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Pity the pop-rock performer: If success comes to him, it normally comes too early. He tends to leave school young and half-educated, then find himself anointed as a god and redefined, before he has fully defined himself in the first ...
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The DACA Compromise Confusion
In the Senate yesterday, John McCain (R., Ariz.) and Chris Coons (D., Del.) introduced a bipartisan plan to extend the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program ahead of its upcoming March 5 expiration.
Their bill would grant permanent legal status ...
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Tax Reform — and Hypocrisy
Conservatives have long argued that taxes matter. Sure, they matter, progressives have countered — if all you care about is making the rich richer and doing nothing to help working people.
Witness an incredible turn of events:
We now hear the ...
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FISA-Gate Is Scarier Than Watergate
The Watergate scandal of 1972–74 was uncovered largely because of outraged Democratic politicians and a bulldog media. They both claimed that they had saved American democracy from the Nixon administration’s attempt to warp the CIA and FBI to cover up ...
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Snakes on a Plane for Emotional Support?
When next you shoehorn yourself into one of America’s ever-shrinking airline seats, you might encounter a new wrinkle in the romance of air travel. You might be amused, or not, to discover a midsize — say, seven-feet long — boa constrictor ...
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Protecting Freedom of Speech Where It Matters Most, on the College Campus
The 45 words of the First Amendment fit well within Twitter’s 280-character limit. Those words are what make the very concept of Twitter possible in the first place. And although I may disapprove of a person’s tweet, I will ...
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Release the Memo That Really Matters
In an outrage and scandal-driven news cycle, it’s easy to lose sight of the truly significant stories. Let’s talk memos, for example. The past five days have been dominated by discussion of two memoranda — one Republican and one ...
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Clint Eastwood's Newest American Heroes
At 87, Clint Eastwood is not only trying new things, he’s trying daring new things, and his new film 15:17 to Paris represents one of the most audacious gambits of his career. To dramatize the tale of three Americans who tackled ...
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#MeToo’s Awkward Side Effects
Human history is full of unintended consequences. Much like the importation of invasive kudzu vines to America, the entire tragic catalogue of Communist central planning, and Barbra Streisand’s ill-fated 2003 attempts to squash publication of photos of her Malibu beach ...
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The U.S. Needs to Rethink What Winning in Afghanistan Looks Like
Editor’s Note: A version of this piece originally appeared in Arc Digital. It is reprinted with permission.
Americans want foreign military campaigns to go smoothly: Deploy, sacrifice, win, leave. And if winning isn’t in the cards, then what’...
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As President Trump finished his first full year in office, he could look back at an impressive record of achievement of a kind rarely attained by an incoming president — much less by one who arrived in office as a private-sector ...
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Mexico City Journal, Part II
Editor’s Note: This journal began yesterday, here. It will conclude today.
He is a fierce-lookin’ hombre, with a poetic name: José María Morelos y Pavón. In his right hand is a sword (shortish but surely deadly). His ...
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Dan Rather Should Shut Up about Memos
Old liberal-media liars never fade away. They just rage, rage against the dying of their dinosaur industry’s light.
I’m looking at you, Dan Rather.
After years of trashing alternative media, which exposed the veteran CBS News reporter’s ...
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It’s Now the Pope’s Scandal
Well, it’s now happened. The great scandal of the modern Catholic Church — its tolerance for clergy who abuse children, and its laxity when dealing with bishops who themselves tolerated or enabled priest-abusers — now touches directly on the pope himself.
...
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Yes, God Cares about Football
On Sunday night, the Super Bowl ended and — for about 20 minutes — a late-night church service began. From coaches to players, the Philadelphia Eagles thanked Jesus, professed their love for Jesus, and expressed how Christ had provided strength through adversity. In ...
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America’s Identity Crisis
‘A nation whose citizens no longer feel national pride or a unique allegiance to their own country is a nation that has lost its sense of national identity, and perhaps its will to survive. This is an identity crisis,” according ...
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Some Activists Want to Turn ‘LGBT’ Into ‘LGBTQQICAPF2K+’ for Inclusion
According to an article in The Gay UK, some people want to use “LGBTQQICAPF2K+” instead of “LGBT” — adding a “K” to represent “kink.”
