ArcaMax

One year ago, almost to the day, I used this column as a "post-wedding dispatch" to offer some (very) preliminary thoughts on marriage. The column was published five days after my wedding. Now, almost exactly one year later, I am using this column as a "post-birth dispatch" to offer some (very) preliminary thoughts on another milestone life ...Read more

The rapid demise of the brutal Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria has taken every geopolitical analyst and self-proclaimed Middle East "expert" by storm. Following 53 years of brutal Assad family rule and 13 years of bloody civil war, the Syrian strongman abruptly fled for asylum in Moscow as rebels finalized their encircling of Damascus. In the ...Read more

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in this term's marquee case, United States v. Skrmetti.

The case, out of Tennessee, nominally involves a state law banning minors' use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for purposes of so-called gender-affirming care -- which, stripped of all euphemism, means genital mutilation and ...Read more

Growing up, Thanksgiving was always -- by far -- my favorite holiday on the American civic calendar. It still is today. And while I have fond memories of playing football on Thanksgiving Day with childhood friends and eating turkey legs smothered in gravy, it was obvious to me at a fairly young age that Thanksgiving is about far more than that...Read more

Barely a week after he was announced as President-elect Donald Trump's choice for U.S. attorney general, MAGA firebrand Matt Gaetz has withdrawn himself from contention for the post. Officially, Gaetz said on X (formerly Twitter) that his "confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition." ...Read more

When one considers Donald Trump's Cabinet selections announced thus far, there are a few themes that emerge.

One discernible theme, which has been the subject of constant teeth-gnashing all week, is the unorthodox or perhaps outright surprising nature of some of the picks. Tulsi Gabbard, tapped as our next director of national intelligence, ...Read more

In a just world, Donald Trump would have won the Nobel Peace Prize for securing the historic Abraham Accords peace agreements of 2020. So too, in a just world, would A-list Hollywood studios now be bidding for the rights to produce the film adaptation of the single greatest comeback story in American history: Donald Trump, the once and future ...Read more

Every four years, we hear a refrain that the presidential election before us is the "most important election of our lifetimes." This line is reflexively repeated by pundits, talkers and thinkers on both sides of the American political divide, and that repetition always engenders a great deal of backlash. We are reliably informed that our ...Read more

If there is one data point above all that suggests Donald Trump and JD Vance are headed for a resounding victory on Nov. 5, it is this: By a nearly 40-point margin in the polling average, Americans are more inclined to believe the country is currently on the wrong track than the right track. There are other reasons to believe the 45th ...Read more

On July 26, in the aftermath of the Democratic Party's ruthless midsummer coup of their own democratically elected presidential nominee, this column predicted that the elevation of dimwitted cackler-in-chief Kamala Harris to the party's presidential slot would "spectacularly backfire." More specifically, I wrote: "Practically, the path to ...Read more

Within minutes of Hamas jihadists breaching the Israeli border on Oct. 7, 2023, and commencing the largest slaughter of the Jewish people since the Holocaust, Western leftists and other defenders of the genocidal Palestinian-Arab cause rallied around a talking point: "This did not occur in a vacuum." The claim, blithely offered by armchair ...Read more

Higher education has been a cesspool of anti-Americanism, censorious leftism and cultural radicalism for longer than I have been alive. The moral rot is, and always has been, particularly acute at Ivy League or otherwise putatively "elite" institutions. The pro-Hamas "protests" that have rocked university campuses since Oct. 7 are indicative: ...Read more