polecat news and views

Thursday, April 2, 2026

Quote of the day

Citing two recent New York Times stories that recount the actual progress made by American and Israeli forces fighting Iran’s political leaders and military assets, Abe Greenwald adds a dose of optimism in the daily Commentary newsletter: “The Iranian regime is dysfunctional, and its air defenses are negligible—and the New York Times has been forced to admit it. Which means that in addition to destroying key targets in Iran, the U.S. armed forces have, in their own way, degraded the mainstream propaganda regime here at home. Accomplishing that in four weeks is also no mean feat.”

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2026/04/quote-of-the-day-98.php

The EV Bubble Is About to Burst

The EV Bubble Is About to Burst

Sydney Rodman

The EV Bubble Is About to Burst — *Townhall Media*

When did getting from point A to point B get so complicated? When the government decided which cars Americans should buy. With the economic and scientific premises behind electric vehicle (EV) mandates collapsing, the EV bubble may burst completely. There is one mandate left to burst: California’s Advanced Clean Cars II (ACC II) regulation, which requires all new vehicles to be 100 percent electric by 2035, or else automakers get penalized.

With the federal repeal of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s Endangerment Finding in February, the government’s formal scientific basis for EV mandates is gone. State governments no longer have a rational scientific basis for requiring EV sales.

The concept of an EV mandate was first made formal policy by the Biden administration when it issued its de facto EV mandate in the form of a 2024 executive order, which changed EPA standards with the clear goal of forcing consumers to start buying EVs over gas-powered vehicles. Though the Trump administration has reversed this policy at the federal level, nearly a dozen state governments have followed a coercive plan to extend EV mandates.

Yet, as I noted in RealClearEnergy, the reasoning behind EV mandates is extremely dubious. The federal government recently emphasized that carbon dioxide emissions, like those from gas-powered cars, should not be considered a pollutant at all. Ironically, EVs don’t dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions due to the reliance on conventional hydrocarbons, like coal and natural gas, to power their batteries and charging stations.

In fact, the federal government had never ruled that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions were a pollutant until the 2009 politically-motivated determination known as the Endangerment Finding. In 2003, the EPA rejected a petition for the agency to declare CO2 a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. When the Obama administration’s EPA issued the Endangerment Finding, it made no effort to quantify the supposed harm of CO2 emissions; rejected every request by Americans to consider contrary evidence; and, puzzlingly, never consulted the EPA’s Scientific Advisory Board.

Fortunately, state EV mandates are not going unchallenged. With the help of Congress, President Donald Trump rescinded the California EV mandate in May 2025. California and the other states doubled down, kicking off a legal battle with the Trump administration. In the ping-pong match of legal battles, the Trump administration sued California on March 12, over its violation of the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975, which directs the federal government to establish uniform fuel economy standards nationwide.

Due to the political inconvenience of admitting that one’s policies are unwise, it may be unreasonable to expect states to reverse course. However, some already are. In addition to Oregon and Vermont, Maryland has already walked back its EV mandates in the past year. Maryland’s governor has decided to delay imposing penalties on automakers who do not meet EV sale quotas and has paused other measures to penalize gas-powered cars.

Leading U.S. automaker executives are also reversing course. GM’s luxury division, Cadillac, has admitted it cannot fulfill its pledge to shift to an all-EV fleet. In December 2025, GM CEO Mary Barra said that Biden-era vehicle regulations, if left in place, would have forced GM to “start shutting down plants.” Ford CEO James Farley, days later, revealed that U.S. automakers are “in a fight for our lives” in the global market, largely due to “aggressive carbon mandates.”

Farley, in particular, wasn’t kidding. Ford has taken tremendous losses in its EV initiatives. The auto giant has lost more than $16 billion on its EV ventures since 2022, and Ford’s financial pain is slated to keep coming for years.

Unfortunately, this situation is not unique to Ford. Other car companies are suffering losses. GM, Stellantis, and Honda have cumulatively sustained a nearly $30 billion loss from jumping into the EV abyss.

We don’t need to reinvent the wheel—and we don’t need to reinvent the engine. There is an opportunity for American EV companies to dominate the market, for example, by leveraging U.S. advances in critical minerals. To require brand new critical mineral supply chains for batteries inevitably creates inefficiencies. For now, though, gas-powered vehicles are the better option, and consumer behavior shows that.

It would be bad enough if Americans were just forced to buy certain kinds of cars and not others. Yet EVs themselves have real—even dangerous—drawbacks. According to a 2024 study from Consumer Reports, EV models had 21 percent more defects than gas-powered vehicles.