“There is now a K to add to the ever-growing LGBT+ acronym – and apparently, it stands ...
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Some things still do not add up about the so-called Steele dossier, FISA warrants, the Nunes memo, and the hysterical Democratic reaction to it.
A Big Deal or a Nothing Deal?
1) Progressives and Democrats warned on the eve of the ...
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In Pennsylvania, a Bellwether Special Election Attracts National Attention
Bethel Park, Pa. — On a snowy Friday afternoon, Vice President Mike Pence took time out of his schedule to visit this hilly, middle-class Pittsburgh suburb in hopes of rallying support for Republican candidate Rick Saccone. At a nearby gas station, ...
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Was the FBI Out to Get Trump?
Was the FBI out to get candidate Donald Trump?
That’s the big question emerging from the much-ballyhooed memo from Representative Devin Nunes (R., Calif.), chair of the House Intelligence Committee. Nunes’s memo focuses on the application for a ...
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Robert Mueller Is No Ken Starr
No matter the criticisms directed his way by Republicans, Robert Mueller should count himself lucky: He’s not Ken Starr.
The punctilious, mild-mannered independent counsel appointed by a three-judge panel in the 1990s, Starr investigated all manner of Bill Clinton ...
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Ruling film culture starts with controlling film history, so last week the New York Times announced, “Our chief critics have chosen essential movies from the 20th century that convey the larger history of black Americans in cinema.” The selection of 28 ...
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How Trump Can Build Infrastructure the Right Way
In a stellar performance, President Donald J. Trump was steady and focused in his first State of the Union. Critics who just days ago warned that Trump was too mentally ill to function must feel foolish. The commander in chief ...
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Democrats’ Immigration Radicalism: The Gift That Keeps on Giving for Donald Trump
The Democrats’ immigration radicalism has handed Donald Trump a huge gift. The only question is whether he will smartly accept that gift by allowing them to walk away from the deal he has offered, rather than engage in pointless bargaining ...
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History Warns: Uphill Battle for the GOP in 2018
With roughly nine months to go until the midterm elections, there is a robust debate right now about whether Democrats can take the House of Representatives. A few weeks ago, it looked like a certainty, but the GOP poll position ...
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Science begs us to tell the truth about life and death and the misery we unnecessarily inflict.
“Until birth, you guys. Until BIRTH. Where’s the ‘science’ supporting that??”
That’s how one young commentator responded to an NBC news “...
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Jerry Nadler's Leaked Rebuttal of the Nunes Memo Is Very Weak
Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, has written a six-page response to the FISA-abuse memo published Friday by the committee’s Republican staffers under the direction of Chairman Devin Nunes (R., Calif.).
...
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The American republic reaches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Florida Keys to the Arctic Circle. It is its own monument. (Si monumentum requiris . . . ) But Americans nonetheless have long felt the need to compete with the teacup grandiosity ...
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All Economic News Is Bad News
In 1930, John Maynard Keynes was worried, but not about the unpleasantness that had begun the previous year and would linger long enough to become known as the Great Depression. What troubled the British economist was that humanity “is solving its ...
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Theresa May returns from her three-day visit to China at the weekend to face two interlinked crises. The first is the threat that Brexit might be indefinitely postponed in a “transitional” period with no clear end in which Britain has ...
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How Congress Can Protect the Mueller Investigation from Trump
One of the questions that have occupied official Washington for months now is what to do if President Trump decides to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller, currently overseeing both the Russia counterintelligence probe and various related criminal investigations, most notably ...
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Trump Honored an Adoptive Family. Why Did Some Feminists Object?
America’s two great political worlds — left and right, liberal and conservative — are truly big places, each filled with millions of people. Many of these people are sensible, some are malicious, and a few are truly nutty. So as a ...
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The Back to the Future Democrats
The Democrats are like characters in a Bill Murray movie. They keep reliving the same day, trapped in the rhythms and routines of campaign 2016. They persist in the rhetoric, tropes, gestures, figures, and policies that delivered the presidency, the Congress, ...
