r/DeepStateCentrism

An academic project hosted by Cambridge University promotes an “Islamic curriculum” which tells 12-year-olds that Hamas is an “excuse that Israel uses to justify its attacks on the Gaza Strip,” calls the civilian hostages taken by the terror group on October 7 “prisoners of war” and publishes in pupils’ course material a map of the region from which Israel has been erased.

The project also publishes a guide aimed at parents and children, written after the attacks, which asks: “What is the reward of a shaheed [a martyr]? How does this make you feel when you think of all the children of Gaza who are now shuhada [martyrs]?” and states, quoting the Quran: “Never say that those martyred in the cause of Allah are dead – in fact, they are alive but you do not perceive it.”

>The driverless future is here—but, to borrow from William Gibson, it’s not evenly distributed. Waymo’s self-driving robotaxis are available in cities in California, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, and Texas. Aside from California, where the technology originated, those are all red or purple states. In every other blue state, meanwhile, driverless taxis are still not allowed to operate. If you live in Miami or Dallas, you can summon a Waymo to get where you’re going. If you live in Boston or New York, you can’t.

>This is not an accident. In Democratic jurisdictions, a coalition of labor unions, anti-tech activists, and politicians have kept driverless vehicles off the streets. (Colorado, which passed a bill authorizing driverless vehicles in 2017, before the current backlash, is on track to become the exception later this year.) They argue that the new technology would make the roads more dangerous and throw millions of human drivers out of work, all to enrich a handful of tech oligarchs.

>A version of this fight is now playing out in Washington, D.C., where Kamala Harris won more than 90 percent of the vote in 2024 and where local officials recently introduced a bill that would provide a pathway for robotaxis to begin operating. Some residents have welcomed that prospect. But others are digging in their heels. Bill Davis, the president of the local Teamsters union, declared in a statement that the legislation “doesn’t benefit anyone outside of Silicon Valley billionaires” and “comes at the expense of middle-class professional drivers and anyone else who wants safer streets in our city.”

>Driverless cars will indeed cost some workers their jobs. But unlike so many other recent Silicon Valley innovations, they have already demonstrated the potential to bring immense societal benefits. About 40,000 Americans die in car accidents every year. The number of crash-related injuries is much larger. As many as 10,000 crash victims enter emergency rooms around the country every day. Waymos are so much safer than human drivers that deploying them widely could avert countless injuries and deaths every year.

>They will also make transportation more affordable: A taxi without a driver is much cheaper. Waymo is currently more expensive than Uber and Lyft, but that’s largely because supply is artificially constrained and demand is high. The price differential is dropping fast and will go away soon. Waymos also show promise in reducing carbon emissions and air pollution (the cars are electric), and providing reliable access to people who live in poor neighborhoods (who are routinely turned down by rideshare drivers). Saying no to Waymo is saying no to a technology that will change the world for the better.

>There is a name for a political movement that taps into people’s resistance to change and defense of the status quo. William F. Buckley famously described a conservative as “someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” Progressivism was founded on the opposite ethic: that scientific and technological progress can bring about a better, more equitable future, provided that it’s steered in the right direction. In this sense, self-driving cars are a test for American progressives—a test of whether they have become so captured by interest groups, so hostile to corporations, and so fearful of technological change that they’ve transformed into enemies of progress itself.

>In much of the country, the popular conception of self-driving cars is something between a bumbling idiot and a mechanical death trap. Videos of Waymo vehicles making ridiculous errors go viral online. Earlier this year, a Waymo hit a child who ran into the road near an elementary school in Santa Monica, California, causing minor injuries. When a jurisdiction considers whether to allow Waymos, stories like these come up again and again. “I’m also deeply concerned about the safety issues autonomous vehicles have already had in other cities,” Helen Raynor-Hughes, a longtime D.C.-area resident, testified during a public hearing in July, citing “reports of crashes, traffic disruptions, and situations where these vehicles failed to respond properly to pedestrians, cyclists, and other drivers.”

>But anecdotes can mislead. The question is how robotaxis’ error rate stacks up against that of human drivers. In a recent study, researchers at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety compared the crash and accident data on a per-mile basis for Waymo vehicles with those of human drivers in the cities where Waymos operated from 2021 to 2024. They found that Waymos were involved in 68 percent fewer crashes serious enough to be reported to police and 81 percent fewer crashes that caused an injury. These findings are “likely conservative” because human drivers regularly fail to report accidents, Eric Teoh, the report’s lead author, told me.

