“Scroll less and live best” is the catchy message of the new 43-page report “Surgeon General’s Warning on the Harms of Screen Use.” The implicit message that spending hours doomscrolling is not the best way to live is practically common sense, yet easier said than done. Published in May, the advisory enumerates a litany of statistics linking excessive screen use to poor developmental, mental and physical health, and educational outcomes in children and teens. The document is more than just a warning. It also provides common-sense recommendations in the form of “the 5 Ds” (discuss, do, delay, divert, and disconnect) to help families navigate their children’s healthy use of screens. If the impact of previous surgeon general reports is any precedent, the new advisory could reshape common norms and practices of American households. The “Surgeon General’s Warning on the Harms of Screen Use” joins a long list of influential surgeon general reports, including one that transformed American health over 60 years ago: the “Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking and Health.” The 1964 report linked cigarette smoking to lung cancer and other poor health outcomes, launching one of the most important public health campaigns. Since then, cigarette smoking rates have fallen 73% among U.S. adults, avoiding an estimated 8 million American premature deaths. Given that 97% of Americans own a smartphone and 81% of parents and 57% of children spend between four and 12 hours a day online, the latest surgeon general’s report could transform Americans’ relationship to their screens if they heed its advice. Like the 2023 advisory on social media and youth mental health, the advisory on screens is less revelatory as it is confirmative and timely. Summer months for families means kids are at home with more free time: the perfect time to create a family media plan or even go on a digital detox. For parents who are unbothered by their children’s screentime, consider this statistic from the report: “By adolescence, children may spend more time on screens than sleeping or attending school.” The report’s emphasis on the role of families and responsibilities parents have in shaping practices in their home is noteworthy. The advisory urges families to “be present in the moment,” “connect with children without a distraction,” and “delay screen time for as long as possible.” The report encourages parents to model healthy screen habits themselves, treating families not only as regulators of children’s digital practices, but also as their primary guides to developing healthy technology habits. This recognition is critical. Acknowledging the household’s role in shaping digital citizenship is vital to developing holistic, family-centered policies. Policies regarding children’s technology use should reflect an existential truth: technology should be shaped to serve the home; the home should not be shaped to serve technology. Parents hoping to form a well-ordered household can look at the advisory’s suggestions as a basic starting point to achieve that vision. While the advisory does not implement policy or regulations, its data-driven safeguards and practices rightly center on the institution which most impacts children—the family.   However, it’s not fair for parents to bear the brunt of this fight. In addition to families, the report provides recommendations to schools, health providers, researchers, policymakers, and technology companies. Without proper guardrails, tech companies will continue to exploit people’s fallible ways, monopolize attention, and influence the minds of children, all of which serves technology over humans. The surgeon general’s warning does not condemn all technology digital screen time. It recognizes that connecting with friends and family members, researching interests, and learning new skills and hobbies are joyful experiences—ones that serve humans. But it also fundamentally acknowledges that living real life means disconnecting from screens. In other words, “scroll less, live best.”

