What happens when political movements stop debating ideas and begin screening out disagreement? This essay examines echo chambers, ideological loyalty, and why free thought depends upon the willingness to confront inconvenient facts.
Why have so few transgender athletes become such a dominant political issue? This essay examines how fear, symbolism, and manufactured outrage can transform a tiny population into the center of a national political campaign while larger problems remain unresolved.
How does modern political propaganda work? This essay examines how fear, distraction, and manufactured outrage can replace policy debate, arguing that democracy ultimately depends upon citizens willing to verify claims before believing them.
The biggest grift in the history of the United States isn’t a Ponzi scheme. It isn’t a crooked casino. It isn’t some guy in a cheap suit selling you a miracle investment from the back of a van. No. The greatest grift is convincing ordinary people to spend fifty years of their lives working so they can finally afford to stop working when they’re seventy. Think about that...
Can a president rename history? This essay explores why executive authority can change government terminology but cannot erase the centuries of Indigenous, cultural, and historical memory preserved in the names of the Great Lakes.
Why do the Founders oppose religious government? This essay explores how Jefferson, Madison, and the Constitution rejected theocracy by protecting religious liberty for every faith and preventing any religion from becoming America's civil law.
Can personal experience replace scientific expertise? This essay examines Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s public health leadership and argues that evidence, not ideology or anecdote, should guide decisions affecting millions of Americans.
Public debates often portray Sharia as uniquely incompatible with democracy while overlooking the similar role religious law has historically played within Christianity. This essay argues that the constitutional issue is not which religion's laws are proposed, but whether any religious doctrine should replace the Constitution as America's highest civil authority.
Why Donald Trump Cannot Stand in the Shadow of John F. Kennedy There is a peculiar vulgarity to the modern American right: a fixation on proximity. If greatness cannot be earned, it can at least be adjacent. If history cannot be mastered, it can be looted for names, monuments, and borrowed glory. Hence the grotesque spectacle of Donald J. Trump—draft-dodger, grievance merchant, and...
On a president who once wondered aloud why the world’s largest arsenal should sit unused, and a war that has now put the wondering within reach of the trigger. A Question, Asked Three Times There is a species of question that, once posed by a man holding nuclear launch authority, cannot be un-posed. It sits there afterward, a small dark stone in the historical record, no matter how briskly...