>Several other studies have produced even more favorable results. These studies are co-authored by Waymo researchers but have been peer-reviewed by independent academics. Every expert I spoke with for this story, including Waymo skeptics, told me that they consider the research to be high-quality. “Reductions this big are basically unheard of when it comes to traffic safety,” Noah Goodall, a senior research scientist at the Virginia Transportation Research Council, told me. “Not even seat belts or airbags achieved the kinds of numbers we’re seeing here.” (Waymo, which is owned by Alphabet, is the only company that has demonstrated such a strong safety record. The others, including Tesla, have not disclosed the data needed to make safety claims.)

>Even these figures probably underestimate how safe Waymos are. The journalists Timothy B. Lee and Kai Williams recently reviewed the details of the 78 accidents that Waymo vehicles had been involved in over a seven-month period and that were serious enough to cause an injury or trigger an airbag deployment. They found just one example where Waymo “could plausibly bear some responsibility” for a taxi crashing into another vehicle or a pedestrian—the Santa Monica–school incident—and another three where culpability was “mixed or unclear.” “We went into this looking for any evidence that Waymo could even remotely be at fault for a given crash,” Lee told me. “But those cases were just really hard to find.”

>The big caveat to Waymo’s safety record is its difficulty with so-called edge cases—unpredictable situations for which its algorithm is unprepared and in which human judgment really comes in handy. When a power outage knocked out a third of San Francisco’s traffic lights last December, at least 60 Waymos abruptly idled mid-road, causing severe gridlock and delays. Something similar happened to a few dozen Waymos this year when the driverless vehicles encountered unexpected road closures during San Francisco’s Fourth of July celebrations. Waymos have obstructed emergency vehicles in several cities, typically because of their tendency to freeze when they encounter alarms, sirens, or temporary road closures. The company has not done nearly enough to fix the problem. “Competent driving is about a lot more than crash statistics,” Philip Koopman, an emeritus professor of engineering at Carnegie Mellon, told me. “If Waymo isn’t able to address some of these problematic patterns, it is going to be very hard to convince the public they are safe.”

>Even so, the fact that Waymos are considerably safer than human drivers is undeniable. A robot driver can’t drink and drive, fall asleep at the wheel, or check its phone. It won’t flout the rules of the road when it’s running late or trying to impress its friends. And it is equipped with more than a dozen different cameras, plus radar and laser sensors, meaning it doesn’t have blind spots. Bryant Walker Smith, an associate law professor at the University of South Carolina, has advised governments on how to regulate self-driving cars. “What I always tell policy makers is that we absolutely should be concerned about automated driving,” he told me. “But we should be terrified of human driving.”

>Safety might be the average American’s top concern about driverless cars, but the average American isn’t spearheading the political resistance to Waymo. Labor unions are. The campaign against driverless vehicles has been led by a coalition of unions representing taxi, rideshare, and truck drivers who argue that self-driving cars will destroy millions of working-class jobs. (Although experts believe that self-driving trucks and delivery vehicles are at least several years away from being a regular presence on roads, labor unions see robotaxi legalization as a stepping stone to a fully automated driving future.) Indeed, Helen Raynor-Hughes, the area resident who testified about Waymo’s safety record, began by identifying herself as a Service Employees International Union member who drives for Uber and Lyft.

>In 2026 alone, this Labor United Against Waymo coalition has helped defeat or delay legislation to authorize driverless vehicles in Illinois, Minnesota, Maryland, Virginia, Oregon, and Washington State. In January, New York Governor Kathy Hochul declared that she would pursue a bill to allow robotaxis to operate in the state, only to backtrack a few weeks later following an outcry from labor leaders.

>When I arrived at D.C.’s city hall in July for a public hearing on the proposed bill to authorize Waymo, I passed dozens of protesters from various labor groups chanting and holding signs with slogans such as WAYMO? HELL NO and AI DOESN’T VOTE. We Do. Inside, about a dozen labor leaders and rideshare drivers demanded that city officials vote against the bill. Crystal Middleton, a D.C. resident who drives Uber and Lyft part-time to support her family, testified that if Waymo were adopted in the city, “many D.C. families, including mine, will struggle to make ends meet.”

>I’m sympathetic to that argument. When I was growing up, my dad spent years driving Uber and Lyft on the weekends to help pay the bills. Like many drivers, he resented the meager pay and lack of benefits. (There’s an irony that unions and Democratic lawmakers are rallying to defend the type of precarious gig work that they have spent more than a decade criticizing.) But it’s hard to imagine what our family would have done without the extra income. The impulse to protect workers like him—not to mention the delivery and truck drivers who fear that they’ll be next—from being displaced by a new technology is understandable.