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From the moment that the so-called Steele dossier burst onto the public scene, thoughtful observers have wondered what role its “salacious and unverified” accusations played in the opening of the so-called Russia investigation, the counterintelligence inquiry into whether Trump officials “...
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Recently, at one of the off-the-record gatherings of globalists I sometimes attend, the head of a major policy think tank was telling the room that the election of Trump was so repulsive to decent Americans that recent polls showed record ...
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Night of the Living Dead: Return of the Politically Repressed
The Night of the Living Dead, which premiered 50 years ago, reinvented the horror film as a genre that relayed contemporary social anxiety — specifically about race. Now it is rereleased as a Criterion Blu-Ray DVD to celebrate Black History Month.
The ...
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In tragic Ohio fashion, the Republican candidate favored to replace term-limited governor John Kasich is also the least likely to break from Kasich’s legacy of expanding government while forgoing chances for reform.
Counterintuitively, the candidate who most threatens Kasich’...
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I’ve been thinking a lot about infrastructure the past couple of weeks, mainly about airports and seaports and the ways in which they are (or fail to be) integrated into our cities and factories. Infrastructure is, among other things, ...
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When Democrats Wanted to Compromise on Immigration
Editor’s Note: The following essay originally appeared in City Journal. It is reprinted here with permission.
There’s little reason to believe that President Trump’s State of the Union immigration proposals will be met with anything but continued ...
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Policy Earthquakes Are Shifting the Ground beneath Our Feet
One of the more annoying things about politics is that you can swing from left to right, or vice versa, without ever changing positions.
For instance, in 2002, I came out in favor of same-sex domestic partnerships, or “civil unions.” This ...
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Trump’s Unifying Nationalism
Donald Trump gave a notably unifying State of the Union address that didn’t back down an inch from his controversial nationalism.
This doesn’t represent a contradiction, but a step toward fulfilling the political promise of his nationalism, which ...
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New Mexico Lawmakers Want to Force High Schoolers to Apply for College, and That's Dumb
New Mexico lawmakers have introduced a bill that would force high-school juniors to apply for college or prove that they have other approved post-graduate plans, and it’s honestly one of the most idiotic ideas I’ve heard in a ...
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The Obstruction Case against Trump Still Has a Way to Go
Yesterday the New York Times dropped its latest scoop on the Mueller investigation: “Mueller Zeros In on Story Put Together about Trump Tower Meeting.” Allegedly, investigators are focusing on the misleading statement that “Trump and his advisers” drafted in response ...
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Positioning over the Nunes FISA Memo Continues Ahead of Its Release
It appears very likely that President Trump is going to allow the disclosure, in some form, of the memo on alleged FISA abuse authored by majority staff of the House Intelligence Committee under the direction of Chairman Devin Nunes (R., ...
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Why Cutting Chain Migration Must Be Part of an Immigration Deal
Democrats and their guests sat in stony silence through most of President Trump’s State of the Union address last night, but one part of the speech drew audible gasps and boos — the mention of chain migration.
The president raised ...
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A Washington State Carbon Tax: All Pain, No Gain
With respect to Washington governor Jay Inslee’s renewed proposal for a “carbon” tax on that state’s greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions, a number to keep closely in mind is: 2/1000 of a degree.
That would be the global temperature effect in ...
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What Does the Future Hold for New York City’s Columbus Statue?
It looks like Christopher Columbus can stay put. For now.
Earlier this month, New York City’s Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments, and Markers announced that the 76-foot monument to Columbus can remain at the traffic circle at the ...
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Strengthen the U.S.–India Relationship
As he begins his second year in office, President Trump has an opportunity both to expand the American economy and to advance relations with a vital U.S. global partner. The Bush and the Obama administrations prioritized America’s outreach ...
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In California, a Christian Baker Wins Narrowly, on Free-Speech Grounds
Earlier this week, a California state-court judge ruled that the California Department of Fair Employment could not require Cathy Miller to make a wedding cake for a homosexual couple to celebrate their marriage.
The couple, Eileen and Mireya Rodriguez–Del ...
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Rethinking the Geography of Power
Where the seats of power are located matters. Given the populist revolt in the United States and Europe against the so-called global elite, it is time to refigure the geography of governmental and transnational power.
