ArcaMax

America, unfortunately, has long been suffering from a crisis of civics. Put simply, many Americans are woefully ignorant about the structure and features of their government. But every so often, an opportunity emerges to reteach some basics. The media's predictable shrieks and howls of "constitutional crisis" notwithstanding, we are in the ...Read more

Days after shocking the world with his upset victory in the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump espoused his hope of negotiating the "ultimate deal" between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs to resolve the "war that never ends." As Trump told The Wall Street Journal at the time: "As a deal maker, I'd like to do ... the deal that can't be ...Read more

Less than two weeks into this second Trump presidency, the fearmongering has already reached fever pitch. "He can't do it!" the critics have invariably howled in decrying President Donald Trump's landmark day-one executive order upending the status quo on birthright citizenship for the children of illegal aliens, "Protecting the Meaning and ...Read more

The civilizational inflection point in our cold civil war happened sometime between Donald Trump's second inaugural address on Monday and the end of his new presidency's second day on Tuesday. At some indeterminate moment between Monday's soaring midday speech, in which the first nonconsecutive two-term president in over 130 years artfully ...Read more

It's hard to believe, but we're finally here. Four years after all the Sturm und Drang that followed Donald Trump's 2020 electoral loss to Joe Biden, the maestro of Mar-a-Lago is set to be inaugurated once more on Monday as president of the United States.

And what an absolutely wild ride it has been. In the interim four years, Trump has ...Read more

The late, great Andrew Breitbart was one of the most quotable conservatives of his era. "Walk toward the fire," he exhorted his fellow activists. "Don't worry about what they call you. All those things are said against you because they want to stop you in your tracks." It was good advice when Breitbart said it during the contentious Barack ...Read more

As woke illiberalism replaced live-and-let-live liberalism as the animating ideology of the American Left, the state of Israel has increasingly found itself on the outs. Never mind that modern Israel was founded by, and for three decades politically dominated by, a bunch of left-wing socialists. Never mind that Harry Truman, an iconic liberal ...Read more

For the past few days, certain highly visible elements of the MAGA coalition have been sparring with one another. Specifically, X users have been privy to an extensive immigration policy flame war between two competing MAGA coalition camps: the pro-immigration "tech bros," on the one hand, and the nationalist-populist immigration ...Read more

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