Recent Viewpoints

Penna Dexter Families with K-12 children have spent the summer waiting to find out whether their schools will reopen for the fall semester or offer virtual learning at least in the early weeks. School districts are announcing plans with the caveat that ‘things could change’ depending on the COVID-19 environment. Adding to this uncertainty is the burgeoning consensus that virtual learning is no substitute for in-person school. Surveys of parents regarding whether their children learned anything during the spring semester…

Kerby Anderson Earlier this month Dr. Thomas Sowell published his book, Charter Schools and Their Enemies. It is an eye-opening look at the success of these schools and the growing criticism of them from the educational establishment and politicians in the Democratic Party. When public schools and charter schools in New York are compared, you can see a significant difference. A majority of charter school students tested proficient or above in the Language Arts test. Most of them were African…

Kerby Anderson If you have ever read George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, you are familiar with the idea of newspeak. Examples would be: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” But if you look at the news media today, you would probably conclude that Orwell accurately predicted the future but was just off by about thirty-six years. Gerard Baker believes “The News Media Becomes Fluent in Newspeak.” He acknowledges that we don’t have a “Ministry of Truth”…

Kerby Anderson It should be obvious to just about anyone with a bit of common sense that the “cancel culture” has gone off the deep end. I have talked about J.K. Rowling, writer of the Harry Potter series, who has been attacked for saying things that are biologically true but contrary to the latest politically correct transgender ideology. Then there is the communications director of Boeing who was forced to resign because of an article he wrote a third of…

Kerby Anderson Dennis Prager recently wrote a column presenting “5 Arguments Against ‘America is a Racist Country’.” His first argument was based on a previous column that asked, “If America Is So Racist, Why Are There So Many Race Hoaxes?” It’s a good question. If racism is as prevalent as activists want us to believe, you wouldn’t expect so many hate crime hoaxes based on race. In many previous columns, I have written about the number of fake hate crimes….

Kerby Anderson China has been in the news lately, and not just because of their mishandling of the coronavirus. A number of government officials have been warning of the danger China poses. And before we go any further, we are talking about the Chinese Communist Party and not the good people of China who have little control over what these communist leaders do. FBI Director Christopher Wray gave a shocking presentation earlier this month in which he mentioned that nearly…

Penna Dexter Historian, columnist, and professor Victor Davis Hanson has been speaking and writing lately about the current cultural revolution. He contrasts cultural revolutions with political revolutions, which change governments and leaders. Cultural revolutions, he writes, “try to redefine entire societies” and “attack the very referents of our daily lives.” He points to the movies, TV shows, and cartoons that have been “canceled” due to the Black Lives Matter Revolution. This revolution, he adds, has “toppled statues, tried to create new autonomous urban zones,…

Kerby Anderson Over the last few weeks, the term “Marxism” has been used quite a bit to describe the philosophy of both individuals and organizations. But what does this term mean? Marxists come in different variations. I saw that when I took a graduate-level class on Marxism with students from different countries who were Marxist. If there is one central, unifying principle, it is the writings of Karl Marx that are best articulated in The Communist Manifesto. Jon Miltimore reminds…

Kerby Anderson The headlines for a New York Times article said it all: “Churches Were Eager to Reopen. Now They Are a Major Source of Coronavirus Cases.” It’s a scary headline, that isn’t even close to being accurate. Tim Challis, in a blog, started with the numbers in the story. It talks about 650 coronavirus cases from nearly 40 churches. That’s not many, especially when you realized that nearly half of the cases come from one church in Oregon, that…

Kerby Anderson How should the academic world respond when a research study published in a peer-reviewed journal comes to a conclusion you wouldn’t expect? In the past, some might have challenged the methodology or even considered doing a second study to see if the conclusions could be replicated. The latest tactic is to bring pressure on the researchers and their universities so they will disavow their own study. That is what happened to professors at Michigan State University and the…

Kerby Anderson “The online mob came for Harald Uhlig.” That is how a recent column by John Stossel begins. The University of Chicago professor is also the head of the Journal of Political Economy but found himself under investigation because he tweeted that Black Lives Matter “torpedoed itself, with its full-fledged support of #defund the police.” He was just another example of how the cancel culture movement tries to destroy the career of someone they dislike. Earlier this month I…