Columnist.
President Trump's zero-tolerance policy for illegal border crossers has provoked a hysterical reaction from Democrats, establishment Republicans, the progressive-liberal media, Hollywood radicals, and the deep state. What particularly motivated the ire of these Trump-haters was the fact that the zero-tolerance policy would require the separation of parents and children at the border. The hysteria was, of course, completely insincere and fabricated, given that the policy of separating children and parents was nothing new — it had been a policy of the Obama and Bush administrations as well.
2018 Commencement Address
Our nation is about to be transformed, thanks to the #MeToo movement. I am not speaking about a cessation of sexual predation in the workplace. If that were the only consequence of #MeToo, the movement would clearly be a force for good. Unfortunately, its effects are going to be more sweeping and destructive.
China poses a formidable strategic challenge to America, but we should keep in mind that it is in large part motivated by insecurity and fear. America has inherent strengths that China does not. And the greatest danger to America is not a lack of strength, but complacency.
Over the past year, facts have emerged that suggest there was a plot by high-ranking FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) officials in the Obama administration, acting under color of law, to exonerate Hillary Clinton of federal crimes and then, if she lost the election, to frame Donald Trump and his campaign for colluding with Russia to steal the presidency. This conduct was not based on mere bias, as has been widely claimed, but rather on deeply felt animus toward Trump and his agenda.
There is a lot of abstract talk these days on American college campuses about free speech and the values of free inquiry, with plenty of lip service being paid to expansive notions of free expression and the marketplace of ideas. What I've learned through my recent experience of writing a controversial op-ed is that most of this talk is not worth much. It is only when people are confronted with speech they don't like that we see whether these abstractions are real to them.
"Wars and rumors of wars" are all around us. At Hillsdale College we have been thinking about the greatest of all wars, the Second World War. If we study that war and the actions of its profoundest statesman, we can find some lessons to guide us today.
The beginnings of identity politics can be traced to 1973, the year the first volume of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago — a book that demolished any pretense of communism's moral authority — was published in the West.
Last year, for the first time in our nation's history, the American people elected as president someone with no high government experience — not a senator, not a congressman, not a governor, not a cabinet secretary, not a general.
We keep being told that President Trump is not normal. This much has been blindingly obvious.
"Religion" tends to get a bad rap these days — and from two directions.
Frederick Douglass, a former slave and a leading abolitionist writer and orator, was the most photographed American of the 19th century.
When you're asked to give a commencement address, the first thing you think about is, what can you possibly tell these young men and women that they don't already know?
I've been a journalist for a long time. Long enough to know that it wasn't always like this.
I like to introduce the topic of free speech with an anecdote about my children. I have three kids, ages twelve, nine, and five. They are your average, normal kids — which means they live to annoy the heck out of each other.
Vladimir Putin is a powerful ideological symbol and a highly effective ideological litmus test. He is a hero to populist conservatives around the world and anathema to progressives. I don't want to compare him to our own president, but if you know enough about what a given American thinks of Putin, you can probably tell what he thinks of Donald Trump.
The performance of our country's intelligence service is the latest example of an issue exploding into the headlines and becoming a shouting match, while failing to clarify anything about the issue itself.
The Senate prides itself as being the greatest deliberative body in the world. When Jefferson asked Washington why the Constitutional Convention created the Senate, Washington compared it to the hot tea Jefferson cooled in a saucer. "We pour legislation into the senatorial saucer to cool it."
The astonishing political campaign of 2016 involved much debate about whether Donald Trump is a conservative. He was not always facile with the lingo of conservatism, and he pointed out once that he was seeking the nomination of the Republican, not the conservative party. Yet there is a lot we can learn from him about conservatism.
One Fourth of July in the 1980s, when I was living in Hong Kong, I read a tidbit in a local newspaper about America's Independence Day. Across the United States today, the columnist declared, families are celebrating the birth of their nation by sitting down to turkey dinners with all the trimmings.
