New York City has long been celebrated as a city of immigrant neighborhoods. Little Italy, Chinatown, Harlem, Washington Heights, Brighton Beach—these communities tell the story of generations of newcomers who helped build America’s largest city while gradually becoming part of it.  That history makes one omission from Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s recently released map of immigrant communities particularly striking.  Little Italy wasn’t there.  Instead, the map highlighted a series of neighborhoods identified as “Little Pakistan,” “Little Senegal,” “Little Yemen,” and even “Little Palestine.” City Hall defended the project by saying it was never intended to identify religious enclaves but rather neighborhoods with substantial foreign-born populations from around the world.  That explanation raises an obvious question: If the goal was to recognize immigrant communities, how does one leave out perhaps the most iconic immigrant neighborhood in New York City?  Little Italy is more than a tourist destination. It represents one of the defining chapters in the city’s history—a reminder of the millions of Italian immigrants who arrived in America, endured discrimination, built businesses, and eventually became woven into the fabric of American life. Omitting it while highlighting far newer and, in some cases, unofficial neighborhood designations sends a message, whether intended or not, about which immigrant stories deserve recognition.  The omission also fits a broader pattern.  During the protests of 2020, Mamdani posted a photograph of himself making an obscene gesture toward a statue of Christopher Columbus, accompanied by the caption, “Take it down.” Columbus has become a lightning rod in America’s culture wars, but for many Italian Americans, his monuments represent more than one historical figure. They symbolize a community that fought for acceptance in a country where Italians were once treated as outsiders.  Seen through that lens, leaving Little Italy off the map appears less like an oversight than another step in distancing the city from parts of its own heritage.  Questions about Mamdani’s priorities extend beyond symbolism.  According to reporting by City Journal, New York City’s Office for International Affairs recently scheduled a meeting between Commissioner Ana Maria Archila and Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations. The meeting was reportedly canceled after intervention from higher authorities, and the State Department reminded city officials that foreign policy is conducted by the federal government, not municipal governments.  The same reporting also alleged that staff within the mayor’s international affairs office were instructed to “prioritize diplomatic engagement” with governments viewed as politically aligned with the administration. Among the examples cited were efforts to engage officials connected to Iran and Colombian President Gustavo Petro, as well as participation in conferences hosted by the Party of European Socialists.  Whether one agrees with those priorities or not, they raise legitimate questions about the role a city government should play on the international stage. New York has every reason to maintain relationships with foreign governments and international institutions, particularly as host to the United Nations. But conducting diplomacy based primarily on ideological affinity rather than municipal interests risks blurring the line between city governance and foreign policy.  Supporters dismiss these concerns by arguing that a mayor’s authority is limited. They contend that campaign rhetoric often exceeds what any municipal executive can realistically accomplish.  History, however, offers plenty of examples of political leaders using local offices to reshape institutions, influence public culture, and redirect investment long before they gain broader power.  Indeed, some investors have already expressed concern about New York’s political direction. If businesses and property owners begin viewing the city as increasingly hostile to investment or economic growth, those perceptions alone can influence where capital flows.  Ultimately, the controversy over Little Italy is not simply about a map. It reflects competing visions of what New York represents.  One vision sees the city as the culmination of generations of immigrants who arrived from around the world and gradually forged a common American identity. The other places greater emphasis on preserving distinct identities and highlighting newer communities while giving less attention to older ones that have largely assimilated.  A map tells a story about what matters, what deserves recognition, and what belongs in a city’s collective memory. When one of New York’s most historic immigrant neighborhoods disappears from that story, people are right to ask why.   Whether intentional or accidental, erasing Little Italy from the city’s official narrative risks erasing part of New York’s own history. And if history is any guide, today’s symbolic omissions often foreshadow tomorrow’s political priorities. COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal. 