Of course, if consumers want to buy EVs, that should be their prerogative. State governments mandating that Americans buy them, though, is the problem. And the impracticality of many EVs, in their current form, is partially why the free market has not spurred a consumer shift.

Take one personal anecdote that I believe many share. I thought EVs were relatively harmless until my own run-in with a rental EV in South Florida. While at my first charging station, my vehicle stopped charging without my knowledge. However, I calculated that, driving at a normal pace, I could get to another charging station many miles away but closer to my destination.

Big mistake. Two hours later, I was stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic, trying to enter a highway that was blocked off due to a foreign leader’s visit to Mar-a-Lago. I watched with dread as the projected mileage continued ticking down to less than 20 miles.

After a fairly dramatic escape, I was just five miles from my destination when the EV was flashing a warning signal on the screen. It would not tell me how many miles I had left—it just told me to charge my vehicle immediately. That was not an option. Miraculously, I made it to my destination.

Thank God I was in an urban area because in the rural United States, the sparse charging infrastructure is even more inaccessible.

For these reasons and others, EVs are unlikely to outpace gas-powered vehicles, and that is perfectly fine. In this sense, it is reminiscent of a strikingly similar historical parallel. In the early 1900s, EVs were all the rage and became a major focus of visionaries like Thomas Edison and Ferdinand Porsche. Gas-powered vehicles, though, easily surpassed EVs in popularity within a few years, for the same reason they are more popular now: gasoline fueling is simple, cheap, and widely accessible. EV charging stations are not.

As one of the largest purchases in someone’s life, car ownership is a serious decision. Moreover, America is a car-dependent country. The United States has the second most cars in the world, after China, and ranks seventh in per capita car ownership. Americans need to exercise their choice, and their choice alone, in one of the largest purchases of their life.

EV mandates only burden individuals and companies. Their scientific basis is gone. States that mandate EV sales should re-evaluate immediately. We are at an inflection point of breaking free of the EV shackles and making consumer choice great again.

https://townhall.com/columnists/sydney-rodman/2026/03/28/the-ev-bubble-is-about-to-burst-n2673568

The climate scaremongers: How can these Oxford ‘scholars’ get so much so wrong?

The climate scaremongers: How can these Oxford ‘scholars’ get so much so wrong?

ByPaul Homewood

FOR those not familiar, the Conversation is, according to its website,

‘an independent source of news analysis and informed comment written

by academic experts, working with professional journalists who help share

their knowledge with the world’.

I have no idea if this is true in other areas of research, but I do know that when it comes to climate science, the Conversation becomes simply a mouthpiece for the climate establishment, printing often woefully inaccurate studies and refusing to publish alternative opinions.

Their latest article, ‘Would more North Sea drilling lower UK energy bills? Our analysis says no’, is par for the course. But of more concern, it is written by three ‘experts’ from Oxford University:

· Cassandra Etter-Wenzel, PhD candidate in energy policy

· Anupama Sen, head of policy engagement, Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, and fellow in environmental change

· Nadia Schroeder, head of strategy and new initiatives, Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment

The article is so full of errors, naivety and wishful thinking that it is damaging to Oxford’s reputation.

Let’s start with their opening statement: ‘As the Middle East conflict intensifies and oil and gas prices swing wildly, the UK has seen renewed calls to drill more in the North Sea. The argument is straightforward: if Britain produces more of its own oil and gas, household energy bills should fall.

‘But our analysis suggests the effect would be minimal. Even if the UK maximised North Sea extraction and returned revenues directly to households, the reduction in energy bills would be at most a modest £82 per year – far smaller than the savings expected from accelerating the shift to renewable energy.’

Bear in mind the study was written before the Iran crisis. Nobody that I am aware of ever argued that energy bills would fall significantly if we maximised the North Sea. In their ivory towers it may not seem a lot, but I can assure them that most people would welcome a cheque for £82 from the Government.

But the real argument for new drilling is that it increases our energy security, cuts reliance on liquefied natural gas imports, which are invariably more expensive, generates billions in tax revenue and sustains thousands of well-paid jobs. Oh, and yes, it reduces emissions by reducing the use of LNG.

But then the three authors drift off into some dreamworld La La Land, stating: ‘In Britain, the wholesale electricity price is usually set by the most expensive generator needed to meet demand. That generator is often a gas-fired power station. As a result, electricity prices tend to rise and fall with gas prices – even when much of the electricity is produced by cheaper sources such as wind or solar.

