Three opinion columns published by The Washington Times over a single twenty-four-hour stretch are drawing attention across conservative commentary circles, touching on compulsory arbitration in American workplaces, the political uses of the American flag, and accusations that pro-terrorist propagandists are dressing up a terrorist-linked town as ordinary American suburbia.
The earliest of the three, carried by the account @WashTimes, argues that lawmakers should slow down before handing arbitrators power over American workplaces. “Before lawmakers empower arbitrators to regulate American workplaces, they should consider whether they are once again underestimating the perverse incentives and adverse consequences that compulsory arbitration will create,” Thomas Beck argues in the column, according to the post from @WashTimes.
Beck's argument is built on the idea that compulsory arbitration changes the incentives on both sides of a labor dispute. The column does not treat the question as a simple matter of efficiency or speed. It treats it as a question of who decides, and what happens when the deciding is handed to a third party whose rulings both sides must live with. That framing puts the column in the middle of a longer-running argument on the right about administrative power, the delegation of authority away from legislatures and courts, and the practical cost of settling disputes through processes that voters never directly approved.
The second column, also carried by @WashTimes, turns to symbolism. “When the glass takes on the look of half-empty, the American way is to drench it in red, white and blue,” Frank Perley writes, according to the account's post. The line is a compact statement of a familiar theme in conservative commentary: that national symbols and national pride function as a response to pessimism, and that the flag is not a decoration but a statement about who Americans understand themselves to be.
That theme runs directly into the third column, which is the most combative of the three. According to the post from @WashTimes, the column argues that “pro-terrorist propagandists are not bothered by the inherent hypocrisy of invoking the American flag and U.S. citizenship as a handy prop to falsely recast a terrorist-linked town as peaceful American suburbia, while simultaneously demonizing Israeli dual nationals.”
The claim in that column is that the same symbols Perley treats as expressions of national confidence are being used instrumentally by people the column describes as propagandists — that the flag and citizenship are being waved in one direction while Israeli dual nationals are attacked in another. The column does not merely criticize a policy position. It accuses its targets of hypocrisy, arguing that they apply the language of American belonging selectively.
Taken together, the three posts show a sequence rather than three isolated arguments. First, a warning about handing workplace disputes to arbitrators. Then, a defense of national symbols as a response to pessimism. Then, an accusation that those same symbols are being deployed dishonestly by people who demonize Israeli dual nationals. The through-line is a suspicion of institutions and movements that, in the writers' view, use American language while working against American interests or American workers.
The columns arrive as the debate over compulsory arbitration continues to move through state and federal policy discussions, and as arguments over the flag, citizenship and the treatment of Israeli dual nationals remain live in conservative media. The Washington Times opinion page has carried all three pieces, and the account @WashTimes has distributed each of them to its readers.
The reaction has been carried by @WashTimes itself, which posted all three columns within roughly four hours of one another, moving from the arbitration argument posted at 01:45 UTC, to the Perley column at 03:45 UTC, with the column on the flag and terrorism posted at 23:45 UTC the previous evening. The clustering matters because it shows the opinion page running a coordinated sequence of arguments rather than a one-off piece — a warning about arbitrators, a defense of the flag, and a direct attack on those accused of misusing it.
Other coverage of the same general subject has taken a lighter approach. A post from Appraisal Buzz, published about eleven hours before the Washington Times columns began circulating, profiled a mild-mannered appraiser who works as a cartoonist and illustrator by night. The post notes that he and his wife live in the wilds of Mississippi, that he has been an appraiser for thirty years, and that he loves his kids and grandkids and hopes to retire a gazillionaire by the age of fifty-five.
That item is a profile of a working appraiser, not a policy argument, but it lands in the same media environment in which the arbitration column is being read, and it reflects an ongoing conversation about the appraisal profession that runs parallel to the larger arguments about workplace regulation.
What the three Washington Times columns have in common is a rejection of the idea that American institutions and symbols are neutral instruments. Beck's column treats arbitration as a transfer of decision-making authority with consequences that lawmakers have previously underestimated. Perley's column treats the flag as a tool for lifting a national mood that can otherwise turn sour. The third column treats the flag and citizenship as things that can be invoked falsely, and accuses its targets of doing exactly that while attacking Israeli dual nationals.
The columns do not present new reporting or new data. They are arguments, published under the opinion label, and the account @WashTimes has distributed them as such. The arguments themselves are the news here: a warning about compulsory arbitration, a defense of patriotism as a response to pessimism, and an accusation of hypocrisy against those said to be using the flag as a prop.
Next News Network could not independently verify the claims made in the third column regarding the conduct or motives of the individuals and groups it describes.
Our Take
The Washington Times opinion page is doing what a conservative opinion page should do: making the argument before the vote, not after. Beck's column is the most practical of the three, because compulsory arbitration is not an abstraction — it is a mechanism that will govern real paychecks and real workplaces if lawmakers hand it over. Once arbitrators are empowered, the decision leaves the hands of the people who answer to voters, and it does not come back. The flag column and the column on terrorism propaganda are two halves of the same point. The flag means something, and it means something precisely because people try to borrow its authority for causes that have nothing to do with the country it represents. Calling that out is not cynicism about patriotism. It is the opposite. The people who wrap themselves in the flag while demonizing Israeli dual nationals should not be surprised when someone finally says the obvious out loud.