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani told ABC’s Jonathan Karl last month that a democratic socialist can win any office in the country. He may be right about the contemporary politics, but he is dead wrong about the underlying economics, and Colonial America proved it four centuries before he took the oath of office. The issue stems from a fundamental question: What makes people act in someone else’s interest instead of their own? The answer, every time, is incentive. Tie a person’s effort to their reward and they produce. Sever that link and they stop trying, no matter how godly or how disciplined the group is. The Pilgrims proved that before they proved anything else about religious liberty, and they proved it the hard way. Plymouth Colony launched in 1620 under a communal labor arrangement forced on the settlers by their London investors. Everyone worked the common fields. Everyone drew from the common store, regardless of how much they had contributed to it. Gov. William Bradford, who lived through it and buried half the colony after that first brutal winter, later wrote that the “common course and condition” bred “much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort.” Young, able-bodied men resented working for other families without any personal payoff. Wives ordered to cook and clean for households outside their own considered it something close to servitude. Bradford, a devout man who had every reason to want communal Christian charity to succeed, concluded that the arrangement did not fail because the colonists were wicked. It failed because it asked fallen human beings to behave like angels, and none qualified. Jamestown ran the same experiment 13 years earlier with the same result, only worse. The Virginia Company set up collective farming so the London shareholders could claim a share of everything produced. Colonists who had every reason to plant, hunt, and build instead let the fort rot and, according to contemporary accounts, spent their days bowling in the street while stores dwindled. Roughly 80% of the population died in what history remembers as “the Starving Time.” Gov. Thomas Dale arrived in 1611, looked at the wreckage, and did the one thing the shareholders had not authorized: he handed every man three acres of his own ground to farm for himself. Colonists began “gathering and reaping the fruits of their labors with much joy and comfort,” in John Rolfe’s words, and the colony that had nearly died of collectivism started feeding itself within a season. Plymouth learned the same lesson two years later. Bradford assigned each family its own plot instead of a shared field, and the shift, in his account, made all hands industrious enough that the harvest that followed became the first Thanksgiving. Two colonies, two governors, two independent experiments in common ownership, and identical outcomes. Neither Bradford nor Dale had read Adam Smith, who would not publish “The Wealth of Nations” for another century and a half. They didn’t need the theory. They had the corpses. That is the inconvenient history sitting behind every modern promise that this time collective control of housing, health care, or wages will work out differently. It has been tried on this continent longer than the United States has existed, and it has produced the same failure that the 20th century confirmed at industrial scale in the Soviet Union and Maoist China. And that’s not even mentioning contemporary Venezuela or Cuba, a country sitting atop the world’s largest oil reserves that still cannot keep grocery shelves stocked. Thomas Sowell spent a career making the point plainer than I can: incentives, not intentions, determine outcomes. A system can be staffed entirely by sincere, hardworking people and still collapse if it severs the link between what a person produces and what a person keeps. I see a version of this same failure mode in my work as an expert witness on fiduciary duty, albeit on a much smaller scale. When a trustee or an investment committee loses sight of whose money they are actually managing, performance sags long before anyone commits outright fraud. The discipline evaporates first, then the returns follow. Plymouth and Jamestown were, in effect, two colony-sized trusts with no beneficiary accountable for the outcome. Everyone was a shareholder in the harvest, and no one was responsible for growing it. That is not a design flaw you can legislate around. None of that means Americans owe each other nothing. The Plymouth colonists still hunted, fished, defended the settlement, and worshipped together after they abandoned the common course of labor. I am not arguing that cooperation and charity are not real or important. The argument is narrower, and it is the one Mamdani’s supporters keep skipping past: Producing wealth at scale requires private ownership and the freedom to keep what you build, while distributing wealth once produced can be a matter of family, community, or voluntary generosity. Collapse those two categories into one government-run system and you get Plymouth’s first winter, not its eventual harvest. Mamdani frames his politics as pragmatic delivery rather than ideology, telling Karl he was not interested in reading or writing a manifesto, only in results. Fair enough. Let’s judge by results. His own city has already forced him to walk back a campaign promise to expand rental vouchers because the fiscal math didn’t survive contact with a shrinking tax base and businesses voting with their feet. That is an example of the same math that broke down at Jamestown and Plymouth, running at a scale those two governors never had to manage. I coached hurdlers, and I told every kid the same thing before a race: Nobody clears a barrier by pretending it isn’t there. The barrier here is human nature, and it has never once moved for a new slogan. William Bradford figured that out with a spade in a frozen field in 1623. New York is about to relearn it with a budget. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