Take the United Nations. Much ...
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Completely Missing the Point on Lisa Page’s Obama Text
Ever watch one of those games in which it looks like the road team is inadvertently doing everything it can to give the game away but the home team is too inept to capitalize?
Welcome to the “Trump-Russia” investigation and ...
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Editor’s Note: The following essay appears in This Way Up: New Thinking About Poverty and Economic Mobility, a collection of essays published by the American Enterprise Institute. It is reprinted here with permission.
Policymakers across the political spectrum are ...
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Välkommen, Senator McConnell
Republicans have more or less abandoned their commitment to fiscal restraint — the recent Senate budget deal is only one more piece of evidence for that.
Cynics and Democratic partisans will say that that commitment was never more than rhetorical to ...
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Against the Spending Bill
Senate leaders have reached an agreement on a two-year budget deal. The deal would raise the budget caps that were established by the Budget Control Act in 2011 by almost $300 billion over the next two years. It would also fund the ...
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A Vatican-Based Bishop Extols China
Despite the media and blogosphere attention he attracts, Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, a 75-year-old Argentine who is chancellor of various pontifical academies, is a small-bore bit player in the current drama of what friends and critics alike regard as ...
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No, the Ivanka–Rubio Paid-Leave Plan Wouldn’t Punish Families
Washington Post opinion columnist Elizabeth Bruenig published an intriguing piece this morning that criticizes a new paid-family-leave plan being promoted by Ivanka Trump and Senator Marco Rubio.
The plan would offer new parents the opportunity to collect Social Security benefits ...
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‘Delegitimizing’ Mueller? Don’t Blame the Nunes Memo
The most bitter dispute over the Nunes memo involves Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. This might seem odd since the memo, published last week by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee chaired by Devin Nunes (R. Calif.), does not ...
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Campus Kangaroo Courts: Blame Colleges, Not Just the Federal Government
Serving on a panel that hears Title IX sexual-assault complaints on college campuses sounds like a full-time job. According to a recent story in the Chronicle of Higher Education, at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater, students, faculty, and staff who ...
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Shutdown Drama Distracts from Our Sorry Fiscal State
The recurring shutdown and short-term-funding debates have let Democrats and Republicans run through debate points about immigration and their views of the president. But lost in an argument that is grounded in spending is the spending itself: the grim outlook ...
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D.C. Desperately Needs a Dose of Fiscal Restraint
Regardless of how one feels about the ups and downs of the Russia saga currently engulfing Washington, one of its worst aspects is the way in which it sucks all the oxygen out of the room, relegating other vital issues ...
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Where is the Trump administration headed in its policies toward Russia and Europe? Several markers have been laid down in recent months.
First, the president delivered a forceful defense of the Western idea in Warsaw last summer, while affirming America’...
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Why the ‘Cult of Trump’ Has Taken Hold
‘Rarely has a president changed his party as fast and profoundly as Donald J. Trump. Love him or hate him, you can no longer argue his ability to bend an entire party to his will,” writes Axios’ Jonathan Swan in ...
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What Exactly Is a 'Lady Dorito'?
I’m very glad I decided to get out of bed yesterday, because I found out that the reason I’m still single is because I eat regular chips.
In case you didn’t make it out of bed yourself (...
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What the Stock-Market Slide Can Teach Trump’s GOP
It was never hard to discern why Donald Trump talked about the stock market. When it suited him, correlation and causation were the same. Equity prices were rising, which gave him something to brag about. But it was always ill-advised ...
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A Defense of Evangelicals Who Support Trump
It is usually easier for an outsider to defend a person or a group that is attacked than for the person or group to defend itself.
In that vein, this Jew would like to defend Evangelicals and other Christians who ...
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The Prosecution Is Weakening
Donald Trump’s critics never imagined that more than a year into his presidency, his approval rating would be rising and just under 50 percent, the economy would be cranking up to a 4 percent growth rate, North Korea would have quieted ...
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Five Major Actions of Trump’s First Year Defending Religious Liberty
During his first State of the Union address, President Trump noted that his administration has “taken historic actions to protect religious liberty.”
