Back in the Sixties, it was easy enough for conservatives to take pot shots at radical students. Not only were they out to subvert the state, but their lifestyle seemed calculated to transgress all standards of decency. They were long-haired …
America’s new antisemitism bill will backfire
As May takes hold, the crisis brewing inside America’s political system shows no signs of abating; if anything, recent events have only confirmed how serious things have become. On May Day itself, the police moved in to quash the occupation …
Clarence Thomas’s court of diversity
As the case of Donald Trump v. United States continues to chafe America’s social fabric, an unlikely character threatens to steal the ex-President’s limelight: the ever-taciturn Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas. The demands for his recusal from the insurrection trial …
The rise of the slacker aristocracy
One is an amateur filmmaker and stay-at-home-dad whose wife is an executive at a financial services firm. Another founded two technology companies and is taking some time out after selling each for millions of dollars. The third supports himself with …
PEN America has surrendered over Israel
Another day, another opportunity for huffy, hypocritical “progressive” posturing. PEN America has now been forced to cancel its World Voices literary festival in New York and LA, on the heels of also cancelling its 2024 awards ceremony. Too many authors …
The growing RFK Jr coalition
The Camelot myth haunts Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He was brought up to believe that he would be the one to pick up the mantle left by Arthur, John F. Kennedy. Even as a precocious 20-year-old — having been hooked …
Columbia’s parody of radical activism
This week, amid widespread US campus protests against the war in Gaza, a video emerged of a confrontation on the Columbia quad. A slender young black man in a keffiyeh and a pair of florid pink Crocs paces through the …
Why the West will refuse to fight
Citizens won’t sacrifice themselvesCitiznsWestern politics is defined by a conflict that is always awkward and sometimes cringe. On the one hand, our leaders are full of loud-mouthed passion, warning that the days of peace are over and that we now …
The fantasy of open borders
Before entering today’s torturous immigration debate, we would do well to remember James Baldwin. “Power without morality is no longer power,” he observed. And the border question is fundamentally a moral one.
On one side, there is a growing belief …
The mythical masculinity of Donald Trump
As Donald Trump endures the eternity of the next month or so on a wooden bench in a courtroom in lower Manhattan, legions of his followers will decry the legal proceedings against him. They will insist that the claims and …
The tyranny of Columbine
The 25 years since the Columbine massacre have given us many occasions — other massacres, alas — to invoke it. But this repetition has had the strange effect of dimming and narrowing our sense of what “Columbine” was in its …
How Antifa went mainstream
In early 2018, I attended a reading at an independent bookstore in the heart of bourgeois Brooklyn. It was to launch the memoir of a Mexican-American former Border Patrol agent who had become disillusioned and quit. To the surprise of …
Why did we forgive OJ Simpson?
Hours after the news broke that OJ Simpson had died from cancer at the age of 76, I was sitting in a conference room, listening to an elevated but meandering discussion on the topic of forgiveness. Could absolution be empowering …
We must become Chernobyl wolves
As I write, lean grey wolves are pacing through a rain-soaked landscape in eastern Europe, untroubled by the fact that their forest is dotted with the decaying ruins of buildings abandoned half a century ago. Their home is the Chernobyl …
How Big Food feeds fat positivity
In 1967, Lew Louderback published an article titled “More People Should Be Fat”. Fat people were being told they were ugly, immoral and unhealthy; they were discriminated against in the job market and in education. Their persecution had “more than …