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal. There’s been a lot of news lately about the university’s higher education crisis, and universities are now competing for students rather than students competing with each other to get into universities.   Maybe the elite universities still, because of their brand name, although they’ve suffered a great deal and their admissions reflect that and their applications are down, they’ll always make it—the seven or eight so-called top tier.  But most four-year colleges and universities are in a bad strait. And why is that?  First of all, it’s demography. During the 1960s, the fertility rate reached, in 1960, about 3.6 children per family. It’s recovered a little bit the last three years, but it’s 1.7. So, the cohort of 17-, 18-, and 19-year-olds is less than half.  So, they are competing for a much smaller pool of young people.  The second thing that’s really turned people off is that tuition has increased, over the last 50 years, three times more than the annual rate of inflation.   Now, why is that?  Mostly it is because of administrative bloat.   Where I work, at Stanford University, The Wall Street Journal recently suggested that if you count graduate and undergraduate students at Stanford, and you count administrators and their staff, there is roughly one administrator or staffer for every student.  This is because the university became in loco parentis. It said, “I am a parent, and I’m going to monitor the 360-degree, 24/7 life of a student. If he’s not happy, we’re gonna deal with it. If somebody accuses you of sexual harassment, we’re gonna deal with it. We’re gonna deal with everything, and we’re going to try to be political.  “Our job is not disinterested, inductive education. It is to turn out left-wing people who can offer an antithesis to the family, nuclear family, the community, religion, etc. We believe society is biased with corporations and family and religion, and we’re gonna offer an antithesis. That turned off people, believe me.  Professors themselves are unique in American life. Nobody else has the same conditions of employment. After six years, they get tenure. Outside the exclusive schools, it’s almost automatic. Where I worked at the [California State University], I think 90% of assistant professors got tenure.  Release time is very common now. You can say, “I want to be a part-time administrator,” or “I am tutoring,” or “I have a special project,” and you can get a reduced teaching load.  Remember that the teaching load has gone way down. In most colleges, it’s between two and four courses a year. A year.  Maybe not at the CSU, but even CSU has gone down on many campuses. That’s the California State University system, the largest in the world. It has gone from four classes to three classes a semester.  And part of the way that they finesse that was when you increase the administrative budget and you increase release time for full-time faculty and decrease teaching, you hire part-time, temporary lecturers, and you exploit them.  You pay them about 40% per class of what you would pay a full or associate professor. You don’t really give them the same type of benefits. And at some universities, the percentage of courses that are taught by part-time, exploited lecturers is getting up to 40% and even 45%.  Another thing that turned the public off about these universities: They grant-gouge.  We’re starting to learn that, say, on NIH grants, many of these universities were charging not 10% or 15% commission, but 40% and even higher.  In other words, if a professor got a million-dollar grant from the federal government, a university would step in and say, “Well, you’re using your office or your phone or your lab, so we want 40% of it.”  And they use that because the whole system is financially unsound. Financially unsound.  Largely because, again, of administrative bloat and the creation of centers and programs that have nothing to do with education but form a huge overhead.  Another thing that got people very worried is another way they financed this debt, expanded their administrators, and cut back on teaching: They brought in over a million foreign students.  And unlike American students, there are no scholarships. There are no discounts. Foreign students pay the premium, if not a little bit higher tuition.  Now, the problem with that is when you bring in 300,000 students from China or over 200,000 from the illiberal Middle East, and when you look at the origin of most of these students, they are from autocratic and illiberal places in Africa, Asia, and the Western Hemisphere, particularly the Middle East and China.  Then you start to politicize the student body, and you can see what happened after Oct. 7.  We had enormous demonstrations, often led by foreign students, chanting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” That’s essentially code for destroying the state of Israel.  And we had violent demonstrations often led by people from the Middle East.  And, of course, the FBI suggests that 1% to 5% of Chinese students are actively engaged in espionage.  The public knows this, and they’re not fond of that idea—that sometimes their children don’t get into school because the universities are letting in foreign students because they pay a premium.  DEI did damage—diversity, equity, inclusion.  The idea that the universities, despite state referenda and Supreme Court decisions and the Civil Rights Act, were deliberately, consciously, insidiously using race as a barometer to admit people, to hire people, to retain people, and to promote people on the basis of their superficial appearance, their sexual orientation, or their gender.  It was entirely anti-meritocratic. It was like the Soviet commissar system. It was like the McCarthy period.  If you wanted to get a job at a university, you had to fill out, in most cases, a diversity statement.  And believe me, if you wrote on that diversity statement, “Honestly, I believe that DEI is anti-meritocratic,” you were not going to be hired.  There’s another reason that these universities are in crisis.  The federal government came in and guaranteed student loans.  Once they did that, the universities jacked up the rate of tuition, as I said, three times higher on an annual basis than the inflation rate.  So the government came in and said, “You guys can loan students money, and we will back it up, so they will pay you back with federally guaranteed dollars.”  And we know now that there’s a 30% to 35% non-compliance rate, that people are either late or have defaulted.  And so, when you have $1.7 trillion in debt and you see that the debt is increasing because the students are not graduating in four years—the average graduation now is six years.  About 30% to 40% of people who enter college do not ever graduate.  But the whole thing is subsidized by loans from banks that are guaranteed by the federal government, and that gave a green light for universities to offer these crazy courses that nobody wants—peace studies, race studies, Black studies, environmental studies, etc., studies—because the students took them and the government paid for them.  And nobody worried about whether they graduated or whether employers found a well-educated and empirical product coming out with a B.A.  Finally, we’re short a couple million plumbers, electricians, blue-collar carpenters, sheet rockers, and roofers.  These are very important to the economy of the United States.  But when these universities said, “Come to us, and maybe even if you don’t graduate—40% of you—or if those who do average six years, and even though you’re gonna run up a big debt, you can take psych and sociology. It’s a good time to kind of float around, live in your basement, and have a good time in your 20s.”  But the economy answered back: We’re wasting kids’ formative years in their 20s.  We need master electricians. We need oil workers. We need skilled carpenters.  And the irony is that if you graduate with a bachelor’s degree in psychology or sociology versus being a master electrician at the age of 22, the electrician these days is going to be making $100,000-plus, and the sociology B.A., or the person with two or three years of psychology, is either going to be unemployed or not using that education at all in employment.  Or, if he is hired, he will be making half of what the electrician or the roofer or the carpenter makes.  Add it all up, and the universities are in bad shape, and they’re in desperate need of coerced reform because they will not reform on their own.  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.   

