politics
Voters hammered Trump in 2016. So how did he end up president?
Reading Time: 4 minutes You may be unaware of it, but the Democratic Party has been on quite a win streak of late, capturing the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections (1992-2020), including when Donald Trump won the White House in 2016. The question is, how was Trump able to
Are fundamentalist religious schools retarding America’s future?
Reading Time: 5 minutes After firmly resisting New York state oversight for years, a private fundamentalist Hasidic Jewish academy in Long Island—one of the state’s largest schools—finally in 2019 agreed to give standardized state tests in reading and math to more than 1,000 students. Every single s
From Hitler to Trump, strongmen’s lies have devastated the world
Reading Time: 3 minutes At the risk of exaggerating a connection to today’s American political environment, bald-faced lies disingenuously and persistently applied over time destroyed Germany’s pre-World War II Weimar Republic. The lies were spread by the racist Nazi Party’s fascist leader, Adolf Hi
Judge backs untrustworthy Trump, further eroding trust in democracy
Reading Time: 5 minutes For now, let’s just focus on this word: trust. Justice, as we all know, is supposed to be metaphorically blind to everything but facts and evidence in courts of law. That’s why, when lacking solid evidence to the contrary, we generally believe American courts are trustworthy.
What makes ‘skeptical’ kids grow up to be God-believing adults?
Reading Time: 8 minutes If kids are the savvy, skeptical creatures that Will Gervais proposes in his recent essay, why do endless hordes of them in each generation turn into conservative American adults who uncritically worship invisible gods with zero objective verification? And what makes these sa
The GOP has become the party of liars
Reading Time: 6 minutes I’ve watched with morbid fascination as an entire American political party—the GOP—has slid, apparently irretrievably, into a deep well of ethical relativism and easily debunked lies. The vast majority of Republicans have clearly decided that virtually nothing is wrong if it
The GOP wants you to believe 87,000 armed IRS agents are coming after you
Reading Time: 3 minutes Have you heard that the U.S. Internal Revenue Service is creating a new, “armed,” 87,000-agent strong “IRS super-police force … willing to kill” that will be targeting regular Americans to audit and investigate? In his August 25 Washington Post column—“Another Republican Lie
Study: How most of the 5 billion would die in a US/Russia nuclear exchange
Reading Time: 2 minutes A new study found that a nuclear war between the US and Russia could be the worst catastrophe in world history. But most people wouldn’t die from the exchange itself; 5 billion would perish from the hunger that follows. The study, published in Nature, found that the soot prod
Are GOP’s social media villains being coached?
Reading Time: 4 minutes The seemingly instantaneous, coordinated blow-back by Donald Trump supporters on social media whenever they believe the former president has been attacked begs the question: Are they being coached? The matches that ignite these online conflagrations are strident public alarms
One man’s transformative journey from Republican to Democrat
Reading Time: 4 minutes My longtime best pal, Paul Sauser, a recent conservative-Republican-turned-Democrat and an evangelical Christian now uneasily reassessing his faith (without chucking it altogether), has, like many, Americans experienced somewhat of a religious and political transformation in
The middle of history
Reading Time: 5 minutes Why today’s utopian ideologies are unlikely to take us all the way to utopia.
Why are so many evangelicals so un-Christian?
Reading Time: 6 minutes Even conservative American evangelicals are becoming increasingly aware—and alarmed—that so many of their fellow brethren continue to model decidedly un-Christian behavior while devotedly embracing the aggressive, heretical cruelties of their beloved but former president, Don