When corporate governance experts speak about “red flags,” they are typically referring to information signaling a problem at a corporation that warrants additional oversight. As a related law firm memo on Delaware law notes: “The duty of oversight requires directors to … take action to address red flags that indicate potential corporate wrongdoing.” As a principal at the Free Enterprise Initiative, which is part of The Heritage Foundation, I routinely come across corporations with numerous red flags. While we generally try to engage constructively with such corporations directly—and have had numerous successes on that front (see, e.g., here and here)—every so often we encounter a corporation that appears utterly disinterested in fully informing itself about the issues we bring to the table. When that is the case, we may pivot from private off-season engagement and preliminary shareholder proposal discussions to more direct actions to protect shareholder value, including publicizing our concerns and in certain cases even pursuing legal action. This column introduces a planned series of “Red Flag Case Studies,” which will highlight specific corporations that appear to be turning a willfully blind eye to certain risks to shareholder value and the well-being of other relevant stakeholders. What are some of the red flags we focus on? Certainly, stock price performance matters a great deal because, among other things, it can alert shareholders and others to a corporation that is in the process of embodying “go woke, go broke.” For example, as of July 9, 2026, Disney has apparently underperformed the S&P 500 the past five years, three years, year, and year-to-date, to the tune of roughly 115 percentage points combined. (On the other hand, it is important to note that outperforming an index like the S&P 500 doesn’t necessarily guarantee all is well because a corporation could still be leaving profit on the table pursuing non-pecuniary and politicized agendas.) Another source of “red flag” information we rely on is the 1792 Exchange’s Corporate Bias Ratings and Board Bias Report. In the case of Disney, we get a “high risk” rating, including for concerns related to the promotion of radical gender ideology as well as wasteful and destructive climate commitments. We also find that Disney’s leadership has apparently given three times more to the causes of Democrats than the causes of Republicans, adding to the specter of echo-chamber governance and a lack of viewpoint diversity. Another source we consider is Alliance Defending Freedom’s Viewpoint Diversity Score Business Index. While Disney is not rated on that index, we can contrast the absence of any ADF score with Disney’s fulsome embrace of the Human Rights Campaign and its Corporate Equality Index. That alone can constitute a red flag (see here), but if that’s paired with a failure to respond to ADF’s survey, we start having concerns about anti-Christian and other forms of bias. Finally, there will often be company-specific items constituting independent red flags, such as Disney having received a letter last year from Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr raising concerns about Disney allegedly having “embedded explicit race- and gender-based criteria across its operations” in recent years. The foregoing is only a partial list of potential sources of red flags implicating corporate governance failures at specific corporations, but it hopefully gives the reader a general sense of some of the issues we pay attention to at the Free Enterprise Initiative. Ultimately, our goal is to help corporations maximize the prosperity-generating power of free market capitalism for their shareholders and other stakeholders. Ideally, we do that via fruitful win-win engagement whereby we provide useful perspectives to corporate decision-makers while at the same time getting a better understanding of what is driving their decision-making. Some may argue that we should just mind our own business, but there is a reason why almost every corporation touts its shareholder engagement. Shareholders are the ultimate owners of the corporation and can provide unique insights—particularly when that shareholder is The Heritage Foundation and the corporation might have a blind spot when it comes to the views of the half of its potential customer base that Heritage can provide insight into.

As America begins its next 250 years, conservatives face a challenge that cannot be solved by winning the upcoming election cycle alone. We must win the next generation. For decades, conservatives have rightly fought to reduce taxes, restrain government, protect constitutional liberties, and defend free markets. Those battles remain essential. But they will ultimately prove unsustainable if young Americans no longer understand why these principles matter in the first place. Principles do not sustain themselves. Every generation must be taught the moral, economic, and civic foundations of freedom. If that education fails, liberty itself eventually fades away. The warning signs are already impossible to ignore. A new Wall Street Journal-NORC poll published July 8 found that confidence in both capitalism and democracy has eroded dramatically. Fewer than half of Americans now believe capitalism is working well, down from 60% a decade ago. More than half say democracy is functioning poorly or not at all, and just 35% said that patriotism is very important to them personally, down from more than 60% in 2019. Equally troubling are the findings from a recent Cato Institute survey, which revealed that an astonishing 46% of Americans do not know what the nation’s 250th birthday commemorates. Among Generation Z, 61% could not identify the adoption of the Declaration of Independence as the event being celebrated. Majorities could not explain the purpose of the Constitution, why the colonies declared independence, or even which branch of government has the final say on constitutional disputes. Perhaps most disturbing of all, the survey found that Gen Z views socialism more favorably than capitalism by a margin of 53% to 45%, while more than one-third express a favorable opinion of communism. As troubling as these figures are, the truth is that none of this should surprise us. For years, America’s educational establishment has devoted far more energy to teaching students what is supposedly wrong with their country than what made it exceptional. Many young Americans can recite a lengthy catalogue of what they view as the country’s historical injustices. Far fewer can explain why millions risked everything to come here, how free enterprise lifted hundreds of millions around the globe out of poverty, or why constitutional checks and balances