by Matthew Friedman | Apr 19, 2025 | Behind the Lines, Essays
By refusing to even countenance the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States from a Salvadorian concentration camp, the Trump regime is testing norms and boundaries; but more than that, it is signaling how it expects to shape the future, and the White...
by Matthew Friedman | Mar 28, 2025 | Behind the Lines, Commentary
“Getting the Hell out of here” is on my mind these days. I live in a deep-blue part of New Jersey, no more than a couple of miles from one of those liberal universities that give Redhats hives. But if I go just a mile further out in either direction, I...
by Matthew Friedman | Mar 21, 2025 | Behind the Lines, Commentary
I could never have imagined that I would find myself “behind the lines.” The phrase was always a feature of the kind of military adventures that I consumed as a boy; the First World War ace forced down behind the German Trenches, Jan Kubis in Alan...
by Matthew Friedman | Feb 15, 2025 | Behind the Lines, Commentary
I am not really a flag guy. I don’t like them. They flatten complex ideas, communities, and identities into simple, two-dimensional images and have historically served as instruments of discipline that evacuate politics and ideas of any depth of meaning. They are a...
by Matthew Friedman | Oct 8, 2023 | Commentary
I have been watching the events in the State of Israel with horror. Hundreds, perhaps a thousand Israelis have been killed in Hamas’s attack, hundreds more Gazans have died under Israeli missiles and “bunker-buster” bombs. And the State of Israel’s Defense Minister...
