Recent Viewpoints

Kerby Anderson Yesterday I talked about the Trump Administration’s decision to cancel federal training sessions on Critical Race Theory. Heather MacDonald argues that this first step should be followed by “removing identity politics from federal operations” in the sciences. The goal is to create a more “diverse” scientific workforce. Those of us who took undergraduate courses in math and science already felt that the scientific landscape was fairly diverse because we were taking courses taught by TAs from other countries…

Kerby Anderson When the Trump Administration decided to cancel federal training sessions on Critical Race Theory, you knew there would be criticism. What may be surprising is how easy it might be to respond to that criticism. For example, deans of University of California law schools signed an open letter criticizing President Trump and his administration. And then David Marshall wrote an open letter to these professors. Here are the first two points in his lengthy letter. First, the professors say…

Penna Dexter Recently President Trump addressed the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, held online this year. To the surprise of attendees, he said these words: “Today I am announcing that I will be signing the Born-Alive Executive Order to ensure that all precious babies born alive receive the medical care that they deserve. This is our sacrosanct moral duty.” It would be a lot better if Congress had enacted this as a law. Since they didn’t, the president acted. You may…

Kerby Anderson On our radio program, we provided a link to a video produced by the Internet Accountability Project with the provocative title “Google is Evil.” Watch the video and come to your own conclusion. It packs quite a bit of information into just a little over two minutes. If you feel you need to learn more, I might suggest the hour and a half long documentary-drama, “The Social Dilemma” that interviews people who have been in the Big Tech…

Kerby Anderson Dennis Prager had to admit that he had been wrong. All of his life, he has said that the left’s moral compass is broken. He has concluded that “in order to have a broken moral compass, you need to have a moral compass to begin with. But the left doesn’t have one.” He doesn’t mean that conclusion as an attack. It is merely an observation that the left doesn’t really think in terms of good and evil. We…

Kerby Anderson Radical students and professors on college campuses claim that their schools participate in systemic racism. In order to appease these radicals, college presidents have been all too willing to agree with the charge with a promise to end systemic racism. But words have meaning. They also have consequences, as Princeton University is now discovering. The president of Princeton published an open letter promising to combat systemic racism at the school in an attempt to mollify progressive students and…

Kerby Anderson Throughout this pandemic, we have been told to trust the experts. But you have probably concluded from the many public statements, that not all the medical experts agree. And the easiest way to demonstrate that is to look at what the experts have been saying about the importance of wearing a mask. At one extreme you have the very strong comments by the Surgeon General Jerome Adams back in February. Here’s his tweet: “Seriously people—STOP BUYING MASKS! They…

Kerby Anderson Our national election is just five weeks away, and yet many news stories illustrate that there are problems on the horizon. Much of the rhetoric focuses on the possibility of election fraud. A greater problem may simply be election mismanagement. The state of New Jersey has provided many illustrations. The election in the state’s third-largest city (Patterson) was such a mess that they will redo the election on November 3. They had to take a “Mulligan” in the…

Penna Dexter When President Bill Clinton announced his nomination of Ruth Bader Ginsberg to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1993, he said she “cannot be called a liberal or a conservative. She has proved herself too thoughtful for such labels.” Though conservatives didn’t buy that, the Senate confirmed her, 96-3. On the Court, Justice Ginsburg was a powerful force for progressive social policy. Justice John Paul Stevens’ retirement in 2010 left Justice Ginsberg as the most senior liberal on the…

Kerby Anderson We are a divided country, but it may be worse than we imagined. An article in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences discussed what is called “motive attribution asymmetry.” That’s a technical term for the assumption that your ideology is based on love and your opponent’s is based on hate. Put another way: we are the good guys, and they are the bad guys. They discovered that the average Republican and the average Democrat today are…

Kerby Anderson In a previous set of commentaries, I talked about the interview we did with Jonathan Haidt on his book, The Coddling of the American Mind. Then I saw an essay that quoted his earlier book, The Righteous Mind, where he talked about “the conservative advantage.” As a liberal, he wrote the book because he “was convinced that American liberals did not get the morals and motives of their conservative countrymen.” In one study he did with Jesse Graham…