May 26, 2021

Cis-Female Takes over at WaPo, Film at Eleven

“The white Christians are coming! The white Christians are coming!” So wails Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan on her post-yoga ride up and down K Street, forewarning Washingtonians of the imposition of a new ethno-theocracy ...

November 6, 2020

Looking beyond Trump, Democrats blew it badly on Tuesday

The country is in the anxious throes of sorting out who, exactly, the president will be next year, and four years thence.  America's campaign law lawyers, the nation turns its lonely eyes to you! Meanwhile, as Democrats yank trash ba...

October 29, 2020

Determining Trump's long-term impact on the Republican Party

America without Donald Trump as president will be inarguably a more boring place.  Does any honest red-blooded American really want politics to regress to the yawnful status quo ante, when the chief executive didn't dole out daily insul...

October 23, 2020

Too many Democrats are creepily suggesting Trump voters should be jailed

Trump voters beware: your ballot could get you jailed after January 20, 2021. If Joe Biden wins the presidency, and takes the oath of office with one hand on Abraham Lincoln's Bible (hopefully not Das Kapital or Kendi's How to Be an Antira...

October 15, 2020

Democrat tricks won't stop with Halloween

Candidates for public office portraying their opponent as an enemy of the people is a time-honored tradition.  Slander, brickbats, half-truths, and lies are as essential to campaigns as yard signs and mailers.  But now we've e...

October 13, 2020

Blow it all, cry the liberal grasshoppers

He who dies with the most toys actually loses.  So says a do-gooding harridan at Bloomberg, financial advice flogger, and journalist, Farnoosh Torabi.  In an opinion piece that's both shamelessly boastful and reader-...

October 4, 2020

Is extreme Trump-hatred the storm before the calm?

Inveterate politiphiles didn't have to wait long in October for a ramdam of a surprise: President Trump testing positive for the coronavirus. The news broke, via Trump's preferred social media feed (natch), overnight on Friday.  ...

September 28, 2020

How the 2014 Midterms Wrecked the Democrats' Supreme Court Hopes

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death leaves an opening for the Republican president and Republican Senate to replacing a notorious pro-abortion, arch-liberal Supreme Court justice with a rock-ribbed, unflinching defender of young souls...

September 19, 2020

Social justice warrior 'fixes' Shakespeare for maximum wokeness

Pace Macduff, we apparently ought to be niggardly with our speech.  Am I still allowed to say that?  A firm and sententious "NO!" is the answer our woke literati thunders from on high.  "No, you may not sa...

September 13, 2020

Corporate woke struggle sessions keep cropping up

The anti-capitalist symbols of yesteryear are gone.  The blistered hands, muscles crabbed from overwork, withered seamstresses with scarred fingers, barefoot children operating heavy machinery, soot-faced dogsbodies stealing a break in an u...

September 5, 2020

Did Antifa-sympathetic Vice News tip off the cops to Portland shooter's location?

"Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." —Samuel Johnson Michael Reinoehl must have been concentrating wonderfully on his own death when he agreed to be interv...

September 1, 2020

Joe Biden pretending to be a revolutionary is embarrassing to watch

The riotous outbursts sparking across American cities are a shot of epinephrine on the Trump campaign.  Weeks before the latest bursts of hellish hooliganism in Kenosha, Wis.; Portland, Ore.; and Washington, D.C., among other metros, the pr...

August 27, 2020

Don Lemon breaks down, begs Democrats: 'The rioting has to stop'

Don Lemon's timbre has never quivered so much.  Even when he wept while reciting his own philippic to President Trump, the CNN host wasn't this unmistakably grave. "The rioting has to stop ... it's showing up in the poll...

August 16, 2020

Kamala, the media’s yas queen

The tongue baths are plashing like steep cataracts already.  And September has yet to show its warm, vermillion glow.   The verbiage class is slobbering over their MacBook Airs, drafting cloying encomium after cloying encomium for the...

August 9, 2020

Time for Trump to start thinking about his legacy

The Trumpian grip on the Republican Party slackened ever so slightly this past week.  Kris Kobach's loss in the Kansas Senate primary was a setback for immigration hardliners in what should have been a banner year in fortress America....

August 4, 2020

Trump flirts with banning Chinese-owned data-mining app, causes meltdown in Gen Z

Did President Trump doom the fortunes of the Republican Party among young voters? Political dabs with their fingers on the adolescent pulse claim he's come screeching close.  The Trump administration's proposed legal proscription...

July 31, 2020

'Washington Football Team' is a great name. The former Redskins should keep it.

Hail to the friable egos of D.C. do-gooders! The gallant American Indian has once again found himself on the receiving end of a righteous crusade led by high-minded palefaces.  Rather than lose his land, his noble visage will be effaced ...

July 22, 2020

Checking newspapers' tortured explanations for capitalizing 'black'

Harold Ross must be spinning in his grave, tearing out leaves from his copy of Fowler's Modern English Usage. With little fanfare, The New Yorker followed suit with other periodicals and adopted a new capital-letter convention: plumping the lo...

July 17, 2020

Can Trump pull off a win in November?

July in a presidential year is better late than never for a campaign reboot.  But a third-down audible is reportedly in the Trump campaign's playbook.  They're calling it: swap out moderate outreach, helmed by family capo ...