Though Jay Clayton did not get to appear for his confirmation hearing this week, former Arizona television news anchor Kari Lake did. Thursday, she testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, standing her ground as Democrats demanded she apologize. President Donald Trump canceled Clayton’s Senate intelligence hearing to be confirmed as director of national intelligence. This heightened both GOP infighting and contention with Trump over the expired Foreign Intelligence Security Act Section 702. With a contentious week of hearing cancellations, Lake went on, but not without a political showdown. Virginia Democrat Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., called out Lake for comments she made about Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., and demanded she apologize. My father walked out on my family when I was a kid. My mother raised us. I made my own way, joined the Marines, and built a life he had no part in. There are thousands of American boys doing the same thing right now, growing up determined to be better men than the fathers who… pic.twitter.com/I4OIhJXrBg— Senator Ruben Gallego (@SenRubenGallego) June 18, 2026 Lake ran against and lost to Gallego in the 2024 Arizona U.S. Senate race. During the campaign, Lake claimed Gallego was “controlled by the cartels.” She went on to say, “His own father was a Colombian drug trafficker, and so he’s got links to the cartel.” Gallego’s father was from Mexico, not Colombia. In his 2021 memoir, Gallego wrote that his father was arrested for possessing cocaine and marijuana with the intent to distribute. Law enforcement was never able to link Gallego to any cartel. Kaine attempted to force Lake to apologize to his colleague, bringing up Gallego’s “traumatic” childhood and abandonment by his father, which the Arizona senator wrote about in his memoir. “I don’t believe my charge was wrong,” Lake said in response. WATCH: Trump nominee Kari Lake refuses to apologize for suggesting during the 2024 Senate race in Arizona that Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), then her opponent, was controlled by drug cartels."I don't believe my charge was wrong." pic.twitter.com/dYjKTI2Di0— Off The Press (@OffThePress1) June 18, 2026 Lake lost the election by less than 2.5% of the vote. She now serves as senior adviser to the United States Agency for Global Media. In May, Trump nominated Lake to serve as ambassador to Jamaica, an independent island country that Lake said she has traveled to “too many times to count.” Lake highlighted was the strength of Christianity in the country, noting Jamaica has more churches per square mile than anywhere else in the world. She said she has numerous priorities for her ambassadorship: keep traveling Americans safe, rebuild from hurricanes, strengthen security, protect the country from transnational criminal organizations, and stop financial scams. Other goals Lake mentioned include reducing trade barriers, advancing American interests, and countering China’s economic influence.