‘A different policy direction – one that reduces the role of gas in electricity production – produces much larger savings . . . If the price of electricity was set by cheaper renewable energy rather than by gas, our analysis suggests households could save £105 to £331 per year through lower wholesale energy costs.’

Note how they jump from an accurate statement – ‘the wholesale electricity price is usually set by the most expensive generator needed to meet demand. That generator is often a gas-fired power station’to a fake claim – ‘even when much of the electricity is produced by cheaper sources such as wind or solar’.

This paragraph shows they have no clue about how the energy market operates, something you might have thought was essential for a PhD candidate in energy policy or the head of policy at the Smith School of Enterprise. They have probably fallen for the ‘wind is free’ fable, no doubt something they read in the Guardian.

I am sure most readers of this column are now well versed in the myriad of renewable subsidies which are added to our bills. But for the benefit of our three Oxford scholars, here is how it works.

Most renewable energy is subsidised via the Renewables Obligation (RO) scheme. This covers most wind and solar farms and biomass plants built or under construction before 2016, when a new subsidy mechanism was introduced; they cover about a quarter of total electricity supply.

All of the schemes covered by RO receive a subsidy payment on top of the price they receive from selling electricity at market prices. Last year this subsidy averaged about £97/MWh, adding about £7billion to bills. For reference, the wholesale market price of electricity last year was under £80/MWh – in total therefore, we had to pay £177/MWh for renewable electricity.

Because all of these wind farms know they will get their nice, fat subsidy, they will always undercut the price of gas power. This is not because they are ‘cheaper’ – it is because they won’t get their subsidy at all if they do not sell their electricity. Even if they sell for a penny per unit, the subsidy itself covers their cost.

Newer renewable generators, those coming on stream since 2016, are subsidised by Contracts for Difference (CfDs), which pay them a guaranteed, index-linked strike price. Whatever the market price is, it is irrelevant for these generators, who get their guarantee anyway. If the market price is lower, they are paid a top up subsidy; if higher, they must pay the difference back to the Government.

CfDs cover about 15 per cent of our electricity supply. Last year, market prices were substantially lower than the guarantee, meaning a subsidy of £2.6billion was handed over. Indeed, other than during the Ukraine energy crisis of 2022, every year has seen subsidies paid out. Since 2017, these have totalled £12billion.

As with RO, this subsidy is added to energy bills. And, as with RO, the CfD generators will always undercut the price of gas when bidding, because they know the guaranteed price is what they will get, regardless of what they bid.

The reason our electricity is so costly has nothing to do with the price of gas, which prior to the present crisis, has not been high in historical terms when general inflation is stripped out. It is costly because of the billions we have to pay in renewable subsidies, not to mention the billions more needed to balance the grid, pay for standby capacity and upgrade the transmission network, none of which would be required if we did not have intermittent renewables.

The article, of course, uses its faulty logic to demand more renewables!

Apparently Jeremy Corbyn’s Magic Money Tree must be alive and well in La La Land, because they suggest one way to cut energy bills is simply to transfer subsidy costs on to general taxation. There, problem solved!

The whole article is full of childish naivety. Just to pick out one comment: ‘Producing more gas in the North Sea would not create the UK’s “own special supply”, nor could its price be set specifically for UK citizens. That’s because any new production would be sold on international markets at international prices.’

Maybe somebody should tell them there is no such thing as ‘an international price’ for gas. If there was, US prices would not be much lower than ours.

Maybe next time, these ‘experts’ might spend a bit of time talking to real energy specialists and less time reading the Guardian, before writing their next study.

https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-climate-scaremongers-dear-oxford-wind/

Wednesday, April 1, 2026

Make Americans Proud Again

Make Americans Proud Again

Matt Margolis

*John Trumbull, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons*

Patriotism used to be something that Americans celebrated. Now, kids are taught to sneer at their own country, to see only its sins and not its staggering achievements. America deserves better than that. As our nation approaches its 250th birthday, three prominent conservative voices are stepping up to change the story being told to the next generation.

Dr. Ben Carson, Kirk Cameron, and Riley Gaines are joining forces in 2026 around a single, urgent mission: making sure American children grow up knowing the truth about the country they call home. They come from wildly different backgrounds — an operating room, a Hollywood set, and a swimming pool — but they're aligned on one point. What is happening to America's kids is deliberate. And it will not fix itself.

