Your lyin’ eyes: When President Trump announced his crackdown on crime in the nation’s capital, the media claimed that crime was already headed down. Not exactly.

• Zack Smith, senior legal fellow in the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, says the crime statistics cited are bogus.
• “First, questions loom as to whether D.C. officials have been accurately reporting their crime statistics,” he notes.
• Smith co-authored the book Rogue Prosecutors: How Radical Soros Lawyers Are Destroying America’s Communities with Charles “Cully” Stimson, deputy director of the Meese Center.

Read his take on D.C. crime here

Hint? Newsom: The truck crash in Florida that took the lives of three Americans was entirely preventable. The driver, an illegal alien, received a commercial driver’s license (CDL) in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s California and blue Washington State.

• Lora Ries, director of the Border Security and Immigration Center, told Fox News that a loophole lets “someone who is merely authorized to work in the U.S.” get a CDL.

Read the Fox piece here.

EU-bound: Last week, the White House officially swore in Andy Puzder as the new U.S. ambassador to the European Union.

Puzder, the former CEO of CKE Restaurants, had been a distinguished visiting fellow at Heritage.

• When President Trump announced Puzder as his pick in January, Heritage President Dr. Kevin Roberts called it “a bold and strategic choice.”

Watch the clip on X here, and read the Heritage press release here.

The horror: Organ procurement organizations are all about saving lives—or they should be.

• A recent federal investigation turned up horrific stories of organizations trying to harvest organs from living patients.
• “Patients shouldn’t lose their lives prematurely at the hands of incompetent or corrupt organ procurement organizations,” writes Mary Vought, vice president of strategic communications at Heritage.

Read Vought’s piece here.

Backwards: Business schools across the globe are now teaching students to put sustainability and social activism before shareholder interests and profitability.

• “Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ remains more reliable at delivering broad-based prosperity than corporate ESG initiatives,” write Heritage Senior Advisor Allen Mendenhall and his co-author.
• “Business schools that forget this risk becoming irrelevant,” they add.

Read the piece in City Journal here.

Want to help to restore America? Join the Heritage Academy—an eight-week online fellowship focused on America’s founding principles and the most pressing policy issues of our time.

• Heritage Academy Fellows gain access to compelling policy lectures, conversations with Heritage experts, and discussions with conservatives from across America. Watch a video about the Academy here.

Apply for this part-time program by Sept. 21 here!

Be gone: The amount of Chinese influence and Chinese actors in the U.S. defense industry is far too high for comfort. It is time to purge the system.

• “Chinese entities have infiltrated the U.S. defense supply chain, controlling a wide range of essential inputs from magnets to drone parts,” writes Yuichiro Kakutani, policy advisor for China and the Indo-Pacific.

Read more here.

No returns: When President Trump announced that the U.S. was leaving UNESCO, the Left called it an “assault” on “global leadership.”

• It turns out that the U.S. never rejoined UNESCO under President Biden, notes Senior Research Fellow Eugene Kontorovich. “From a constitutional perspective, the U.S. hasn’t been a member at least since Trump first quit it in 2017,” he notes.

Read his op-ed in The Hill.

Semiquincentennial: In response to the high volume of applications received in the first round, Heritage has opened a second round of Innovation Prizes related to America’s 250th anniversary.

• “This 250th anniversary gives us a special opportunity to reclaim our history, our schools, our churches, and our monuments, and in the process, build our future,” states the application page. Deadline for submissions is Sept. 2.

Get the details here.

The Muslim Brotherhood Threat, National Security, and America’s Global Leadership

 

Join Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Dr. Victoria Coates, vice president of the Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy, for a fireside chat examining the Muslim Brotherhood’s role in fueling terrorism, and the urgent need for congressional action.

 

Sept. 10, 1 p.m. Register here.

• Regulatory Reform Is a Great Start, but Modernizing Defense Industry Will Require More—Steven P. Bucci, Ph.D.
• Report: China and Cannabis—Paul J. Larkin
• Trump’s Smithsonian Review Is Long Overdue—Mike Gonzalez
• Uber’s New ‘Women Preferences’ Program Violates Civil Rights Law—Hans A. von Spakovsky and Sarah Parshall Perry
• Report: The Case for Redeploying Non-Strategic Nuclear Weapons to South Korea—Robert Peters
• The Left’s ‘Tax Cuts for the Rich’ Bogeyman Doesn’t Apply to Big Beautiful Bill—Preston Brashers and Ethan Xu

Nile Gardiner, director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, appeared on Fox & Friends to discuss the White House meeting with leaders from Ukraine and Europe. “You are seeing strong, robust American leadership on the world stage,” he said. “If you had Kamala Harris as president, you would not have seen this kind of gathering.” Watch the clip on X.