Pigs on Two Legs Turn on Each Other
Tennis great Martina Navratilova until recently had long been coronated as a social justice trailblazer. She was one of the first marquee celebrity athletes to […]
California’s Rendezvous With Reality
Californians brag that their state is the world’s fifth-largest economy. They talk as reverentially of Silicon Valley companies Apple, Facebook and Google as the ancient […]
Yes, ‘This Is America, 2019’
We really are suffering from a national illness—just not the one the media is peddling.
Changing Reality With Words
The reinvention of vocabulary can often be more effective than any social protest movement. Malarial swamps can become healthy “wetlands.” Fetid “dumps” are often rebranded […]
Autopsy of a Dead Coup
The illegal effort to destroy the 2016 Trump campaign by Hillary Clinton campaign’s use of funds to create, disseminate among court media, and then salt […]
The Mythologies of ‘Joe Being Joe’ Biden
Some polls put 76-year-old Joe Biden as the Democratic front-runner for the 2020 presidential election. There is certainly some logic to that reckoning. Biden has […]
Progressives Bearing Gifts
Donald Trump in 2016 did not only run against the planted rumors of the fake Steele dossier, 90 percent negative media coverage, his own boisterous […]
The Return of Ancient Prejudices
In the latter half of the 19th century and early in the 20th century, as Catholic immigrants poured in from Ireland and eastern Europe, an […]
How to Make It Home in California: Rules for the Modern Odysseus
I drove back from San Francisco not long ago to the rural San Joaquin Valley. It is only 200 miles. But in fact, it can […]
Much Has Changed for the Better Since 2016—Not That Trump Will Get Credit
The news obsesses over the recent government shutdown, the latest Robert Mueller arrest and, of course, fake news—from the BuzzFeed Michael Cohen non-story to the […]
Attack of the Techno-Lynch Mob
The Covington Lie offered the perfect occasion for the electronic mob to pounce—after temporarily licking its wounds following the BuzzFeed fake news hysteria. And it […]
Auditing Our Auditors
The Roman satirist Juvenal, in a famous passage, asked, “Who will watch the watchmen?” That problem of policing the police has troubled Western thinkers from […]
Should the FBI Run the Country?
Since the media would doubtless answer that loaded question, “It depends on the president,” let us imagine the following scenario. Return to 2008, when candidate […]
Trump’s Re-Election Chances May Be Better Than You Think
What are Donald Trump’s chances for re-election in 2020? If history is any guide, pretty good. In early 1994, Bill Clinton’s approval rating after two […]
The Game of Pseudo-Authenticity
Americans always have been prone to reinventing themselves. We now live in an age of radical social construction—a sort of expansive update on F. Scott […]
The Ironies of Illegal Immigration
Estimates suggest that there are 11 million to 13 million Mexican citizens currently living in the United States illegally. Millions more emigrated previously and are […]
An Epidemic of Erasures, Redactions, Omissions, and Perjuries
Imagine the following: The IRS sends you, John Q. Citizen, a letter alleging you have not complied with U.S. tax law. In the next paragraph, […]
Actually, 2018 Was a Pretty Good Year
The year 2018 will be deplored by pundits as a bad year of more unpredictable Donald Trump, headlined by wild stock market gyrations, the melodramas […]
Our Exhausted American Mediocracy
The unlikely 2016 election of Donald Trump—the first president without either prior political or military office—was a repudiation of the American “aristocracy.” By “rule of […]
Mueller Investigation Stirring Up More Trouble Than It’s Finding
After 19 months, special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation has charged a number of targets with almost every conceivable sin—except collusion with Russia to throw an […]