July 10, 2020

Freedom is gone in the age of cell phone surveillance by good citizens

So shouted a grown man after an elderly termagant scolded him for failing to wear a facial covering in Costco.  That the foaming hollerer hailed from the Sunshine State (home of the much mocked "Florida man") and was wearing a sca...

July 1, 2020

Is it too late for Trump to keep his promises?

Is an economic depression combined with weekly spasms of violence and monument iconoclasm necessary to produce genuine America First policies? President Trump's expansion of his April 20 immigration moratorium to include nearly all foreign lab...

June 25, 2020

Reparations and Rioters

Somewhere along the way, outrage over George Floyd’s slaying turned into a larger plea for more recognition of African-Americans in areas ranging from the arts to corporate boards to the big screen.  Demands for policing reform and greater...

June 11, 2020

Media and the leftist code

Go ahead and make it official: Senator Tom Cotton is the 2024 Republican presidential frontrunner. In driving the staff of the New York Times positively batty (including woke hostage victim and executive editor Dean Baquet), Cotton ...

June 5, 2020

The media's VP drama

June is young and the summer’s delirium-inducing heat is already frying Washington.  The blood-thirsting mosquitoes are in full peckish force around my humble rancher a dozen miles off the Potomac littoral, and while they aren’t carr...

May 29, 2020

Trump should just kill social media altogether

Is the beginning of Jack Dorsey's end in President Trump's executive order on social-media bias? In an adjective: unlikely.  Should Trump get his druthers, social media companies will be liable for the content published on their ...

May 26, 2020

Libertarian Party's VP pick destroys any remaining illusions of party's seriousness

Justin Amash got out just in time.  His congressional career is kaput, but that's perhaps for the best. The Libertarian Party, of which Rep. Amash briefly sounded out a presidential bid, has ratified its ticket to the White House....

May 17, 2020

A $3 trillion spending bill even a progressive Democrat could despise

House Democrats just passed the latest in an ongoing series of coronavirus-relief packages, the newest iteration scored with the princely sum of $3 trillion.  Dubbed the HEROES Act, a forced acronym for “Health and Economic Recovery Omnibu...

May 8, 2020

Trump or Biden: Whom will voters punish at the polls?

Six months until Election Day.  Despite COVID-19 seemingly pressing the brakes on time, calendar pages are falling away fast.  A lingering political question that defies seasonal turnover: Will Donald Trump defy his detractors onc...

May 1, 2020

Vice President Stacey Abrams?

The name and executive honorific combo has a poetic lilt to it.  It's also an appellation we're going to hear a lot more, as anticipation of whom Joe Biden will select as his running mate picks up. The vice presidential pick is normal...

April 26, 2020

Justin Amash Should be Embarrassed.

Not because Amash threw a temper tantrum and jettisoned himself out of the Republican Party after unironically calling the President a despotic blowhard and feckless nebbish. And I don’t mean he should be shamefast over crowing for Trump’...

April 20, 2020

Joe, Bernie, and the Hard Left

What’s the price of a good socialist these days? A wilted rose, dog-eared copy of Das Kapital, and a glass of Château Margaux 1848? Or is it just a dais and eleven and a half minutes of speaking time at a major party’s televised ...

April 13, 2020

Will Americans develop trust issues when it comes to medical professionals?

The halving of the estimated COVID-19 fatality rate was welcome news — to a point. To state the obvious, fewer lives lost to the virus is a happy development.  Saving lives is a paramount good — it's not the only good, bu...

April 5, 2020

As Easter approaches, church-state separation revealed as myth

President Trump's Easter wish to raise the economy from the dead won't be granted.  This past week, the Trump administration extended its social quarantining recommendation through April and perhaps until June.  Retail wor...

March 21, 2020

Coronavirus, boredom, and the Millennials

The problem started immediately: busy bars, packed streets, crowded beaches, ironic admonitions about social distancing.  Millennials heeded expert advice to stay indoors and socially isolate themselves about as well as their high scho...

March 15, 2020

Liberals demand federal coronavirus crackdown from president they want to impeach

We're all going to be spending a lot more time on the internet as long as the informal COVID-19 sequestration remains in place.  That means that our unoccupied attention will be subject to more inane opinions than normal, but hey, at le...

March 8, 2020

Liberal journalist realizes what was wrong with Elizabeth Warren

Wonkish scribbler Matthew Yglesias of Vox.com has, by dint of introspection or pure satori, come to a realization: not everyone in the U.S. of A. is a well-to-do master's degree–holder.  And because every American didn't spend...

March 3, 2020

Rich Democrats can't win the White House on ads alone

A billionaire in his shirtsleeves and Dockers, gyrating on stage to a late '90s gangsta-rap tune, complete with misogynistic lyrics and pulsating, syncopating production.  Rarely has there been such a pat demonstration of the scourge of...

February 29, 2020

What modern liberals and conservatives have in common

Even if America is going through a political realignment, the dichotomies therein still contain a common thread: the avaricious strong outfacing the righteous meek.  Urban-dwelling toffs trying to stamp out salt-of-the-earth provincials is ...

February 19, 2020

Will the Bernie Bros Burn Down the Democratic Party?

A specter is haunting the Democratic Party: the specter of Bernie Bros. What is a Bernie Bro, exactly?  Where along the cline of various political creatures does one fall? The Bernie Bro's natural habitat is the internet. ...

