It’s still before dawn when hundreds of Chinese missiles begin to rain down on Taiwan. Much of the self-governing island’s air and naval forces are obliterated in a matter of minutes. Chinese special forces storm the residence and offices of …
How Joe Biden wasted his presidency
In his farewell address to the nation on Wednesday, President Biden warned that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy”. He went on to explicitly echo his predecessor …
Border hawks need the labour Left
My grandfather Jesús came to the United States to work on the railroads and harvest crops at the tail end of World War II. He arrived through the bracero programe, the first legal guest-worker system in American history. Designed to …
Trump can’t end Mexico’s cartel war
Most residents in the town of Jerécuaro in Central Mexico were asleep when the car bomb exploded in the plaza at 5.10 am on 24 October, blowing out the windows of stores and scattering debris. But when a second car …
Bring back paternalism for the mentally ill
Donald Trump is a master at disrupting stale bipartisan orthodoxies and remaking the politics of familiar issues. He did so with free trade and industrial policy in his first term, forcing even the Biden administration to adopt his views. This …
American empathy has turned to ashes
The great British historian Arnold Toynbee created the challenge and response theory of history, in which civilisations — like people — flourish or collapse on their ability to respond to adversity. By that measurement, American civilisation is in free fall.…
‘Experts’ killed trust in vaccines
Vaccination rates against childhood diseases have been on a downward slide for the past few years in the United States. Nationally, for example, the share of kindergarteners with completed records for the measles vaccine dropped to 93 percent last year, …
How Bob Dylan fought the proto-woke
The American birthright entails both the freedom and often times the necessity of making yourself up from scratch. Many of America’s most famous heroes were self-made men, from Benjamin Franklin to Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. The same is true …
The devilish appeal of Satanism
Jared Mammon is not the sort of person you’d associate with the Prince of Darkness. A mild-mannered Floridian with a day job in finance — hence his alias — he could easily pass under a demon hunter’s radar. Yet when …
Wildfires don’t care about DEI
In a fight between a good big man and a good little man, the good big man will generally prevail. In a straight-up shootout, a small female police officer is the equal of a large male predator. But police use …
Why Gotham’s bad old days are back
In the New York of my 1970s boyhood, urban chaos encircled ordinary people. Subway cars were covered in graffiti, inside and out. Pickpocketing, public urination, and assaults were common. I vividly recall the homeless people sprawled out on the sidewalks …
Is Elon the new Enoch?
In the opening of E. H. Gombrich’s A Little History of the World, there’s a lovely metaphor of the work of an historian. History, he writes, is like a bottomless well stretching into eternity, visible only by human recollection falling …
LA’s dreams went up in flames
The fire still engulfing large swaths of Los Angeles has done more than destroy homes, businesses, and livelihoods. It has scorched the whole dream of Los Angeles, part of a downward spiral unfolding for a generation — and cast into …
Annexation has always haunted Canada
“It is her own soul that Canada risks today.” Rudyard Kipling’s cable to a Montreal newspaper was an explosive intervention in the country’s 1911 election, which turned on a familiar question: should Canadians submit to the “economic force” of the …
Is Trump the most libertarian president ever?
It’s unusual to have a single figure, Donald Trump, dominate the political life of a country for a decade — and for nobody, really, to have any clear definition of his core political philosophy. For much of that decade, Democrats …