ArcaMax

"Protestors in California," tweeted ABC News, about an incident in Oakland, "set fire to a courthouse, damaged a police station and assaulted officers after a peaceful demonstration intensified."

If you'd presented your ninth-grade teacher with that sentence in your weekly writing assignment, she might have taken out her red pen and asked you, ...Read more

If things had proceeded according to schedule, we'd be checking the polls this week to see if Joe Biden had gotten a bounce from his acceptance speech in Milwaukee. That's because the Democratic National Convention was originally scheduled for July 13-16.

It has since been postponed, due to COVID-19, to August 17-20, and will evidently be ...Read more

You could say it's all Donald Trump's fault. His bad qualities -- his carelessness about facts, his obstinance about admitting error, his contempt for others' views -- have turned out to be contagious, to the point that you could argue they're more damaging to his opponents than to him.

This started early on, during the 2016 campaign. "I will ...Read more

"I don't think I've ever seen such dishonest and biased coverage of any event." That was Brit Hume, who has been covering events for more than 50 years for Fox News, ABC News and investigative reporter Jack Anderson.

The event, as you may have guessed, was President Donald Trump's Independence (without the scare-quotes) Day speech at Mount ...Read more

Americans naturally tend to think of their presidents in terms of generations, like they do with their families. This may have started with the news that former Presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on July 4, 1826, half a century to the day the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence they jointly drafted.

...Read more

"What gives urgency to debates about race in America today -- and what drives the reparations movement, are two basic facts," Walter Russell Mead writes in the Wall Street Journal.

The first, he says, is that "The median white household has a net worth of $171,000, roughly 10 times the median net worth of black households." The second is that ...Read more

White college graduates have emerged from the last two decades of elections as an increasingly large and cohesive political bloc -- and one that poses problems for both political parties.

Back in the pre-COVID-19 era, their numbers augmented by recent products of woke campuses, they seemed the dominant force in the race for the Democratic ...Read more

Success breeds failure. That's a lesson taught by America's current woes, the stumbling attempts to cope with the novel coronavirus, and the all-too-familiar scripts for responding to police misconduct and violent riots.

What worked once upon a time no longer proves functional; policies that once enjoyed consensus now evoke multivarious ...Read more

It's all about religion, isn't it? "(W)e have the cult of social justice on the left," Andrew Sullivan wrote in New York Magazine, "a religion whose followers show the same zeal as any born-again Evangelical."

Linguist John McWhorter elaborated on that theme in The Atlantic. "(A)ntiracism," he wrote, "is a profoundly religious movement in ...Read more

"America is burning. But that's how forests grow." So spoke Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey.

"Riots are an integral part of the country's march towards progress." So read a now-deleted tweet from the Democratic Committee of Fairfax County, Virginia, the affluent Washington suburb with a population of 1 million.

"Please, show me ...Read more

America faces a contagious infection: partisanship. Consider the responses to a poll question about treating the COVID-19 virus with the long-approved and widely used drug hydroxychloroquine.

A Morning Consult poll shows 52% of Republicans supporting the drug and 16% against. At the same time and in the same country, 56% of Democrats opposed it...Read more

Do you remember the 1957-58 Asian flu? Or the 1968-69 Hong Kong flu? I do. I was a teenager during the first of these, an adult finishing law school during the second. But even though back then I followed the news much more than the average person my age, I can't dredge up more than the dimmest memory of either.

I don't have any memory of ...Read more

On a multicountry trip to South America, President Ronald Reagan couldn't restrain himself from the inane observation that every tourist finds himself saying about such trips. "Every country is different." So, it seems, is every virus capable of spreading into pandemic.

The influenza pandemic of 1918-19, for example, tended to kill otherwise ...Read more

"In the great debate of the past two decades over freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong." So write Jack Goldsmith and Andrew Keane Woods, law professors at Harvard and the University of Arizona, respectively, in The Atlantic.

And they seem to mind, as their next sentence indicates...Read more