Measured against eight years of a previous president intent on reducing religious liberty to little more than “freedom ...
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Preserving Our Republic as Federal Government Expands
Editor’s Note: The following speech was delivered on January 27 in Old Saybrook, Conn., as an address to the William F. Buckley Jr. Program at Yale upon the inauguration of the James L. Buckley Award for Public Service.
When I ...
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When College Presidents Mistake Lib-splaining for Conservative Outreach
From the provost’s office, conservative college students can appear a curious, benighted infestation, gadflies to be marveled at and handled with gardening gloves. Despite constant assurances that campus bias is a figment of the right-wing imagination, nothing better illuminates ...
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Mexico City Journal, Part I
Mexico has a terrible distinction: Except for Iraq and Syria, it is the deadliest place in the world for journalists. And it is not far behind Iraq and Syria, if behind at all, really.
Anyway, suffice it to say, if ...
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Feminists Seize the Moment for Sisterly Revenge
Women aren’t automatically credible when making accusations of sexual misconduct. Getting very drunk with a man could lead him to make a pass at you, or vice versa. Power is and as always has been a turn-on for women. ...
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The Memo Doesn’t Make Its Case
It’s a fact of human nature that our experience colors our perception. In this instance, my experience dealing with classified information and my experience making and evaluating highly contested arguments tells me to hold the outrage in response to ...
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On the Vatican’s Reported Capitulation to Beijing
The “examination of conscience” is an important part of Catholic spirituality, which always precedes confession but is ideally practiced at the end of each day: a review of what one got wrong, and what right, as preparation for an act ...
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The GOP’s Coming Obamacare Capitulation
Congressional Republicans were elected to repeal Obamacare. They may run this year as the politicians who saved it.
Since late last year, GOP leaders have been planning to pump tens of billions of dollars’ worth of new federal spending into ...
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Last week, news came from Cuba that Fidel Castro Jr. had killed himself. He had been battling depression for a long time and finally succumbed.
There was skepticism about this news because it was delivered by Cuba’s state media, ...
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Nunes Memo: National-Security High Alert! Not.
Leaving aside all of the hyperbole and smokescreens surrounding the Nunes memo, one indisputable fact stands out. Many leading Democrats asserted confidently that the memo would expose national-security information and damage the ability of our intelligence agencies to function. The ...
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When Parliament resumed after the Christmas break, Theresa May’s political position was getting slowly weaker, but it was not plummeting downwards. As I argued yesterday, the main reason for her declining authority was that she had not been able ...
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‘Often it is better simply to slow down,” says Pope Francis, “to put aside our eagerness in order to see and listen to others, to stop rushing from one thing to another and to remain with someone who has faltered ...
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The Nunes Memo Should Be Just the Start
The Nunes memo has been released and America’s national security has not, as far as we can tell, been irreparably harmed.
The campaign waged against the memo as a grave threat to America’s intelligence operations appears completely absurd ...
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CFPB Case Threatens the Power of a President to Shape His Administration’s Policies
The federal appeals-court decision last week in PHH v. CFPB should be of concern to all Americans. Very simply, by permitting Congress to create an executive-branch agency that is independent the president, the court’s ruling authorizes Congress to put ...
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Where Is the Catholic Church Headed?
On Wednesday night, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat and Villanova professor of theology Massimo Faggioli came together for a debate entitled “Francis @ Five: Assessing the Legacy of Pope Francis Five Years after His Election.” As I made my way ...
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Conservative Economic Stewardship Will Help Janesville
Editor’s Note: The following piece appears in This Way Up: New Thinking About Poverty and Economic Mobility, a collection of essays published by the American Enterprise Institute. It is adapted here with permission.
Conservatives are coming to a consensus ...
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House Memo Details Use of Steele Dossier to Spy on Trump Campaign Adviser
What we have long suspected (see, e.g., here and here) has now been confirmed: The Obama Justice Department and the FBI used the unverified Steele dossier to convince a federal court to issue a warrant authorizing surveillance of a ...
