ISIS Gunmen
Plus: Universal child care polls well, DEI and generational dynamics, and more...
Gunmen in Sydney appear to have been motivated by ISIS: Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said yesterday in a news conference that the Bondi Beach shooters—who murdered more than a dozen Jews celebrating Hanukkah out on the beach—appear to have been radicalized by the Islamic State. "Radical perversion of Islam is absolutely a problem," said Albanese. The car believed to be driven by the suspects, Indian national Sajid Akram and his Australian-born son Naveed, had multiple homemade ISIS flags in it, as well as improvised explosive devices that were not detonated.
"Australian officials said Tuesday that both the father and son had traveled to the Philippines last month, and that the reasons for that trip were being investigated," per The New York Times. It's not clear yet whether that trip had anything to do with their radicalization or their planning of this horrific crime, but it seems possible, given where in the country they traveled. ("The Philippine Bureau of Immigration said they had arrived in the country together on Nov. 1, reporting their final destination as Davao, a city considered the gateway to the south of the country. Parts of the southern Philippines remain a center for Islamic State militant activity. The two men left the country on Nov. 28.")
The Reason Roundup Newsletter by Liz Wolfe Liz and Reason help you make sense of the day's news every morning.
Back in 2019, the son, Naveed, came under substantial police scrutiny. "Naveed Akram was closely connected to Isaac El Matari, who was arrested that year and later jailed for planning an IS insurgency as the self-declared Australian commander of the terrorist group," reports an Australian network. "Matari was part of an IS cell with several other Sydney men who have since been convicted of terrorist offences and were also close to Naveed Akram, according to sources with close knowledge of the matter." Naveed apparently tried to study Arabic and learn Koranic recitation back in 2019.
Sajid Akram was a licensed gun owner in Australia due to his membership in a shooting club.
Scenes from New York: "As Zohran Mamdani, the mayor-elect of New York City, prepares to go to battle in the State Capitol over his campaign promise to provide universal government-funded child care, he appears to have New Yorkers on his side," reports The New York Times. "A new poll released by Siena University on Tuesday found that nearly two in three voters across the state favor the new benefit and would support Mr. Mamdani's plan to pay for it by increasing taxes on those earning more than $1 million a year."
This is both predictable and disappointing. People love free things (or, rather, things they perceive to be free). I have a forthcoming magazine feature and video essay on why Mamdani's child care plan is doomed to fail, in part because Bill de Blasio's universal child care plan has been so roiled by inefficiency and bad seat allocation. But one thing that New Yorkers just seem totally unable to grasp: Child care is expensive because human labor is expensive.
"Child care is a prime example of the Baumol effect," writes economic policy analyst Jordan McGillis in The Washington Post, "in which prices for labor-intensive services rise even when worker productivity stays flat. What makes this possible is that wages in those sectors have to increase for employers (here, parents) to compete for workers who might otherwise be enticed to sectors further up the wage table." Worker pay alone tends to be about 60 percent to 80 percent of a standard day care's operating budget.
And Mamdani hopes to expand the existing universal child care plan to the youngest age groups—infants 6 weeks and older—which will require the highest caregiver-to-child ratios. There's just no way to make the math work, and there's no reason why the absolute richest people should subsidize the also-rich people, which is what the universal nature of the system leads to. But de Blasio said the quiet part out loud several years ago, when chatting with a reporter from The Atlantic: "Anything that has a broad constituency will also have more sustainability." This has become, in some sense, the mantra of the modern Democratic party: The wealthyish, highly educated based likes universal child care because they too stand to benefit from it (blissfully unaware of how this might drive prices up). Means-tested is out; universal social welfare programs are in.
QUICK HITS
- Catch me on this week's Reason Roundtable:
Forgive the puffy 38-weeks-pregnant face and don't yell at me for my, um, slight interest in Venezuelan regime change or my Jesus-y entertainment recommendation. He is the REASON FOR THE SEASON after all!
- What a sad, mean, ugly post:
Trump on Rob Reiner's death: pic.twitter.com/PWtHZsvGpR
— philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) December 15, 2025
- More details on the victims lost in the Brown University shooting: "Ella Cook, a math whiz from Alabama with a deep Christian faith and plans to study in Paris next year, and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, the son of doctors from Uzbekistan with dreams of becoming a neurosurgeon, were shot in a lecture hall during a review for an economics final," per The Wall Street Journal.
- "The Brother I Lost," by Megan McArdle at The Dispatch. Long, worthwhile musing on abortion and dying parents:
"I was surprised to learn that many women say they are having an abortion because they could never give their baby up for adoption. This seems like a confession that the life growing inside her is so precious to her that she could never bear to let go of it, which makes killing…
— Leah Libresco Sargeant (@LeahLibresco) December 15, 2025
- The generational dynamics at play during the DEI years:
"'enough white guys already'—seemed to me to be the mantra"
I know so many people who have told me they personally were told explicitly they were passed over, dropped from a project, or not hired because the company "needed diversity."
This is exactly how it's been in most… https://t.co/9XQQlu61Pc
— Inez Stepman ⚪️????⚪️ (@InezFeltscher) December 15, 2025
