Column

It’s easy to miss some dramatic differences between the Trump years and the Biden years. Take, for example, the “tell-all books,” either written by journalists who are granted access to insiders or books written by the insiders themselves. By this time in the Trump term – the summer of 2019 – we were 18 months into “tell-all season.” But no Biden insiders are writing a “tell-all book.” We’re…

Institutional trust is built over the course of years. Decades. Centuries. Dishonesty takes just a moment to destroy institutional trust. This week, Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and professor of molecular virology at Baylor College of Medicine, got into a spat with podcaster Joe Rogan and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Hotez has a long-…

Conservatives on Twitter are mocking CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale again, especially since his Twitter bio explains his work as “I fact-check the president. “ Fox News reported on June 16 that Dale hasn't published a fact-check of President Biden since March 30, and that was only online, not on TV. “Since that time, though, his database shows 21 bylined stories or on-air appearances that fact-…

People hate Chris Rufo. “Your agenda to turn our campus into a space of extremist indoctrination is harming our enrollment!” shouts a student at Florida’s New College. “You are the problem!” “I’m not the problem,” Rufo tells me in my newest video. “I’m actually the solution.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis made Rufo a trustee of a state college. Rufo quickly moved to end what he considers leftist…

When George W. Bush was running for president in 2000, he spoke to the NAACP’s 91st annual convention where he coined the phrase “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” By that he meant the attitude held by some that if one is Black, it automatically means they should not be expected to achieve much in life because so many start off in circumstances that are difficult, if not impossible, to…

June 1 marked the advent of Pride Month -- the most important sacrament of the American secular religious calendar. During Pride Month, public schools across the nation teach small children the joys of alternative sexual practices and orientations; corporations plaster their stores in rainbow accoutrements of all sorts; and the federal government of the United States proclaims its fidelity to…

WASHINGTON -- Last week in this space I wrote about culture and how essential it is to the politics of a nation. If the culture of a country is upbeat, the country will be fine. If the culture of a country is in decline, its politics will follow. Simply put, culture prefigures politics. Russia -- once referred to as the Soviet Union -- is an example of what I have in mind. Imagine mighty…

This week, Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and President Joe Biden cut a deal to raise the debt limit. The breakthrough came after three months of Biden pledging not to even negotiate over the debt limit. Instead, Biden was forced to concede to a 1% cap on increases for non-military spending, a cutback on IRS funding, a clawback of some unspent COVID-19 allocations, and addition…

“Where there’s a will, there’s a way” is an old and familiar quotation, often attributed to Albert Einstein, who was on to something almost as significant as E=MC2. What if there is no will, is there still a way? It doesn’t seem likely. In Washington, will has come to die to paraphrase Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida and now Republican presidential candidate. Rarely is anything significant…

This week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis decided to announce his 2024 presidential candidacy on Twitter Spaces, the newest feature on Elon Musk’s Twitter. Musk himself would be co-hosting the event, giving DeSantis access to Musk’s 141 million Twitter followers. Only after the Twitter launch will DeSantis begin the more typical campaigning, embarking on a series of campaign events across the…

WASHINGTON -- Tucker Carlson’s recent travails with the media remind me of the great M. Stanton Evans’ solomonic judgment regarding Richard Nixon. Said Stan: “I never liked Richard Nixon ... until Watergate.” Then he saw the 37th president in a different light. Well, I did not like Tucker Carlson very much until he got fired by Rupert Murdoch. Then, as everyone among the bien-pensants piled on…

This week, the media found its latest iteration of its favorite narrative: white man harms black man. That iteration featured a 24-year-old white Marine from Queens attempting to suppress a 30-year-old homeless, psychotic black man, Jordan Neely, via use of a suppression hold. Neely was apparently threatening people on the subway when the Marine took him down from behind, keeping him in the…

The very term “debt limit” makes a mockery of any kind of responsible budgeting. Each time the government reaches the “limit” it gets raised with the familiar scenarios that include threats of a government shutdown (an idea that increasingly appeals to some conservatives) and the claim that the “full faith and credit” of the U.S. is at stake. We have faith and credit? Who knew?

Some schools are ditching traditional grading. Instead, they use “labor-based grading,” an idea promoted by Arizona State University professor Asao Inoue. Labor-based grading means basing grades more on effort than the quality of work. In addition, Inoue lectured a conference of rhetoric professors “stop saying that we have to teach this dominant English. ... If you use a single standard to…