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Political correctness has become a major bugaboo of the right in the past decade, a rallying cry against all that has gone wrong with liberalism and America. Conservative writers fill volumes complaining how political correctness stifles free expression and promotes bunk social theories about “power structures” based on patriarchy, race and mass victimhood. Forbes charged that it “stifles freedom of speech.” The Daily Caller has gone so far as to claim that political correctness “kills Americans.”

But conservatives have their own, nationalist version of PC, their own set of rules regulating speech, behavior and acceptable opinions. I call it “patriotic correctness.” It’s a full-throated, un-nuanced, uncompromising defense of American nationalism, history and cherry-picked ideals. Central to its thesis is the belief that nothing in America can’t be fixed by more patriotism enforced by public shaming, boycotts and policies to cut out foreign and non-American influences.

Blaming the liberal or mainstream media and “media bias” is the patriotically correct version of blaming the corporations or capitalism. The patriotically correct notion that they “would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University” because the former have “common sense” and the “intellectual elites” don’t know anything, despite all the evidence to the contrary, can be sustained only in a total bubble.

Ever since Lee Wong came to the U.S. after graduating from high school, he has faced questions about his patriotism.

Throughout his life, the discrimination continued — his application to be a police officer was immediately thrown into the trash, he says, as the officers laughed about the "Chinaman" who wants to be policeman.

Removing his tie and unbuttoning his shirt, the 69-year-old continued: "Here is my proof." He stood up, raising his undershirt, revealing a large dark scar across his chest. "This is sustained through my service in the U.S. military. Now is this patriot enough?"

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Hodgson approached the organisers of the California State Fair wine competition, the oldest contest of its kind in North America, and proposed an experiment for their annual June tasting sessions.Each panel of four judges would be presented with their usual "flight" of samples to sniff, sip and slurp. But some wines would be presented to the panel three times, poured from the same bottle each time. The results would be compiled and analysed to see whether wine testing really is scientific.

Results from the first four years of the experiment, published in the Journal of Wine Economics, showed a typical judge's scores varied by plus or minus four points over the three blind tastings. A wine deemed to be a good 90 would be rated as an acceptable 86 by the same judge minutes later and then an excellent 94.

Senate voted on Tuesday to curtail the federal government’s sweeping surveillance of American phone records

take one more tool away from those who defend our country every day.

An early adopter of the QAnon mass delusion, on board since 2018, she held firm to the claim that a Satan-worshipping cabal of child sex traffickers controlled the world and the only person standing in their way was Trump. She saw him not merely as a politician but a savior, and she expressed her devotion in stark terms.

“The prophets have said Trump is anointed,” she texted me once. “God is using him to finally end the evil doings of the cabal which has hurt humanity all these centuries… We are in a war between good & evil.”

By 2020, I’d pretty much given up on swaying my mom away from her preferred presidential candidate. We’d spent many hours arguing over basic facts I considered indisputable. Any information I cited to prove Trump’s cruelty, she cut down with a corresponding counterattack. My links to credible news sources disintegrated against a wall of outlets like One America News Network, Breitbart, and Before It’s News. Any cracks I could find in her positions were instantly undermined by the inconvenient fact that I was, in her words, a member of “the liberal media,” a brainwashed acolyte of the sprawling conspiracy trying to take down her heroic leader.

The 1619 Project introduced a date, previously obscure to most Americans, that ought always to have been thought of as seminal — and probably now will. It offered fresh reminders of the extent to which Black freedom was a victory gained by courageous Black Americans, and not just a gift obtained from benevolent whites.

in a point missed by many of the 1619 Project’s critics, it does not reject American values. As Nikole Hannah-Jones, its creator and leading voice, concluded in her essay for the project, “I wish, now, that I could go back to the younger me and tell her that her people’s ancestry started here, on these lands, and to boldly, proudly, draw the stars and those stripes of the American flag.” It’s an unabashedly patriotic thought.

ambition can be double-edged. Journalists are, most often, in the business of writing the first rough draft of history, not trying to have the last word on it. We are best when we try to tell truths with a lowercase t, following evidence in directions unseen, not the capital-T truth of a pre-established narrative in which inconvenient facts get discarded

Political biases are omnipresent, but what we don’t fully understand yet is how they come about in the first place.

In 2014, Michele J. Gelfand, a professor of psychology at the Stanford Graduate School of Business formerly at the University of Maryland, and Jesse R. Harrington, then a Ph.D. candidate, conducted a study designed to rank the 50 states on a scale of “tightness” and “looseness.”

titled “Tightness-Looseness Across the 50 United States,” the study calculated a catalog of measures for each state, including the incidence of natural disasters, disease prevalence, residents’ levels of openness and conscientiousness, drug and alcohol use, homelessness and incarceration rates.

Many Americans may be tired of armed conflict, but less than one percent of them will ever find themselves in remote proximity to a combat zone.

Extremism is not going away. We have already been fighting radical Islamic terrorism for decades. Our children and grandchildren will be fighting radical Islamic terrorism for decades to come.

Yet so few Americans understand the immense sacrifice undertaken by one of the most elite, rigorously trained, and patriotic group of men in the world.

The slogan evokes a time when America was stronger and more prosperous. But Mr. Trump doesn’t specify whether he’s expressing nostalgia for the 1950s — or 10 years ago. That vagueness is reflected by his voters, according to the results of a new survey, conducted online by the digital media and polling company Morning Consult.

Trump supporters offered a wide range of answers, with no distinct pattern. The most popular choice was the year 2000. But 1955, 1960, 1970 and 1985 were also popular. More than 2 percent of Trump’s supporters picked 2015, when Mr. Trump’s campaign began.

