K. Chad Clay, University of Georgia

In the lead-up to the 2026 midterm elections, how is the U.S. government performing in terms of human rights? Listening to politicians, it can be difficult to know.

On one hand, some have pointed to a number of potential human rights abuses committed by the U.S. government inside and outside its borders in the past two years.

On the other hand, while marking the United States’ 250th anniversary this year, President Donald Trump called the country “the home of freedom,” “the land of liberty” and “the most extraordinary, most exceptional, most incredible nation ever to exist on the face of the earth.”

“We’re doing better now than we’ve ever done before,” he said.

So which is it?

According to many of the human rights data sources available, the U.S. lags behind most other high-income democracies – countries that are both members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and classified as high income by the World Bank. The U.S.’s poor performance spans civil and political rights, such as the right to be free from torture and the right to political participation, as well as economic and social rights, including the rights to health and food.

In fact, the U.S. has been a relatively poor performer across many of these rights for quite some time, regardless of the political party in power.

Even accounting for the U.S.’s prior poor practices, however, new data from the Human Rights Measurement Initiative shows that in 2025 the country’s civil and political rights performance deteriorated even further.

As a human rights scholar who has been measuring human rights practices for 20 years – and as one of HRMI’s co-founders – I believe this data raises serious questions about the United States’ commitment to human rights.

How are rights practices measured?

Governments rarely publish accurate information on their own human rights abuses, so the task of measuring them typically falls to advocates and scholars.

Historically, most international measures of civil and political rights have depended on public reports from the U.S. State Department, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch or news organizations.

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However, these reports cannot cover every human rights violation that experts know about, especially in countries with low government transparency or high levels of repression.

Thus, data produced using those sources will show fewer abuses than those that have actually occurred and will be more accurate about some places than others. Further, the Trump administration has changed one of the most important sources of human rights information, the U.S. State Department’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, to contain more bias in favor of the administration’s foreign allies and less information on human rights abuse overall.

Since 2017, HRMI has used a different approach. Recognizing the problems with public reports, we collect information directly from researchers for human rights organizations, human rights lawyers and others, asking them about governments’ practices across several rights and using a statistical model to assess their information and ensure that the resulting metrics are comparable across countries. The result is a robust dataset that includes information previously missing from public reports.

Today, HRMI’s civil and political rights dataset covers 62 countries, with more added every year.

How does the US compare?

According to the Human Rights Scores dataset, which uses publicly available information to score more than 190 countries on physical integrity rights – such as the rights to be free from torture, killing, forced disappearance and political imprisonment – the U.S. never ranked higher than 81st from 2001 to 2021 or higher than 109th from 2010 to 2021.

Indeed, from 2003 to 2021, the United States’ score was either the worst or the second-worst every year among high-income OECD member states, which include the United Kingdom, Japan and New Zealand.

The Human Rights Scores dataset has not been updated past 2021, but HRMI’s data collected since that time suggests that the pattern has continued.

Among the six high-income OECD countries on which HRMI currently collects data, the U.S. has been the worst performer for physical integrity rights since 2017.

It has also frequently been rated as the worst performer on “empowerment rights,” or the rights to assembly, association, opinion, expression, political participation, religion and belief.

What changed in 2025?

Even starting from this poor position, the U.S.’s civil and political rights practices dramatically worsened in 2025. HRMI measures nine civil and political rights, and the U.S. significantly worsened on eight of them.

These were not small changes. Measured against every significant change HRMI has recorded since 2017, the U.S. showed the largest decline ever observed for the right to be free from forced disappearance and for the right to freedom of religion and belief.

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The U.S. showed the second-largest decline ever observed for the right to be free from arbitrary or political arrest and for the right to opinion and expression.

The U.S. also showed major declines in the rights to be free from torture and extrajudicial killing, and the right to political participation – that is, the right to participate in one’s government via free and fair elections, to take part in public affairs and to have access to public service. U.S. scores likewise fell in the right to assembly and association, which are, respectively, the rights to peacefully gather in public or private and to form or join groups and organizations.

What caused the scores to fall?

Human rights experts raised several issues that led to these declines. For instance, the U.S.’s worsened scores for the rights to be free from arbitrary detention, disappearance and torture were tied to the expanded use of practices such as incommunicado detention and warrantless arrest by ICE and other immigration-related agencies.

While several killings occurred during ICE operations in 2025, the worsened extrajudicial killing score was also tied to the country’s use of airstrikes against boats in the Pacific and Caribbean, which caused the deaths of at least 123 people in 2025 alone.

Other changes enacted in 2025 contributed to large declines in the U.S.’s rights scores, including crackdowns on anti-ICE demonstrations and government pressure on universities, including limits on free speech and class subjects.

Last year also saw threats to television networks over political expression, restrictions on mail-in voting, state measures targeting American Islamic organizations by labeling them “foreign terrorist organizations” and an executive order focused on eradicating “anti-Christian bias.”

While current HRMI data does not yet cover 2026, early indicators are not promising, with continued abuses by ICE, further killings in international waters and allegations of attempts to use government powers to punish critics.

K. Chad Clay, Director, Center for the Study of Global Issues (GLOBIS); Associate Professor of International Affairs, University of Georgia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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U.S. News & World Report has released its 2026-2027 Best High Schools rankings, giving families a fresh, data-driven snapshot of top-performing public, charter, and STEM high schools across the country. The new edition evaluated about 27,000 eligible public high schools, with nearly 18,000 schools ultimately ranked at national, state, and local levels.