February 6, 2020

Explaining why Mitt Romney really voted to convict Trump

Mitt Romney didn't just shoot inside the Grand Old Party's tent by voting for one article of impeachment against President Trump.  The Utah senator became a heretic to the very people who once supported him, financially and electora...

February 3, 2020

The Ghostly Hands of the 1930s

In the parlous year of 1938, German littérateur Thomas Mann left his homeland in order to save it. He emigrated to the United States and, using his unique verbal gifts, attempted to persuade our political leaders to drop their neutrality and a...

January 28, 2020

Prediction: Warren will blow it in Iowa

The Iowa caucus has entered its home-stretch stage.  In less than two weeks, we'll know which Democratic candidate is leading the pack of lily-white hopefuls. Prediction: Elizabeth Warren won't win Iowa.  She won't ...

January 21, 2020

Millennials Offended by Suggestion They Work Weekends

Individual tweets rarely deserve article-length analyses.  In our social media–addled age, blithely drafted tweets too often lead to unforgiving shaming campaigns, which result, not infrequently, in ruined careers.  But, once ...

January 13, 2020

Trump has triggered a great social media pullback

Predictions about the future, Yogi Berra observed, are tough to make.  Retrodiction, with the help of hindsight, is much easier. A Commentary article got me ruminating on an alternative present day — one where Hillar...

December 30, 2019

2020 Is Trump's to Lose

We're on the point of 2020, and it's still not obvious who the Democratic presidential candidate will be.  The winnowing of the field hasn't cleared the way for a bankable winner.  Democrats are about where they starte...

December 18, 2019

How a liberal made Black Hebrew Israelites into white supremacists

An uncomfortable truth: The shooting at a kosher market in Jersey City would still be getting full media coverage were the assailants and target different.  Had laid off, pale-faced, bald-pated Larry, with a history of anti-immigration rant...

December 13, 2019

The Conservative Resistance and 2020

American Conservative correspondent Curt Mills’ latest dispatch takes account of a leading indicator of President Trump’s 2020 chances.  While some prognosticators look to betting markets or polls to predict likely electoral outcomes...

December 5, 2019

The rapid decline of ol' Joe

Now we know why Barack Obama hasn't endorsed his number two for president.  Or given tacit support to the Biden campaign.  Or even acknowledged the man seeking his former position, whom he chose to lead the country in his stea...

November 27, 2019

Obama a sellout?

Barack Obama is selling out to stuffy-nosed swells.  Don’t take my word for it; that’s the dim asseveration of David Dayen, executive editor of the liberal periodical the American Prospect. In an optimism-popping post “What ...

November 22, 2019

How populism will change the electoral landscape

We're living in a populist moment.  That is the contention of a number of journalists, thinkers, observers, panjandrums, and political invigilators. From Washington to Warsaw, the West is seeing the postwar order of openness and...

November 9, 2019

Will Democrat primary voters care if Elizabeth Warren's health care plan can't possibly work?

Elizabeth Warren's presidential campaign is over.  Kaput.  Finito.  Nipped in its enviously green bud.  The senator's essay for the Oval has been foreshortened before the first caucus ballot is cast....

November 2, 2019

Will Mitt Romney be the man to knock out Donald Trump?

In The Atlantic, Sarah Longwell, executive director for something called Republicans for the Rule of Law, an advocacy group run by NeverTrumps still bitter that Jeb Bush was denied his designated shot to lose to Hillary, drafts a plan for Senate Repu...

October 25, 2019

Legalize prostitution? Even some conservatives argue for it, and they are wrong

There is an annoying form of opinion writing that conservatives wise enough to live outside the Acela Corridor are acutely aware of.  It's usually produced by fellow travelers of the center-right, though it's unclear how v...

October 22, 2019

Amazon Is Becoming the Government

"You can't trust anybody or anything anymore." I don't know how many times I've cited journeyman Johnny Whitmire's inelegant lament.  America's receding trust in institutions is well trod territory. ...

October 13, 2019

The New Political Matrix

Civil war in Syria. China’s authoritarian ambition. Russian chicanery. Iranian proxies interfering with the international fuel supply. Most global threats facing America are relatively straightforward: they’re country-based, tangible d...

October 6, 2019

The Toxic Scourge of Twitter

Leave it to the Irish to discover the mot juste for what truly ails society. Author and playwright John Waters has illuminated what I’ve long thought but couldn’t articulate: Twitter, and social media more generally, is a toxic scourge on...

September 25, 2019

The Realities of Impeachment

I won’t say that impeachment is back in the news, because the removal of the President never left and has been a headline grabber since before Trump took the oath. Back then, desperate cable commentators tried in vain to convince Electoral...

September 15, 2019

Can mainstream conservatism survive in the 21st century?

Is it authoritarianism to ban Drag Queen Story Hour in public libraries, with the explicit threat of violent prosecution? That's the question at the heart of the recent debate between author Sohrab Ahmari and National Review's David French...

September 8, 2019

How mainstream reporters disgraced themselves during Hurricane Dorian

Hurricane Dorian has come and gone, leaving the U.S mainland largely unscathed. With the storm over and the president summoning his own Twitter tempests to distract impressionable journos like a cowherd, Dorian will soon fade from the public's...

