Conservatives have a special purgatory for uppity black women who dare question America’s founding myths. New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones — her Pulitzer Prize-winning “1619 Project” centralized slavery in America’s origin story, a heres

“If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” I’ve long argued that this exhortation is a soft form of totalitarianism. It’s rhetorical bullying. The speaker assumes he or she has authoritative knowledge of not just the problem bu

Last summer, conservative state lawmakers pontificated with great bluster about a federal plan called Operation Legend. They saw it as a vehicle to appear empathetic about the gun violence destroying urban neighborhoods, while also allowing them to d

A New Jersey school district has voted to eliminate “the names of all religious and secular holidays from the school calendar … opting for the more generic description ‘Day Off.’” You can guess the reason. They used those increasingly popular words —

“The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie.” I offer these words of Nikole Hannah-Jones, whose 2019 essay is part of the New York Times Magazine’s “1619 Project,” to the Heritage Foundation and the horde of Republican politicia

After more than a century and a half of underappreciation, the emancipation celebration known as Juneteenth is bringing out the regional differences in various ways, some of which make me wonder whether the Civil War really ended in 1865 — and if so,

Some people can’t take yes for an answer. Take America’s Catholic bishops. For only the second time in our history, a Catholic has been elected president of the United States. But Joe Biden’s not just a Catholic in name only, like John F. Kennedy. Bi

The morning bell rang at Republican High (”Home of the Fightin’ Pachyderms”) as students shuffled in. Gretchen Niedermeyer dry swallowed a couple of pre-emptive aspirins and reminded herself as she did every morning that she was just 16 months and —

President Joe Biden and Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin are scheduled to meet today for the first time since Biden was elected president. For many in the foreign policy establishment and diplomatic press corps, this is an exciting opportunity to conj

Cover-ups of sexual misconduct, allegations of racism and intimidation of those who wish to speak their minds but can’t for fear of losing their jobs. It sounds like the dysfunctional ways of the world, doesn’t it? These are just some of the problems

About a year ago in a June 2020 column, I posed this question: “Is the aftermath of George Floyd's killing the beginning of a lasting tide or a mere moment in time?” We’re about to find out. To all those who were newly engaged in the Black Lives Matt

A few words about the makers and the takers. That, as you may recall, was the formulation once favored by Fox “News” and other organs of the political right to describe the dynamic between those at the top of the economic pyramid and those at the bot

ProPublica obtained the tax returns of the richest Americans and discovered what every informed person already knew: They don’t pay as much in income taxes as some people would like them to. This is being called a great scandal by many Democrats and

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez actually was being kind when she described Vice President Kamala Harris’ “Do not come” message to undocumented Central American migrants as “disappointing.” “Embarrassing” would have been closer to the point. On her firs

Remember the Space Force? You know, the sixth branch of the U.S. military, officially created in 2019, “establishing space as a warfighting domain and guaranteeing that the United States will dominate in that environment just like all others.” Thus d

In an era of political correctness, virtue signaling and woke-ness, wisdom is in such short supply that when discovered it stands out like a beacon in a storm. Wisdom should not be equated with information, of which we have plenty, though information

Dear Sen. Manchin: I don’t know you, senator. We’ve never met in person. But, ever since you arrived in the Senate, I’ve admired your streak of independence, your willingness to reach out across the aisle, and your dedication to the people of West Vi

It’s official: In the great existential battle between a return to normalcy and a new progressive era, normalcy is winning. Recall that Joe Biden ran as a moderate in 2020, not just in the general election but also in the Democratic primaries. Biden

Dear Sen. Joe Manchin: It has only been 56 years. As Americans, we are pleased to call ourselves one of the world’s oldest democracies. We are actually one of the world’s newest. Democracy, after all, is government shaped by the will of the people. B

He was so close. Danny Fenster was about to board a plane in Myanmar on May 24 to return home to Michigan. Instead he was detained at Yangon International Airport, apparently for — as one of his former teachers at Columbia College in Chicago aptly tw

In the 1964 presidential campaign, Republican candidate Barry Goldwater had a slogan: “In your heart you know he’s right.” That was aimed at deflecting the stereotype about Goldwater and Republicans in general that they were an uncaring lot. It is a

So what will you do after democracy dies? Who will we be after democracy dies? After democracy dies, will we remember the country we had? Will we remember all that we lost? How will we explain what we allowed to happen? Will we be ashamed after democ

I think Joe Biden’s decision to fully withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan is a mistake. It’s mistaken on strategic and moral grounds. I hope I’m wrong. But when even administration officials, and experts who favor the decision, concede that our pul

Let’s listen in for a moment to the gentle, awkward language of mass killing: “The employment or threat of employment of nuclear weapons could have a significant influence on ground operations. . . . Integration of nuclear weapons into a theater of o

President Biden has pledged to “help narrow the racial wealth gap and reinvest in communities that have been left behind by failed policies.” He used the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre in Greenwood, a thriving African American community

We all remember that fateful day, September 11, 2001, and the moment when President George W. Bush got the news. While Bush was reading to a group of second-graders at Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida, White House Chief of Staff

Over Memorial Day weekend, Michael Flynn, who briefly served as Donald Trump’s first national security adviser, appeared at a QAnon-affiliated conference in Dallas. During a Q&A session, an audience member asked, “I want to know why what happened in

On the court, Naomi Osaka can still physically pound her opponents to a pulp. She’s the same incredible athlete. Nothing has changed — except for a very public admittance of details about her mental health after she chose to withdraw from the French

It’s not just Tulsa. From the 2019 premiere of HBO’s “Watchmen,” which introduced many Americans to a racial atrocity they’d never heard of, to all the recent media attention — CNN, the New York Times, NPR — marking this week’s centennial, the Tulsa

Of the many lessons to be considered 100 years after a breathtakingly brutal race riot tore through Tulsa’s Greenwood district, one of the most painful is this: Tulsa wasn’t alone. The two-day rampage came two years after the “Red Summer” of 1919 in