ArcaMax

The midterm elections are right around the corner, and both parties are about as popular as a Monday-morning visit to the DMV.

The time-tested solution? Find a scapegoat, go negative, and blame the other side.

This year the weaponized bogeyman is artificial intelligence.

Many Americans are falling for the anti-AI information operation. They...Read more

American businesses have long practiced what political scientists call regulatory capture. A company that cannot repeal a law takes control of the people the government put in charge of enforcing it. The airlines did it to the Civil Aeronautics Board, which in 40 years never approved a new trunk carrier. The health insurance industry helped ...Read more

Loathing of President Donald Trump and his trash-talking trade wars has launched Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney into the socialist stratosphere. Try not to laugh at this headline from Rolling Stone Canada: "How Mark Carney Became Leader of the Free World by Standing Up to Trump."

This is the hot anti-Trump take: socialists can run the "...Read more

This election is a contest to see which party can do its best to lose. Looking forward from mid-September, President Donald Trump's Republicans seem to be well ahead at this. But the Resistance (or don't they call themselves that anymore?) Democrats are putting up a contest.

Second-term presidents tend to make political mistakes by doing things...Read more

If "The Golden Thread," the new two-volume history of the Western tradition, landed with a thud, it's a matter of sheer weight.

Altogether, about 12 pounds of book and 1,968 pages of text, "The Golden Thread" is a prodigious product -- and an even more prodigious achievement.

At a time when Western civilization has been successfully "de-...Read more

The freedom of speech and of the press is not a gift bestowed by a president, Congress or a federal agency. It is a natural right of all persons. The First Amendment does not create that right; it prohibits the government from infringing upon it. The ability to think, speak, write, criticize, ridicule, persuade, offend, dissent and challenge ...Read more

Five seemingly unrelated developments -- the Supreme Court's intervention in mail-in ballot rules, a federal judge's decision affecting foreign students and journalists, the blockade threatening Saudi Arabia, an unusual alliance in Michigan politics, and the accelerating power of artificial intelligence -- are testing whether American ...Read more

Inflation hasn't gone away -- it's going up. With the midterm elections seven weeks off, that's a problem for the president and Congress. Voters hate inflation. They don't much like the cure either, and the cure has two parts. The Federal Reserve raising interest rates, like it just did, is one. The second part is overlooked and in the hands ...Read more

One of the primary tenets of the American legal system is the importance of precedent; the common law doctrine of "stare decisis" means "to stand by things decided." The purpose of law in such a system is to provide stability and predictability, so that people can conform their conduct to the law's requirements.

Another way of describing this...Read more

As I began a column examining the violent antics of ayatollah Iran's Houthi proxy army, news media were reporting that Saudi Arabia has asked Egypt to join its coalition to destroy the Houthis' military and gangster threat to the Arabian Peninsula, the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea.

Sketching the map helps explain the strategic security and ...Read more

During a Sept. 1 preliminary hearing for the defendant accused of fatally shooting Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk on Sept. 10, 2025, the defendant's attorney, Richard Novak, accused Kirk of "speaking hatefully of certain groups of people. He spoke hatefully of people who don't have traditional, nonconforming gender identities. He spoke...Read more

ATTENTION 'JOHN STOSSEL' EDITORS: THIS COLUMN IS BEING RETRANSMITTED TO ACCOUNT FOR AN EDITORIAL CHANGE. THANK YOU. -- CREATORS

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Free AI

Cell phones made my life easier. So did the internet.

Artificial intelligence may enrich it even more.

But lots of people are worried.

"Stop AI or we're all going to die!" shout protesters.

It's ...Read more

Had you driven into the parking lot of a certain 7-Eleven in suburban Virginia at about 1 p.m. on Sept. 11 of this year -- which this writer did -- you would have seen 11 men standing, sitting or sleeping on the concrete there and on a nearby sidewalk.

This is essentially the same scene you would have encountered there 25 years ago in the ...Read more

The New York Times has an annoying habit of topping its front page with an article labeled "News Analysis." In reality, it's a badly disguised editorial, often inveighing against their rage target, President Donald Trump.

In 2024, Times White House correspondent Peter Baker wrote a "news analysis" nudging voters to pick the Democrats with the...Read more

The Beatles told us: "All you need is love."

They were right, but along with love must come marriage.

But marriage rates have plummeted, especially among young men.

A Pulitzer Prize-worthy story by Sean Salai of The Washington Times crunches all the numbers. To say they are worrisome would be a vast understatement.

-- In 2025, nearly twice...Read more

LATROBE, Pennsylvania -- The late afternoon sun catches the twin spires of the Archabbey Basilica at St. Vincent College, casting a long shadow across the pristine practice fields of the Pittsburgh Steelers' training camp.

For 60 years, this rural patch of Westmoreland County has played host to an annual cross-cultural pilgrimage. Here, the ...Read more