September 2, 2019

The Upcoming Democrat Climate Change Extravaganza that No One Will Watch

Fair warning, industrious reader: You may want to request off from work now.  CNN has carved out nearly eight full hours for a climate change town hall featuring a smattering of the gajillion still declared Democratic presidential candidate...

August 21, 2019

Boris Johnson promises a Halloween Brexit. Don't hold your breath

A happy early Halloween to globalists, Davos regulars, jet-setters, and self-described "world citizens" alike.  Great Britain is due to crash out of the European Union, come what may, on October 31, 2019. Heretofore, no exit de...

August 15, 2019

Should conservatives want The Hunt to hit theaters?

The hunt is over before it even began. Universal Pictures has canceled the theatrical release of its summertime bloodfest The Hunt in response to — twist ending! — conservative outrage. Fed up with the Left's cancel culture, con...

August 8, 2019

Blowback and Mass Shootings

Former Texas congressman Ron Paul famously caused an uproar among the Republican faithful during a 2008 primary debate when he suggested that our interventionism in the Middle East was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Former Big Apple mayor Rudy Giu...

July 28, 2019

Why Liberals Are Dying Out

Conservatives may outlast liberals after all, if only through the age-old wonder of procreation. Our punditry class, which is increasingly composed of cut-rate political scientists, enjoys gabbling about the urban-rural divide, the eternal elector...

July 20, 2019

Trump is no Racist

Shelley called poets the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Auden, who was never as full of sauce as some prosody scribes, rejoined mordantly: “'The unacknowledged legislators of the world,’ describes the secret police, not the ...

July 12, 2019

Millennial journalist goes on crusade of rage against air-conditioning

Is Taylor Lorenz the most privileged journalist in America? The Atlantic writer concretizes the stereotype of Millennials as mollycoddled paintywaists with no firsthand experience of actual suffering.  She was once the target of widespre...

July 6, 2019

Free speech and Frederica's hat

Conservatives looking for retribution after losing access to social media now have an unlikely champion: Rep. Frederica Wilson. You may remember Wilson from her revealing a private conservation between Donald Trump and a Gold Star f...

June 30, 2019

Democrat debates show whom the party cares about least

The first Democratic primary debates didn't alter the standings in the crowded pack, but they did reveal one thing.  It's no longer a question of whose interests the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Andrew Jackson now serve....

June 23, 2019

Incredible hypocrisy as Democrats demand Trump be arrested once he leaves office

Elections are no longer just an advanced auction of stolen goods, as Mencken so gnomically put it.  They're now advanced cases of court remand. The Trump campaign's winning strapline may have been "build the wall," but ...

June 15, 2019

Have the NeverTrumps found their candidate?

Forgive me, dear reader, for being late to the pooh-pooh party. Commentators of a certain Numquam Trumpus disposition are apparently hitching their wagon to another lost cause two falls from now.  After searching far and wide, ...

June 3, 2019

Can Conservatives Afford to Be Nice Anymore?

Tucker Carlson's famous Fox News monologue about the moral pitfalls of unquestioned free-market worship continues to cause aftershocks. The right has long had the debate on just how healthy individual autonomy is for societal well-being. ...

May 23, 2019

Biden and the Millennials

Joe Biden may give Donald Trump a run for his money in the race for irreverence.  Trump slaughters sacred cows of propriety like a walleyed abattoir worker with a bolt gun.  But gaffe-prone Biden once again proved that savoir-fair...

May 19, 2019

Has Joe Biden already wrapped up the 2020 Democrat primary?

Joe Biden might want to inform the president he's trading in nicknames: no longer so somnolent, the avuncular V.P. is swapping out eye crust for Kevlar.  Call him Teflon Joe now. As of May 2019, Biden has pretty much wrapped up the D...

May 13, 2019

Journalism vs. human nature

Trashing one's own brand is a bold strategy.  Let's see if it pays off for The New Republic. The liberal periodical just published a plaint disguised as an observation by freelance journalist Jacob Silverman.  Who...

May 6, 2019

Oh, Beto, we hardly knew ye

The once wunderkind from El Paso has lost his shine of late, and is now being eclipsed polling-wise by a Midwestern mayor whose sexual predilection scratches off one of the Democrats’ diversity boxes. Perhaps O’Rourke’s gringoish ni...

April 27, 2019

Can Joe Biden Pull Out the Democratic Nomination?

The Democratic Party's savior has arrived.  White-haired, wizened-faced, cleft-chinned, liver-spotted Joe Biden, the shriveled and pale second banana to Barack Obama, has entered the presidential race to all the dry acclaim Morning Joe ...

April 21, 2019

The Symbolism of Notre Dame

It’s hard to think that Holy Week anno domini 2019 will be remembered as having created a strict demarcation in our cultural timeline: pre-Notre-Dame fire, and post. April is the cruellest month, indeed. But here we are. Living in a world, i...

April 15, 2019

Should the GOP Back Off Socialism?

Memo to Republicans: don’t rest easy on your laurels, thinking that casting the word “socialism” on Democrats as an aspersion will win the White House in 2020. The House chamber may have erupted in cheers when President Trump declar...

April 5, 2019

Trump and Republican Orthodoxy

Tucker Carlson’s infamous monologue about the working class’s struggle with Republican economic orthodoxy precipitated a maelstrom of debate within the conservative movement. The National Review crowd, gatekeepers of mainstream right-of-c...

