Recent Viewpoints

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…

Kerby Anderson A dead cat in Atlanta, Georgia was sent a voter registration form in the mail. That is unfortunate since only live dogs and cats should be registered to vote. I’m joking, but just barely. One journalist has documented that, “Pets, some named Mozart and Scampers have also received voter applications in Florida, Colorado, and Washington state.” This is not a new phenomenon. Years ago, I had a commentary about all the false names used to register voters in…

Penna Dexter On Independence Day this year, some faculty members published a letter to the senior administration at Princeton University. Eventually hundreds signed on. But classics professor Joshua Katz did not. He posted his own “Declaration of Independence” at Quilette.com. The lengthy Faculty Letter opens with this sentence: “Anti-Blackness is foundational to America.” As Professor Katz points out, “the Princeton Letter demands a dizzying array of changes.” Here are some examples: “Reward the invisible work done by faculty of color…

Kerby Anderson Most of the debates we have in society are a war of words. It’s not surprising that liberals and progressives have redefined words and phrases to promote their agenda. Abortion is called choice. Homosexual marriage was recast as marriage equality. The list of redefined words and phrases has become quite long. But the latest phenomenon has been to ban certain words and phrases. David Harsanyi mentioned an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer that describes four racists words that…

Kerby Anderson In the midst of the debates about which lives matter is a more important question as to why lives matter at all. This is not a commentary about “Black Lives Matter” or “All Lives Matter.” There is a more fundamental question. If you start with an evolutionary view that all of life is the result of chance, then on what basis can you argue that any life is more important than any other? One of the guests on…

Kerby Anderson The list of statues that have been defaced or torn down increases each week. What started a few years ago as an attempt to remove a few statues after an extended political debate has obviously spun out of control. What do George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Winston Churchill, Gandhi, Cervantes, Voltaire, and guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughn have in common? Not much. But that is just a small representation of statues that have been defaced or pulled…

Kerby Anderson The lockdowns during the pandemic may have been helpful for our physical health, but they have not been so helpful for our mental health. One example can be seen in the dramatic increase in drug overdose deaths. The database constructed by the Washington Post found a troubling correlation between the lockdowns and drug overdose deaths. Of course, a correlation doesn’t mean causation, but I think we can reasonably infer the connection between the two. Even if you assume…

Kerby Anderson Two weeks ago, schools were in the news for many different reasons. The Supreme Court ruled in a case involving schools and scholarships. The latest book by Thomas Sowell (Charter Schools and Their Enemies) was released. And Kevin Williamson wrote a commentary that asked the question, What Are Schools For? The Supreme Court ruled that if a state like Montana provided scholarship programs that allowed students to attend private schools of their family’s own choosing, it could not…

Penna Dexter After some depressing rulings, it was great to get a win for religious liberty and school choice at the U.S. Supreme Court. The 5-4 decision means states that provide assistance to private schools may not exclude some solely because they are religious. In Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, the Court affirmed, by a slim margin, that the Constitution prohibits explicit religious discrimination. In 2015, the state of Montana established a program in which businesses could receive tax…

Kerby Anderson For decades most people knew Bono as a musician with the group U2 and a social activist. But today many of his fans would be surprised to hear him promote some of the benefits of capitalism. At a World Economic Forum, he made this observation. “Capitalism is not immoral—it’s amoral. It requires our instruction. Capitalism has taken more people out of poverty than any other ‘ism.’ But it is a wild beast and, if not tamed, it can…

Kerby Anderson Antifa is a group that is supposed to be “anti-fascist” but actually shows the very characteristics of some fascist groups as well as anarchist groups. As a recent editorial in the Washington Examiner explained, Russians used a similar tactic many years ago. The Soviets coined the term “anti-fascism” as a way to distinguish themselves from Bolshevism. That way they could gain the approval of many credulous Western democracies. It conveyed the idea that Stalinism was not opposed to…