Recent Viewpoints

Penna Dexter At this year’s D.C. March for Life, Vice President J.D. Vance announced the “historic expansion” of the Mexico City Policy, which prevents federal funds from going to groups that perform abortions overseas. Pro-life administrations have maintained and reinstated the Mexico City policy since President Reagan initiated it in 1984.When pro-abortion presidents enter office, they  rescind it. The edict sets the tone for the values the American government will export in its foreign policy, in effect answering the question:…

Kerby Anderson Yesterday I talked about social media and the teen brain. Today I want to talk about social media and its impact on teenagers’ mental health. An article in Axios reminds the reader that experts have been “increasingly warning of a connection between heavy social media use and mental health issues in children.” Apparently, there are lawsuits against social media producers that accuse them of contributing to a youth mental health crisis. One of the experts quoted is Jean…

Kerby Anderson What is the effect of social media on the brain? Nicholas Carr made this observation fourteen years ago in an article in The Atlantic: “Over the past few years, I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory.” In a book he later wrote, he blamed the internet and social media. We now have studies that seem to confirm what most of us suspected. Neuroscientists at…

Kerby Anderson A few weeks ago, the price of gold shot past $5,000 per ounce. President Trump has been proclaiming that the country is entering into a new golden age. I don’t think this is what he was talking about. Some say that gold is a barometer of belief, while others say it is a vote of declining confidence by the market. It isn’t just that gold is $5,000 an ounce. It is also a recognition that the dollar is…

Kerby Anderson Andrew McCarthy recounts the first time he encountered sports gambling. As a deputy US Marshall, he learned about it from Henry Hill, who was later portrayed in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. The amount the mob made from the Boston College basketball point-shaving scandal would be a rounding error today in the world of online sports gambling. The Internet revolution and a 2018 Supreme Court ruling has turbocharged legalized gambling. A few decades ago, it wasn’t as easy to bet…

Kerby Anderson Clay Shirky, writing in the Yale Alumni Magazine, reminds us of the benefits and limitations of chatbots. He begins with a thought experiment. Imagine you were sitting around the Thanksgiving table in 2022 and a guest asked the table when AI would get to a million users. Some might say two years away, others might say ten years away. The answer is “a week from Monday.” OpenAI dropped ChatGPT 3.5 on the last day of November. It had…

Penna Dexter Newly-inaugurated New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani ran for office on a 4-point platform: rent freezes, free buses, free childcare, and city-run grocery stores. In an essay for The Claremont Review of Books, Christopher Caldwell points out that these are the policy positions of the Democratic Socialists of America which, he says, “shows signs of turning into the main political organization of the political Left.” These are bad ideas. There’s already a housing shortage. Mr. Caldwell says the rent…

Kerby Anderson James Piereson declares that “Socialism is a hate crime.” He uses this phrase often used by leftists against them because of their admiration of socialism. He thinks “it is remarkable that, despite its long record of failure, socialism is now more popular than ever among college students and in progressive precincts of the Democratic Party.” He believes that anyone with just a bit of curiosity can open a history book and see the millions who have died or…

Kerby Anderson On the last day of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, a woman asked Benjamin Franklin what government he had given them. His famous reply was: “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.” Professor Robert George wrote about “How to Keep Our Republic.” He begins by reminding us that most Americans are concerned about the direction of this country. “A December 2025 Gallup poll found that just 24 percent of Americans were satisfied with the nation’s direction. A Politico poll…

Kerby Anderson Law professor Jonathan Turley writes about free speech, but also has a book on Rage and the Republic about to be released. We get a preview of his concerns in his article, “Clickbait: How the left created yet another false story to trigger outrage.” To put the latest false narrative about the “bait boy” story in perspective, he begins by reminding of the outrage Democratic leaders expressed about the false story of Border agents whipping migrants in Texas….

Kerby Anderson One recent national survey discovered an ongoing ideological and spiritual drift among Americans. But what was more significant was the fact that even consistent churchgoers are abandoning traditional biblical beliefs. And they also rejected conservative social perspectives and are more likely to support socialism. The survey revealed that just a plurality of regularly churched adults (34%) now considers themselves conservative on social issues. Nearly as many describe themselves as moderate (29%) or liberal (19%). One of most striking…