ArcaMax

SAN DIEGO -- Crafting a column can be an unpredictable endeavor. That is especially true when you're writing about politics.

Like most human beings, elected officials can be awfully complicated.

Take California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is as complicated as they come. His personal story is filled with paradoxes.

On the one hand, as the son of ...Read more

SAN DIEGO -- I'm the product of a mixed marriage. My parents are both Mexican American, but they were born on what sometimes seem like different planets.

I'm a lifelong Californian, who has spent all but a dozen of my 58 years living in the Golden State. I share those roots with my father, who was born in Central California in 1941.

But I'm ...Read more

SAN DIEGO -- Good mentors can teach us a lot, except how to say goodbye.

One of mine -- who entered my life a quarter century ago as one of my graduate school professors and who I was later fortunate to call "friend" -- schooled me both in and out of the classroom.

Even now, I hear his gravelly voice in my head offering a gentle scolding: "...Read more

ATTENTION RUBEN NAVARRETTE EDITORS: THE 8TH GRAF REFERENCES LANGUAGE THAT SOME READERS MAY FIND OFFENSIVE. THANK YOU. -- CREATORS

Trump's Immigration Crackdown Creates Mayhem and Madness. Here's What We Can Do.

SAN DIEGO -- It feels as if California has a new state motto that boils down to just four words: "What can we do?"

As a Mexican ...Read more

SAN DIEGO -- What does political analysis sound like when it comes from Generation X? For one thing, it can be set to 80s music.

Talking Heads probably hoped that a Trump presidency was a trauma that Americans would only have to experience Once in a Lifetime.

No such luck. The sequel isn't even six months old, and already, many critics agree...Read more

SAN DIEGO -- Well, this Fourth of July weekend will be awkward.

As we mark the end of the first month of the Trump administration's occupation of Los Angeles -- which is centered around an un-American crackdown on Latino immigrants, and anyone who looks like them, by masked men who won't identify themselves, don't act like police and get ...Read more

SAN DIEGO -- It's been nearly eight months since the 2024 presidential election, and Americans are still debating what happened, why it happened and what it means that it happened.

The Pew Research Center recently provided more grist for the mill when it released an extensive study of nearly 9,000 voters conducted in the weeks following the ...Read more

SAN DIEGO -- As they try to tell the complicated story of what has been happening for the last three weeks on the streets of Los Angeles, the media have been making a big mistake.

Reporters, anchors and columnists need to stop accepting at face value the increasingly dubious claim that these are, in fact, "ICE agents" who are snatching from ...Read more

SAN DIEGO -- The modern-day classic Western "Tombstone" has plenty of memorable scenes. One of the best is set in a saloon when Doc Holiday (played masterfully by the late Val Kilmer) meets fellow gunslinger Johnny Ringo (played exceptionally well by Michael Biehn).

Referencing Ringo, Holiday turns to his female companion and asks: "What do you...Read more

SAN DIEGO -- Some say politics is poetry. But much of it is metaphor.

As a disturbing symbol of the extreme disrespect being shown Latinos in California, U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif. -- a mild-mannered Mexican American MIT-trained engineer -- was recently manhandled, thrown to the ground and handcuffed by members of Secretary of Homeland ...Read more