When I was in my 20s, I attended a friend’s bachelor party, the highlight of which was a stripper in a hotel room. It was a Saturday night, and somewhere along the line I picked up a Sunday New York Times from a street vendor. The prospective groom said I was carrying this massive newspaper around during his bachelor party to piss him off. That wasn’t true. I just wanted to know what was happening in the world.
Curiosity can be compulsive, but it’s essential for figuring out which of many claims one may encounter online or offline are correct. For instance, I saw a mention on social media that 94 percent of hires by big companies in 2021 went to people of color. That sounded like a bogus number, but a quick look revealed it was the conclusion of a Bloomberg analysis.
I was intrigued recently to see online citations of a statement by John Adams, “For I really wish the Jews again in Judea an independent nation,” apparently embracing Zionism before it was a movement. It turned out this was from a letter the ex-president wrote to Mordecai M. Noah in 1819, in which Adams explained he wanted the Jews to become Unitarians:
“For as I believe the most enlighten’d men of [the Jewish community] have participated in the ameliorations of the philosophy of the age, once restored to an independent government & no longer persecuted they would soon wear away some of the asperities & peculiarities of their character possibly in time become liberal Unitarian Christians for your Jehovah is our Jehovah & your God of Abraham Isaac & Jacob is our God.” That puts a different spin on the notion of Adams as proto-Zionist.
On another matter, I saw claims that Democrats gain an advantage from illegal aliens boosting census numbers, generating more blue districts and electoral votes. Law professor Glenn Reynolds, in a New York Post opinion piece, saw a solution: “Massive deportations will decrease the illegal population in time for the 2030 census, costing Democratic states seats in the House and helping to cement a GOP majority.”
Investigative journalist Daniel Greenfield explained in a Front Page Magazine piece, “Why Dems Are Fighting a Civil War Over Illegal Aliens,” that, as the subtitle put it: “Without illegals, Republicans would control the country.” Greenfield: “If America’s illegals were to be deported, Democrats could lose as many as 15 electoral college votes and close elections would naturally trend toward Republicans.”
Not true, according to number-crunching by social scientists published in the February 2025 issue of journal PNAS Nexus: “If undocumented residents had been entirely excluded from census data used for apportionment, no more than two House seats and three Electoral College votes would have shifted between political parties in any year since 1980; this would have had no bearing on party control of the House or the outcome of presidential elections.” And the modest effects of removing the illegals reduced the clout of red states like Texas as well as blue ones like California.
A 2020 analysis by Pew Research, focusing on that year’s census, similarly showed minor effects that cut both ways. According to an analysis at the Cato Institute, growth of the undocumented population in the early-2020s gave an electoral advantage to Republicans, boosting their control of state legislatures that control congressional redistricting. It’s possible there are studies and data out there pointing in other directions, and if so, readers are encouraged to identify such research, as the NYPost and FrontPageMag didn’t bother.
Lest readers complain that I’m always dumping on Republicans, there’ve been some encouraging developments from the GOP in another area: budgeting for physics and astronomy programs. I’ve written recently about the Trump administration’s draconian proposed cuts to NASA and National Science Foundation projects. The provisional good news is that congressional Republicans seem inclined toward smaller reductions. There’s also been pushback by the Smithsonian Institution as well as Virginia’s Democratic senator Tim Kaine against a wasteful plan to relocate the space shuttle Discovery to Texas. (It’s currently housed in Virginia, not in D.C., as I should’ve noted in a previous piece.)
—Kenneth Silber is author of In DeWitt’s Footsteps: Seeing History on the Erie Canal. Follow him on Bluesky