The Covid era cut through traditional ideological paradigms like knives on tissue. Nothing behaved as we might have expected. The civil libertarians were nowhere in sight. The courts did not work. Big business and media fully cooperated. The major religions caved. The...
In 1883, when the Pendleton Act was passed, creating the US civil service, it must have seemed like no big deal. The forgotten Chester A. Arthur was the president. The fear of being assassinated like his predecessor James Garfield convinced him to back the...
The excuse that this regime is better than it was, or might otherwise have been, only lasts so long. Every transition government in history has deployed that trope. Think the Girondins in France, Kerensky in Russia, Weimar in Germany, the Second Spanish...
The American system of medical-care delivery has no name. It is neither single payer nor based on private enterprise. It is a patchwork of cockamamie carrots and sticks, agencies and incentives, exceptions and accounting tricks, cajoles and punishments, cobbled...
The most dramatic narrative shift in this post-lockdown period has been the flip in the perceptions of government itself. For decades and even centuries, government was seen as the essential bulwark to defend the poor, empower the marginalized, realize justice, even...
Part of the sweep of government in the first days of the Trump administration has been a freeze on communications. The explosion has hit the whole of public health bureaucracies, which Trump personally blames in part for the meltdown of his previous term of president...
Bram Stoker’s classic Dracula (1892) was written as a Victorian-style moralizing tale of sin and its consequences. The author, a political and religious conservative of his times, never could have imagined that his novel would become a bestseller in his own...
Are there words in the English language that fully describe what happened during the Covid years that are not already overused? Calamity comes to mind. Disaster. Cataclysm. Ruin, devastation, catastrophe, unprecedented debacle, fiasco, and utter wreckage – all fine...
No matter how bad you think Covid policies were, they were intended to be worse. Consider the vaccine passports alone. Six cities were locked down to include only the vaccinated in public indoor places. They were New York City, Boston, Chicago, New Orleans,...
The global Covid response was the turning point in public trust, economic vitality, citizen health, free speech, literacy, religious and travel freedom, elite credibility, demographic longevity, and so much more. Now five years following the initial spread of the...
The censors are losing patience. They have gone from regretting the existence of free speech and gaming the system as best they can to fantasizing about ending it through criminal penalties. You can observe this change in temperament – from frustration to fury...
Conventional wisdom has it that the US and much of the Western world has polarized into right and left. These tribes are hard-core and share mutual loathing. That model of understanding pervades all popular media and consumes the culture, such that everyone feels the...
There is only one major social media platform that is relatively free of censorship. That is X, once known as Twitter, and owned by Elon Musk, who has preached free speech for years and sacrificed billions in advertising dollars in order to protect it. If we don’t...
Four years later, many people are investigating how our lives were completely upended by a pandemic response. Over my time on the case, I’ve heard countless theories. It was Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Finance, the Green New Deal, the CCP, Depopulation, Get Trump,...
It’s not been a good week for the Censorship Industrial Complex. The machine has been built and put into action over nearly a decade but largely in secret. Its way of doing business has been via surreptitious contacts with media and tech companies, intelligence...
They are wearing us down with shocking headlines and opinions. They come daily these days, with increasingly implausible claims that leave your jaw on the floor. The rest of the text is perfunctory. The headline is the takeaway, and the part designed to demoralize,...
The last few years can be tracked at two levels: the physical reality around us and the realm of the intellectual, mental, and psychological. The first level has presented a chaotic narrative of the previously unthinkable. A killer virus that turned out to be...
We’ve all wondered if the fix is already in. Given the irregularities of the last election, and the manner in which the whole of the U.S. establishment rallied around one side, maybe a Biden victory in November is a foregone conclusion. I’m guilty of believing this....
In the 1990s and for years into our century, it was common to ridicule the government for being technologically backwards. We were all gaining access to fabulous things, including webs, apps, search tools, and social media. But governments at all levels were stuck in...
In 1960, Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell published a book called The End of Ideology. It argued that it was time to put aside all our ridiculous arguments of the past – socialism, fascism, liberalism, anarchism, technocracy, etc. – and just recognize that elites like...
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