>That approach, however, ignores the larger number of people who would benefit from a change to the status quo. At the public hearing, local nonprofit leaders and politicians, including Shane Simenstad, the director of public policy for Safe Kids Worldwide, pointed out that rideshare drivers often refuse to enter less desirable parts of the city, leaving residents of poor neighborhoods without a reliable way to get to work or school. Claire Stanley, the director of advocacy and governmental affairs for the American Council of the Blind, spoke about being denied Uber and Lyft rides because of her service dog. Multiple women testified about their fear of being harassed or assaulted by rideshare drivers. (According to a 2025 New York Times investigation, Uber received a report of sexual assault or misconduct nearly every eight minutes on average in the U.S. from 2017 to 2022.)

>Some of the most moving testimonies came from the victims of car crashes and their loved ones. Rameez Tase, a local resident and avid cyclist, told the story of a friend who had been nearly killed after being hit by a car. “Anyone who knows me well knows that my biggest fear of death is being struck and killed by a distracted driver—and leaving my three young children without a father for the rest of their lives,” he said. Cesar Toledo, a member of the D.C. Commission on Poverty, recounted a childhood “marked by the terrifying reality of riding in vehicles driven by family members under the influence.”

>Car accidents kill roughly as many Americans each year as breast cancer does, and twice the number of people who die from homicides. It is a leading cause of death among children and young adults. “The number of traffic deaths in America is the equivalent of a Boeing 737 crashing every single day,” Jonathan Slotkin, a neurosurgeon who regularly treats crash victims, told me. “That’s what we’ve chosen to tolerate as the price of mobility.”

>Waymos, to be clear, wouldn’t solve this problem right away. Although rideshare and taxi drivers get into accidents at higher rates than the average driver, they make up a small fraction of cars on the road. But operating robotaxis is a key step for Waymo and other companies to perfect their self-driving technology, which could then be sold to vehicle manufacturers like Toyota to include as an optional feature in every car. “If we had a drug that showed these kinds of results, we’d be doing everything we could to get it out to as many people as fast as possible,” Slotkin said.

>Widespread adoption of driverless vehicles would further a litany of goals that anyone should celebrate, especially those who claim to be progressive: slashing traffic injuries and deaths; helping the poor and disabled secure stable employment; making cities safer places to bike and walk; reducing the prevelance of sexual assault and misconduct; putting more electric vehicles on the roads. And yet progressives are the ones standing in the way. “Honestly, it’s just embarrassing,” Colin Mortimer, the director of the Center for New Liberalism, a center-left advocacy group, told me. “Liberals are always talking about how we’re the party that believes in science, that believes in data, that believes in helping the vulnerable. But on this issue we’re doing the exact opposite.”

>Some Washington, D.C., legislators believe that the nation’s capital can pioneer a different approach to Waymo. In May, the D.C. Council member Charles Allen introduced a bill that would authorize driverless vehicles to begin operating in the district, but only if their makers meet certain key conditions designed in part to address the edge-case problem and reduce the impact on the city’s labor force. These include completing stringent testing and safety requirements and submitting a plan for interacting with first responders. Even then, the total number of driverless vehicles would be capped at a few hundred during the initial rollout. Each vehicle would also be subject to a per-mile tax used to fund public transit, as well as workforce training and compensation for displaced rideshare and taxi drivers. “We have to be honest with ourselves: This technology is already here and is only going to become a bigger part of our lives going forward,” Allen told me a few weeks after the hearing. “And so we can either bury our heads in the sand and have this change happen to us. Or we can put guardrails in place to make sure the technology works for us and our communities.”

>In Allen’s view, too many restrictions would risk throttling a technology that could otherwise bring huge benefits; too few would invite a high-profile incident that draws a public backlash. Getting the balance right will be difficult. My own view is that the bill should have more restrictive testing requirements around edge cases—for instance, simulating power outages or major emergencies—before driverless vehicles can be deployed. But it should also create a less bureaucratic process for increasing the number of vehicles once those requirements have been met. The bill also faces several political obstacles, including an incoming mayor who expressed skepticism about Waymo expansion on the campaign trail. But Allen is trying to do something that no city has done before: chart a middle course between letting the new technology rip and blocking it altogether.

