Political Commentary & Opinion

Congress is considering proposals for another coronavirus relief bill on top of the $4.1 trillion in aid already authorized. Politicians on both sides of the aisle are lobbying Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and President Donald Trump to increase the cost of a package even further to include another round of checks to most…

Sometimes, the legacy of great men is that the world doesn’t realize how great they were until they are gone. This might be the case with Walter E. Williams. Williams passed away last week. He was the John M. Olin distinguished professor of economics at George Mason University, where, for six years, he served as…

Chuck Yeager, the Air Force pilot who became the first man in history to break the sound barrier, made his last takeoff Monday, dying peacefully at age 97.  Yeager’s name is recognized around the world, that of a test pilot who chased the demon of speed—and then exceeded the speed of sound in 1947. But,…

As a global power, the United States has global interests. Currently, those interests are being directly contested by near-peer competitors China and Russia. Effectively meeting these challenges requires attention and care to America’s network of alliances—its greatest asset in the era of great power competition—as well as a strategic outlook regarding forward-deployed forces and key…

After the 2016 presidential election, I wrote an exceptionally unpopular op-ed for The Washington Post headlined, “We must weed out ignorant Americans from the electorate.” In it, I noted that “never have so many people with so little knowledge made so many consequential decisions for the rest of us.” My assumption has always been that…

There’s a lot of talk these days about conspiracies. A huge number of Americans are prone to believing some pretty wild stuff. This is true on the left, where a large number of people never stopped believing that President Donald Trump colluded with Russia to steal the White House from Hillary Clinton. This is also…

Yale University has fancy dining halls. They pay no property tax. Local restaurants struggle to compete, but their tax burden makes that hard. “We basically pay one-third of our rent in taxes!” complains Matt West, manager of Koon Thai Restaurant. “Yale is a money-making machine.” It is. Many colleges are. Yale has a $31 billion…

Ever since Joe Biden became our nation’s presumptive next president, the media has been bending over backward to celebrate historic “firsts” for women. This past week alone, they couldn’t get enough of the first female college football player kicking in a Power Five conference, Kamala Harris hiring the first all-female senior vice president staff, or…

When COVID-19 lockdowns brought the U.S. economy to an abrupt halt, all eyes turned to a handful of industries that have suffered as a result, such as restaurants, small businesses, and airlines. But few people realize that the entertainment industry is being hit from all sides without a moment of reprieve. For example, Musical Theatre…

Walter E. Williams loved teaching. Unlike too many other teachers today, he made it a point never to impose his opinions on his students. Those who read Walter Williams’ syndicated newspaper columns know that he expressed his opinions boldly and unequivocally there. But not in the classroom. Walter, a professor of economics at George Mason…

A half-century ago, progressives used to push limitless free expression, blasting conservatives for their allegedly blinkered traditionalism. They boasted of obliterating once-normal boundaries in art, music, and literature to allow nudity, profanity, sexuality, and anti-American boilerplate. Now? The left is Victorian—increasingly puritanical, regressive, and hypersensitive. Even totalitarian censorship and book-burning have weirdly become part of…