Los Angeles voters are set to decide whether noncitizens should have a say in city elections after the City Council on Wednesday voted 10-5 to place a controversial voting measure on the Nov. 3 ballot. If passed, the city would have the legal authority to create a program allowing certain noncitizens to vote in Los Angeles municipal and LAUSD elections. The proposal would not allow noncitizens to vote in federal elections. However, many questions remain about how the system would work, and how officials would ensure participants receive ballots only for elections in which they are permitted to vote. According to LA City Councilman Hugo Soto-Martínez, who introduced the proposal in April, eligibility would be limited to residents with some form of legal status. This would include Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients, green card holders, and individuals with temporary protected status. Supporters of the measure argue it would give long-term residents a voice in local decisions that affect their families and communities. “People have spent many years here, and in many cases, decades, contributing to the city of Los Angeles,” Soto-Martínez said during the council debate. “This is about local representation and local democracy.” He later added, “We say L.A. is for everyone, and that means no exceptions.” Opponents, however, argue that voting should remain tied to citizenship, and that letting noncitizens vote could harm public confidence in elections. Councilman John Lee warned that changes to voting eligibility should be approached with caution. “Election laws are different from ordinary policy decisions,” he said. “They establish rules under which elected officials are chosen and held accountable, and because of that, changes to voting eligibility should be approached with the utmost public trust and legitimacy.” Others, including Ira Mehlman, spokesperson for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, are concerned about the potential devaluing of citizenship. “Citizenship does mean something. It means you are a fully participating member of society,” he said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. “It doesn’t seem unreasonable to say you’ve got to do some time here and demonstrate that you’re somebody that we want as a citizen.” Many questions remain about how such a law would be carried out. Los Angeles relies on Los Angeles County to administer elections, and city officials have yet to explain how noncitizen voters would be registered, what documentation would be required to prove eligibility, or how separate voter rolls would be maintained. Questions also have been raised about how election officials would ensure participants receive ballots for races they are legally allowed to vote in, while preventing them from receiving ballots for state and federal contests. California law currently requires citizenship in order to register to vote. But multiple cities in the Golden State have implemented similar policies, including San Francisco in 2016, and Oakland in 2022, both of which allow noncitizens to vote in school board elections. If approved on Nov. 3, city officials would begin the process of determining who qualifies, how the program would be administered, and whether it can withstand potential legal challenges.

A Florida law disqualifying 18- to 20-year-olds from legal concealed carry violated the Second Amendment, a Florida appeals court ruled Wednesday. “Eighteen- to 20-year-olds can defend the country without restriction but can only utilize their Second Amendment right to self-defense with severe restrictions,” the three-judge panel stated in their opinion. Police arrested 18-year-old Jaylen Tyrus Eubanks in 2024 for carrying a concealed firearm in violation of Florida law that restricts licensing provisions of concealed carry to eligible United States citizens 21 years or older. A trial court denied Eubanks’ motion to dismiss the lawsuit, ruling that “licensing provisions for concealed carry are designed to ensure that only law abiding, responsible citizens are permitted to carry concealed firearms.” Eubanks pleaded nolo contendere and appealed the court’s decision to deny dismissal, which was addressed by the Florida Fourth District Court of Appeal. The state attorney’s office argued against the motion to dismiss, claiming there was “nothing inherently unconstitutional about requiring a person to qualify for a permit to carry a concealed firearm or carefully restricting a few citizens from carrying a concealed firearm because of a concern for the public safety.” The state attorney’s office also claimed that the Founders defined adulthood as beginning at 21, not 18, and that 18-to-20-year-olds commit a disproportionate amount of firearm violence. The appellate court acknowledged the Founders’ understanding of adulthood. However, the judges argued that courts should not restrict the understanding of “adults” to the Founders’ interpretation. Similarly, the courts do not restrict the understanding of “arms” to muskets or flintlock pistols, which is how “arms” would have been understood at the founding. “The general understanding in our present world [is] that 18 is the age used to mark passage into adulthood,” the opinion reads. The court also addressed the state attorney’s claim that 18-year-olds’ ability to conceal carry causes a “concern for the public safety.” “No historical analogue presented would place 18- to 20-year-olds in the same category as felons, the mentally ill, or domestic violence offenders,” the judges stated. The judges also cited the Militia Act of 1792, which stated that “all able-bodied men” were required to enroll in the militia “upon turning 18.” Above these reasons, the court decided the ban clearly violated the Second Amendment. “In this case, the inability of law-abiding adults aged 18 to 20 to use concealed carry available to all law-abiding adults 21 and older would certainly classify as a hindrance and, as such, an infringement of their Second Amendment rights,” the panel stated. The court granted Eubanks’ motion to dismiss his conviction and declared the Florida rule unconstitutional. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed the law in April 2023 as part of an expansion of constitutional carry.