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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

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Opinion >  Syndicated columns

Ross Douthat: Today’s anti-Trump demonstrators carry a political burden

In June 2020, there was a vigorous debate among progressives about whether protests that turned violent would risk helping President Donald Trump win reelection. “Vigorous” is a euphemism here: What actually happened was that Democratic strategist David Shor was fired from a progressive data analytics firm after tweeting academic research suggesting that riots helped tip the 1968 election to Richard Nixon, because left-wing activists deemed that kind of analysis a form of aid and comfort to the enemy.
Opinion >  Syndicated columns

Michelle Goldberg: This is what autocracy looks like

Since Donald Trump was elected again, I’ve feared one scenario above all others: that he’d call out the military against people protesting his mass deportations, putting America on the road to martial law. Even in my more outlandish imaginings, however, I thought that he’d need more of a pretext to put troops on the streets of an American city – against the wishes of its mayor and governor – than the relatively small protests that broke out in Los Angeles last week.
Opinion >  Syndicated columns

Michelle Goldberg: The alarming part of the Musk-Trump dispute

At the height of the juvenile flame war on Thursday between the world’s richest man and its most powerful one, Donald Trump posted a barely veiled threat on his website Truth Social. “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts,” he wrote. “I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”
Opinion >  Syndicated columns

F.D. Flam: This isn’t how you ‘restore gold standard’ science

In another attempt to concentrate power, President Donald Trump has signed an executive order to “restore gold standard science” in federal research and policy. It sounds reasonable given the instances of bad or faked science being published, including high-profile papers on Alzheimer’s drug development and one misleadingly claiming that hydroxychloroquine would cure COVID-19. In the last decade, scientists themselves have grown concerned about the large number of studies whose promising results couldn’t be replicated.
Opinion >  Syndicated columns

Gautam Mukunda: What D-Day tells us about how tech goes from niche to mass

Today is the 81st anniversary of D-Day, the Allied invasion of France that began the liberation of Western Europe. I always mark the date, but this is the first time I’ve been able to commemorate it so personally: Last week, I fulfilled a lifelong dream of hiking the Normandy beaches stormed by those unimaginably brave American, Canadian and British soldiers. Like most who visit, I’ve tried to imagine how they must have felt. Unlike most, I suspect, I also spent the walk thinking about weather forecasting.
Opinion >  Syndicated columns

Michelle Goldberg: Why women are leaving this Broadway show in tears

I cried the first time I saw the play “John Proctor Is the Villain,” set in a high school in small-town Georgia during the height of the #MeToo movement, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it for weeks. On social media, I saw other women reacting similarly, leaving performances in tears. This past weekend, I went a second time with a friend. As the houselights went up, she was crying, as was the woman in the row in front of us. They spontaneously hugged, which is something I’ve never seen before at a Broadway show. Outside the theater, two women were sobbing.
Opinion >  Syndicated columns

Outside View: Media presence vital in the upcoming trial of Bryan Kohberger

Ada County is about to get its third major national-interest trial in a little more than two years. And while the county’s experience with the trials of Lori Vallow Daybell in 2023 and Chad Daybell in 2024 were valuable, the upcoming trial of Bryan Kohberger promises to be of even higher interest. And based on a recent media briefing call with District Judge James Cawthon, the Ada County ...
Opinion >  Syndicated columns

Michelle Goldberg: From the creator of ‘Succession,’ a delicious satire of the tech right

In November, when “Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong got the idea for his caustic new movie, “Mountainhead,” he knew he wanted to do it fast. He wrote the script, about grandiose, nihilistic tech oligarchs holed up in a mountain mansion in Utah, in January and February, as a very similar set of oligarchs was coalescing behind Donald Trump’s inauguration. Then he shot the film, his first, over five weeks this spring. It premiered Saturday on HBO – an astonishingly compressed timeline. With events cascading so quickly that last year often feels like another era, Armstrong wanted to create what he called, when I spoke to him last month, “a feeling of nowness.”
Opinion >  Syndicated columns

Commentary: Immigration procedures should be modeled after TSA PreCheck

The Trump administration is working to secure the borders and deport criminal aliens from the country. So far, the very blunt criteria being used is that anyone who has broken any law, even something as benign as a speeding ticket, may place them at risk of deportation. Such a chaotic approach is creating anxiety not only amongst undocumented immigrants, but all visa and green card holders, ...
Opinion >  Syndicated columns

Commentary: Trump’s policing policies threaten human rights

In late April, President Donald Trump issued an executive order that expands the federal government’s power over local and state police. The order is a recipe for abuse. The return to the overt embrace of mass incarceration through expanded funding and other support for police and prisons, coupled with the divisive underlying rhetoric of law-abiding citizens versus “dangerous criminals,” is ...
Opinion >  Syndicated columns

Commentary: Donald Trump is getting a reality check on his peace plans for Gaza and Ukraine

If there is one lesson President Donald Trump is learning during the first four months of his second term, it’s that talking about peace isn’t the same as fostering it. In Ukraine and Gaza, host to two of the most intractable wars in the world, the president is striking out. The self-professed master dealmaker devoted considerable time on the campaign trail trumpeting his ambitions for a more ...