The numbers are hard to argue with. A June 2025 Gallup poll found that only 41% of Gen Z adults say they are proud to be American — the lowest of any generation, compared with 83% of the Silent Generation. It won’t surprise you to learn that Democrats are driving that decline in patriotism. Meanwhile, the federal government's own National Report Card shows just 13% of eighth graders are proficient in U.S. history.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We can make Americans proud again.

Carson, who grew up in deep poverty in Detroit and was raised by a mother with only a third-grade education, who could not read. He credits the true story of America with saving his own life. He became one of the world's most celebrated neurosurgeons, received the Medal of Freedom, and served as a member of Donald Trump’s Cabinet during his first term. His life is the embodiment of the American Dream. Naturally, he is furious that this story is being systematically hidden from the children who need it most.

"Every movement that has sought to destroy a nation has followed the same playbook: before you can transform a country, you have to erase its memory," Carson told PJ Media. "You strip the children of their history, you teach them to despise their own country, and then you offer them your replacement. Such a movement is taking root in America today. It is not an accident. It is a strategy. Our kids are being taught that America is stolen land, that our founders were villains, and that there is nothing here worth protecting. That is not education. That is demolition. I grew up in poverty in Detroit, and the true story of this country saved my life. I wrote Built on Faith because every child in America deserves that same opportunity before it's erased for good."

Cameron brings a Hollywood insider's eye to the fight. After spending decades inside the entertainment machine and walking away to build something different, he knows exactly how cultural narratives get manufactured, and who they're targeting. "I have traveled this country from coast to coast, and I can tell you, the American people are not what they are being told they are," Cameron told PJ Media. "They are generous, faithful, hardworking, and they love this country. The problem is nobody is telling that story to their kids. We are."

And then there’s Gaines. She first stepped into the public arena when she was forced to compete against biological male swimmer Will "Lia" Thomas, managed to tie with him, and was denied a trophy.

"A generation that does not know its own history cannot defend its own freedom," she told PJ Media. "I have seen it firsthand on college campuses across this country. Kids who have been fed nothing but shame about America since before they could think for themselves. By the time they get to college it is already too late. We have to reach them young and we have to reach them with the truth."

The vehicle for that truth is BRAVE Books, a Texas-based, faith-focused children's publisher trusted by more than 275,000 families nationwide. The three new titles — Carson's Built on Faith, Cameron's Built by the Brave, and Gaines' 1, 2, 3 We Are Free — are included in the "America Wins Bundle," a limited-edition collection marking the nation's 250th birthday.

"What we have built with Dr. Ben Carson, Kirk Cameron, and Riley Gaines for America's 250th birthday is the most ambitious and important project we have ever undertaken," said BRAVE Books founder and CEO Trent Talbot. "These are not just books. This is a movement. And these three voices represent exactly the kind of courage, faith, and conviction that built this country in the first place."

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2026/03/28/make-americans-proud-again-n4951175?utm_source=pjmediavip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl_pm

Another Attempt At 'No Kings' Today? Why?

Another Attempt At 'No Kings' Today? Why?

Eric Florack

PJ Media

Leftists are trying again with the “No Kings” nonsense. They’re out there today, making fools of themselves, objecting to Donald J. Trump. I’ve already written repeatedly about this sorry business, without really examining what is driving these folks, and given today’s events, perhaps it’s time that I do.

I find myself forever fascinated by the left and their attitudes toward President Trump. Not appreciative, mind you, and certainly not convinced of the justification of the reactionary venom they apply to every single action the President takes, particularly when they offer no demonstrably viable counter agenda.

For example, I’m old enough to remember when Democrats liked the idea of using reciprocal tariffs to protect and grow American businesses. They also tended to take the threats by China to our industry seriously. Somewhere along the way, they lost that edge and now disregard the trillion-dollar trade deficits, which we have no hope of sustaining. Because of Trump’s actions, the bean counters are projecting on the order of $300 billion in new revenue, and foreign businesses are investing upwards of $15 trillion in America as of March 10th of this year. Domestic businesses are upping the ante as well.

Based on their reaction, it seems the left is worried that China will lose money because of Trump. And they’re right. The trouble is that they inexplicably consider China’s loss, and for that matter, America’s gain, a bad thing.

Take, for example, the president’s America First policies. The left will praise Volodymyr Zelensky all day long for putting HIS country first, and yet will chastise Trump for taking the same position about America. He was elected by the people of America. Shouldn’t he be representing their interests?