>One-hundred and fifty years ago, the United States was experiencing the advent of a brand-new transportation technology. Railroads reduced cross-country travel from months to days, turned the U.S. into an industrial powerhouse, and enabled the modern consumer economy. But they also displaced workers, such as canal operators and stagecoach drivers; led to skyrocketing inequality; and produced corrupt monopolies presided over by ruthless oligarchs. A new political movement formed in response. Its adherents passed legislation that protected workers, created novel regulatory agencies, broke up powerful monopolies, and developed safety standards. Neither techno-utopians nor luddites, they believed that technology could be a force for progress—but only if it was actively shaped and regulated by the public. They thus called themselves progressives. Their political descendants would do well to remember their example.

>As Greg Bovino strode towards the stage, the crowd erupted into chants: “USA! USA! USA!” It was late May, several months since Bovino’s ignoble ousting as the greatcoat-clad “commander at large” of US border control.

>But for this audience, Bovino’s record was not a liability. It was his calling card.

>In Figueira da Foz, a sleepy Portuguese beach town just south of Porto, a few hundred of Europe’s most important far-right influencers, decision makers and activists had gathered for the “Remigration Summit”. A gathering to strategise how to expel millions of migrants deemed ethnically “unsuitable” from Europe, by force or encouragement, including those legally settled.

>The Americans — not just Bovino but several dozen, including Stefano Forte, president of the New York Young Republican Club — were the guests of honour. Remigration, Bovino told his audience, is the defining political issue of our time.

>“I’ll make you a deal, Europe,” he said. “We get this remigration under way full throttle in Europe, I’ll break that trench coat [sic] out, and I’ll wear it on European soil.”

>For Europe’s far-right parties, Donald Trump’s second presidency has brought as many complications as opportunities: his war in Iran, tariffs and threats to seize European territory have proved deeply unpopular, making any open embrace of Maga politically awkward.

>But for the activists pushing remigration, US support in recent months has been transformational.

>The cause they espouse is an ethnonationalist project that seeks to shrink immigrant communities in western countries in the name of restoring cultural homogeneity. At its mildest, it means stricter immigration rules and tougher enforcement. In its most extreme form, it means adopting measures to encourage or even coerce the removal of “unassimilated” legal residents and even naturalised citizens to their countries of “origin”.

>Remigration began as a fringe idea but Trump and his Maga supporters have put it at the centre of their domestic political agenda — and in doing so, have given its European proponents a massive boost.  

>A concept that was once too toxic to mention in Europe has become the rallying call for a powerful new movement of young influencers and radicals.

>“What’s happening in the US over the past 18 months is definitely a normalisation of the term — 100 per cent,” said Martin Sellner, the Austrian far-right activist credited with leading the remigration movement.

>Remigration’s journey from Europe to America and back again reveals the depth of the new right’s transatlantic networks. It also shows how US-controlled social media platforms have blurred the line between America’s domestic politics and Europe’s own radical right movements.

>“It’s stuff I didn’t think I would see in my lifetime,” said Bernhard Weidinger, an Austria-based extremism researcher who monitors online narratives. “I am baffled and shocked by how fast things have become sayable and doable [in America] . . . and I think it is a cautionary tale for Europe. It is coming here.”

>What is remarkable, Weidinger said, “is that in many places in Europe [far right] parties are soaring in the polls even as they become more radical”.

>Remigration is at the heart of that shift, he added. Among its proponents, the feeling is that, with the White House behind them, their time has come: “The general sense is that they are winning. And that they are winning big.”

>In November 2023, a year before Trump’s re-election, Sellner laid out his plan for remigration to a select group of far-right influencers and politicians at Villa Adlon, a lakeside neo-baroque residence in Potsdam just outside Berlin.

>Participants discussed measures to remove illegal immigrants, asylum seekers and even non-native residents and “unassimilated” German citizens — including to a “model city” in north Africa, according to media reports. When those reports emerged weeks later, they triggered mass protests and a backlash that reached into the far right.

>Remigration was considered so toxic that even Alternative for Germany (AfD) distanced itself from members who had attended. Two months later, after waves of protests across German cities, Sellner was banned from Germany — though the ban has since been overturned.

>Sellner is the most prominent of Europe’s Identitarians, a movement that began in France two decades ago and later flourished in Austria and Germany — classified as extremist by European domestic security services. The Identitarians have made remigration their rallying cry.

