Opinion: CNBC just gave a master class in why so many people distrust the media

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Every year, U-Haul gives a snapshot of the states where Americans are moving, offering an interesting if nonscientific glimpse of where people want to live — and don’t want to live.

In recent years, Texas, Florida, Tennessee and the Carolinas have all dominated the company’s annual “Growth Index.” Earlier this year, a U-Haul report said that blue-to-red state migration is a “discernible trend.”

“Seven of the top 10 growth states currently feature Republican governors, and nine of those states went red in the last presidential election,” the report said. “Conversely, nine of the bottom 10 growth states feature Democrat governors, and seven of those states went blue in the last presidential election.”

What, then, should we make of the report from CNBC that tells us that Vermont is the best state to live (along with Nebraska, New Jersey and most of New England) while ranking Tennessee, Texas and Utah among the worst places to live?

What we should make of it is that it’s bunk.

This becomes clear when surveying the criteria that CBNC used to make its selections, which include “reproductive rights,” inclusiveness, and the right of workers to organize.

This helps to explain why Minnesota is lauded, the state having “among the nation’s strongest guarantees of reproductive rights, according to analysis by the Guttmacher Institute,” the CNBC report said.

In other words, it’s the ease with which women can get an abortion that is indicative of a good place to live, rather than the number of people actually moving there.

Beyond that, CNBC’s choice of Vermont as the best state is downright perplexing. The main reason given is that 54% of Vermonters said in a 2024 survey that they were in good or excellent health. But in a more recent survey, Vermont came in third and Utah ranked fifth in health.

Meanwhile, CNBC noted Vermont’s struggle with homelessness as a drawback, writing that “more than 3,000 people were unhoused as of January 2025, in a state with just 644,000 people.” The unhoused population is especially problematic in a state where temperatures can drop below zero in the winter, and where Burlington — home to Bernie Sanders, Ben & Jerry’s and the University of Vermont — struggles against the perception that it’s unsafe.

Should the best state to live have the highest tax burden? Americans flocking to no-income-tax states like Texas, Tennessee and Florida would say not.

Vermont was recently ranked as having the highest property tax burden in the United States, and the third highest overall, after Hawaii and New York. Vermont is also in the top 10 of personal income tax rates, something CNBC doesn’t mention while it lauds the state’s reproductive rights and inclusiveness. (The latter is a bit puzzling, given that Vermont is one of the least diverse states in the U.S.)

Vermont also lacks some things that many Americans consider integral to their quality of life, including a variety of fast-food restaurants. (It’s one of two U.S. states without a Chick-fil-A, the other being Alaska.) And there’s only Target in the entire state, which would be a deal-breaker for some people I know.

On a more serious note, Vermont is also the least religious state, with only 13% of residents reporting being highly religious. Given the well-documented association between religiosity and well-being, that seems like a strike against the state, as beautiful as it may be. If you’re a person of faith looking for a supportive community of like-minded believers, you’re likely better off elsewhere.

The proliferation of “best” and “worst” lists, driven by websites such as WalletHub, is so ubiquitous that they’re hardly worth paying attention to until one clearly runs afoul of reality, like this one does. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis took notice and called it “typical nonsense.”

As Patrick Bet-David summed it up: “The American people disagree with CNBC.”

So does U.S. News & World Report, which has named Utah the best state to live for the past three years.

The latest debate over pronouns

There’s a new debate over pronouns that has arisen in Hollywood: whether AI-generated characters should be referred to as “he” or “she,” as opposed to “it.”

As the Los Angeles Times reported, the question rises from industry-wide angst about the AI-generated “actor” Tilly Norwood, who has a website, an email address, a music video and a whole lot of detractors in the film industry.

Earlier this month, it was announced that Tilly will star in a feature-length film called “Misaligned” that is something of a coming-of-age story about an AI creation.

As Alex Ritman described it for Variety, “The film will follow Tilly, an AI being with no real body, no childhood and no lived experience of her own … only access to everyone else’s. Things spiral when a seductive rogue bot from the dark web convinces her to abandon her guardrails and begin developing desires, impulses and ambitions, making her more human.”