At the state level, Massachusetts again led the nation, with 47% of its high schools landing in the top quarter nationally. New Jersey followed at 44%, with Maryland close behind at 43%. Metro-area results also highlighted standout regions with high concentrations of top-ranked schools, including San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, California (60%), McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, Texas (59%), and Milwaukee-Waukesha, Wisconsin (56%)—each with the highest shares of ranked schools placing in the top 25% nationwide.

Charter and STEM schools were a major storyline in the 2026-2027 release. While California (96) and New Jersey (50) led the nation in the number of ranked STEM schools, charter schools claimed 23% of the national top 100. U.S. News pointed to Arizona’s BASIS charter network as a key example of that performance, noting it secured three of the country’s top five STEM schools and placed 12 campuses in the overall national top 100.

U.S. News said the rankings are based on six performance indicators, including state assessment achievement, graduation rates, and college readiness measures such as AP and IB participation and performance. The methodology was implemented with RTI International using data from the 2023-2024 school year.

Source: U.S. News & World Report

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Hilary Smith, University of Denver

Lactose intolerance makes drinking milk or eating ice cream a literal pain. For some people, eating a dairy treat can lead to bloating, nausea and diarrhea. You might’ve experienced its effects yourself. If so, you may think of lactose intolerance as a defect rather than the norm.

But did you know that most people in the world today are lactose intolerant – and that the condition itself was invented in the 1960s?

“Surely you mean discovered, not invented,” I hear you saying. I don’t. As a historian who has traced the origins of nutrition-science ideas, I have chosen the word “invented” on purpose.

Inventing lactose intolerance

Variations in people’s ability to digest lactose first came to scientists’ attention after American dairy producers found a way to rid themselves of a postwar milk surplus. To offload what they couldn’t sell, they looked to the government to intervene. And it did, buying the excess and embedding it in school lunches and other places with publicly funded meals.

Suddenly, many people who had not habitually drunk milk were consuming it regularly, including not only some Americans but also people overseas. Part of that same milk surplus found its way into school lunches in places such as Japan and Taiwan in the 1950s as the American government began to sell milk to allies during the Cold War.

Many of the groups drinking milk regularly for the first time did not like it. In fact, it made them feel sick. Intrigued, scientists set up experiments to figure out why. In a 1966 study comparing how Black and white people incarcerated in Baltimore metabolized lactose, researchers found that Black participants had lower levels of lactase – the enzyme that breaks down lactose – in their guts.

To the white scientists conducting this study, the trouble that the Black prisoners had digesting milk looked like an “inborn error of metabolism.” They assumed that the normal human state was lactose tolerance and that the lactose intolerant had inherited a genetic mutation.

It was only after years more work with research participants of many races that experts realized that, as one National Institutes of Health official put it in 1981, “lactose intolerance is a normal physiological condition, shared by every adult animal except for certain ethnic and racial groups in man.” People of northern European descent, it turned out, were the weird ones. It was their ancestors who had passed down a genetic mutation – one that made them able to digest milk after infancy.

In short, what scientists discovered in the 1960s was that different bodies process milk differently. What they invented was the idea that lactose intolerance is a defect. Accepting that framing would mean nearly two-thirds of the human population – the estimated prevalence of lactose intolerance worldwide – is defective.

Instead of acknowledging that dairy-free diets can be healthy, people innovated ways to overcome this supposed disability so everyone could consume more.

Nutritional imperialism

Lactose intolerance is one example of what I call nutritional imperialism: a way of thinking that treats white diets as the norm and everyone else’s as an aberration.

Nutritional imperialism was common in the 20th century, when scientists thought that not only milk-rich but also meat-heavy diets were best; they considered diets outside of the United States and Europe too vegetarian. Some also argued that wheat flour, not rice, ought to be the universal staple.

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The same bias applied to bodies. Besides faulty lactose digestion, nonwhite bodies were accused of other failures, too, such as aldehyde dehydrogenase deficiency, an inability to digest alcohol quickly. The less technical term for this may be more familiar: Asian flush.

Such differences might have been thought of as variety, just another way of being human. Instead, each became a deficiency.

Many people today have inherited and perpetuated this way of thinking without knowing it, including those who are deemed deficient by it. In 1959, the director of Japan’s nutrition bureau declared that “rice-eating peoples” such as the Japanese were “resigned and passive” and could correct this by imitating Western diets and switching to wheat.

Today, the most prominent scientist promoting the idea that Asian flush is a disease is a geneticist of Taiwanese descent who started a research consortium to study “the most common human enzymopathy in the world.”

The Chinese Nutrition Society placed a tall glass of milk next to its 2022 Food Guide Plate – never mind estimates that the vast majority of Han Chinese, the largest ethnic group in China and worldwide, are lactose intolerant.

Turning sickness back into difference

Science that pathologizes difference helps racism persist.

In recent years, white supremacists have embraced the concept of lactose intolerance as a distinguishing debility of nonwhite people. Social media users have copied and pasted a map of the geographic distribution of lactose tolerance originally published in the scientific journal Nature into racist chat threads on the online discussion forum 4chan.

In 2017, internet trolls disrupted an anti-racist art installation with neo-Nazi chants and messily downed jugs of milk to accentuate their white identity.

Turning a lactose-digestion difference into a deficiency has done more to reinforce narratives of racial hierarchy than to improve public health. So here’s a suggestion: If you enjoy eating dairy, keep doing it; if you don’t, don’t – and know that there is nothing wrong with you.

Hilary Smith, Professor of History, University of Denver

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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