>In the same month that Sellner was banned from Germany, he was also reinstated on X, as part of Elon Musk’s liberalisation of the platform’s rules. Sellner’s return to the site was a pivotal moment: it accelerated remigration’s journey into the US right, where he increasingly presented his thoughts and ideas around the subject in English.

>The backlash to Potsdam ultimately proved counter-productive. Had the meeting gone unnoticed, remigration might have remained a fringe concept. Instead, the outrage helped carry the idea into the Anglosphere.

>Remigration soon entered the lexicon of those involved with Project 2025, the policy plan advocated by the rightwing conservative Heritage Foundation for Trump’s second term. 

>Stephen Miller, Trump’s soon-to-be deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser, wrote on X: “THE TRUMP PLAN TO END THE INVASION OF SMALL TOWN AMERICA: REMIGRATION!”

>From there, the term rose quickly through the Trump White House tweetocracy: first Miller, then the Department of Homeland Security, then Trump himself became regular users. “Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation,” the president posted last year.

>Asked on Air Force One days later what he meant, Trump said: “It means get people out of here who are in our country. Get them out. I wanna get them out.”

>In May, just before the Portugal summit he co-organised, Sellner saw the White House’s X account post an image of Trump at a lectern. Underneath, the words “replacement migration” were crossed out. Beneath them, in oversized type, stood: “Remigration”.

>“It’s absolutely been a breakthrough, having the president say this,” said Sellner. “This picture — it could have been an Identitarian graphic,” he said.

>“Having the most powerful man in the world start talking about remigration — that’s definitely a victory. The effects of it will last even after the Trump presidency.”

>Words matter greatly, in Sellner’s view, as much as funding or electoral victories. He sees himself as a “metapolitical” campaigner, constantly pushing the boundaries of what is sayable and doable.

>Across Europe, far-right parliamentary parties are now talking about remigration.

>In Italy, a citizens’ initiative launched in January under the banner “Remigration and Reconquest” gathered more than 150,000 signatures and forced a parliamentary debate.

>In mid-July, Sellner and Dutch political commentator and far-right activist Eva Vlaardingerbroek arrived in Brussels with a wheelbarrow of paper: 500,000 signatures calling for remigration to be registered as a European Citizens’ Initiative, the threshold at which the European Commission must consider a response.

>In Germany, remigration is official AfD policy. In Saxony-Anhalt, where the AfD is on course to win more than 40 per cent in September’s election, local leaders have promised to begin deportations “from day one”.

>In the UK, the Restore Britain party, which seeks to outflank Nigel Farage from the right, has made it a central theme. Harrison Pitt, Restore’s chief ideologue, has travelled to Vienna to meet Sellner and discuss common ground and tactics.

>In Sellner’s telling, X has become a “LinkedIn for the [far] right” with Musk as their champion. “Anyone who does not support remigration is a traitor,” Musk wrote on X on July 25.

>Once fragmented by language and national politics, Europe’s hardliners are now plugged into a US-led conversation, Sellner said.

>“What happens in America matters . . . it’s consumed, read, internalised by all the young rightwing politicians, influencers and brought into the debate. [Maga] is a huge cultural influence for the new right.”

>In June, Sellner announced a new “Institute for Remigration”, a “think-tank” he wants to become a lobby group for far-right parliamentarians — “a National Rifle Association, but for deportations”, as he puts it.

>Since Bovino’s encouragement in Portugal, Sellner said the movement “made a huge leap” in contacts with American think-tanks and people close to the Washington establishment. “We are in way deeper now.”

>A new transatlantic relationship was being forged, he said, “based not on neoconservatism or Pax Americana . . . but on identitarianism”.

>US campaigning expertise was already professionalising Europe’s far right, he added. Sellner is developing “customer relationship management” software to mobilise what he claimed were about 100,000 pro-remigration activists across Europe.

>For all the noise, however, the route to actual policy remains uncertain. Identitarian rallies have often been met by larger counter-demonstrations, while far-right parties remain wary of alienating the voters they need to reach office.

>In France, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National has been notably reluctant to adopt the language of remigration. She fell out with the AfD over the Adlon villa meeting in 2024 and hasn’t patched up relations since.

>Sellner is unperturbed. Short-term electoral gains and losses, he argues, matter less than shifting the debate before it reaches parliament.

>“It’s already happening. The debate is already shifting in Europe. I don’t really think I have to do anything any more. The ball is rolling.”

Hell yeah, we got cancer vaccines now!

>An experimental mRNA-based vaccine succeeded in preventing cancer from coming back or spreading in a study of high-risk melanoma patients, Moderna and its partner Merck said Wednesday, paving the way for a potentially new life-extending treatment for the thousands of people diagnosed with the deadly skin cancer each year.