March 23, 2019

Suicide Deserves Stigmatization

I thought we had reached the zenith of liberal language policing.  What with the left grousing like henpecking harridans over improper pronouns, gender labels, offensive jokes, stereotypes, sexual preference, and plain old observations, one migh...

March 18, 2019

Is America Headed for a Wave of Political Violence?

In March of 2016, during the heat of the Republican primary contest, Josh Marshall, the tetchy founder of Talking Points Memo, offered an ominous augury about the raucous Trump campaign. “Someone will die,” he thundered, giving, at the ti...

March 11, 2019

The Anti-Natalist Fallacy

Back in college, I participated in one of those summer-long, Koch-funded libertarian internship programs. During the final week of the program, clusters of us interns, fresh off working in the "real world" for two total months, were tasked ...

March 5, 2019

Cultural Exile for the Duke

The outrage directed at John Wayne's non-P.C. comments about blacks and homosexuality is not genuine.  Like the late actor's profession, it's mostly performative. Recently resurfaced remarks made by the man who shot...

February 25, 2019

Futile Dreams of Primarying Trump out of Office

A recent column by Matt Lewis in the Daily Beast takes (almost) seriously the chances of a successful primary challenge to President Trump. Lewis, the author of a book on the dumbing down of the Republican Party during 2016, is no fan of the Presiden...

February 14, 2019

Millennials: Workaholics and Slackers

Do American millennials take too much joy in working? It’s an odd question to ask, really, considering the stereotype of the average young adult as an anxiety-ridden snowflake hooked on anti-depressants. But for every sociology major squalli...

January 27, 2019

How 'Cool Guy' Ruins the Drama of Life

"All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players." There's much truth in Jaques's mediation on life's seriated stages.  We embody different characters as we age: the helpless babe, the self-cen...

January 22, 2019

The Democrats' Nomination Contest Promises Great Fun for Conservatives

This may be the election cycle where we watch identity politics destroy itself live on stage. It'll be the greatest show on earth. With multiple declared candidates, the 2020 election season is now underway. And there couldn't be more hype...

January 17, 2019

Tucker Carlson and the Working Class

With Democrats newly empowered in Washington, the left is sorting out its priorities among pie-in-the-sky socialist dreams of universal health care and more practical policies such as restoring public funding for Planned Parenthood. ...

January 6, 2019

What Is the Trump coalition?

Pundits, commentators, penny-ante prognosticators all talk with certainty about the mixture of voters who sent Donald J. Trump, a gaudy real-estate developer, to the White House.  Yet most can't pinpoint who composed this group of Ameri...

December 26, 2018

DC Decriminalizes Theft

Legalized theft.” A favorite saying of libertarians when talking about taxation. A metaphor invoked by reformers of civil asset forfeiture. A wry phrase constitutionalists use when describing eminent domain. And now, real-life public poli...

December 18, 2018

Broadway Sacrifices a Classic to Mock Trump

Atticus Finch may soon be de trop in polite company. That is, the Southern gentleman lawyer could be cast out, if he were real and not a projection of the collective American imagination. Harper Lee’s beloved character, based upon her real-l...

December 9, 2018

Wife of a Liberal Senator Gets ‘Mugged by Reality’

Mecca. The Holy Land. Sacred ground. I feel sacrilegious for invoking such numinous phrases, but it’s hard to think of a better personal metaphor for the Strand, New York City’s iconic bookstore located in Greenwich Village. Visiting t...

December 1, 2018

How Twitter really works

God's in his heaven. All's right with the world.  And Jesse Kelly is back on Twitter. Kelly's permanent banning from Twitter elicited an outcry not just from conservative Twitter-users, but also from two U.S. s...

November 18, 2018

Voters Electing Democrats Who despise Them

Kyrsten Sinema might not be able to stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue, shoot someone, and lose no support, but she could and did insult the very voters she was trying to woo and be the next duly-elected senator from the Copper State. The former ...

November 12, 2018

Sessions, the left, and hypocrisy

In the end, Trump had them marching for a man they hate. The scuttlebutt currently in Washington, D.C., is that Robert Mueller is drafting his final report, wrapping up his nearly two-year-long probe. There’s no timetable for its releas...

November 6, 2018

Lowering the Voting Age to Sixteen

The Washington D.C. City Council will soon hold a vote on a bill that would lower the voting age to 16. The measure, which has already passed the Judiciary and Public Safety Committee by a margin of 3-0, will, unless sanity somehow reenters the counc...

October 28, 2018

Jim VandeHei tries (and fails) to tell journalists how to regain public trust

How do we eliminate the scourge of fake news, media bias, and distrust of the press? Axios CEO Jim VandeHei thinks he has the answer. The twice-successful founder of major news organizations, VandeHei is a doyenne of political publishing. If anybo...

October 20, 2018

Conservatives Love Hillary Clinton

Since life isn't fair and God finds humor in our feeble attempts at self-governance, Hillary Clinton continues to haunt public life, like a jilted ex-girlfriend stalking all your usual hangouts. The only reason, as I see it, why Clinton is sti...

October 12, 2018

Taylor Swift, having wrecked country music, now wrecks politics

Was it really any surprise that Taylor Swift came out as a liberal?  The quaint country singer-turned-pop megastar endorsed two Tennessee Democrats for Congress: Phil Bredesen for Senate and Jim Cooper for the House of Representatives....