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Hillary’s Failed #MeToo Moment Exposes Insincerity of Progressive Politicians
Hillary Clinton is the latest politician embroiled in a #MeToo sexual-harassment scandal. The New York Times reported earlier this week that she shielded a top adviser from allegations of sexual misconduct against a subordinate.
During the 2008 campaign, a young woman ...
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The Inadvertently Libertarian Trump
Jonathan Chait wrote Monday, “The latest development in the relationship between the Kochs (right-wing heirs to a business fortune) and Trump (also the right-wing heir to a business fortune) is that the former have thrown the weight of their massive ...
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David Brooks’s Simplistic Immigration Argument
In a New York Times column earlier this week, David Brooks claims that, no matter how much he thinks about it, “the case for restricting immigration is pathetically weak.” Brooks’s argument basically boils down to this: Almost all economic ...
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The U.S. Should Pressure India to Curb Hindu Extremism
India has been a steady U.S. strategic and economic partner for at least the past decade. It helps maintain political balance in the region, while reforms implemented to boost economic growth hold the promise of lifting millions out of ...
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Public-Employee Unions Do Not Promote Labor Peace
In a matter of months, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide one of the most significant labor cases in decades, Janus v. AFSCME Council 31, and determine whether states can force public employees to financially support a government union against ...
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Law-Enforcement Unions Have Too Much Power
The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association of the City of New York, the largest union representing NYPD officers, took a bold step toward reform this week: It cut the number of “courtesy cards” members can give to their friends and family ...
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Toward a Trump Republicanism
Donald Trump’s surprisingly good State of the Union speech got a record 70 to 75 percent positive approval rating from those who watched. Even if you discount (as you should) for the Trump haters who can’t bear to watch him ...
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The Gang That Couldn’t Lie Straight
With the much anticipated FISA-abuse memo expected to drop any second, the media are attempting to refocus the narrative onto possible obstruction of justice by President Trump and his subordinates.
Thursday, the New York Times led with a lengthy report ...
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Be Cautious, but Take the Nunes Memo Seriously
For more than a year now, half of America has been driven into hysterics on a weekly basis by highly selective, often partisan leaks fed to it in 900-word increments by Democrats using the political media. Whether these sensationalist stories ...
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State of the Union: Imagine CNN for an Hour without Russia
For an hour and 20 minutes on Tuesday evening, the world stood still for CNN and MSNBC. Despite setting a record for length during the televised era, President Trump gave a fairly normal version of the State of the Union ritual, ...
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A New Balance on the Supreme Court Won’t Be the End of American Democracy
Realities both political and actuarial fuel speculation about when Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy — for more than a decade the deciding vote on issues from abortion and gay marriage to campaign-finance regulation and gun rights — might hang up his robe. ...
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I Am White and I Do Yoga and I’m Not Sorry
Yoga is a culturally sensitive issue, apparently — it’s in the news yet again, thanks to a piece by a Michigan State University professor who declares that white people practicing yoga are “connected with a system of power, privilege, and ...
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Want 5G Speed and Security? Keep Washington’s Hands Off
Editor’s Note: The following piece originally appeared at AEIdeas, a public-policy blog produced by the American Enterprise Institute. It is adapted here with permission.
On Sunday night, Axios published a memo and slides, reportedly obtained from a National Security ...
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Anything-but-Straight Talk on Trade
Dani Rodrik is on a mission to save globalization — not from its enemies, but from its biggest boosters and its own excesses.
For a couple of decades now, and in his new book, Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a ...
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As America edges closer to the 2018 midterm elections, expect to hear a growing herd of weirdly confident political pundits talk about a coming and inevitable “blue wave” — you know, the overwhelming mass election of Democrats to Congress that’s sure ...
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Pursuing the Truth Requires Modesty about Ourselves
Early in George W. Bush’s first term, I was dining with a friend who didn’t agree with my worldview. He challenged my certitude, allowing that he wasn’t sure about many issues. “Don’t you wonder whether you’...
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Remembering Frederick Douglass, Champion of American Individualism
It was an assertion of hard-won personal sovereignty: Frederick Douglass, born on a Maryland plantation 200 years ago this month, never knew on what February day because history-deprivation was inflicted to confirm slaves as non-persons. So, later in life, Douglass picked ...
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