Across the country, many cities have settled on the same fix for housing shortages: order developers to include affordable units in every new project, or charge a fee if they don’t. Boston does it. So does San Francisco, Chicago, and Denver. The pitch is that affordability comes free, paid for by the market-rate units next...
As the nation marked the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, an old debate returned: Is America a creedal nation—defined by the truths that all men are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights? Or is that claim a later abstraction that ignores blood, soil, culture, and the European origins of those ideas? Mike Gonzalez recently addressed this...
Governor Greg Abbott made parental rights a big focus of his RNC midterm convention speech, declaring: “I put a stop to the craziness by signing laws that protect parents’ rights in the state of Texas.” Texas has indeed made major strides to advance parental rights in recent years, both through statute and a voter-approved constitutional...
Many small and mid-sized cities and counties are right now considering tax rates that, if ultimately adopted, will result in homeowners paying higher taxes. In some cases, those threatened tax hikes are dramatic. To better understand which Texas taxpayers are in the danger zone, I recently surveyed numerous Notices of Public Hearing on Tax Increase,...
September 11, 2001 was not an inexplicable act of violence. The men who carried out the attacks belonged to an ideological tradition that had identified the United States and the broader West as enemies long before commercial airplanes were hijacked that morning. Twenty-five years later, the danger is that Americans remember the horror of 9/11...
Texas cities are pouring unprecedented amounts of taxpayer money into homelessness services, yet the crisis on the streets continues to visibly worsen. From Dallas to Austin, budgets for housing initiatives expand every year, but the encampments remain. Taxpayers are justifiably wondering where exactly all their money is going. The answer, according to a new research...
The twenty-fifth anniversary of the massacres of September 11th, 2001, brings with it a flood of memory, and regrets. The simple reality, visible at the time and brought into ever-sharper focus across each successive year, is that the enemy in Al Qaeda achieved its major strategic objects in its attack upon the United States of...
Taylor Sheridan’s hit CIA thriller Lioness has never shied away from America’s enemies. The show explores threats from the Middle East to cartel-CCP infiltration, but season three is looking a little different. This season centers on something quieter and potentially more consequential: the “long game” being played inside the United States. The premise is chillingly...
United Flight 93 carried 40 passengers and crew when hijackers seized it as part of the attack on America. Through phone calls with people on the ground, several learned that hijacked airplanes had already struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. They understood that Flight 93 was part of the larger attack, took a...
For decades, the American university has been drifting away from its most important purpose: giving students a common education in the knowledge and principles they need to become educated citizens. The core curriculum was supposed to provide that common ground. Instead, it became a collection of distribution requirements—a little History here, a little PoliSci there,...
We all know we are being watched all the time. The cellphone in our pocket tracks our every movement. The CCTV at Starbucks captures my coffee order. The “For You” feed on my social media knows exactly which posts will keep me lingering a bit too long. But fears about the use and misuse of...
“You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy” is an increasingly fitting description of the American college graduate. While that World Economic Forum slogan is rightly mocked for its managerial creepiness, jokes aside, the average student nowadays is surely more nihilistic about the world than previous generations. The economic bargain of college, however, is looking increasingly...