Quick Read
Although Jonathan Swan appears to have positioned a recent essay on Axios with a view toward explaining away President Trump’s electoral gains among Latino voters as a “counterintuitive” political benefit-to-him of the coronavirus, I think the real lesson is quite different. Swan argues that by “shifting Trump’s rhetoric from immigration to fears around the economic impact…
Ethan Yang, in a post for the American Institute for Economic Research, asks, “Why Have the Courts Been Deferential to Lockdowns?” Yang addresses legal principles and tests, such as “rational basis” and “the narrowly tailored standard” and writes: Hollow phrases such as “the common good,” “the public interest,” and “reasonable” give enormous discretion to judges…
As we watch the cycle of moral panics churning over one another — each being replaced for a season or two and then resuming for another turn — it’s important to keep in mind how easy it is to construct narratives. On a continent of hundreds of millions in a world of billions, a well-networked,…
Each instance is a small thing, and especially in a small state, one wants to limit one’s time spent lurking around social media like a sort of contrarian anthropologist. (Of course, most insiders aren’t on there purely for fun and distraction, but are working angles, too.) Still this subtle dynamic may be one of the…
When you get one of the regular giant mailers from a cabal of government labor unions advocating for higher taxes, it’s pretty obvious what’s going on. They want government to collect more money so they can arrange with elected officials to transfer more of it to them, with the promise that the unions will feed…
I’m just a hair too young to remember car lines for gasoline in the 1970s, but I do remember my parents explaining to me why cars’ gas fill lines had to be unlatched from inside the car. (For younger folks: because gas was so rare and important that people were siphoning it out of cars…
That simple truism, which buzzed around my ears as I mowed the lawn this weekend, holds in politics, in family, in religion… in life. I was catching up on various podcasts from recent weeks, and as I began to feel my mental muscles tensing up to battle a global conspiracy seeking a “Great Reset,” I…
The Providence Journal recently published a multi-author op-ed on the idea, written by civic engagement “consultant” Cynthia Gibson, Providence College global studies professor Nicholas Longo and activist Pam Jennings. “Participatory budgeting” — which the authors link to the Rhode Island Foundation’s non-governmental “Make It Happen” initiative to spend federal stimulus money — belongs on the…
Gail Heriot — a civil rights attorney and law professor — gives a quick summary, over on Instapundit, of the argumentative bind of transgender activists in the Biden Administration trying to force the College of the Ozarks to allow men who identify as women to live in girls’ dorms: If an anatomical woman who wears dresses…
The 199,922 Rhode Islanders who voted for President Trump (and probably tens of thousands more who supported him but did not vote) have good cause to wonder whether the governor of the State of Rhode Island cares about their lives and interests. When Dan McKee found out that somebody hosting a fundraiser for him,…