>The study looked at people who had surgery to remove a melanoma—the point of the treatment was to reduce the risk of it coming back.

>The companies said the late-stage study, which tested the personalized cancer vaccine intismeran in combination with Merck’s blockbuster cancer immunotherapy Keytruda, met its main goal of extending the time before cancer returns in high-risk patients. The study also met a secondary goal of preventing the disease from spreading to different organs.

>“I have a feeling that this is just the beginning of a new field,” said Jane Healy, a vice president of oncology at Merck, adding the goal for patients is “to give them longer without having to worry about treatments for cancer.”

>Moderna shares surged more than 80% in early trading Wednesday, while Merck’s stock rose 8%.

>The companies didn’t provide specific details about how long patients taking the Moderna-Merck combination lived without their cancer progressing or how long they lived on average. The companies will present more details at a medical conference later this year.

>Investors and researchers will be watching closely to see how effective and tolerable the vaccine proves to be, as that has the potential to dictate its chances for approval and how widely it is used.

>The results mark the first successful late-stage trial for a personalized mRNA cancer therapy, validating decades of research into custom treatments engineered specifically for an individual’s tumor mutations.

>For Moderna, these results could pave the way for its entry into the $240-plus-billion cancer-drug market, a boon for a company that has been dependent Covid-19 vaccine sales, which have been falling. For Merck, this could bring a new drug into its arsenal to help offset the impending patent loss for Keytruda, one of the top-selling drugs in the world.

>Moderna has been trying to regain financial ground after years of consecutive losses since the Covid-19 pandemic started to wane.

>“We are now an oncology company,” said Moderna Chief Executive Stéphane Bancel. “By Christmas, you could have a company that’s going back into sales growth for the first time in four years.”

>The melanoma study followed more than 1,000 patients who were randomized to either receive a combination of intismeran and Keytruda or Keytruda alone for about a year.

>Unlike traditional vaccines designed to prevent infections, intismeran is a personalized therapeutic vaccine built for a single person. The process begins after a patient undergoes surgery to remove a high-risk melanoma tumor. Doctors send a blood sample and biopsy of the tumor, where the cancer’s genetic profile is analyzed. 

>Scientists home in on unique mutations on the cancer cells that are likely to alert the immune system. Those mutation targets are encoded into mRNA and manufactured into a vaccine—a process that takes about six weeks from the date of the biopsy.

>Meanwhile, patients recover from their surgery and start a regimen of Keytruda to keep the disease in check while their personalized shot is prepared.

>Moderna and Merck teamed up in 2016 to jointly develop personalized mRNA cancer vaccines and expanded that partnership over time. The researchers began by studying the vaccine in melanoma because those tumors are typically highly mutated. There are other studies under way in different types of cancer, including bladder cancer, a common form of lung cancer and kidney cancer. 

>Ahead of the news, Citi analyst Geoff Meacham said the study could be a “defining catalyst” for Moderna’s cancer drug business and that strong results could speed FDA review. Bancel said the company hopes to have the drug on the market in 2027.

>Earlier trial readouts showed that the vaccine in combination with Keytruda reduced the risk of melanoma recurrence or death by 49% compared with Keytruda alone. 

>Moderna recently won approval for its mRNA-based flu vaccine, though analysts said this was more likely to be a long-term growth driver than an immediate financial windfall.

>Personalized cancer vaccines are complicated and expensive to produce. Questions remain as to how accessible the vaccines will be if they are approved. The only FDA-approved therapeutic cancer vaccine to date is Provenge, a personalized immunotherapy for prostate cancer.

>Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Governor Kathy Hochul have announced that some communities in New York City will receive free 2-K (daycare for two-year-olds) seats this fall. Their supporters are hailing the move as a major step toward universal childcare, such as that provided in Sweden.

>The American Left reveres Sweden’s childcare system. Jacobin celebrates it as delivering on a “collective responsibility.” The People’s Policy Project praises the Nordic nation’s generous public funding. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Elizabeth Warren champion taxpayer-funded universal childcare modeled in part on Sweden. “What we have in mind and what my policies most closely resemble are what we see . . . in Sweden,” Ocasio-Cortez has said of her broader policy agenda.

>They’re right that Sweden heavily subsidizes childcare, with public funding following families using public or private providers. But one feature of Sweden’s childcare system would shock many on the American Left.

