ArcaMax

"Populist politicians and parties," writes the Ethics and Public Policy Center's Henry Olsen in The Spectator, are "rapidly gaining strength and power across the developed world." They're doing so despite the opposition and angry scorn of political and intellectual establishments of Left and Right, and with a resilience that they find baffling. ...Read more

Are non-white voters really moving away from the Democratic Party? To partisan Democrats confronting this question on Twitter (sorry, X), it seems preposterous that the party of former President Donald Trump, whom they routinely call a racist, could be gaining support from blacks, Hispanics and Asians.

But the evidence for eroding non-...Read more

You could blame Victor Hugo. In 1846, the French novelist observed a young man being arrested for holding a loaf of bread he stole.

Deeply touched, he fashioned his novel "Les Miserables," published in 1862, around the character Jean Valjean, who is imprisoned for 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread and pursued relentlessly after his ...Read more

"These rich men north of Richmond, Lord knows they just wanna have total control." So goes the refrain of singer and songwriter Oliver Anthony's suddenly famous song. "Wanna know what you think, wanna know what you do, and they don't think you know, but I know that you do."

The song has inspired plenty of negative feedback from inside-the-...Read more

Having completed the first presidential debate of the 2024 campaign cycle, it's tempting to focus on minor but perhaps momentarily decisive details, such as whether Ron DeSantis was wise to outsource strategy to a committee that he's legally barred from communicating with or whether it was wise for Trump campaign spokesmen to not be allowed in ...Read more

America's political parties are the oldest and third-oldest in the world, and they have competed for votes among a population that has been diverse since colonial times. If you have any doubts about that, consult David Hackett Fischer's 1989 classic "Albion's Seed" on how settlers from different parts of the British Isles brought distinctive "...Read more

Let's take a time out from reports of indictments and threats of impeachment, from nostalgia for the 1940s days of American scientific creativity and ability to get big things done fast ("Oppenheimer") and the 1950s days of American popular culture appealing to every cultural subgroup without the trigger warnings and apologies for past national ...Read more

"We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible." That's the key sentence in an article published in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, titled "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2."

It's also a prime example of eminently credentialed and government-subsidized scientists saying the exact opposite of what they believed, ...Read more

Have we gotten to the point that it's politically necessary to defend the principle of free speech? Apparently so.

Consider the reaction of journalists -- people who, more than anyone else in our society, have a professional and economic interest in free speech -- to Louisiana-based District Judge Terry Doughty's July 4 decision on a motion to ...Read more

News stories have reported that despite the Supreme Court's decision in cases brought against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, those and other selective schools still want to employ racial quotas and preferences in admissions.

They've been abolishing requirements that applicants take objective tests like the SAT and are inviting ...Read more

"This is not a normal court." So said President Joe Biden last week as the Supreme Court was handing down its rulings in big cases decided since its current term began last October.

He's right in a trivial sense. The Supreme Court hears appeals, not trials as most courts do; its nine members can serve for life; it sets its own docket. But he's ...Read more

No one knows whether last weekend's Wagner Group uprising means the end of President Vladimir Putin's control of Russia, just as no one knew before the last few weeks of 1999 that Putin would replace Boris Yeltsin and become Russia's leader for the next quarter-century.

But everyone knows that the widely shared optimistic expectations of that ...Read more