Political science research suggests that Americans’ optimism can be influenced by whether their political party is in the White House. So it’s perhaps not surprising that Democrats feel better than Republicans about current circumstances.

Old, white, wrinkled and angry, they are slipping from polite society in alarming numbers. We’re losing much of a generation.  They often sport hats or other clothing, some marking their status as veterans, Tea Partyers or “patriots” of some kind or another. They have yellow flags, bumper stickers and an unquenchable rage. They used to be the brave men and women who took on America’s challenges, tackling the ’60s, the Cold War and the Reagan years — but now many are terrified by the idea of slightly more affordable healthcare and a very moderate Democrat in the White House.

I enjoyed Fox News for many years, as a libertarian and frequent Republican voter. I used to share many, though not all, of my father’s values, but something happened over the past few years. As I drifted left, the white, Republican right veered into incalculable levels of conservative rage, arriving at their inevitable destination with the creation of the Tea Party movement.

My father sincerely believes that science is a political plot, Christians are America’s most persecuted minority and Barack Obama is a full-blown communist. He supports the use of force without question, as long as it’s aimed at foreigners. He thinks liberals are all stupid, ignorant fucks who hate America.

The College Board, a nonprofit corporation founded in 1926 to make higher education accessible to more Americans, introduced the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) and, after World War II, the advanced placement (AP) test.

Students who score three of five points on the AP test are credited with completing a two-semester introductory college course in subjects like English, math and history. But revisions are coming, and they’re not going to result in better education.

Periodically, the College Board publishes new frameworks to alert schools to changes in AP tests. The latest American history framework has raised a raging controversy over what should be taught in AP U.S. history classes.

For all our talk about separation of church and state, religious language has been written into our political culture in countless ways. It is inscribed in our pledge of patriotism, marked on our money, carved into the walls of our courts and our Capitol. Perhaps because it is everywhere, we assume it has been from the beginning.

the founding fathers didn’t create the ceremonies and slogans that come to mind when we consider whether this is a Christian nation. Our grandfathers did.

Back in the 1930s, business leaders found themselves on the defensive. Their public prestige had plummeted with the Great Crash; their private businesses were under attack by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal from above and labor from below. To regain the upper hand, corporate leaders fought back on all fronts. They waged a figurative war in statehouses and, occasionally, a literal one in the streets; their campaigns extended from courts of law to the court of public opinion.

China's decision to end its 36-year-old one-child policy imposed on 1.3 billion people was surprising but not entirely unexpected.

By 2025, the U.N. projects that China will be the most elderly nation on Earth, with more Chinese 60 and over than 14 and under, drastically burdening social welfare infrastructures and slashing workforce productivity.

Will the new two child policy really encourage Chinese parents to start having two children?

The quickest way, it says, is to have fortune on your side from the outset, with plenty of inherited money and a leg up through family connections.

Make the people your best friend. Promise to protect their interests against predatory elites and foreigners.

he recommended them – that he himself is the original Machiavellian, the first honest teacher of dishonest politics.

Looking into the future, consciously and unconsciously, is a central function of our large brain, as psychologists and neuroscientists have discovered — rather belatedly, because for the past century most researchers have assumed that we’re prisoners of the past and the present.

Behavior, memory and perception can’t be understood without appreciating the central role of prospection. We learn not by storing static records but by continually retouching memories and imagining future possibilities

Our emotions are less reactions to the present than guides to future behavior

They focused on blaming President Donald Trump and the appropriate way to hold him alone accountable.

But many, citing the President's speech during his "Save America Rally" moments before the riot began, claimed there was no evidence of incitement and that the President was just doing his patriotic duty by encouraging his supporters to use their voices.

While Democrats were rightly enraged by the actions of the President at the rally just before the march on the Capitol, each speaker should have spent more of their limited time at the podium to remind their colleagues and the American public of the lie that sparked this fire.

You’re wrong.

You’re wrong.

who, until 2009, considered himself a partisan liberal. In “The ­Righteous Mind,” Haidt seeks to enrich liberalism, and political discourse generally, with a deeper awareness of human nature.

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, writer and regular Guardian columnist Oliver Burkeman faithfully carries the spirit of Seneca’s classic essay forward

It’s a deft and eclectic synthesis of ancient and modern thinking about how humanity can come to terms with our limited time on Earth – the title derives from the length of the average human lifespan – ranging intellectually from ancient Greek and Roman philosophers like Seneca to modern-day Buddhist and existentialist thinkers.

he only touches on politics briefly and sporadically throughout the book’s 245 pages. But those of us in politics and policy – whatever capacity we find ourselves in – can learn quite a bit

It’s a deft and eclectic synthesis of ancient and modern thinking about how humanity can come to terms with our limited time on Earth – the title derives from the length of the average human lifespan – ranging intellectually from ancient Greek and Roman philosophers like Seneca to modern-day Buddhist and existentialist thinkers. Stuffed with valuable and practical insights on life and how we use – or misuse – it, Four Thousand Weeks is an impressive and compact volume well worth the time and attention of even the most casual readers.

As Burkeman notes, our preoccupation with productivity allows us to evade “the anxiety that might arise if we were to ask ourselves whether we’re on the right path.” The end result is a lot of dedicated and talented people in politics and policy burning themselves out for no discernable or meaningful purpose.

Then there’s social media, defined by Burkeman as “a machine for misusing your life.” Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook don’t just distract us from more important matters, he argues, “they change how we’re defining ‘important matters’ in the first place.”