Many medical experts and journalists believe that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is wrong about vaccines. They say that Kennedy, a candidate for the 2024 Democratic nomination for president, wrongly says that COVID-19 vaccines are ineffective and incorrectly validates assertions that childhood vaccinations can cause autism. Many people, all of whom are pro-Biden Democrats, say that... Read More

As the COVID-19 pandemic has made painfully clear, our health care system is a disaster; 12% of Americans are uninsured and 21% are underinsured. Many counties have zero or just one health care plan on offer through their local Affordable Care Act marketplace, so there is no price competition whatsoever. Due to the lack of... Read More

One of my complaints about mainstream media is that they recruit reporters from inside the establishment: Ivy League colleges, expensive graduate journalism programs, rival outlets with similar hiring practices. Some staffs develop admirable levels of gender and racial diversity. But they all come from the same elite class. Rich kids believe in the system and... Read More

Shutting down businesses and schools felt to many people like a natural response to the COVID-19 pandemic. But the extended coronavirus lockdown of 2020 did not follow any widely accepted standard strategy. Lockdowns were sporadic and short-lived during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, the most recent historical parallel. Encouraging and coercing tens of millions of... Read More

During last year's campaign, Joe Biden promised to "listen to the scientists." He repeatedly said his coronavirus-response policy would be "informed by science and by experts." On issues from the environment to teaching evolution in public schools to the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic, liberals often accuse conservatives of putting emotions ahead of... Read More

"Radical solutions require radical solutions," I wrote in my 2010 book, "The Anti-American Manifesto," a polemic that calls upon us to save ourselves from imminent social, economic and political collapse by overthrowing the system and rebuilding society from the ground up. We currently face several radical problems. But we're not likely to rise to the... Read More

The COVID-19 pandemic was a crisis tailor-made for a xenophobe like Donald Trump. The coronavirus provided an ideal opportunity to turn the president's biggest liability — the nativist bigotry that went so far as to lock children in cages and then lose hundreds of their parents, which elicited disgust even among some of his supporters... Read More

I don't give a damn if Donald Trump lives or dies. I don't wish him well. I don't send him thoughts or prayers. If COVID-19 or green men from Mars or liopleurodon take him to his despicable maker, so be it. Everyone dies. Being famous and/or a billionaire and/or president of the United States does... Read More

Front and center in the raging debate between liberals and progressives over whether they should support Joe Biden or opt out of the two-party trap by voting third party or not at all is the assumption that Biden would do less harm both to the world and to American leftism than Donald Trump. Even many... Read More

COVID-19 has created the ideal medium for a summer of continuous protest. Political protests and demonstrations used to be weekend affairs during which angry leftists shouted at empty government offices before shuffling home Sunday afternoon to gear up for the workweek. With 1 out of 4 workers having filed for unemployment and many more working... Read More

Few things are more terrifying than the unknown, as we are discovering as we struggle to navigate, avoid and (if we fail to avoid) survive a mysterious new virus. That goes double when reliable information is hard to come by; it is unquantifiably worse without credible leadership. "Who ya gonna believe," Chico Marx asked, "me... Read More

The coronavirus pandemic has laid bare two fundamental flaws in the American health care system. No. 1: There's a reason that other rich countries treat health care as a taxpayer-financed social program. Employer-based health insurance was stupid pre-COVID-19 because our economy was already steadily transitioning from traditional full-time W-2 jobs to self-employment, freelance and gig... Read More

We can save the economy. We have to throw the landlords under the bus to do it. At this writing, 26.5 million Americans have lost their jobs to the national lockdown necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Added to those who were unemployed before the coronavirus crisis, we will soon face jobless numbers equivalent to or... Read More

The COVID-19 medical and economic crisis remains mostly unaddressed by both the Republican and Democratic parties. They have only passed one piece of legislation that significantly helps workers: supplementing existing state unemployment benefits by $600 per week. Those additional payments expire in four months. Until then, many people who are out of work will receive... Read More

Some of my commentary about politics is presented in the form of "advice" to the ruling classes. Please understand: I don't really expect those in the ruling class to take my advice. My advice is not really directed toward them. It is a theoretical exercise. I am really speaking to you, the people. My goal... Read More

After my mother died on Feb. 7, I gathered her valuables and photo albums and drove home to New York. But there wasn't enough room in the car for everything I wanted to keep. There were tchotchkes such as a silly white ceramic saltshaker and pepper shaker in the shape of Arab kings. They weren't... Read More

It's the end of the world as we know it, and the banks and airlines feel fine because even in the midst of economic collapse, CEOs can sleep soundly at night, secure in the knowledge that the American taxpayer will bail them out. Again. All they have to do is wait a respectable six to... Read More