>Sweden, often held up as an exemplar of high-quality early childhood education, does not regulate preschool staffing through mandated child-to-staff ratios.

>That’s right. Sweden has no legally mandated child-to-staff ratio for förskola (preschool), which serves children ages one to five. Many other countries do, and all U.S. states do. Yet as the OECD notes, “There is no regulation or guideline for child-staff ratios” in Sweden.

>Has the lack of a government mandate led to mayhem in Sweden? Does the absence of a required ratio mean that a single overburdened childcare worker is expected somehow to supervise hundreds of children alone?

>Not in Sweden, which has a similar proportion of children in its population as the United States. Even without any explicit mandate, typical child-to-staff ratios remain quite reasonable. According to the Swedish National Agency for Education (Skolverket), the ratio of full-time staff positions to children in preschool is roughly 5:1.

>If the government is not prescribing every staffing decision, what ensures that providers make responsible choices? Competition and market signals.

>A preschool that created unreasonable conditions would swiftly face reputational consequences. Sweden gives families the freedom to choose private preschools. Parents can select environments they feel best meet their children’s needs, encouraging preschools to provide a high-quality environment as they compete for families. About 22 percent of Swedish preschoolers attend privately run preschools.

>Judging by Sweden’s example, child-to-staff ratio mandates apparently aren’t necessary. And it’s not clear that they offer many benefits, either. A 2022 systematic review and meta-analysis of studies from the United States and several other countries found surprisingly little high-quality evidence that smaller ratios improve child outcomes among children ages zero through five. The researchers noted that any effects on measures such as literacy were “inconclusive” and that existing research provides “little guidance on what the appropriate adult/child ratios and group sizes are.”

>But while any benefits remain uncertain, one effect of strict ratio requirements is well documented: they raise costs, reducing affordability.

>In the United States, the wide variation in state regulations—from California and Michigan, which allow one staff member to supervise no more than four toddlers (ages one to three), to Florida and Texas, which allow up to 11—provides ample opportunity to examine the effects of more stringent staff-to-child ratio requirements.

>In the state with the least restrictive child-staff ratio mandate, toddler care costs $7,254 annually, while in states with the most restrictive child-staff ratio, toddler care costs an average of $20,196—more than 2.5 times as much. One explanation is that high-income states have both stricter ratios and more expensive childcare. But even after controlling for state income, stricter childcare regulations are associated with higher costs for families. Research shows that more regulations mean fewer childcare centers, especially in lower-income communities.

>In part, that’s because these strict ratios also create needless compliance burdens: inspectors may cite childcare centers when a teacher briefly steps out of a classroom that remains supervised by several other staff members.

>By not regulating staffing ratios, Sweden proves the choice isn’t between mandates and bad care. In the United States, the choice often comes down to trusting the people closest to the children or pricing their families out of care altogether.

>Sweden’s approach asks policymakers to place their confidence in childcare professionals and families instead of micromanaging these arrangements. If Sweden can trust parents and providers to deliver quality care, so can we.

Summary: MattY explains why the narrative "moderates vs left" is unhelpful.

A Graham Platner and a Troy Jackson are from different factions.

Platner is from the insurgent left. They tend to follow Bernie Sanders, campaign against Democrats and tend to rely on their personal charisma.

Jackson is part of the progressive establishment. These are more conventional, play by party rules, politicians (who in turn are more deferential to interest groups)

Yglesias goes on to describe how these factions do and don't get along, how the insurgent left can be more ideologically flexible at times and the dangers they pose:

He also explains why moderates are better served thinking in these terms:

Somewhat curiously at the end, MattY floats possibility that while insurgents can be dangerous, the ability to say no to progressive interest groups may be valuable.

Quotes:

>Part of what’s frustrating to moderates right now is that the drama over the Insurgent Left has managed to largely erase the existence of the Progressive Establishment, creating a sense that party leadership, incumbent officeholders, and the Democratic Party status quo are all aligned around moderation.

>....The surprisingly sweeping nature of the Biden policy agenda reflected the circumstances of the pandemic and the ideas of the Progressive Establishment. The agenda came from the progressive think tanks and the progressive advocacy infrastructure and was driven by the insertion into key roles of personnel who believed that being responsive to progressive advocacy infrastructure was the most important thing.

>It’s not, of course, that the Progressive Establishment got its way on every single issue. But I do think that with Biden’s domestic policy, the question was always whether ideas emanating from the Progressive Establishment would be adopted.

