Confronting the Deep Roots of Violence in El Salvador
In 1982, Joan Didion famously wrote of El Salvador that “terror is the given of the place.” At the time, the country was in the midst of a civil war, which pitted the leftist guerrillas of the...
View ArticleCan the Supreme Court Be Fixed?
With the likely confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett this week to the Supreme Court, conservatives will secure a majority they can use to strike down liberal legislation for years to come. Why do nine...
View ArticleExxonMobil’s Real Quid Pro Quo With the Government
Donald Trump didn’t actually give Exxon drilling permits in exchange for $25 million in campaign donations. He just wants you to know that he could, if he wanted to. That was the message behind a viral...
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America Has No Duty to Rule the World
The United States is the world’s overwhelming military power, and it’s not even close. The country controls about 750 overseas bases (China, by comparison, has only one foreign base, in Djibouti). It...
View ArticleLiberals Are Losing the Journalism Wars
The University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media recently released a report titled “The Expanding News Desert,” which showed that over the last 15 years, more than a fourth of...
View ArticleTrump Is Giving America a Grisly Preview of a Second Term
I’m not very good at math, which is probably how I ended up writing for a living. Fortunately, the statisticians over at FiveThirtyEight do not share this shortcoming. Nate Silver’s famed...
View ArticleThere Are No Good Republicans for a Biden White House
There is a battle brewing over the shape of a potential Biden administration between the center and the left. Broadly speaking, the left, defeated in the primaries, is pushing from the sidelines for...
View ArticleThe Emerging, Tenuous “Essential Worker” Vote
Over the past few weeks, when Diego Isaacs hasn’t been at his job in the produce department at the grocery store Harris Teeter in Charlotte, North Carolina, he’s been busy contacting as many people as...
View ArticleCan Podcasts Save Local News?
No one knows what to do about the crisis in local news. Recent research from Pew Research Center includes a host of depressing statistics: More than 50 percent of all newsroom jobs have been lost since...
View ArticleCultural Resentment Is Conservatives’ New Religion
Even if he’s handed a defeat in November, there probably won’t really be anything like a truly “post-Trump” politics for a long while: Donald Trump himself is likely to stick around one way or another...
View ArticleThe Native Vote Is Crucial This Election—and Under Threat
Speaking with The Washington Post for a cringe-inducing piece about the influx of people moving to Montana, Candace Carr Strauss, the CEO of the Big Sky Chamber of Commerce, offered a potential selling...
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The Small, Midwestern Town Taken Over by Fake Communists
The Marathon County Historical Society sits in an old church building in Wausau, just up the Wisconsin River from the town of Mosinee. The lobby is large, a gift shop with books and paraphernalia in...
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Martin Amis, the Accidental Memoirist
How do you solve a problem like Martin Amis? Like Maria from The Sound of Music, he’s a clown to his detractors and a musician to his fans—the music of the well-tuned sentence, that is, and the...
View ArticleYes, You Have a Duty to Vote
There are two dominant political traditions in the West and the United States: that of liberalism, which dates back to seventeenth-century England, and that of republicanism, with its roots in ancient...
View ArticleWill Joe Manchin Ruin Democrats’ Best Chance to Fight Climate Change?
There’s been a bit of common wisdom circling among green groups in Washington. If Biden gets elected and Democrats take back the Senate—both, granted, big ifs—then any climate legislation they might...
View ArticleTrump’s Scorched-Earth War Against Federal Employees
One advantage of a vague slogan like “drain the swamp” is that it can mean different things to different people. Does it mean ousting elected officials from their comfy seats in Washington, D.C., which...
View ArticleLesley Stahl Blew Her Chance to Eviscerate Trump
For days we’ve been hearing President Donald Trump fulminate about his “FAKE and BIASED interview” with Lesley Stahl of CBS News’s 60 Minutes. It was a “vicious attempted ‘takeout’” full of “bias,...
View ArticleIn Memoriam: The Trump Pivot
For more than four years—ever since it became clear that Donald Trump would actually be the Republican nominee for president—pundits have fixated on one question: Is Donald Trump about to pivot to...
View ArticleThe Working Class Goes Missing From Yet Another Debate
Earlier this month on the stump, Joe Biden tried some Bernie-style class war on for size. “If every investment banker in New York went on strike, nothing would much change in America,” he said at a...
View ArticleThe Righteous Anger of Joe Biden
American political debates began in 1858 with Abraham Lincoln taking on Stephen Douglas over the future of slavery. And 162 year later, in what will hopefully be the final debate of Donald Trump’s...
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