When Andrew Yang bowed out of the 2020 presidential race, I was fairly ambivalent. As a supporter who had volunteered for his campaign, I obviously felt a bit sad that he would no longer be on the debate stage. …

An obscure political philosophy that deserves a second chance I’ve become a pretty anti-nostalgic person. Proclamations that “things were better in the good old days” tend to be both factually wrong and socially harmful. This is true in politics and in other areas of life (do you really miss having…

Even the least contentious online spaces require moderation — In much the same way that a virus will mutate over time to increase its immunity against various treatments, so too do bad internet arguments. Realizing how quickly the “big tech censorship” narrative crumbles under scrutiny, some defenders of Donald Trump and the “anything goes” social media app Parler have…

Add “free markets” to the far-right’s long list of enemies — There’s a growing disconnect between the more academic definitions of “Left” and “Right,” and what these labels are commonly understood to mean. If you ever attended a university and took an intro-level Poli-Sci class, you were probably taught that the political Right supports things like free markets, fiscal restraint, and…

Contempt for the other side has little to do with policy — It’s almost become a cliché to state that we are living through unprecedented times. As Covid-19 continues its merciless resurgence, and the soon-to-be former president desperately tries to overturn a democratic election in what can only be described as a dictatorial coup attempt, it’s understandable that many of us would…

What really has a chilling effect on speech? — There’s a term that originally comes from the field of social psychology, but has since been co-opted by right-wing internet people. The term is “virtue signaling.” It’s typically used to mean something like “political correctness,” or the act of being sanctimonious about a particular social issue so that one can…