The character assassination of Marty Peretz by his allies on the left is a familiar punishment for political incorrectness and an all too familiar sight. But the abandoning of Marty Peretz by people whose careers he fostered and whose reputations he made – among them Peter Beinart and this pipsqueak at the Times is particularly disgusting. It [...]

This column originally appeared at Salon on February 24, 1997. Fifty years ago this spring, Jackie Robinson broke the color bar in baseball. The events that followed provide a lesson for Black History Month — which ends this week — that many civil rights leaders seem to have forgotten. Following Robinson’s historic breakthrough, as everybody knows, [...]

Leftwing viper and racial demagogue Jim Sleeper last came to my attention when he attacked Jewish students for standing up to the Muslim Brotherhood and their allies at Yale. Now he rises to the defense of radical provocateur Frances Fox Piven, who only this month called for a bloody revolution in America. Of course, in [...]

This column was originally published by Salon on March 3, 1997. Tom Hayden and I were once comrades-in-arms in a movement to overthrow America’s democratic institutions, remake its government in a Marxist image and help America’s enemies defeat her sons on the field of battle. Now he is running for mayor of Los Angeles and many people [...]

This column was originally published by Salon on February 17, 1997. Everybody from Newt Gingrich to Bill Clinton agrees that the crisis in our schools demands national action. Many proposals — raised standards, smaller classrooms — are already part of a bipartisan agenda. But no one seems to have the political spine to name the parties [...]

Oseola McCarty shows the way to a principled conservative worldview.

This column was originally published by Salon on October 6, 1997. It has become the topic of the season on the political right: Whatever happened to the triumph of conservatism? Recently, the Weekly Standard ran a cover symposium titled “Is There a Worldwide Conservative Crackup?” Conservative ideas appear to be ascendant, the editors pointed out, but [...]

This article was originally published by Salon on September 22, 1997. Lino Graglia is a 67-year-old Sicilian-born American who was an attorney in the Eisenhower Justice Department and has been teaching constitutional law at the University of Texas in Austin for 33 years. A stiff-necked Catholic conservative — some would say eccentric — he passionately holds [...]

This article was originally published by Salon on September 15, 1997. During the darkest days of the Cold War, the Italian writer Ignazio Silone predicted the final struggle of that conflict would be between the communist believers and the ex-believers. A similar conflict seems to be shaping up among civil rights activists, as affirmative action undergoes [...]

This article was originally published by Salon on October 20, 1997. Two weeks ago, three leftist radicals from the University of Wisconsin were arrested and charged with spying. The media played the story big. But I still have one question: Why only three? James Clark, Kurt Stand and Theresa Squillacote were all New Left enthusiasts, Maoists [...]