Ronald Yates 
Vladimir Lenin, the man who in 1917 created the now-defunct one-party socialist state called The Soviet Union, understood how critical education is in molding pliant minds. “Give me four years to teach the children, and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted,” he once said. Lenin knew that …
A long time ago, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Kansas editor named William Allen White wrote an editorial in the Emporia Gazette entitled “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” In it, he railed against obtuse populist politicians and visionless citizens who he was convinced were running Kansas (my home state) into the ground. …
Given the mood of our country today, I am resurrecting one of my commentaries I posted a while back about white guilt and those terrible creatures known as “white men.” (Spoiler alert: I am one. Gasp!) White men, after all, are the ones that committed the unpardonable sin of writing …
Okay, inflation is killing us. Gas here in California is $6 and $7 a gallon, the shelves of the local Walmart and grocery stores are still half-empty, and the sidewalks of our cities are swathed with homeless tents and commanded by smash-and-grab thieves and vicious lowlifes. Meanwhile, our bumbling, mumbling, …
With baseball season in full swing and some teams, like my Kansas City Royals foundering, the conversation, as it often does, comes around to the greatest baseball players of all time. Discussions like that are exasperating and always incomplete—especially when the discussants represent multiple generations. Evaluating baseball players from different …
(I continue to receive requests that I repost my piece on Evelyn Waugh’s “Scoop,” the classic book that lampoons foreign correspondents. I first read Scoop in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in March 1975 as Communist Khmer Rouge guerillas surrounded the besieged city. Day after day, the Khmer Rouge bombarded the city …
[This is a follow-up to the story I posted last month on the 47th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon in 1975. ) After several dozen others and I were evacuated on April 29th, 1975 from the hulking Military Assistance Command-Vietnam building at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut airbase I filed …
Let me say right off: I do not believe in the idea of hate speech. One person’s “hate speech” is another person’s “free speech.” In that regard, the American Civil Liberties Union and I are in 100 per cent agreement. More on the ACLU later. In a previous post, I …
Most Americans have heard of something called the “1619 Project.” If you are one of those who haven’t, here is what the spurious 3-year-old notion posits in a nutshell: America wasn’t founded in 1776 with the Declaration of Independence. It was actually founded in 1619 when the first 20 slaves …
Today, I am reposting a commentary I wrote while I was the Dean of the College of Media at the University of Illinois. At the time I taught classes in journalism and shared this with my students. It still resonates with me even though I wrote it about ten years …