Author: Lance Garrison
Between Kentucky and Ohio, there’s a bridge that will eventually be rebuilt and replaced. Early last year, Joe Biden flew there and stood next to Mitch McConnell and they celebrated the $1.6 billion dedicated to this bridge from the infrastructure law’s $1.2 trillion budget. Sixteen months later, $15.7 million of federal funds have been spent toward the project, while the yearslong formal process for awarding the bulk of the money continues. Billions and billions of infrastructure money is similarly slowly winding its way through various processes, but, as Politico recently reported in an in-depth look at Mr. Biden’s domestic agenda,…
Appearing last week on “Morning Joe,” Hillary Clinton lamented what she views as the ignorance of students protesting the war in Gaza. The host, Joe Scarborough, asked her about “the sort of radicalism that has mainstream students getting propaganda, whether it’s from their professors or from the Chinese Communist government through TikTok.” Ms. Clinton was happy to oblige. “I have had many conversations, as you have had, with a lot of young people over the last many months,” she said. “They don’t know very much at all about the history of the Middle East or frankly about history in many…
Produced by ‘The Ezra Klein Show’The international legal system was created to prevent the atrocities of World War II from happening again. The United Nations partitioned historic Palestine to create the states of Israel and Palestine, but also left Palestinians with decades of false promises. The war in Gaza — and countless other conflicts, including those in Syria, Yemen and Ethiopia — shows how little power the U.N. and international law have to protect civilians in wartime. So what is international law actually for?[You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio app, Apple,…
In her new book “Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches From the Wrong Side of History,” Nellie Bowles, a former New York Times journalist grown disillusioned with both the mainstream media and the left, writes about the year 2020, when the combustible confluence of the pandemic, the murder of George Floyd and the prospect of Donald Trump’s re-election made politics and culture go “berserk.” She describes a liberal intelligentsia “wild with rage and optimism,” brimming with “fresh ideas from academia that began to reshape every part of society.” Her name for this phenomenon, often derided as “wokeness,” is the “New Progressivism,”…
There is a good chance that Donald Trump’s polling lead in the 2024 presidential election is more fragile than it looks.The most immediate problem for him is the fact that he’s on trial in a criminal case. Even if Trump isn’t convicted, the trial keeps him away from the trail.There is also the issue of the campaign itself, which is a smaller affair than his 2020 effort, with fewer resources. “The situation has alarmed G.O.P. officials in key states, like Arizona, Georgia and Michigan, who have yet to receive promised funding, staff or even briefings on the new plans since…
Listen to and follow ‘Matter of Opinion’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeThis week on “Matter of Opinion,” the hosts debate what the latest Times/Siena poll reveals about Joe Biden’s weaknesses and mull over the question of whether Vice President Kamala Harris is one of them. Plus, Carlos on some advice that’s gold, Jerry, gold.(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available within 24 hours of publication in the audio player above.)Mentioned in this episode:Thoughts? Email us at matterofopinion@nytimes.com.Follow our hosts on X: Michelle Cottle (@mcottle), Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) and Carlos Lozada (@CarlosNYT).“Matter of Opinion” is…
There has hardly ever been as fierce a defender of free speech as the current Supreme Court.Since John Roberts became chief justice almost 19 years ago, the court has expanded the protective net of the First Amendment to cover such activities as selling videos depicting animal torture, spending unlimited amounts of money in support of political candidates and refusing to pay dues (or a dues-like fee) to a public employee union.This last decision, Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, Council 31, overturned a 41-year-old precedent and led a dissenting justice, Elena Kagan, to accuse the majority…
Then, as partisanship deepens, partisan subcultures can get increasingly weird. They become so convinced of the us-versus-them dynamic that they’ll eventually believe virtually anything, as long as it’s a claim against the other side. MAGA’s Taylor Swift conspiracies, in which her popularity is some sort of liberal psyop, and election denial conspiracies sprang from the same poisonous partisan well. If decades of partisanship have persuaded you that your opponents are evil, have no morals and want to destroy the country, then why wouldn’t they hack voting machines or recruit a pop star as a government asset?George Orwell famously wrote that…
Donald Trump isn’t exactly Don Quixote, but he does have a thing against windmills.Indeed, Trump’s animus toward wind power is one of the strangest obsessions of a man with many unusual preoccupations (toilets! hair spray!). Over the years, he has asserted, falsely, that wind turbines can cause cancer, that they can cause power outages and that wind energy “kills all the birds” (cats and windows do far more harm). Now he says that if he wins in November, on “Day 1” he’ll issue an executive order putting the brakes on offshore wind farm construction.Trump claims, without evidence, that such wind…
The central struggle in the world right now is between liberalism and authoritarianism. It’s between those of us who believe in democratic values and those who don’t — whether they are pseudo-authoritarian populists like Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Narendra Modi or Recep Tayyip Erdogan or straight-up dictators like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping or theocratic fascists like the men who run Iran and Hamas.In this contest, we liberals should be wiping the floor with those guys! But we’re not. Trump is leading in the swing states. Modi seems to be on the verge of re-election. Russia and Iran are showing…