Recent Joseph Welch Commentaries

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Nothing Beside Remains
I have stopped watching national news about Donald Trump because the coverage now mirrors the damage itself. What once informed now exhausts; what once clarified now amplifies. The daily cycle no longer explains what is happening to the country—it re-enacts it. His indecent words following the death of beloved filmmaker Rob Reiner were the last straw. They recalled Joseph N....
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December 16, 2025
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Have You No Sense of Decency?
Under a cloud of simmering fear, Senator Joseph McCarthy, absent any real evidence, announced to the American public that communists were working inside the federal government. During 1954’s Senate hearings investigating the Wisconsin Senator’s blatant character assassinations, one exchange was particularly noteworthy. Following McCarthy’s accusation that counsel for the committee, Joseph Welch, placed a member and communist from his own...
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March 2, 2020
Read Some of the Most Recent Articles
The Latest... And Often Greatest
The Story of Chips, and The Cost of Looking Away
It’s just a photograph: a wartime dog sitting alert, ears up, wearing a military harness. But the story about a World War II sentry dog...
It’s Time to Talk About Respect
A cancer has been growing in our national life, so embedded in our culture that we’ve stopped acknowledging it. In the 1940s and the decades...
Adversity and Perseverance
“How you climb a mountain is more important than reaching the top.”— Yvon Chouinard “Every new adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem”—Eric Hoffer “Retreat, Hell!...
Who Decides What’s Seen?
There are moments when a single arrest tells us more about the state of the country than a thousand speeches. The recent detention of Don...
The Death of Shame
Over the past several months, I’ve written commentaries revisiting moments in our history when individuals confronted serious challenges and rose to meet them — to...
Because We Need It
From the man who invented The Tonight Show. What Steve Allen understood—long before humor became sharper and more performative—is that laughter can be light and...