Even though the Mueller report seemed to bring an end to the long investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign for something that is not even a federal crime—collusion—the left can’t seem to let it go. Even though they expressed full confidence in Mueller as the investigation went on, they suddenly began to question his credibility … Read more
The events in Charlottesville have shaken the nation, and many have rightly condemned the violence at the August 12 protest that resulted in one tragic death and many wounded. Some were hesitant to make a sweeping condemnation pointing to the violence of the counter-protesters as a factor that must also be considered. Others feared that … Read more
Whereas T.S. Eliot wrote that “April is the cruelest month” in The Waste Land (a fact empirically verified for me by living in Alaska for 9 years), I’ve found that, at least in the decade of the 2000s, October sometimes became my crankiest. 2004 and 2008 come to mind. Both involved a significant pre-election immersion … Read more
We hear a lot nowadays about the polarization in American politics, between the two parties and between conservatives and “progressives” (as liberals have come to be called). What is not mentioned is that, due especially to ideology, the great casualty of our current politics has been integrity. While politics is not known as a field … Read more
On the Saturday following Trump’s inauguration the capital was clogged with another mass rally—the Women’s March on Washington. At first described as “spontaneous” by the media, it gradually leaked out that the whole thing had been planned—by Planned Parenthood, NARAL, CAIR, Move-On, and approximately fifty left-wing groups infused with cash from rich Uncle Soros. Reliance … Read more
In the mid-1990s the philosopher Norman Geras published a short book on the “ungroundable liberalism” of Richard Rorty. Geras was annoyed that many of Rorty’s relativist fellow travelers were some of the same people demanding “social justice” of one sort or another based on claims about reality they took to be self-evidently true (e.g. “The … Read more
In a speech delivered to the Annual MAS-ICNA (Muslim American Society and Islamic Circle of North America) Convention in December 2015, Nihad Awad, the Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), urged Muslim Americans to take up the cause of Black Lives Matter. “Black Lives Matter is our matter,” he said; “Black Lives … Read more
I have written in this column about how in these times when our traditional liberties and even such natural rights as religious freedom are under siege, we need to look to executive power—exercised in the right way—to help us. In recent months we have seen striking examples of how noted state governors in varying ways … Read more
Some days ago, Josh Barro of the New York Times tweeted the following message: “Anti-LGBT attitudes are terrible for people in all sorts of communities. They linger and oppress, and we need to stamp them out, ruthlessly.” It’s quite a statement for a public figure to make—for anyone to make—but especially one supposedly devoted to … Read more
Many people complain about the “gridlock” in Washington and about how the two parties need to work together, compromise, and come to agreement about things. They decry the lack of bipartisanship. What they don’t realize is that the main culprit in this is the political left, which has gained almost complete control over the Democratic … Read more
One of the unfortunate byproducts of the fact that, for many years now, nobody has studied Latin in school is this: Hardly anybody remembers Cicero and the conspiracy of Catiline. If we could remember this, it would be helpful in thinking about what those on the American Right call “enhanced interrogation” and those on the … Read more