Column

We are told climate change is a crisis, and that there is an “overwhelming scientific consensus.” “It’s a manufactured consensus,” says climate scientist Judith Curry in my new video. She says scientists have an incentive to exaggerate risk to pursue “fame and fortune.” She knows about that because she once spread alarm about climate change. Media loved her when she published a study that…

Anyone watching television in the last few months has been inundated with marketing for the “Barbie” movie. It wasn’t just in the movie commercials. It was in commercials for cars and other products.  It was inserted into the plots of reality shows. It was everywhere. It’s not a movie I had any interest in seeing, whether it was a movie made for grade-school girls or a satirical sendup for the…

Plymouth Notch, VT – One hundred years ago on Aug. 2, President Warren Harding died and Calvin Coolidge became America’s 30th president. The contrast between the two men is stark. While Harding was extremely popular with voters, later revelations doomed his presidency to the bottom rungs. Scandals included paying hush money to cover up extramarital affairs (sound familiar?), an out-of-wedlock…

There is actually a Democratic governor who cares about economic freedom! He’s Colorado Gov. Jared Polis. He’s the subject of my new video. Before Polis got into the ugly field of government, he did useful work. He was an entrepreneur. He started an online flower company, modernized his parents’ greeting card company, and founded charter schools, an internet access company, Spanish-speaking…

There’s a group of people who control what you are allowed to see -- the news you read, the videos you watch, the posts you engage with. You haven’t heard of them. You don’t know their names, but they determine, through methods both direct and indirect, whether you are allowed to be exposed to particular messages. Their decisions can bankrupt companies, silence voices and fundamentally shift…

This week, according to sources ranging from the Biden White House to Moody’s to The New York Times’s Thomas Friedman, Israel entered into a period of severe existential danger. What prompted this crisis? Not a potential Iranian nuclear attack, not the presence of violent terrorist groups embedded in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. According to our foreign policy elite, the breaking point…

It was in the early ’60s. I was a copy boy at NBC News and the overnight disc jockey for the local radio station called and asked if I’d like to go on a boat ride down the Potomac River with his guest, Tony Bennett. For several hours we cruised past some of Washington’s most famous landmarks. Tony let me take a picture of him, shirtless and with a big smile on his face. He later signed it and…

This weekend, Tucker Carlson interviewed a bevy of Republican presidential candidates in Iowa. Despite the fact that polls show that nearly zero Americans consider the war in Ukraine to be a top voting priority, Carlson spent a disproportionate share of his time grilling the candidates over their position on Ukraine.

Inflation numbers are out. Living costs are decreasing, but that does not mean things are cheaper. It just means things are not getting more expensive as quickly as they were. The cost of living is still high, and rental and mortgage prices continue to rise. During these times, the Biden administration has found a new target for their ire: airplane bathrooms.

It began shortly after President Biden’s inauguration. First, there were whispers and what seemed like slander on far-right websites and social media that the president was suffering from cognitive decline. His subsequent slurred speech, his trips and falls, and his confusion even while reading a teleprompter, all have led to denunciations and explanations by the White House press secretary,…

This week, Republicans in the House of Representatives revealed the testimony of an IRS whistleblower who worked on the Hunter Biden investigation. That whistleblower had two revelations to present. First, he said that the federal prosecutor overseeing Hunter’s case told at least six witnesses that he had been blocked by Attorney General Merrick Garland from special counsel status -- a status…

It is an unfortunate truism of politics that partisans tend to believe the worst about members of the opposite party and no amount of facts — if, indeed, facts can be agreed upon — move people from their entrenched positions. Largely, I think, it’s all about gaining or keeping power and not actually discovering the truth or solving problems.

It’s easy to miss some dramatic differences between the Trump years and the Biden years. Take, for example, the “tell-all books,” either written by journalists who are granted access to insiders or books written by the insiders themselves. By this time in the Trump term – the summer of 2019 – we were 18 months into “tell-all season.” But no Biden insiders are writing a “tell-all book.” We’re…

Institutional trust is built over the course of years. Decades. Centuries. Dishonesty takes just a moment to destroy institutional trust. This week, Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and professor of molecular virology at Baylor College of Medicine, got into a spat with podcaster Joe Rogan and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Hotez has a long-…