Recent Viewpoints

Kerby Anderson After a mass shooting, one question rarely asked is whether there is any connection to psychiatric drugs. As I have explained in previous commentaries, there are many factors and explanations for young men who decide to shoot innocent citizens. There is no “one size fits all” explanation. It’s worth a brief mention that many of these young men were on what are called SSRI drugs. That stands for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Correlation is not causation, but we…

Penna Dexter The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision restores the regulation of abortion to the states where it belongs. The abortion industry is pushing back with scare tactics as evidenced at a hearing before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP). In testimony before the HELP Committee, Kristyn Brandi, chair of Physicians for Reproductive Health, tried to convince senators that banning abortion would deprive women with ectopic pregnancies of lifesaving care. Ectopic pregnancy is any pregnancy that…

Kerby Anderson The attorney general of the state of New York would like to wipe pregnancy centers off the map, digitally. She (along with other progressive activists) is pressuring Google to remove “pregnancy centers that are not real clinics” from digital maps. This represents the latest in what could be called the digital cancel culture. Progressives aren’t very interested in engaging their opposition in debate when they can merely remove any opposition. Conservative or Christian speakers are prevented from speaking…

Kerby Anderson A few decades ago, Americans were increasingly concerned about privacy. Back then, we did several radio programs on the topic but now many of our privacy concerns have faded. Mark Zuckerberg put this in perspective. He said when he got to his dorm room at Harvard, the question many students asked was, “why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?” He then went on to…

Kerby Anderson “This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the US government closing the gold-exchange window and putting the world on a fiat monetary system.” That is how Saifedean Ammous begins his book, The Fiat Standard. His earlier book, The Bitcoin Standard, was a bestselling book that has been translated into more than 25 languages. He argues that by first understanding the operation of bitcoin, someone can then better understand the equivalent operations in fiat. “It is easier to explain…

Kerby Anderson Why do we write down our laws? I recently read an article providing a practical reason for writing down the laws of a nation, but I would also like to add one historical reason for why we write down our laws. This country is supposed to be a nation of laws and not men. We haven’t always lived up to the vision, but that is what we are to aspire to achieve. When you write down a law,…

Kerby Anderson Americans are concerned about crime and will likely vote in these midterm elections based on those concerns. But crime is scarier now, and many politicians who might have addressed the issue in the past, now ignore it. The first point is the theme of a commentary by Peggy Noonan. She says that “the scary thing isn’t that crime is high, though it is, though not as high as in previous crime waves. What’s scary is that people no…

Penna Dexter The 8.6-percent rate of inflation we’re seeing in headlines is bad. If you’re 40 or younger, you’ve never experienced anything like it. But inflation, for most Americans, is much worse. Washington Post columnist Henry Olsen explains that “The official government inflation rate comes from the consumer price index, which measures the prices of a basket of goods that reflect the overall annual consumption of items and services that an average household pays for.” But prices differ from city…

Kerby Anderson America is fragile. That is the conclusion of Victor Davis Hanson. We assume that this country can take anything thrown at it. The republic, however, is more fragile than we might imagine. He has many examples. “We can afford 120 days in 2020 of mass rioting, $2 billion in damage, some 35 killed, and 1,500 police injured. We can easily survive an Afghanistan, and our utter and complete military humiliation. There was no problem in abandoning some $70-80…

Kerby Anderson Mass shootings have many things in common. The perpetrator is an alienated young man who usually broadcasts his intent on social media. Instead of focusing on gun laws and mental health, we should focus attention on the psychology of the shooters. David French writes about “The Lost Boys of American Life.” In his essay, he quotes from two authors I have discussed in previous commentaries. Robert Putnam is best known for his book, Bowling Alone, which addressed the…

Kerby Anderson We are living through a period of “bullhorn politics.” Who would have imagined that people with bullhorns would not only be marching in the streets but even in front of the homes of Supreme Court Justices? Daniel Henninger reminds us that after the draft of the opinion by Justice Samuel Alito was leaked, a high fence was set up that surrounds the Supreme Court building. But think back to 2015 when the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4…