Pop star Britney Spears was charged in California on Thursday for driving under the influence of drugs and alcohol, the Associated Press reported. The 44-year-old faces a single misdemeanor count of driving under the combined influence of alcohol and at least one drug, authorities said. Police did not specify the type of drug she had taken. On March 4, the California Highway Patrol arrested Spears on suspicion of D.U.I. after officers observed her driving erratically and at a high rate of speed. Spears was the “solo occupant” of the vehicle and “showed signs of impairment and submitted to a series of field sobriety tests.” In April, Spears, at the urging of family and loved ones, voluntarily checked herself into a treatment center, according to NBC. “Whether or not Ms. Spears will appear at the hearing will be a decision made between her and her attorney,” the Ventura County District Attorney’s office said in a statement. “Since it is a misdemeanor charge, she is not required to attend, and her attorney can make the appearance for her.” Spears is set to be arraigned next Monday in Ventura County Superior Court.

Disneyland is cracking down on certain behaviors causing disruption in their theme park, which has some visitors crying foul. The biggest rule update causing an uproar is a cell phone policy nicknamed “Stow it, Don’t Show it” that would require guests to fully put away their phones when going on certain rides, including Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railroad and the Incredicoaster, as reported by the Disney-focused site Inside the Magic. Another item guests won’t be able to bring on the ride is heavy insulated tumblers. This rule is popularly known as “the Stanley ban,” referencing the popular brand-name cup. It was implemented as a reaction to an increase in “unplanned downtimes” for rides last year, per Fox News, which was all due to security incidents related to guest behavior. It all comes down to common sense. Phones and metal cups can become projectiles during high rates of speed on these and other rides, which poses a potential safety threat to riders. Cast members have been instructed to conduct visual checks and refuse to dispatch the ride if phones or cups are visible, the outlet noted. There will also reportedly be cast members searching bags before guests get in line for the rides, specifically looking for oversized cups. Natalie Katzka, director of attractions engineering services at Disneyland, spoke at a briefing on the updates. “Handheld filming is no longer permitted on these high-motion rides. … Phones must be fully secured in a bag or pocket before boarding,” Katzka confirmed. Disneyland will reportedly be providing cubbies and storage lockers for phones and other loose items. Beyond just posing a risk of flying through the air and hitting someone, Inside the Magic noted, phones and big cups could cause other problems. A dropped phone could trigger an “E-stop,” or emergency safety stop of the ride, while liquid from a spilled cup could mess with magnetic and electrical components of the ride and cause delays. These disruptions have larger repercussions across the park as staff would have to spend time addressing these issues and wait times for other park visitors would increase. While the changes make logical sense, some Reddit commenters are mad about the cell phone policy in particular because the app is required for ride access and payment throughout the park.  “Their entire ecosystem … requires you to use your phone for everything. This is laughable,” one Reddit user wrote. “Disney makes everything as app-based as possible … then complains about people being glued to their phones,” another commenter agreed.

If Michigan’s 2026 Democratic Senate primary were a Goldilocks story, there are three bowls: one too radical, one not radical enough, and one that’s just the right amount of radical for today’s Democrats. Her name is Mallory McMorrow, and her deleted tweets might be exactly insane enough for progressive Michiganders to hand her the nomination. McMorrow, a state Senator and Majority Whip, is locked in a three-way battle for the open seat being vacated by retiring Senator Gary Peters (D-MI). On her far left is Abdul El-Sayed, the former Wayne County health director and Bernie Sanders-backed leftist who has also scrubbed his social media history after championing “defund the police” rhetoric. On her right is Representative Haley Stevens, the establishment moderate, who was recently booed at the Michigan Democratic convention for being just that.  