have preserved liberty longer than almost any other system of government in history. The result is a generation that often takes freedom for granted because it has never been taught how rare freedom actually is. Capitalism is not perfect. No system created by human beings ever will be. But compared with every serious alternative, free enterprise has produced unparalleled prosperity, innovation, and opportunity. It rewards creativity, encourages personal responsibility, and gives ordinary citizens the ability to improve their lives through talent and hard work. Yet free enterprise is only one pillar of the American experiment. The other is our democracy, which has protected individual liberty and restrained the power of government for two and a half centuries. It depends upon civic virtue, respect for the rule of law, independent institutions, and citizens willing to place the common good above immediate self-interest. Without those habits, democratic institutions become little more than empty shells. The Founding Fathers understood this well. In an Oct. 11, 1798, letter to the Massachusetts Militia, John Adams famously observed that the Constitution was made “only for a moral and religious people” and was “wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” That insight remains just as relevant today. Citizens who do not understand their rights will struggle to defend them. Those who do not appreciate economic liberty will become increasingly willing to surrender it. And those who lose confidence in the American experiment will be more easily drawn to promises that government can solve every problem by assuming ever more control. But complaining about these trends is not enough. Conservatives need to invest far more heavily in civic education, youth leadership programs, entrepreneurship initiatives, constitutional literacy, and the teaching of American history in a way that acknowledges the nation’s mistakes without diminishing its greatness. Students need to understand not only socialism’s repeated failures, but why it has failed wherever it has been tried. They should understand how markets create wealth, why limited government protects liberty, and why personal responsibility remains indispensable to a free society. Parents, religious institutions, civic organizations, businesses, and philanthropists all have important roles to play. The task cannot be left solely to public schools, many of which have demonstrated little interest in presenting America’s founding ideals in a positive light. The good news is that the public is ready. The Cato survey found that Americans overwhelmingly want children to learn that freedom is rare and must be protected, that patriotism means loyalty to America’s principles rather than to any political party, and that the nation’s history includes serious failings as well as extraordinary accomplishments. America’s 250th anniversary year, therefore, should not simply be an occasion for fireworks and parades. It should be the beginning of a renewed national effort to ensure that the next generation understands why this republic was created, how it has endured, and what each citizen must do to maintain it. For a generation that does not understand liberty cannot be expected to preserve it. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

When it comes to Virginia’s economy, the glass may be half full, or it may be half empty. First, some bad news: In the year that ended May 31, Virginia lost 51,400 jobs. That is the most jobs lost by any state. A good share of those jobs, about 40%, were caused by federal government cutbacks. The Department of Government Efficiency has shut down, but it continues to bite in the commonwealth. However, “even if Virginia didn’t lose any federal jobs, it would still lead the nation in job losses, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics,” as Dwayne Yancey notes at Cardinal News. “Virginia has actually lost more jobs (22,600 or 43.9% of the total) from professional, scientific and technical service jobs; a lot of federal contractors fit under that category. Virginia has lost jobs in most other categories, too.” To make matters worse, Virginia is losing manufacturing jobs at a faster rate than any other state. Part of the problem is that several 20th-century-era factories have shuttered in the last year, such as the Goodyear plant in Danville and the Yokohama plant in Salem. Meanwhile, many of the forward-facing manufacturing projects that have been announced, especially energy plants and pharmaceutical plants, will take years to construct and open. The proposed fusion plant in Chesterfield could be a game changer for energy and employment, but it’s also possible that the fusion technology might never work, which would make the whole proposal a washout. The commonwealth wants to provide the manufacturing jobs of the future, making rockets and zero-carbon electricity rather than providing coal and lumber to other states. But that future is always uncertain until it arrives, and the transition was always going to be rocky. There is also good news. In the fiscal year that ended June 30, the commonwealth racked up a budget surplus of $936 million. General fund revenues last year jumped by 6.7%, more than $2 billion. More than $500 million of that surplus will be incorporated into the 2027 budget. In addition, Virginia jumped a slot and now ranks third in CNBC’s annual listing of “America’s Top States for Business.” Virginia had ranked No. 1 in CNBC’s 2024 report when it notched its third victory in five years. The commonwealth dipped to No. 4 in 2025. For this year, CNBC cited the state’s infrastructure (second in the nation) and education policies (fifth in the nation) as major factors in its move back up the rankings. CNBC changes its methodology every year, which can change its rankings. Looking ahead, economists at the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service projected that Virginia will lose jobs this year. However, they forecast that the state may turn the corner and start to gain jobs again in 2027. In testimony to the state Senate this spring, Secretary of Finance Mark Sickles warned that “while Fiscal Year 2026 looks good for revenues, macroeconomic trends indicate there may be storm clouds on the horizon.” So, Virginia’s glass is filling or emptying, depending on how you prefer to look at it.