Recent Viewpoints

Kerby Anderson Were the lockdowns a bad idea? Fifteen months ago (November 2020), I wrote a commentary about the radio interview I did with Dr. Jay Richards about the book, The Price of Panic. He and two other authors wrote it to set the record straight. It was filled with lots of facts, figures, and graphs. It demonstrated that the human cost of the emergency response to the pandemic far outweighed the benefits. Earlier this month, a paper from Johns…

Kerby Anderson Yesterday I talked about the privacy concern that results from you being required to share lots of personal information, including a photo and a video of yourself. Today I wanted to illustrate how you can lose your privacy even when you don’t share information. Twenty years ago, the Target Corporation was able to conclude that a shopper was pregnant and even estimate her due date. The story was written up in the New York Times and has become…

Kerby Anderson The federal government wants more of your privacy. That’s the only way to explain the recent announcement from the IRS that required that you provide a photo of your government identification as well as a video for facial recognition. Fortunately, the backlash to the announcement led to the IRS removing the requirement. When I first heard about this last month, I had doubts as to whether or not it was worth a commentary, since the IRS assured us…

Penna Dexter The U.S House of Representatives just passed a bill called the Global Respect Act. Supporters say it is meant to protect and foster respect for human rights in foreign countries. But it does the opposite. The bill elevates the so-called human rights of some individuals — those who identify as homosexual or transgender — over the rights of political, cultural, and religious leaders who refuse to advance the homosexual/transgender agenda. Six Republicans joined Democrats in giving the U.S….

Kerby Anderson One advantage of being an alarmist is that you never have to admit you were wrong. Covid alarmists warned us that there would be so many Covid infections, you would call 911 and no one would be there to answer your call. Economic alarmists have predicted dozens of the last two recessions. Sterling Burnett argues that climate alarmists get away with much more than any other of these alarmists. Polar bears will go extinct. Rising sea levels will…

Kerby Anderson Seeing a crisis on video has greater power in the minds of Americans than merely reading about it. For some time, we have been hearing that the Biden administration has been relocating thousands of migrant border-crossers into the interior of the country. But seeing the videos provided by Fox News raised concerns to a higher level. Body-camera footage from security officers at New York’s Westchester County Airport shows illegal border-crossers being dropped off in the middle of the…

Kerby Anderson The Great Depression took place in the 1930s. Arthur Herman suggests that we refer to the first two years of the 2020s as the Great Confinement. He argues that just as the Great Depression changed the political landscape, so the Great Confinement will do the same in the next few years. We may be on the verge of a significant political realignment. The Great Depression destroyed the American voters’ faith in Wall Street and big business. In 1932,…

Kerby Anderson Yesterday I talked about the leftist impulse to censor. But you might wonder why the left so frequently promotes censorship. Dennis Prager recently provided some insights into “Why the Left Has to Suppress Free Speech.” He begins by stating a fact from history. The left always suppresses speech going all the way back to Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. He explains that this is an important difference between liberals and the left. Liberals and conservatives…

Kerby Anderson All factions, at some time, can succumb to the impulse to censor, but liberals have almost made it a religion. That’s the argument Glenn Greenwald makes as he talks about the attempt by the left to remove podcaster Joe Rogan from Spotify. Greenwald would likely describe himself as a liberal, but he is talking about people on the left who don’t believe in free speech. He says they “are obsessed with finding ways to silence and censor adversaries….

Penna Dexter Following the Biden administration’s admission that its Build Back Better Plan is dead, there’s an effort to resurrect parts of this massive social spending bill. One goal is the White House’s proposal for a “transformational investment” — $200 billion — for free universal pre-K for 3 and 4-year-old children. The plan is modeled on the Head Start program which was launched in 1965 to get kids from low-income families prepped for kindergarten. This push comes despite extensive research…

Kerby Anderson Stacey Lance has been a teacher in the Canadian public school system for the past 15 years. Her recent essay laments that “the kids aren’t alright.” She begins by saying that she isn’t a doctor or expert in virology. But she does know her students, and she is very sad about what they have experienced these last two years. Of course, there is the students’ loss of learning and their mental issues. But what is overlooked, she says,…