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Restriction backlash is coming

It already seems clear that the first major political and culture eruption of the Biden years will be a roiling populist backlash against the next round of COVID restrictions. We saw this sentiment play out in sporadic anti-lockdown demonstrations last spring and it has driven ongoing resistance to masks, but it is, in all likelihood, about to reach an entirely new level — fueled by exhaustion with the virus, elite hypocrisy and the shattered credibility of the public-health establishment. The ascension of Joe Biden will add force to the reaction. It is an iron law of American ...

Let’s define some ambiguous terms

Some of the confusion in thinking about matters of race stems from the ambiguity in the terms that we use. I am going to take a stab at suggesting operational definitions for a couple terms in our discussion of race. Good analytical thinking requires that we do not confuse one behavioral phenomenon with another. Let's start with "discrimination." Discrimination is the act of choice, and choice is a necessary fact of life. Our lives are spent discriminating for or against different activities and people. Some people shop at Wegmans and thus discriminate against Food Giant. Some students ...

Will we ever learn?

Missing in any debate about whether it is wise for the United States to reduce our troop numbers in both Afghanistan and Iraq, as the Trump administration has ordered, down to 2,500 Americans in each country (a number, let it be noted, that is too few to fight and too many to die), is the question members of Congress and policymakers invariably choose to duck: How did we get into the longest war in U.S. history in Afghanistan and the second-longest in Iraq? Of course, we know, it was in response to Sept. 11, 2001, when al-Qaida operatives hijacked four commercial U.S. airliners and ...

Trump’s case is unraveling

The Trump legal team's move over the weekend to distance itself from attorney Sidney Powell as it seeks to overturn the November 3 election results is a major blow to the president's attempt to win a second term. Powell, whose 2014 book, "Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice," along with her work as the attorney for former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, made her a darling of conservatives. But her assertions that Chinese communists, voting machines once used to flip Venezuelan elections and foreign money were behind Trump's defeat lack as much ...

It’s a climate hustle

I hear that climate change will destroy much of the world. "There will be irreversible damage to the planet!" warns a CNN anchor. Joe Biden says he'll spend $500 billion a year to fight what his website calls an "existential threat to life." Really? I'm a consumer reporter. Over the years, alarmed scientists have passionately warned me about many things that they thought were about to kill Americans. "Asbestos in hair dryers, coffee, computer terminals, electric power lines, microwave ovens, cell phones (brain tumors!), electric blankets, computer terminals, herbicides, ...

Student debt forgiveness? Bad idea

One good rule of thumb is to judge parties and politicians by their priorities. Politicians often pretend to be for every good thing under the sun, so the best way to judge them is to look at which things they actually work to achieve or spend political capital on. This will tell you not only what they're really for, but which constituents they really care about. By that metric, it will be very revealing if one of Joe Biden's first actions as president will be to forgive student debt. That's an idea swirling around Democratic circles - particularly among the progressive base, which ...