Speaking of Zelensky, why did the left, back in the spring of 2025, complain so bitterly about Trump’s attempts at peace negotiations? You will remember perhaps the knee-jerk reactions of the Democrats to Trump’s meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska, despite it being a summit that the EU leaders almost universally praised. After all, the EU by that point had a war on their very back yards with nobody, not even those self-same EU leaders, making a move toward ending it, or even limiting it. Their praise was understandable. After all, at that point, there was already about a million and a half wounded, missing, or dead. But leftists in this country complained bitterly about it.

Then the left reacted negatively when, about a week after that, Zelensky, along with those same EU leaders, flew to the White House. I don’t know, but it seems to me likely that the reason for their objection to this process is that it is a path that they, under Obama, didn’t have the courage to follow.

What was the plan of the Democrats with Ukraine? What did Biden do? He provided massive amounts of arms and money so that both sides of that conflict could keep fighting and dying, with no way to get either side to back down. Not even a hint at diplomacy, which historically, the left champions as a nearly knee-jerk reaction.

When Biden was in the White House, some 14 million illegal aliens flooded into our country, with a good half million being tagged as violent criminals in their own countries. That situation has changed under Trump, to where there is statistically no illegal immigration, with a million who entered the country under Biden, have left the country voluntarily, and 100,000 more have been deported.

Meanwhile, the left fights like a cornered raccoon against the enforcement of Immigration laws that the vast majority of Americans want strictly enforced. If we take their complaints and their protests seriously, we must assume that they don’t want our immigration laws enforced. You really must wonder what their goal here is. Should we be allowing millions of unvetted and often criminal aliens so that the census can be tilted in favor of the Democrats? That’s not even addressing the issues of illegal aliens voting, which they’ve been shown repeatedly to do. JustFacts.com tells us:

In 2014, the academic journal Electoral Studies published a groundbreaking study by three scholars who estimated how frequently non-citizens were illegally voting. Based on data for the 2008 presidential and congressional elections, the study found that:
“Roughly one quarter of non-citizens” in the U.S. “were likely registered to vote.”
“6.4% of non-citizens actually voted.”
81.8% of them “reported voting for Barack Obama.”
illegal votes cast by non-citizens “likely” changed “important election outcomes” in favor of Democrats, “including Electoral College votes” and a “pivotal” U.S. Senate race that enabled Democrats to pass Obamacare.
The study’s voter registration rate was estimated with data from two key sources:
A national survey in which 14.8% of non-citizens admitted that they were registered to vote.
A database of registered voters that reveals what portion of the surveyed non-citizens “were in fact registered” even though “they claimed not to be registered.”
By combining these data, the author’s “best” estimate was that 25.1% of non-citizens were illegally registered to vote.

The left seems to feel that this is a net positive. That’s understandable if we take as a given that they approve of illegal immigrants voting because it supports their candidates and their misbegotten policies.

Then we have Iran, where the left apparently preferred Obama’s approach, which all but handed nukes to the insane Islamic dictatorship. What could possibly go wrong? Both the left and the centrist GOP have been kicking that particular can down the road for very nearly five decades, under the guise of “diplomacy,” which in the end has actually made the problem worse. And for all the moralistic and legalistic preaching they do, they’ve apparently forgotten the people in Iran. They’d rather have those people suffer and die than admit Trump’s actions are the correct ones.

I can’t help looking at the Democrat party of today without wistfully recalling what JFK said at his inaugural address, back in 1961: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

Apparently, they’ve either forgotten what Kennedy said that day or they reject it outright, either of which would make me question why they still consider him a party icon. I believe that Kennedy would not want anything to do with the Democrat party of today, which in turn explains why the polling of the last several years has been showing the Democrats of today are just about equal in popularity with raw sewage.

The anti-America left finds itself being strictly contrarian. If Trump wants peace, leftists go out of their way to support war, as in Ukraine. Yet they come down against the reckoning being waged in Iran.

Trump wants prosperity; they fight to maintain poverty. If individual freedom is the issue, they fight for virtual slavery. Witness the doings in Cuba over the last few weeks, and their whining about our arrest of Maduro as two prime examples of such. Instead of being pleased that the law is being enforced, they side with the criminal.

So deeply into this contrary position are they that they’ve invested literally billions in tax dollars in over 90 versions of lawfare, in bogus investigations, they’ve tried to jail him, and they've tried impeaching him twice. Heck, they’ve even tried killing the man. And he just gets stronger.

And most recently, they fight tooth and nail to keep a bill from passing that repeated polling shows that well over 80% of American voters from both parties support: The SAVE Act.

