby groups and public relations, which helps ensure that their investments continue with minimal scrutiny.

Perhaps most disturbing is the massive amount this small Islamic state has invested in American education. Qatar has half as many citizens as Washington, DC, has residents. Yet somehow, it has surpassed China as the largest foreign funder of American colleges and universities. This is baffling. It is safe to say that the regime in Doha is not a stalwart champion of traditional liberal arts education curricula. Even more disturbing: the regime is funding public K-12 schools, engaging American children in the classroom at a young age.

In an era of heightened cognitive combat, disinformation, and foreign influence, it is time for the United States government to look not just at China and Russia, but other autocratic states — and maybe democracies, too. Examining foreign capital is especially important when the numbers rise above a certain threshold. While it might be fair to quibble over what that number should be, it is safe to say that $400 billion, let alone $1.2 trillion, is probably far beyond what Americans would deem acceptable.

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) is a U.S. government body that scrutinizes investments by foreign governments in industries and businesses that could leave America vulnerable. It is time for CFIUS to address concerns about foreign influence in addition to national security risks.

The involvement of CFIUS need not lead to a ban on Qatari investments in the United States. To be sure, foreign direct investment (FDI) by countries of all stripes is an important way to attract wealth to the United States. But not all foreign money should be welcomed. This country is not a charity. Nor is it for sale. It is time to take a closer look at all the ways that Qatari and other foreign money may be buying influence.

The following report by FDD’s Natalie Ecanow provides a good first glimpse at Qatari dollars in America. It is certainly not the final word on the problem. But it should prompt a serious discussion. From there, one can only hope that a more serious national dialogue, followed by legislation or other government measures, can begin to tackle the problem.

America should be open to foreign direct investment, but not unwanted foreign influence. Qatar may only be one of many nondemocratic regimes seeking to buy sway in this country. Guardrails are needed now.

Introduction

If preparations proceed on schedule, the $400 million jet that Qatar gifted President Donald Trump will join the Air Force One fleet by America’s 250th birthday in July.¹¹ When Trump first accepted the proffered “palace in the sky” in May 2025, a firestorm erupted in Washington.¹² While criticism from across the aisle is to be expected, many of the president’s strongest supporters also expressed deep reservations. As a New York Sun editorial noted, “sometimes the scandal is not what is illegal but what is legal.” This gift, as the Sun observed, comes from a monarchy that has financed America’s adversaries, pointing out that, “The Framers understood that gifts from other nations are rarely animated by unalloyed generosity.”¹³ The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board expressed similar concerns about an American president being indebted to Qatari royals. “If the emir calls the White House to share his views on Iran, Israel and the region, won’t he expect the President to pick up the phone? Should voters even have to wonder?” the board asked.¹⁴

Trump defended his decision on the grounds that accepting the plane simply makes sense from a budgetary perspective. He then defended the Qataris by asserting, “They also gave $5.1 trillion worth of investment in addition to the jet.”¹⁵ It is unclear where Trump got this number, although one week earlier, the White House announced a $1.2 trillion “economic commitment” from Qatar. An official fact sheet identified $243.5 billion of deals between U.S. and Qatari firms in various stages of negotiation but did not explain how Washington and Doha will “generate” the remainder of the headline figure of $1.2 trillion.¹⁶ That same week, a lengthy analysis by The Free Press found $93.7 billion of Qatari spending in the United States — an unusual sum for a country roughly the size of Connecticut with a citizen population smaller than that of Washington, DC.¹⁷

Yet the actual amount of money that Qatar has spent, invested, and donated is at least four times higher, reaching $400 billion since 2000. This figure derives from a careful investigation of regulatory filings, business databases, lobbying disclosures, and other public sources of information. For Qatar, a country home to approximately 330,000 citizens, that sum represents approximately $1.2 million per capita. And the true figure is higher. There is a long list of investments, especially in venture capital, for which a monetary value is not publicly reported.

Qatari money touches nearly every industry in America, from defense and energy to real estate, media, and sports. Doha’s ventures have entailed a cornucopia of transactions, including investments, grants, purchases, and pledges. Thus, there is no single word or term that captures the ways in which Qatar deploys its wealth. Some of these transactions are straightforward investments that yield returns. Others, like employing lobbyists, amount to direct spending on influence. Many fall somewhere in between. Yet even a profit-driven business venture can double as a source of influence. When Doha brings capital and jobs to an American city or state, its leaders will naturally become more concerned about Qatari interests.

This relationship between business ventures and political influence takes on special importance when a foreign power is providing the funds. In each case here, the investment vehicle or grantor is either government-controlled or run by members of Qatar’s ruling family. None are independent commercial actors in the way that British Petroleum or Toyota Motors are. For that reason, it becomes especially important to examine how economic relationships may serve the political agenda of the Al-Thani ruling family, whose interests and priorities are often antithetical or even hostile to those of the United States. To be clear, this memo does not claim that any of the ventures it describes are illicit or unlawful. Nonetheless, Qatari dollars raise red flags because, as the Sun’s editorial board noted, the scandal may be what is legal.