September 29, 2018

Is Free Will a Myth?

Beware when encountering a shiny new commentator decrying the concept of "free will."  In paying him attention, you are lending credence to a casuist. Every once in a while, some peddler of intellectual schlock will come along ...

September 23, 2018

Are Short Skirts and Thug-Wear Conducive to Learning?

I've never worn a school uniform.  My burgherly public high school didn't require pressed slacks, liveried sweaters, solid-colored ties, button-ups, or polished Oxfords.  The only proscribed apparel items were shorts for b...

September 18, 2018

Trump and the Media Dialectic

When journalists want to appear intelligent, they'll attach the term "postmodern president" to Donald Trump.  Their reasoning goes that because Trump so often exaggerates and embellishes basic facts to reflect favorably upon h...

September 13, 2018

The one entity that can destroy Mark Zuckerberg

There's a fake Voltaire quote that floats around the internet: "To learn who rules over you, simply find out whom you are not allowed to criticize."  The quote is usually accompanied by a meme showing a gigantic hand crushing ...

August 21, 2018

SJW feeding frenzy: Lesbian actress not lesbian enough to play Batwoman

Holy intersectional infighting, Batman! Fans of the dime-a-dozen televised superhero dramas may be in for some unfortunate news.  The actress tapped to play Batwoman in the latest installment of The CW's seriate "Arrowverse...

August 14, 2018

Where the real divide in American politics lies

During President Trump's presidential campaign and its aftermath, it became commonplace to cite Yeats's "Second Coming" when describing the ongoing splintering of the country.  The poem's most famous lines we...

August 8, 2018

QAnon, weird conspiracy theories, and the media liberals who love them

Everyone except the most cold-blooded rationalist has a pet conspiracy theory. Whether you think the CIA used Oswald to off President Kennedy or the Rothschilds secretly control the weather, there's almost certainly something you believe that ...

July 31, 2018

I want to feel sorry for the laid off staff of the New York Daily News. I really, truly do.

I want to feel sorry for the laid off staff of the New York Daily News.  I really, truly do. Being let go from any job is always dispiriting.  Never mind the financial uncertainty it brings; to involuntarily lose your situ...

July 24, 2018

Trump shines a spotlight on the media's left-right double standard

What Republican pundit has been driven mad the most by President Trump? The choice isn't immediately clear.  There's Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin, who, once a strong critic of Democrats' foreign policy, has fallen o...

July 19, 2018

A Hopeful Trend among Millennials

There's much to worry about in the U.S.'s current state.  Allow me to channel my inner David Brooks and take heart from a more hopeful trend. Writing at Vox, agricultural economist Lyman Stone flips the script on a widespread tro...

July 10, 2018

Scott Pruitt's exit probably was necessary

"Thank goodness he's gone." "Shame.  He should have stayed." I have a devil and angel on my shoulders arguing over, of all people and things in our sinful world, President Trump's former head of the Environ...

June 30, 2018

Good riddance to Justice Anthony Kennedy

The Supreme Court’s longest serving justice announced his retirement shortly after casting the deciding vote on a string of decisions that were seen as wins for the conservative side of the bench. Kennedy’s stepping down didn’t...

June 26, 2018

Policy experts propose creepy population control solution for too many African babies

Africa's burgeoning birth rate is expected to touch off more migration to its northern continental neighbor, as globalization and rising global temperatures both push desperate people to a place less ravished by crime and intolerable clime. ...

June 22, 2018

Media Lining Up to Defend Black Teen Shot in Carjacking, Attempted Murder

What's it like to feel powerless? A lieutenant in the Chicago Fire Department may find out.  The fireman committed the grave sin of defending himself and his property from an aggressor.  Now he is the target of a social med...

June 15, 2018

America's Root Disease: An Aversion to Responsibility

One of the crucial things I've found wanting in modern-day America is a simple concept: responsibility.  We are living through what David Bahnsen calls a "crisis of responsibility."  It's from this aversion to bl...

June 2, 2018

The Hazards of Full-Bore Snowflake-Melting

To own the libs, or to not own the libs, that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to sit and take the abuse The slinged insults and the pointed ire of outrageous liberals, Or to take arms against a sea of troubled contradictions.....

April 26, 2018

An American Millennial Explains American Millennials

A confession: I'm an American millennial. Popular lore holds that I enjoy lazy, booze-filled brunches; binge-watching Netflix with my significant other; the faux healthful benefits of working at a standing desk; and taking long sits on th...

April 19, 2018

Digital Publishing and Why the YouTube Shooter Opened Fire

Nasim Aghdam is a 21st-century Willy Loman, the hapless protagonist of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. The eccentric vegan activist who shot up the headquarters of online video giant YouTube epitomized today's forgotten man – or...

April 15, 2018

Trump's Syria Attack: Praiseworthy or Bad Precedent?

It's hard to think of the last time America didn't have a wartime president.  From Franklin Roosevelt on, the U.S. military has been ordered to engage in hostilities at least at one point during each administration. Donald Trump,...

April 4, 2018

Enough already: Parkland kids' fifteen minutes of fame is over

It's time for a time-out. The student survivors of the Parkland, Fla. shooting have overdrawn their influence credit, and it's time to cut them off.  The cherubic faces of David Hogg, Emma González, Cameron Kasky, and othe...

March 28, 2018

The Luddites Were Right!

