ArcaMax

Back when a public backlash began to rise up mostly among white parents against “critical race theory,” I joked as to whether Black History Month might be next.

I don’t joke about that anymore.

In the wake of President Donald Trump’s re-election, largely on culture war issues, we see how the mere mention of race, academically or ...Read more

As the investigation into Wednesday’s air disaster in Washington was still getting underway, President Trump didn’t bother to wait for actual evidence to figure out what was to blame: “DEI.”

That’s shorthand, in case you haven’t heard, for diversity, equity and inclusion programs, a controversial hiring practice that has become a ...Read more

Hindsight, as the old saying goes, is always 20/20. That thought came to mind after a couple of the roughly 1,500 Jan. 6 offenders given pardons by President Trump said they didn’t want it.

Finally, I thought, a bright light of sanity shows itself.

I am heartened by the example of Pamela Hemphill, 71, of Boise, Idaho, ...Read more

As we mark the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, ironically on the same day as Donald Trump’s second presidential inauguration, I am reminded of a famous quote from another King:

”Can we all get along?”

Yes, that plea came not from MLK but from Rodney King, no relation to the great civil rights leader, in May 1992 as riots ...Read more

When he showed up at the Chicago Tribune one day in early 1976, James Earl Carter, Jr., was announced by one of our young newsroom copy clerks as “that governor from Georgia who thinks he can run for president.”

Yes, as a young reporter in that newsroom, I remember Jimmy Carter as a former peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, and a former ...Read more

Just weeks before President-elect Donald Trump was scheduled to return to the White House, the coterie of American tech oligarchs who played a decisive role in re-electing him was busy exerting their own power in ways that suggest the MAGA coalition may be heading for a crack-up.

Trump famously invited fellow billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek ...Read more

As it has been doing yearly since 2009, the fact-checking organization PolitiFact has chosen the Lie of the Year. There was an abundance of nominees.

And, it turns out, they chose the same whopper I identified as a top contender months ago: President-elect Donald Trump’s unfounded claim that Haitian migrants were eating the household pets of ...Read more

Watching the year-end budget fights in Congress as we await the second term of President-elect Donald Trump, I find myself wondering: Will this era be remembered as the time when Trump was president and Elon Musk ran the country?

Trump earned such nicknames as “Captain Chaos” and worse for his unpredictable, constantly changing and easily ...Read more

When Merriam-Webster chose “polarization” as the word of the year for 2024, the timing was dramatic for many of us who make our living through words.

Defining the word as “division into two sharply distinct opposites; especially, a state in which the opinions, beliefs, or interests of a group or society no longer range along a continuum ...Read more

Just once.

Just once amid all the times that reporters asked President Joe Biden whether he would give a pardon to his son Hunter, who was facing a possible federal prison sentence, I wish I could have heard jolly Joe give the sort of response that the late Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley offered to such unwelcome questions.

I’m thinking of ...Read more

“Democrats are like the Yankees,” said one of the most memorable tweets to come across on X after Election Day. “Spent hundreds of millions of dollars to lose the big series and no one got fired or was held accountable.”

Too sad. But that’s politics.The disappointment behind that tweet was widely shared, but no one with...Read more

“Kakistocracy” is trending again.

The obscure term, coined as early as the seventeenth century and defined by Merriam-Webster as “government by the worst people,” has surged on Google Trends since the election.

What does government by the worst look like? To ...Read more

Far-right streamer Nick Fuentes, who usually welcomes publicity, received the type he probably didn’t want after Donald Trump’s election victory.

The 26-year old white supremacist and antisemite, who has been banned from multiple social media sites for violating hate speech policies, posted on X: “Your body, my choice. Forever.”

...Read more

In the aftermath of Vice President Kamala Harris' decisive electoral loss to former President Donald Trump, my mind has kept going back to a memorable and widely repeated gaffe by a man who was not on the ballot.

That man was Joe Biden, and the unfortunate utterance in question happened more than four years ago when he was a former vice ...Read more

It seems to me that Tony Hinchcliffe, the podcast host and alleged "roast comedian" who warmed up the crowd at Donald Trump's recent campaign rally at Madison Square Garden in New York, could have found a less gratuitously cruel way to get laughs than to call Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.“

Call me old-fashioned, but I long for ...Read more

Donald Trump and MAGA loyalists may scoff at the charge that he’s a fascist, but let’s face it, he at least offers a remarkably good imitation.

The F-word came up prominently as radio host Charlamagne Tha God interviewed Vice President Kamala Harris in mid-October about her vision compared to that of her Republican rival.

“The other is ...Read more

I was delighted but, alas, not all that excited by the platform of policies that Vice President Kamala Harris unveiled to court Black male voters this week.

Her “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men” offers a big package...Read more