But McMorrow is in the hot seat: CNN’s KFile just exposed that she quietly deleted roughly 6,000 old tweets shortly after launching her campaign — posts where she lambasted the rural Midwest, lamented ever leaving California, and admitted she continued voting there after claiming a “permanent” move to Michigan. This is what Democrats all across the country are doing: running cover for their radicalism, pretending to be moderates on the campaign trail, then implementing policies that have the Founders rolling in their graves. Unfortunately for McMorrow, the internet lasts forever. Before purging her X account, she was posting gems like this: “I had a dream that the U.S. amicably broke off into The Ring (coasts + Can + Mex + parts Mich/Tex) and Middle America.” Fantasizing about a national divorce from Middle America. Charming. She also agreed with a tweet claiming it’s actually rural white working-class America that needs to “reach outside its comfort zone” — adding, “I’m from rural New Jersey, this rings 100%.” Ah, yes, that coastal-elite condescension. Classic, timeless, insufferable. After moving from California to Michigan, the complaining never stopped. April 2014: “Aaaand it’s snowing. Screw you, Michigan. #NYCtoLA.” Another post: “I don’t like you, Michigan.” I’ll give her one point of agreement: “At least ‘ugh, Michigan’ is a sentiment we can all get behind.” Precisely. Go Bucks. She can’t hide from her true feelings.  McMorrow is the radical wolf in moderate sheep’s clothing, just not quite as far gone as El-Sayed, who called cops “standing armies,” bragged about taking political opponents “to the mud and choke them out,” and still won’t disavow his pro-terrorist views. The party of empathy, ladies and gentlemen.  But she’s close. She’s praised “white privilege” seminars, compared Trump supporters to Nazis, and built a record as an extreme gun-control activist, abortion-on-demand advocate, child-mutilation enabler, and clean-energy socialist superstar. Yet she’ll pretend — just like Mikie Sherrill, Zohran Mamdani, and Abigail Spanberger — that she’s a moderate, campaigning on lofty non-statements like “Hate won’t win” and “New American Dream.” In reality, she’d be a nightmare. A McMorrow agenda would likely include more federal green-energy mandates that have already driven up Michigan electricity bills 6%; minimum wage hikes that studies show disproportionately kill entry-level jobs for teens, disabled workers, and black men without reducing poverty; extreme gun restrictions with negligible effects on crime; and support for youth gender interventions with documented long-term harms to fertility, bone density, and cognitive development. Policies like hers never work, only hurt, because they produce business flight, crime spikes, higher taxes, and top-down cultural mandates that deepen the very divisions she claims to oppose. The deeper sickness is that the radical Left isn’t just nibbling at the edges of the Democratic party, it’s devouring it from within. Michigan voters still have a shot at sanity if they rally behind Rep. Haley Stevens, who hasn’t fantasized about carving up the country. The RealClear Politics polling average has Stevens at 21%, tied with McMorrow and 2 points behind El-Sayed, with 35% still undecided — but she was booed off stage just last week. That final block will send a loud message: Is the Democratic Party finally rejecting its crazies, or will it hand the nomination to the online radical Left’s favorite wolf in sheep’s clothing? America works best with two sane parties that argue over policy within the guardrails of the Constitution. Not one normal(ish) party and one engulfed in a perpetual revolution against its own country. A party that treats capitalism as the enemy, Christianity as suspect, and America as something to apologize for isn’t a governing party; it’s a protest movement with better branding. If Michigan voters follow the online mob, it signals something grim: a nation increasingly comfortable electing leaders who no longer see America as a great country worth fighting to keep that way. We don’t need more coastal elites mocking Middle America while promising a “New American Dream” funded by higher taxes and more regulations. We need leaders who unapologetically say America is sui generis, that capitalism lifts people out of poverty, that Christianity built the moral foundation that makes freedom possible, and that smart conservation — not socialist green mandates — will keep this republic churning strong for the next 250 years. Anything less isn’t moderation. It’s managed decline.  Michigan, what political porridge are you picking?