"Is It OK to Be a Luddite?" asked novelist Thomas Pynchon all the way back in 1984, the year, according to George Orwell's prediction, that we'd all be living in a technologically advanced dystopian hell.  At the time, the...

March 14, 2018

Who Will Be Trump's Next Economic Adviser?

"He may be a globalist, but I still like him." So said President Trump in a back-slapping farewell to his chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn.  Because humor is rotting roadkill in the era of high-speed political correctness, the...

March 8, 2018

Too Kind to the Media

He who indulges hope will always be disappointed.  So said Dr. Johnson in one of his many apothegms. The sudden departure of Ms. Hope Hicks, the White House communications director, was indeed a disappointment.  It's not th...

February 14, 2018

Libertarianism Is Still a Mess

Remember Gary Johnson?  The former New Mexico governor was supposed to be the rational presidential alternative to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump – 2016's respectable choice among the morally compromised.  Standard-bea...

February 7, 2018

Identity Politics Hits a Brick Wall

Dave Weigel, the portly, nesting doll look-alike reporter for the Washington Post, is no fan of Mark Lilla, the Columbia University professor who issued a distress call to liberals about embracing identity politics following Donald Trump’s pres...

January 24, 2018

Bradley Manning to the Rescue...of Republicans?

Bradley Manning, who goes by "Chelsea" because he thinks he is a woman, could end up as the unlikeliest hero in history for Republicans.  The soldier-traitor-"transgender" activist recently announced a bid for Senate in ...

January 10, 2018

What Liberals Think America Is Doing Right

America's in trouble, we're told. Our politics is coarse and divided.  The media have been driven mad by the need to break scoops first, leading to clumsy and embarrassing errors.  Social media are turning us all into Narcissus, ...

January 2, 2018

Law vs. the Human Heart

By any measure, the past year was nothing short of monumental: a new president dogged by allegations of foreign election meddling, a media class working in overdrive, a remaking of the federal bench, the routing of the Islamic State, a...

December 28, 2017

The Age of Reflexive Antagonism

When the obituary is written on American democracy, Jonathan Haidt will merit a mention. No thinker has done a better job documenting the dizzying deterioration of our national fabric than this social psychologist.  Through his many books, le...

December 14, 2017

Media Hubris and the Fall of the Center

Mitch Daniels, the former governor of Indiana, went from estimable presidential candidate to nondescript university president in the political timeframe of a nanosecond. Back in 2011, Daniels was on many a short list of potential Republican president...

December 5, 2017

Garrison Keillor and the runaway sex harassment train

All right – now it's personal. For weeks, I've been riding a wave of schadenfreude, smoothly enjoying liberal actors and celebrities getting crushed under the swell of sexual assault allegations.  The tremor Ronan Farrow unleash...

November 17, 2017

The Fight for True Liberalism

These are dark days for liberalism.  What Walter Lippmann defined as the exemplar of the Western nation, the "liberal democratic society," has lost its prestige among the people. Take stock of the current situation.  In the lat...

November 8, 2017

Coming Soon: Incest, State-Sponsored and Court-Approved

Oh, Rick Santorum, you left us too soon. The former Pennsylvania senator and obdurate social conservative may be absent from public life, but he's on track to receive a bigger honor: going down as a biblical prophet, not unlike Micah. Durin...

October 11, 2017

At Last, the Moment I've Long Anticipated!

The liberal obsession with identity politics and “intersectionality” has begun to turn on itself. Like an uroboros of a pasty white bespectacled college student swallowing herself, recycled hemp TOMS shoes first, the petty pique of the pr...

October 2, 2017

The Curious Case of the Democrats vs Zuckerberg

The worst kind of fight in one in which you wish for both sides’ demise. Whatever satisfaction you get from watching one foe whipped is instantly tempered by the victor’s success. It’s a no-win situation. Watching Facebook CEO Ma...

September 17, 2017

The Radical Center Returns

Every once in awhile, radical centrism makes a trendy return to American political discourse. From the presidential campaign of Ross Perot, to the lackluster launch of the vapid “No Labels” campaign, to the equally yawn-worthy “R...

September 12, 2017

Your Beliefs Are No Longer Allowed

American progressives have fnally gone all the way to a totalitarian vision, demanding control over not just your behavior, but your thoughts and beliefs. This as the price of simply living without being attacked.  And hats off to Erick Eric...

August 31, 2017

After Charlottesville, an Uncertain Outlook for Free Speech

When historians look back, I fear they’ll view the events of Charlottesville, Va., as a turning point, a crossing-the-Rubicon moment that preceded the inevitable fall of a great civil right. Free speech is a right—a privilege, really...

August 23, 2017

The Insatiable Left

The architect is finished. Steve Bannon, the wily provocateur who helped push President Trump across the finish line in the bloody 2016 presidential contest, has resigned from his position as White House Chief Strategist. Or, in Washington speech,...

August 17, 2017

Life in the Time of Thoughtcrime

Just when I thought I was inured enough to America’s slow degradation, a series of recent events crystallized Alasdair MacIntyre’s observation that barbarians are no longer beyond our borders but “have already been governing us for ...

August 10, 2017

Can Libertarians Lighten Up Enough to Win?

Economist Walter Block is fond of saying if you stick ten libertarians in a room, you get 11 different opinions.  It’s because libertarianism has become little more than a self-obsessed glorified debate club that I left the ideology years ...