Amid the indignant howling from Hollywood, there is adjacent handwringing about what pronouns are appropriate for Tilly Norwood and other AI “beings.”

Writing about her “conversation” with Tilly for a New York Times article, Taffy Brodesser-Akner said, “Yes, I know that calling Tilly her is technically incorrect at best and makes me complicit in civilization’s demise at worst, but it is too hard to keep saying it, just as it’s hard to keep remembering that Tilly is just a computer.”

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It’s hard not to see, in the first half of that sentence, the protests of people who have resisted using “they” and “them” for a single person on the grounds that they are technically incorrect.

But the creator of Tilly shrugged the controversy off, saying that she doesn’t see the pronoun as important. “People can call her whatever they want. I take no offense to them calling her an ‘it’,” Eline van der Velden told the LA Times.

It’s a strange time to be alive, that’s for sure.

RIP to the ‘fire and humor’ of the 3 Amigos

Former President George W. Bush, in his statement to the media about the passing of Lindsey Graham, called the South Carolina senator “a kind and funny man who loved our country and loved serving it.”

And it’s been heartwarming to see so many people sharing their favorite funny story about Graham, whose comic skills until now were underreported.

Here’s his response to Donald Trump giving out his actual cellphone number at a rally in 2015. Others would have been apoplectic. Graham turned it into a comedy skit worthy of a late-night show.

It’s an example of how Graham, at least at one point in his career, didn’t take things personally, but had the ability to let things pass, like water off a duck’s back, as they say. We sure could use more of that today.

In her tribute to Graham, published in The Washington Post, Meghan McCain wrote about the “three amigos” who were the most important men in her life as a child: her father, John McCain, and his friends Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham.

“Dad was the soul of the group, Joe was the heart, and Lindsey was the fire and humor. Their combination bonded them as friends for decades. That sort of friendship was rare in politics, and it is nearly extinct today.”

McCain has characterized her relationship with Graham in recent years as “complex” because of political differences. She clearly regrets their estrangement and said on her podcast, in tears, “All I have to say to people is, if you are not connected to people, are not talking to them, that it’s not worth it. Reach out to the people in your life.”

Recommended Reading

After the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Barbara, the “birthright citizenship” case, people unhappy with the majority opinion were critical of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, saying she was a traitor to President Donald Trump. Thomas B. Griffith and Joshua Topham argue otherwise.

“Cynics who view everything through a partisan lens find it hard to believe that a judge is capable of making decisions based on something other than his own policy preferences. Yet setting those preferences aside and following what the law requires is not the exception in judging. It is the job.”

In defense of Justice Barrett — and the independent judiciary

The bipartisan friendship of the “Three Amigos” — Lindsey Graham, John McCain and Joe Lieberman — makes perfect sense when reading this analysis by Michael Barber and Jeremy Pope, who explain why Americans can’t be easily separated into ideological buckets.

“Many voters are not moving from one fully coherent ideology to another. They are choosing which part of their own mixed worldview feels most urgent at the time.”

The red-blue illusion: American voters are far more complex than their parties

We can’t talk about the decline in marriage rates without also talking about a parallel decline in religious participation, write Shima Baradaran Baughman and Loren Marks.

“We treat family formation as a stand-alone problem to be solved with the right incentive, while ignoring the institution most responsible for producing it. Daniel Cox at the American Enterprise Institute calls the broader pattern a romantic recession, though new research shows the desire for family is still there.”

The link between declining faith and falling marriages in America

End Notes

In last week’s Right to the Point subscriber poll, we considered the remarkable rise of Zohran Mamdani, who was born in Uganda, became a U.S. citizen in 2018 and is now mayor of New York City.

But according to our entirely unscientific survey, Republicans shouldn’t worry about him too much, with most respondents seeing Mamdani as enjoying his 15 minutes of fame rather than becoming the face of the Democratic Party.

Meanwhile, in a week in which many people have been talking about Rose Horowitch’s story in The Atlantic that announced “The End of Reading is Here‚” I’m thinking of what Thomas Jefferson once wrote to James Madison:

“Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption, but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.”

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