CNN anchor Don Lemon thinks he knows the cause of terrorism: white people. He told CNN anchor Chris Cuomo — the brother of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D) — that “We have to stop demonizing people and realize the biggest terror threat in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the right, and we have to start doing something about them.”

Starting late in the Obama administration, Americans’ life spans began dropping (coincidentally or not, this happened after Obamacare went fully into effect in 2014; the opioid crisis has been cited as a possible cause of the drop in life spans).

A large minimum wage increase in Venezuela has dealt a “fatal blow to 40 percent of Venezuelan stores,” reports the Miami Herald. That has closed many stores, and left employees jobless. Venezuela’s government ignored the most basic law of economics in raising the minimum wage — the law of supply and demand. But laws don’t go away just because you ignore them.

Reading views that are consistent with your own mildly reinforces them. But what really reinforces your views is being exposed to diametrically-opposing views on social media, or slanted articles with an opposing viewpoint. Such exposure is so annoying that it actually hardens your views. You may not be able to see how cartoonish your own views are, anymore than a fish notices water. But you can easily see how cartoonish someone else’s extreme-opposite views are. That’s the logical inference of a recently published study by Christopher A. Bail and others called “Exposure to Opposing Views on Social Media Can Increase Political Polarization.” The study might be an additional reason not to regulate broadcasting or social media to mandate exposure to competing views, and not to reinstate speech restrictions such as the “Fairness Doctrine.” Such regulations may achieve nothing other than violating the First Amendment’s command that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”

Radical court rulings threaten to strip people of the right to govern themselves. The people’s elected representatives in state legislatures often pass laws that prevent cities from adopting burdensome rules, such as ordinances whose costs fall not just on city residents, but on people who live outside their borders. States’ right to preempt burdensome local rules was undermined by a recent federal appeals court ruling. It allowed Alabama to be sued for its law overriding the Birmingham City Council’s attempt to increase the minimum wage. That minimum wage increase would have led to both job losses and increased consumer prices for non-residents who work in the city.

When the White House orders federal agencies to comply with a Supreme Court decision, that’s not a sign of dictatorship looming, but rather, a vindication of the rule of law. But left-leaning lawyers, bloggers, and officials are claiming otherwise. They are sounding the alarm over the Trump administration’s compliance with the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Lucia v. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The Education Department last week rightly withdrew two famous examples of regulatory “dark matter” issued during the Obama administration: its April 4, 2011 “Dear Colleague Letter” about “sexual violence” and its April 29, 2014 “Questions and Answers on Title IX and Sexual Violence.” These bureaucratic decrees heavily intruded into how schools handle complaints of sexual harassment and assault, banning the clear-and-convincing evidence standard, restricting cross-examination rights, and restricting the appeal rights of accused people.

On September 12, the Federalist Society’s Regulatory Transparency Project released a paper about illegal overreaching by the Obama-era Education and Justice Departments, which resulted in policies that still persist today. The paper, written mostly by people with a civil rights background, examines three areas in which the federal government attempted to micromanage educational institutions by imposing new rules that never went through the legally-prescribed rulemaking process and purported to do so based on antidiscrimination statutes passed many years ago. These rules dealt with three areas: (1) transgender bathroom, locker, and dormitory room access under Title IX, a statute which bans discrimination based on “sex,” not “gender identity”; (2) investigations by colleges and schools of sexual assault and harassment claims, also under Title IX; and (3) school districts that suspend more students of one race than another, or whose discipline policies have an unintentional “disparate impact,” under Title VI, a statute which bans intentional racial discrimination.

In a major speech today, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos indicated that the Education Department may withdraw some of the regulatory “dark matter” discussed by CEI’s Wayne Crews, such as its April 4, 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter micromanaging college discipline.