ArcaMax

In an apparent bid to pick up where the late Rush Limbaugh and the deplatformed former President Donald Trump left off as leading voices for the far-right, Fox News star Tucker Carlson has taken up that burning cross that passes itself off as a “theory.”

It’s called the “great replacement theory.” It was cited by the mass murderers in...Read more

As a high school student, bestselling “Hillbilly Elegy” author J.D. Vance recalled, “People talked about Clarence as someone to look up to.”

“Not when I was there,” I interrupted.

And we laughed like two people who went to the same high school, although in vastly different decades.

So did the host of our discussion, Bob Woodson, a...Read more

If the late Martin Luther King Jr. were to hold the Montgomery bus boycott today, would conservative politicians call him a “woke” activist pushing a repressive “cancel culture”?

That thought came to mind after Georgia’s Gov. Brian Kemp, former President Donald Trump and other Republican leaders denounced woke Democrats and cancel ...Read more

When the network TV news anchor warned that the next news report contained images that some viewers might find too disturbing to watch, I perked up and watched quite intensely.

When the anchor went on to say the story was about the brutal, unprovoked and uninterrupted beating of an Asian American woman near Times Square in New York in broad ...Read more

Mainstream media are trying to make President Joe Biden look good, according to conservative critics who want to make him look bad. Nothing new about that in our polarized times in which it is easier to find news that agrees with your views than to challenge them.

But as a longtime critic of former President Donald Trump’s “kids in cages,�...Read more

I am hardly a core member of Teen Vogue magazine’s demographic. But I began to pay attention to the lively Conde Nast publication back in 2016 when their take on the presidential race showed they were about more than fashion, makeup and boy bands.

The one prominent example that had Washington’s grown-ups gabbing was an essay, “Donald ...Read more

When I first wrote about a national surge in reported hate crimes against Asian Americans since the coronavirus pandemic began, it was easy for the rest of us to sympathize, yet also believe, however feebly, that the problem was not about us.

A month later, the shooting deaths of eight people, including six women of Asian descent, in three ...Read more

Are we all socialists now?

In numerous intriguing ways, the pandemic appears to be pumping up the popularity of big government, even among (gasp!) Republicans — as long as you’re not talking about the current crop of the Grand Old Party’s lawmakers.

Republican lawmakers displayed impressive unity as Democrats passed President Joe Biden�...Read more

I got it!

After working my way through a labyrinth of websites and telephone numbers and waiting lists, I finally received my first of two scheduled coronavirus vaccination shots.

Halfway there, I told myself. After a year of COVID-19 lockdowns, the slight soreness in my upper left arm is thoroughly mitigated by my overall sense of relief.

I ...Read more

Dr. Seuss and Potato Head may not seem the same.

But don’t load “cancel culture” with all of the blame.

Forgive me. That moment of mangled poetry is inspired by the overblown uproar from right-wing politicians and media to the news that, as Fox News’ Martha MacCallum put it on her morning show last Tuesday, ...Read more

As one who covered Vernon Jordan off and on for several decades, I remember how he defied easy labels. You had to get to know him. There was a lot about him to know.

His outsize personality, courtly manner, commanding presence, historic impact, strategic thinking and robust — occasionally ribald — humor were not easily contained in the ...Read more

Maybe Rep. Marie Newman, an Illinois Democrat, should send flowers or a fruit basket to her controversial fellow freshman, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

After all, Washington is a town in which publicity often translates into power and political donations, no matter which political side you’re on — and Greene, a Georgia Republican whose ...Read more

To paraphrase the great sage Samuel Johnson, nothing concentrates the mind of a member of Congress like the prospect of being hanged in a mass assault on the U.S. Capitol.

And in a similar vein, nothing divides lawmakers — even in the same party — like the question of what to do after the domestic terrorism that put thoughts of being hanged...Read more

Incessant Republican complaints about “cancel culture” might have more credibility if the Republicans didn’t engage in so much canceling of their own.

The Grand Old Party’s alarm over “cancel culture,” the hottest buzzword of its sort since “political correctness” was all the rage, has hardly been subtle.

“I don’t know ...Read more

I don’t want to spoil the party, but amid the hopeful signs that we might — just might — be turning the corner on the coronavirus pandemic, let us not overlook how much COVID-19-related racial rhetoric has fueled a pandemic of hate crimes too.

With a guarded sense of relief, I welcomed the news that Oakland, Calif., police arrested a ...Read more

Talking about race, I have long observed, is like talking about sex: We know it’s important, we like to think we know all about it, and yet we’re reluctant to talk about it in mixed company or in front of the children.

So, for much of that challenging educational task, we turn — where else? — to teachers, for whom the challenging task ...Read more

Column: A 9-year-old girl in Rochester, ill-trained police and the need in all cities for more community help

Rochester, again?

The video-recorded pepper-spraying of a screaming, handcuffed 9-year-old Black girl by police last week has gone viral, and it’s painful to watch.

It is even more painful when we recall another video released last ...Read more

If you can’t be a king, goes an old nugget of political wisdom, be a kingmaker. Former President Donald Trump is taking that advice to heart, shifting his post-presidency to endorsements of some and condemnations of others.

When he said, “We will be back in some form,” before his final Air Force One flight home, some of his fellow ...Read more

I have an extra reason to be pleased that President Joe Biden has revoked the Trump administration’s 1776 Report, released on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and aimed to promote “patriotic” history education in schools.

I happen to have an essay in the Woodson Center’s older and unrelated but similarly purposed and privately funded Read more

Even now, deep into the age of Twitter and YouTube, I am bemused by the fact that the violent mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 couldn’t resist shooting and posting so many photos and videos of themselves. But I’m glad they did.

Thanks to that bravado and some demented hunger for fame at any cost, federal investigators report ...Read more