August 5, 2017

Mooch Mugged

Anthony Scaramucci’s stint as White House Communications Director was as short as the former Wall Street executive’s temper. In ten furious days, he went from Trumpian darling, with his sassy Italian tact and coruscating, greased-up hair,...

March 5, 2017

The Shift: From Liberal-Conservative to Globalist-Nationalist

Last July, with Donald Trump on the verge of sealing up the Republican Party's presidential nomination, Ross Douthat authored a column in the New York Times about the new political battlefield.  "[P]erhaps we should speak no more of lef...

February 7, 2017

Trump and conservatism

It was surprising to read a highly critical polemic about President Donald Trump in the pages of The American Conservative, the small periodical cofounded by proto-Trumpian commentator Pat Buchanan.  On the outskirts of mainstream...

February 2, 2017

Trump Overseeing the Destruction of the Democrat Coalition

Back in November of 2000, the alt-right blogger Steve Sailer wrote a provocative column on how the Republican Party could achieve near-permanent electoral majorities for at least a generation. And, no, his proposal wasn't amnesty, entitlement...

January 22, 2017

No, Most People Don’t Need to Go to College

If human nature weren’t as it is, I’d be perfectly content with tearing apart America’s educational system, root and branch, and starting over from scratch. Compulsory schooling? Gone! Federalized K-12 standards? Fini...

December 19, 2016

Sometimes there’s such a thing as too much schadenfreude

For example, the activist who in 2008 was raped and killed in Turkey while on an worldwide “peace tour” meant to promote inclusion and tolerance with Muslims.  Or the leftist Norway politician who felt remorse after the Somali refuge...

December 7, 2016

The Left’s Retreat into Fantasy

The Left, it seems, has lost its grip on reality, and is dead-set on creating its own actuality. And the election of Donald Trump seems to have been the catalyst for the breakdown of the liberal mind.  Weeks after Trump’s unexpected victor...

September 27, 2016

Corporate, Cultural and Political Elite Combine to Steamroller the North Carolina Bathroom Controversy

Andy Griffith defending grown men peeing with little girls? Well, now I’ve heard everything! Joe Bob Briggs over at Takimag claims as much, in his most recent (and most startling) column. North Carolina governor Pat McCroy, Briggs says, is d...

September 22, 2016

Donald Trump and the Politics of Righteous Anger

When Donald Trump stepped out on stage at a recent Miami rally, the Les Misérables classic "Do You Hear the People Sing?" boomed from the audio system.  The audience –  which, let's be honest, probably isn...

September 19, 2016

The Triumph of the Sexual Left

Prolific blogger Rod Dreher has a thing he calls the Law of Merited Impossibility. It goes, roughly, as follows: “If you believe x is going to happen, you’re crazy. But if it does, you bigots will deserve it.” X can be any number...

September 2, 2016

Paul LePage at Bay

Outspoken Maine governor Paul LePage is considering resigning from his governorship. Pressure is mounting on him to step down after he left a hilarious and expletive-filled voicemail for a Democratic state lawmaker. Believing the lawmaker, state rep ...

August 24, 2016

The Conservative Mistake in the Culture War

Whenever conservatives get down in the dumps about their seemingly nonstop string of losses, they take solace in a simple trope: politics is downstream of culture. Coined by the late Andrew Breitbart, the phrase excuses political failure by elevat...

December 7, 2015

Everything Bad, It Seems, Is My Fault

I’ve been feeling down lately. You see, I’m a white heterosexual American Christian. That means I’m the worst thing to ever draw breath on the planet. By virtue of existing, my kind if responsible for all the injustice in the wor...

March 30, 2015

Barney Frank, Gay-Rights Warrior

Apparently Barney Frank, in his retirement from Congress, has taken it upon himself to be the eager warrior for gay rights. And he’s not letting a little thing like personal privacy get in his way. What better way to do that than to expose clos...

October 5, 2014

Scientism and Morality

When ther famed utilitarian Jeremy Bentham wrote, “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure,” I suspect he knew what he was unleashing. When human life is limited to the corporeal, there i...

August 9, 2014

The Contradiction in the Left's View of Gender

It was only a matter of time before the illogic of égalité came to head. The warm fraternité shared by progressives is suddenly dropping in temperature, focusing the “unappeasable indignation” inward. The point of con...

July 20, 2014

New 'Conservative' Idea: Monthly 'Don't Kill Your Baby' Payments

At The American Conservative, Elizabeth Stoker Bruening believes she has an answer for conservatives looking to stop the flow in America of purposeful infant death. Data on why abortions are sought is clear: most women opt to kill their unborn chi...

July 6, 2014

Progressives At War with Reality

In his essay The Part Played by Labor in the Transition From Ape to Man, Frederick Engels wrote, “Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on u...

June 22, 2014

Summer in D.C. Brings out the 'Skinterns'

Here in the District of Criminals, it’s the season of sultry, sweat-stained humidity. The city by the Potomac is famous for its almost-unbearable summers. As the seasons change, the sun turns into an incredible weight, the air becomes impenetra...

June 7, 2014

Dissolving the Institution of Marriage

For years, opponents of same-sex marriage fretted that the unleashing of gay nuptials would open the door for all types of sexual decadence. Last presidential cycle, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum was panned heavily for comparing gay marri...