Jason Riley

Jason Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the “Upward Mobility” opinion columnist for The Wall Street Journal, where he has written about politics, economics, education, immigration and social inequality for more than 25 years. He’s also a frequent public speaker and provides commentary for television and radio news outlets, and he joins the 2026 Chautauqua Lecture Series for the Week Two theme “Breaking the News: Charting a New Media Landscape.” Riley is the author of six books. In 2008 he published Let Them In, which argues for more legal immigration. His second book, Please Stop Helping Us, is about government efforts to help the Black underclass and was published in 2014. In 2017 he published False Black Power?, an assessment of why Black political success has not translated into more economic advancement. In 2021 he published Maverick, a biography of the iconic economist and social theorist Thomas Sowell and narrated the documentary film “Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World.” In 2022 he published The Black Boom, an analysis of Black economic progress prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. His most recent book, The Affirmative Action Myth: Why Black Don’t Need Racial Preferences to Succeed, was published in 2025. Riley earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He has also worked for USA Today and the Buffalo News.