Across the board, trust in our institutions in the United States is at an all-time low. Trust in the media is at an all-time low. Trust in church is at an all-time low. Trust in the scientific establishment is at an all-time low. Trust in government is at an all-time low. And, of course, trust in academia is at an all-time low. Because of our lack of trust in institutions, Americans also mistrust one another. You might think that it would be the opposite, that we mistrust one another, and therefore we mistrust our institutions. That’s not the case. Our institutions shape us, and the way that we interact with the world is through the mechanism of institutions. If you grew up in a religious community, going to church helped shape you. The rules of the church helped shape you. The people you spent time with shaped you. The institution of your family shaped you. Your school or university shaped you.  As we lose faith in all of those institutions to shape us, we are incapable of coming together anymore. Institutions tend to foster a common orientation, which is why Alexis de Tocqueville was such a big fan of them. It’s why in Democracy in America, he made the suggestion that one of the things that made America so different from all other countries was the plethora of social institutions in which Americans were enmeshed. He noted that in most other countries, people had formal institutions that they were forced to interact with, but in America, everybody was a member of a social institution or many social institutions — and that created this extraordinary social fabric that was durable, that allowed for innovation, that allowed for freedom.  Without trust, there can’t be freedom at all. If the institutions that provide the shaping function that set the rules for our lives, the way we interact with the world, die, so does the social fabric. And then, when the social fabric dies, we stop attributing decent motivation to each other. Instead, we start engaging in what the philosopher Alistair MacIntyre called “emotivism”: the belief that everybody except for you is motivated by something nefarious. Instead of having a political conversation, what you do is attribute a motive to the person’s policy. You shouldn’t be attributing motivations to other people unless you have good evidence that their motivation is malign. But that’s what we jump to when there is no trust. I trust my wife. I’m not worried that when she criticizes me, it’s coming from a terrible place. I trust the people that I go to synagogue with. If they have a critique or we have a disagreement, I don’t immediately jump to, “They do it because they hate me.” “You’re doing it because you hate me” is the death of politics, because if that’s the case, then how exactly are we supposed to live together and work together and create policy together? Religious institutions used to be truth-making institutions, but the question of whether those institutions ought to pursue truth has been supplanted by the idea that they ought to do politics. In many cases, they have become progressive bastions where people go to eat pizza and play guitar rather than unite with some eternal value. That is why many people don’t attend anymore. Why go there when you can go to a sports event instead? We saw the scientific establishment move from evidence to narrative, most obviously during COVID. The result for an enormous number of people was to completely discard science in favor of nonsense that has zero evidence to back it. The slide from truth to narrative is almost invariably followed by a slide from narrative to conspiracism or nonsense. The move from seeking the truth at universities to “We are going to engineer a population of discontented people who believe that the system must be turned on its ear” led people to stop trusting the universities. The American government was built to pursue one fundamental principle above all: epistemic humility, the idea that you might not be correct. If you think you’re always correct, you might want to be a tyrant.  Humility with regard to other people in your society, the idea that maybe they’re right on occasion, maybe you’re wrong on occasion, has to be rooted in trust of our fellow citizens. We have checks and balances in the United States government to prevent it from swinging side to side to stop radical things from happening. That is legitimately the point of the American government. Unless we have a very broad agreement on something, it should not happen. That is why we have a bicameral legislature. It is why we have three branches of government. But when that wears away, when we hate each other, what we end up with is a battle to the death in the blood sport of politics. We get angry at the checks and balances because it’s not possible that people who oppose me are correct; those people are malign. “Those people want bad things to happen to me and to my family, and so I’m going to grab the government. I’m going to kill the filibuster. I’m gonna stack the Supreme Court. I’m going to add states willy-nilly to the United States Senate, and then I’m just going to run right over everybody.” In the absence of rebuilding trust in the institutions, you end up with a war of all against all on the governmental level. And things will not go well. When you get rid of the fundamental epistemic humility of the government, checks and balances give way to a centralized tyranny. If you don’t trust your neighbor and you think your neighbor is taking advantage of you, you might say that the government should just do what you want it to do. Grab that brass ring and do exactly what you want with that power. In order for a solid debate to take place, there must be a fundamental sharing of values and rules of the road. There ought not to be debate about fundamental propositions, because if you are having to debate individual value — such as the idea that individual human beings have individual worth — you’re arguing with something outside the system. If you have to argue with somebody about the worthiness of truth, that is not an argument that can ever be won, because truth itself is an assumed value. This is why, in the Declaration of Independence, when the Founders said that there are certain rights that are self-evident, they didn’t mean that they prove themselves. They mean that these are the fundamental building blocks of a society. And if you question them, the society crumbles. Only a carefully cultivated moral culture that values truth and evidence and logic and moral decency, that actually protects free speech and property rights and equal rights under the law, is capable of restoring our institutions. We shouldn’t be debating about fundamental moral matters, things like “lying is wrong.” If I have to debate you about that, there’s no debate. Individual human beings have moral worth, and their autonomy has moral value. Those are the values that we begin with, and those are the values that need to be embodied in institutions.