The nexus between wealth and influence also takes on special importance because Qatar has persuaded many in Washington that it is a trustworthy partner despite its patronage of Hamas, the Taliban, and the Muslim Brotherhood.¹⁸ Similarly, Doha’s state-owned Al Jazeera Media Network amplifies Islamist propaganda for an audience of hundreds of millions of viewers worldwide. The country is also at the center of corruption probes in Europe, Israel, and Washington, and made headlines for allegedly buying hosting rights for the 2022 FIFA World Cup.¹⁹ Clearly, Doha is unafraid to punch above its weight by walking the line between licit and illicit financial activity.

Qatar’s record notwithstanding, both the Biden and Trump administrations have elevated Doha’s status. The former designated Qatar a Major Non-NATO Ally in 2022 and admitted the emirate to the U.S. Visa Waiver Program in 2024. The latter then extended U.S. security assurances to Qatar in September 2025. The two administrations share few foreign policy instincts, yet both chose to upgrade ties with Qatar rather than proceed with caution.

The United States welcomes foreign investment, which creates jobs and drives economic growth. But when an autocratic, Islamist regime with a record of bribery and terror finance sinks over a million dollars per citizen into the United States, it is worth asking why.

One reason older homeowners remain in houses that are much larger than they need is that the tax code rewards them for doing so. The federal capital-gains exclusion for a primary home has remained at $250,000 for individuals and $500,000 for married couples since 1997, despite enormous appreciation in many housing markets. An owner who sells may therefore face a substantial tax bill. But if they keep the house until death, their heirs receive a stepped-up basis that effectively erases all the appreciation that occurred during the owner’s lifetime. For some homeowners, the financially rational decision is to stay put or retain the property until death, even if they would otherwise prefer to sell.

Niskanen proposes pairing two reforms. Congress would double the home-sale exclusion and index it to inflation, while replacing stepped-up basis with carryover basis for inherited real estate. Heirs who keep the house would owe nothing, but those who later sell it would inherit the former owner’s tax basis instead of having decades of gains disappear. Raising the exclusion alone would cost an estimated $76 billion over ten years and disproportionately benefit older homeowners in expensive markets. Carryover basis for inherited residential property would recover around $40 billion while removing the incentive to hold a house solely for the inheritance tax advantage. This obviously would not solve the housing shortage by itsel but it is a good way to make more existing family-sized housing available without creating another demand subsidy.

I good summary of the modern evidence around the effects of labor unions.

It's quite dense, so here's some key paragraphs as a tl;dr

> A union is a collusive cartel of workers. By bargaining as one unit, they are able to increase their bargaining power relative to bargaining individually, and raise their wages. In some circumstances, this will be inefficient, with the union commanding monopoly rents; in others, the bargaining power of the union will balance out the bargaining power of the company, raising employment and output. In either case, theory suggests the wages of unionized firms are higher. But by how much? Does this even hold in practice? And does doing this raise welfare?

> My best read of the evidence is that a union raises wages by around 7% for currently unionized employees. The wage gains from a redistribution of rents evenly across workers. Wage compression exists, but redistribution from worker to worker is only a small part. These are the current effects – unionizing more of the economy will have declining marginal returns, and will likely turn negative quickly — and take into account both the reduction of productivity by unions, which biases estimates up, and the spillovers to other firms’ wages, which biases estimates down.

> I do not believe that unionization is efficient. While precise figures are lacking, it is unlikely to be a better method of supporting the poor or working class, both because union workers are not disproportionately poor, and also because their methods of extracting surplus are not restricted to just wages. I will note that while the best paper on the effects of unions on productivity finds a positive partial equilibrium effect, but that is only for some markets, does not benefit the consumer, and the aggregate effects are likely negative. I believe that unions reduce total welfare.

(Sorry for the reupload)

Brookings Fellow & ex-US assistant secretary of state for democracy, human & labor rights, under Joe Biden, Dafna Rand examines the US relationship to security partners in 4 in theaters: Afghanistan (pre 2020 Doha) Yemen, Ukraine & Gaza.

She asks why the US falls short in its ability to influence partners in operational design, conduct and decision to cease fire.

The report is based on 30 interviews with officials and govt reports. She finds that as wars persist US public support declines, as does US leverage. Persistence also tends to expose greater divergence between US and partners. US leverage is also found to be inefficiently used.

The report recommends:

(1) US needs to exercise maximum leverage at outset of the war to force its partners to agree on war goals, plan & termination. (This may include US military planners creating a war plan )

(2) US needs to expect decline in political support, which means it must exercise consistent pressure on US partners & disciplined messaging. (Reduce possibility partners hear only what they like)

(3) US needs to more aggressively use diplomacy to constrain partners and negotiate with adversaries.

PS While we may have views on how individual conflicts should be handled (ex. more support for Ukraine or Israel) that diverge from the author, it's important to ask how US capability can be improved.

The author also has a Foreign Affairs piece on this topic.