ArcaMax

Watching Tim Scott's announcement speech, I was struck by how differently I would have responded to his message 10 years ago. In 2013 I wrote: "It's to their credit that Republicans are obsessed with getting the government to address its unconscionable and unmanageable debt, freeing up the productive private sector to create economic growth and ...Read more

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is causing eyebrows to arch all over the political world. The 69-year-old son of slain Sen. Robert F. Kennedy is a former environmental lawyer turned vaccine conspiracist. On April 19, he announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president. His aim? To "end the corrupt merger of state and corporate power."

...Read more

The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto is befuddled. He cannot understand how people who are or once were Republican or conservative can criticize Justice Clarence Thomas. In a piece titled "Et Tu, Juan? Clarence Thomas's Fickle Friends Pile On," Taranto denounces Sen. Mitt Romney and me for insufficient partisan zealotry.

As delighted as I am...Read more

The journalists at ProPublica are proud of their scoop about Justice Clarence Thomas accepting scads of luxury gifts over the years from a billionaire pal, Harlan Crow. Many who never liked Thomas' jurisprudence are piling on and declaring a four-alarm fire. Writing in The American Prospect, Max Moran intones that Thomas has "broken the law, ...Read more

You hear it said in responsible quarters of the right that Democrats are undermining the rule of law by handing up an indictment of Donald Trump. Sure, they acknowledge, Trump has done terrible things, but by bringing this case, Democrats are twisting the law to get at one particular defendant, and that's not the way things should work. Further,...Read more

In 2016, the prolific author and economist Thomas Sowell gave up his syndicated column after a quarter-century. A few months later, I asked him how it felt. He was delighted. The best part, he confided, was not having to read the news so assiduously every day.

Hoo boy. "I feel ya," as Ted Lasso might say. Aware that my own consumption of news ...Read more

I recall imagining, back in 2020, that when COVID-19 was finally in the rearview mirror, we would witness a global party of epic proportions. If the "Roaring Twenties" were partly a reaction to the ebbing of the Spanish flu, perhaps the 2020s would feature a similar eruption of animal spirits and devil-may-care antics (albeit, alas, without the ...Read more

University of Pennsylvania Professor Amy Wax has no patience for victimhood complaints. Asked whether she considers mid-20th century British politician Enoch Powell (whose writing she assigned and who gained fame for his "rivers of blood" anti-immigration speech) was a racist, Wax was indignant:

"Can you define racism for me? Is so-and-so a ...Read more

In late 2019, Politico asked a high-ranking Biden aide about the candidate's age. "If Biden is elected," the anonymous adviser said, "he's going to be 82 years old in four years and he won't be running for reelection."

That was then. Though Joe Biden never did forswear a second term, thus avoiding Teddy Roosevelt's 1904 mistake, which made him ...Read more