People in Britain often say that the United States is much like the United Kingdom. Recent polling by Freshwater Strategy showed that the British public thinks that the U.K., as a country, would be the 7th richest U.S. state. The actual 7th richest state, North Dakota, boasts a GDP per capita of $102,000 compared to the U.K.’s $52,000. Many Brits assume that in both economies most people are poor, while a small number of individuals accumulate vast wealth at the top. In this myth, the U.S. suffers from the same perceived problem as Britain of inequality without wider prosperity. The uncomfortable reality, however, is that the average Brit is significantly poorer than most Americans. By GDP per capita, parts of America that are routinely described as economically lagging outperform the British economy. Even Mississippi, often cited as the poorest state, has a GDP per capita of $54,000. That should be a sobering benchmark. This is not a story about inequality in Britain but about weak national wealth creation. Britain retains the self-image of a rich country but its underlying performance tells a different story — one of high taxes, vast regulation, weak productivity growth, and poor incentives for entrepreneurs. This reality has shaped the political climate. Between 2008 and the E.U. referendum in 2016, living standards stalled. The Brexit vote was, in part, a collective response to that stagnation and a demand for a different economic trajectory. Leaving the E.U. was never a growth strategy in itself but rather an opportunity to pursue one. In this respect, Brexit was — and still is — a fork in the road. Britain has greater autonomy over its regulatory, tax, and trade policy. The question is whether that autonomy is used to drive growth or not. My forthcoming story of the Brexit referendum, Ten Years On, chronicles the campaign and what has happened since. Henry NICHOLLS / AFP via Getty Images In some areas, Britain has benefited from its post-Brexit freedoms. Examples of this range from tech, where being outside the E.U.’s regulatory regime has allowed the U.K. to be more nimble, to healthcare, where we can now approve new drugs far faster. Overall, however, we have not made as much of these freedoms as we should have.  Critics blame Brexit for Britain’s economic stagnation, but much of it stems from longer-term policies that have held back prosperity. The preconditions for entrepreneurship are not new, nor are they particularly complicated. I recently co-authored a book with Dr. Arthur B. Laffer and others called Prosperity Through Growth: Boosting Living Standards in an Age of Autocracy and AI. We argue that growth requires low tax rates, low government spending, sound money, smart regulation, and free trade. Ultimately, prosperity is generated not redistributed. The focus of economic policy should be incentivizing entrepreneurship rather than redistribution. Without economic growth, debates about inequality become zero-sum. Britain’s problem isn’t that wealth is unevenly distributed. It is that the overall economic pie has grown too slowly for too long. And that pie is being cut into ever more pieces with the explosion of migration to the U.K. This explains a paradox that defines modern Britain. All the fundamentals are there, but the incentives often discourage entrepreneurship. Inequality becomes more visible not because of a few too rich people but because the middle is comparatively squeezed. Americans, on the other hand, enjoy higher median incomes. Take plumbers, for example, who earn $62,000 on average in America, compared to $43,000 in Britain. As President Kennedy once said, “A rising tide lifts all boats.” The danger is that the debate remains focused on distribution rather than growth. Framing Britain as a country with a few very rich people and many struggling households risks misdiagnosing the problem. A more accurate diagnosis is that Britain is an underperforming advanced economy. It has the capabilities to be significantly more prosperous than it currently is, but has failed to convert those capabilities into sustained growth. The implication is straightforward. If Britain wants to meaningfully raise living standards, it must prioritize policies that incentivize growth. The European Union referendum result reflected a demand for change. Whether that demand ultimately leads to greater prosperity depends not on the act of leaving the E.U., but on what we do with the freedoms that followed. Ironically, when critics of Brexit cite studies suggesting that the U.K. economy would be 8% bigger had it stayed in the E.U., those studies assume Britain would have grown at the same rate as the United States in the period since 2016. I look forward to seeing the British people enjoy the same pro-growth policies and prosperity that Americans enjoy. * * * Matthew Elliott is President of the Jobs Foundation and is a member of the House of Lords. He was also the Chief Executive of Vote Leave.