>The Biden administration undertook no significant moderate or reformist initiatives of any kind. There was no equivalent to Bill Clinton’s welfare reform or Barack Obama’s push for performance pay for K-12 teachers.

>The Progressive Establishment, to be fair, did the work. They did the organizing, built the media infrastructure, persuaded elites, and basically called the tune. It’s embarrassing for them that it didn’t work well, but objective observers of the scene should acknowledge that this is what happened. The Insurgent Left augurs a new approach to Israel, involves running some perhaps-unwise electoral risks (there’s way more downside to Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan than to less-edgy Peggy Flanagan in bluer Minnesota), and threatens to make life uncomfortable for incumbents. But it’s an insurgency against a set of party leaders who already embraced the bulk of the progressive agenda in large part because (except on Israel) the donors party leaders listen to are very progressive.

>Conversely, I think moderates are excessively focused on complaining about the insurgents.

>It’s true that as a matter of causation, a big reason that Democrats have moved so far left over the past 10 or 15 years is the activity of the Insurgent Left. But in terms of what specifically is happening, the story is that party leaders keep ceding more and more decision-making to the Progressive Establishment, not that insurgents have won all the primaries and taken over. If people who want Democrats to be more willing to say “no” to the groups want to win the argument, we need to make the right argument. The Progressive Establishment dominates the legislatures of almost every blue state. Someone like Abigail Spanberger who’s trying to chart a prudent course for Virginia and keeps clashing with progressives in the legislature as a result isn’t battling with a small band of insurgent leftists; she’s dealing with mainstream progressive advocacy infrastructure.

The sociology of the Israeli right is truly fascinating and I think if we delve deeper into it we will understand that it is not a homogeneous group. There are many factions there, each resembling a different political movement.

In terms of ideology, Netanyahu and his associates are like Nixon, Trump and Berlusconi. Basically, a tough realist and national capitalist and not a far-right, but with a hatred of the media and the old order, a sense of persecution, personal politics and a desire to control the centers of power and shape the country in the image of his personality cult. For secular/traditional nationalism with religious symbolism as a tool against liberal opponents.

Ben Gvir's movement is Mussolini's movement. Fascist anarchism. Classic fascism, very shallow nationalism and based on the periphery, street thugs and aggressive activity. This is also the largest group.

The Smotrichs and the Religious Nationalists are religious fundamentalists like the Ayatollahs.

On the other hand, there is the Anglo-elitist religious Zionism, which is very reminiscent of the 2025 Project. Kohelet Forum members, jurists and libertarian ideologues who want profound constitutional and institutional change and see the old elites as opposed to the Jewish state and a takeover of the centers of power and their fundamental change.

Within the Bibiists there are many groups: the corrupt, the power-seekers and the opportunists, who pollute the centers of power for personal power and jobs. The old-school Bibiists who live on the deprivation of the Mizrahi community, for whom Bibi is the king of Israel, and who are still interested in taking revenge on the liberal establishment for what their parents went through.

There are more ideological groups, such as Yair Netanyahu's right, which is very reminiscent of the American Rockbridge network: a non-religious, but very nationalistic right, uses religion as a symbolic tool, and has an independent historical narrative that sees itself as a current target of the 'deep state's' persecution of the revisionists and despises Begin for not firing officials and taking over the centers of power. These are people with an ideology similar to that of Peter Thiel, Chris Buskirk, Blake Masters, and the rest of the Trumpian elitist right: these are people who value technology, entrepreneurship, state power, the army, the defense industry, private capital, and a strong state, but reject liberalism. They are in favor of establishing a unified executive branch that controls all authorities, a basic free market but one that serves the right and punishes the traitorous liberals, and in favor of a model of the right taking over the Israeli public and establishing a new oligarchy. They flirt with Kahane in their suspicion of Arabs, believe in treason conspiracies, etc.

There are right-wingers who hated the High Court long before Netanyahu's trial and accused the court for the illegal immigrants crisis of Southern Tel Aviv. They don't necessarily support Netanyahu, but they started supporting him as a symbol of persecution. "I can't stand Netanyahu, but if the choice is between Netanyahu and the High Court - I'm with Netanyahu" style.

There are many more subgroups, but don't treat the Bibi camp as a homogeneous group

Submission statement: The article describes Abdul El-Sayed’s efforts to win over Black voters in Detroit and Wayne County. El-Sayed’s campaign is working to educate voters about his positions and experiences, particularly regarding his work in the community. The article also highlights the importance of political education and engagement in the Democratic Party.