ArcaMax

It's the biggest political hoax since Titus Oates's allegations of a "Popish Plot" to assassinate King Charles II in 1678. Oates's charge of a Jesuit conspiracy swept through London and led to the execution of four innocent men before Oates was proved a fraud.

The full consequences of the great political hoax of our time -- the charge that ...Read more

The nation's largest state has just voted in an election triggered by one of the nation's weirdest recall processes, and the results have come out just about where they've been before.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom was elected governor in 2018 by 62% to 38%, a result that was, unsurprisingly in an era of straight-ticket voting and strong ...Read more

Are we witnessing the feminization of America? And if so, is that a good or bad thing, or is it, like so many quiet but ineluctable trends, a combination of the two?

Perceptions of feminization come from some unexpected quarters. The (mostly) free market economist Tyler Cowen sees it as a long-term trend, going back to the suffragist movement a...Read more

"The worst president since Jimmy Carter."

You see a lot of that sort of thing if you regularly read conservative commentary, as I do. But as a conservative writer, I think it's unfair to the 39th president. I think it's time to say some good words for Carter. And if some of his accomplishments provide stark contrasts with his only-18-years-...Read more

"This is now on track," said White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Tuesday, "to be the largest airlift in U.S. history." On the process of bringing American citizens, Afghan partners and allies out, she continued, "I would not say that is anything but a success."

Psaki was careful not to use the word "all" in identifying the categories of ...Read more

Historians aren't actually sure that Nero caused or neglected a fire that consumed much of ancient Rome. Historians, however much they'd like to, won't be able to deny that President Joe Biden bears full responsibility for America's humiliating retreat from Afghanistan, and our neglect of the tens of thousands who aided us and now face torture ...Read more

Will Gov. Gavin Newsom be the second Democratic California governor to be recalled and removed from office in this (or the last) century? Polls suggest that's one possible result of next month's recall election.

If so, it would be a startling result. We have just seen the second consecutive Democrat elected governor of heavily Democratic (61% ...Read more

The Manhattan Project didn't look like America. Undertaken today, it would be criticized for failing to meet diversity and inclusion guidelines.

Today's human resources department professionals would be triggered if they looked at the list of physicists hired to produce what President Franklin Roosevelt was told could be a uranium-based bomb "...Read more

Why do I feel that I have seen this movie before?

I would like to think that learning is cumulative. But I'm beginning to think that every generation or two, people need to learn all over again the lessons that have unaccountably been forgotten or tossed aside. The elderly among us can see this, even as young people are inclined to insist that ...Read more

Speech suppression is a habit that the Biden administration and its liberal supporters can't seem to break. Many staffers may have picked up the habit in their student years: Colleges and universities have been routinely censoring "politically incorrect" speech for the last 30 years. As Thomas Sowell noted, "There are no institutions in America ...Read more

Did you know that Black people are not going to be allowed to vote in America anymore? At least in states controlled by Republicans. Sounds a bit unlikely, but that's a conclusion you might have come to if you took seriously what President Joe Biden said in Philadelphia Tuesday.

Biden decried Republicans' proposed changes in election laws as "...Read more

I like to apply free market analysis to American politics. Within established laws, politicians compete for votes and are rewarded for maximizing voters' preferences. As in economics, there are sometimes market failures, but mostly the system seems to be self-regulating.

This sounds nice, but it doesn't seem to describe what's been happening ...Read more

New York City's notoriously incompetent election officials have not finished tabulating the votes in the June 22 Democratic primary, with its novel ranked choice voting system. But the first choices of voters -- minus some 124,000 absentees -- nevertheless reveal some important things about the differences between different segments of the ...Read more