Why do they continue? Simple: They’re not worried that his policies will fail; they’re concerned about being shamed by comparison to what the establishments of both parties have offered us, his policies will be wildly successful.

So they have been. And America’s success under Trump, particularly the long, long list of failures the left has given us, is something they simply cannot stand.

Remember, gang, as you watch the riots erupting today: Businesses and municipalities have never had to board their windows because of conservatives.

https://pjmedia.com/eric-florack/2026/03/28/another-attempt-at-no-kings-today-why-n4951165?utm_source=pjmediavip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl_pm

Where Is the Arc of Justice Headed?

Where Is the Arc of Justice Headed?

Michael Barone

Where Is the Arc of Justice Headed? — *AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster*

Former President Barack Obama liked to quote the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s line that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Of course, what was an expression of optimism for the moral reformer King was more like a victory spike of the football for a competitor in a zero-sum electoral contest like Obama.

More importantly, the belief that things are moving toward justice comes more naturally to believers in American exceptionalism, of which Obama isn't one. He famously said that he believed in America's exceptionalism only as much as "Brits" believe in British exceptionalism or Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.

But British and Greek exceptionalism look to distant pasts and encompass the idea of decline, which, if not the opposite of justice, is certainly not positive. Britons may look with pride on the British Empire, but not without a twinge of regret that it has all but disappeared. Greeks may look back on the astonishing creativity of Athens 2,500 years ago, but not without recognizing that it was held down under the Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman empires for almost all the centuries since.

In contrast, the United States has a history that can be easily, if perhaps oversimply, interpreted as a story of continual winning. Economic growth — the exception rather than the rule before 1800 in European lands — has been cumulative over time. Cultural progress abounds: the abolition of slavery, equality for women, and civil rights for Black people, all have advanced, though with some setbacks over the years.

In such an environment, it may seem natural to believe that, as a general rule, anyway, things get better. Yet the long run of history teaches different lessons. Historians of ancient cultures and their archaeological colleagues can describe marked declines of civilization enough for one of them to title a book "1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed."

Historians continue to dispute just how much and even whether the Roman Empire declined. But it seems indisputable that its military forces dwindled, its long-distance trade petered out, and its technological advances were forgotten. It took centuries for Europeans to figure out how to build a dome like that of the Pantheon in Rome, but there it is today.

In American politics over the last century, it has been the Democrats whose rhetoric proclaims them as the party of progress. Some of this has a Marxist base, the New Deal idea that a complex industrialized society should have an increasingly large government to protect and guide individuals.

To many since at least the 1980s, that argument seems antique. Big government has not managed to build a single mile of track for California's high-speed rail line in 19 years, while the private sector has developed artificial intelligence at astonishing rates. Note also that in this century Americans, including recent immigrants, have been moving out of big-government states like New York, Illinois and California, and into small-government states like Florida, Tennessee and Texas.

Republicans under Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes made the argument and provided some proof that market-friendly policies can produce more than big government. But President Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" mantra suggests moving back to some unspecified moment in the past.

Perhaps to the low-immigration, high-family-formation, high-churchgoing 1950s in which Trump and his baby boom predecessors, former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, grew up. In any case, Trump's inevitable retirement leaves Republicans uncertain and probably divided on what progress and decline mean.

For articulate Democrats, the focus has moved from economics — on which they make vague promises of more redistribution to the less affluent — and toward cultural issues. But on that, their confidence that the arc of justice moves their way has encountered some turbulence. They have seen American opinion do so on some issues, notably same-sex marriage, but not on abortion or immigration.

Or, as the liberal economist Noah Smith argues, in their isolated communities — trendy central city neighborhoods, affluent suburbs and university towns — and sycophantic media, they have failed to notice that most Americans don't believe, or aren't moving closer to believing, that "racial preferences in hiring, leniency toward petty crime and illegal immigration, and trans women on women's sports teams are basic rights."

My sense is that the arc of history moves around, and sometimes in a malign direction. Notably, among the sharply increasing antisemitism of the university Left (now installed in New York's Gracie Mansion) and in the emergence of a less numerous but equally disturbing antisemitism on the fringes of the podcast Right from Southwest outposts to the woods of Maine. There are some directions in which the arc of history should never head again.

https://townhall.com/columnists/michaelbarone/2026/03/27/where-is-the-arc-of-justice-headed-n2673505?utm_source=thdailyvip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&utm_content=ncl-FZMbYkTYpW&utm_term=&_nlid=FZMbYkTYpW&_nhids=ncdGxHGkCPEzls