ArcaMax

George Orwell, call your office. That's my initial and slightly out-of-date response to news stories about the Biden administration's efforts to stamp out "misinformation." It's an interesting irony that covert censorship should be undertaken enthusiastically by those who call themselves "liberal" or "progressive" and who claim the opposition ...Read more

There's plenty to be thankful for this Thanksgiving season -- at least if you take your eyes off a presidential race in which most voters want to reject both candidates with big leads for their parties' nomination and in which international news is dominated by Hamas' atrocities against Israel and Russia's destructive invasion of Ukraine.

Put ...Read more

In the nauseating demonstrations celebrating Hamas' slaughter of Israelis, one hears repeated, again and again, the refrain that Israelis are "settlers" and "colonists" -- and therefore, in the catechism inculcated in universities in recent decades, oppressors not deserving of mercy or sympathy when tortured and murdered by those who deemed ...Read more

What's with young voters? It's a question prompted by two surprising and perhaps contradictory developments that are out of line with conventional wisdom and prevailing expectations among political observers.

One is the sharp difference in opinion between young voters and their elders on the Hamas atrocities against Israel. A post-Oct. 7 poll ...Read more

Is it inevitable that Donald Trump will be the second person in history -- Richard Nixon was the first -- to win the Republican Party's nomination for president three times? Many thoughtful observers, and others as well, think so.

They have some solid evidence. Polling has been showing majorities of Republicans favoring Trump since Manhattan ...Read more

After a little more than three weeks, House Republicans have finally elected a speaker. He's Mike Johnson, first elected to the House in 2016 from a district in northwest Louisiana. He's almost unknown to the public, has a right-wing voting record, and has been a supporter of Donald Trump. He grills witnesses effectively but calmly, with no ...Read more

The 2020s are starting to look like the 1930s, as I wrote last week in the wake of Hamas' unprecedentedly vicious attack on Israel.

Nations that embody, imperfectly but creditably in any historical perspective, representative politics, rule of law, and respect for human rights -- Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan -- have been under attack or threat of ...Read more

Russia has been attacking Ukraine for 20 months now. Iran, through its terrorism partner Hamas, attacked Israel this weekend. China has been threatening to attack Taiwan.

The world is beginning to look a lot like the 1930s, when Japan attacked and overran much of China, and Nazi Germany and its then-ally the Soviet Union attacked and overran ...Read more

"The World Turned Upside Down." That's the song, or so longstanding legend would have it, that the British army band played after surrendering to American and French forces at Yorktown, 242 years ago. You can understand, even while not sympathizing, with the choice of ditty.

American partisan warfare does not produce the conclusive, decisive ...Read more

Net zero is in trouble. In utterly predictable trouble, in the king's-wearing-no-clothes trouble.

The signs are all around. Governments from coastal America to Communist China and businesses from automakers to toymakers have promised that they will produce no net carbon emissions by some date conveniently far in the future. But as years have ...Read more

"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