Call it “The Trump Revolution.”
The news that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — scion of America’s most famous, not to mention one of its most historic, Democrat political families — was endorsing the GOP’s former President Donald Trump spoke volumes about the current state of American politics.
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Brent and Donna McGee were the “First Couple” of Wetumka, Oklahoma. He was athletic director and football coach at the high school who had once served as mayor; she was superintendent of the school system.
And as if all those levers of local power weren’t enough, they also owned the Dairy Queen, the prime hangout in this small rural town and a key source of high school jobs.
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Kamala Harris shrugged.
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How do accomplished radicals elect a mediocre far-left presidential candidate?
The task might at first seem impossible.
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Law enforcement in the United States has collapsed. Americans in many parts of the country see that products at CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart stores are behind plexiglass, that you must call a clerk to unlock the glass and then wait while you read and examine the different packages. People know these companies have no choice. Americans know that crime is rising, but the true collapse in law enforcement, particularly in large cities, is without precedent.
A Gallup survey last November showed that 92 percent of Republicans and even 58 percent of Democrats believed that crime was rising. In a series of surveys from March 2023 to April 2024, Rasmussen Reports finds a remarkably constant percentage of Americans who believe that violent crime is getting worse – 60 percent to 61 percent. Roughly four times as many people think violent crime is rising rather than getting better.
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California has finally arrived. A female former California attorney general and U.S. senator is at the top of the Democrat presidential ticket. This is the culmination of generations of California politicians who have heavily influenced American politics and culture and are now, once again, on the verge of taking the top political office in the Free World.
“California is having a moment,” said Don Sipple, a California political strategist. To be more accurate, on a nationwide political basis, California has been having a lot of moments for decades.
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It seems reasonable that a program designed to assist those with low incomes should go only to low-income households. But the Biden-Harris administration is using a dubious mechanism to get around that expectation in a program designed to help low-income families pay for broadband internet service.
Congress created the Emergency Broadband Benefit Program in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, to provide broadband internet assistance to low-income households.
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Bearing my cross like the good book counsels us to do, I watched most of the Democratic National Convention last week. Reflecting the party as a whole, it was a mélange of mixed messages.
Back in 2020, the party’s leaders intervened during the primary in order to stop a Bernie Sanders’ victory. Right before Super Tuesday, they rallied around Joe Biden, the excuse being that he could win because he was a likable moderate from Pennsylvania.
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Navigating the complexities of smartphone use in K-12 education is a collective effort that requires ongoing adaptation as technology evolves. We expect the Tennessee General Assembly to draft legislation on this issue in the next session. There is an increasing push to safeguard young individuals from spending too much time in front of screens.
States and public school districts are advocating cellphone bans in schools, driven by concerns about distractions and their adverse effects on student well-being. This growing trend should not just be about restrictions but about creating a more focused and conducive learning environment. Teacher buy-in is critical to this process.
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When Florida was hit with severe storms and Hurricane Ian in 2022, Vice President Kamala Harris demanded that “communities of color” must be first in line for aid and that assistance should be prioritized “in a way that is about giving resources based on equity.”
She has repeatedly made similar claims, differentiating “equity” from equality, stating that “not everyone starts in the same place.”
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There are three current hot or cold wars: on the Ukrainian border, in the regions surrounding Israel, and in the strategic space between Taiwan and mainland China. All three conflicts could not only expand within their respective theaters but also escalate to draw in the United States.
And all three involve nuclear powers.
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Democrats ended their four-day convention on Thursday with a vacuous speech by the party’s installed candidate, Kamala Harris. Her short stint on the main stage made the regime media, which has blessed her with 84 percent positive news coverage since the Pelosi coup according to one analysis, drunk with joy. Harris,…
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Money always finds a way. In the years following the 2020 election, dozens of states managed to ban private funding of elections. But even though Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly promised not to pour more of his money into your local election office, this year, the “Zuckbucks” team is recommitted to spreading cash wherever they legally can.
Recall that in late 2020, Zuckerberg directed his charitable arm to pass $350 million through an obscure nonprofit called the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) to fund large and small election offices around the nation. Some politically important counties received millions of dollars while others did not. As of today, 28 states have since banned the practice. Despite the bans, the CTCL’s work continues. In fact, the bans guide cash along new paths of least resistance.
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A Pennsylvania teacher who was fired for allegedly attending the U.S. Capitol “insurrection” on January 6, 2021, has won a wrongful termination lawsuit after a two-week trial.
Jason Moorehead, a 17-year veteran social studies instructor in the Allentown School District, had always maintained he was “at all times over a mile away” at the Washington Monument when the riot occurred.
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For several weeks, social media has been flooded by teachers’ posts with Amazon wish lists, soliciting others to stock their classrooms with basic supplies. Creating these lists has been commonplace in recent years as teachers look outside their schools and districts to fill their supply needs.
Some of the most popular requested items are dry erase markers, Kleenex, Lysol wipes, erasers, tape, pens, colored copy paper, file folders, and pencil sharpeners. Others request educational items such as a microscope, map, or globe, which seem essential for student learning.
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Vice President Kamala Harris was “proud to cast the tie-breaking vote” for the Inflation Reduction Act. Would she be proud if her administration’s solar subsidies fund supported forced labor in China?
That may be the case with Hanwha Qcells, a South Korean solar company operating in Georgia. Bloomberg recently reported that two Chinese suppliers of the company obtained polysilicon for solar panel components from companies sanctioned by the U.S. government for employing forced Uyghur labor. Hanwha and their Qcells plant leadership deny these allegations, but Bloomberg reports “that the company offers assurances but no public details of its polysilicon sourcing.”
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Many Americans believe our world’s becoming more secular. While that’s true, many of today’s fastest-growing religious denominations aren’t progressive—they’re traditional. Here’s what the data show.
In the 1990s, 90 percent of Americans identified as Christians on Pew surveys. Today, that number has fallen to about 67 percent. Among young adults, over 40 percent are religiously unaffiliated.
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Since Kamala Harris unseated President Joe Biden to become the Democratic presidential nominee, her campaign has spent the last few weeks trying to distance herself from the failed policies of the current administration where she holds the title of vice president and was dubbed “Border Czar.”
Despite being part of the administration responsible for an unprecedented 10 million (and counting) encounters of illegal aliens at our borders and at least 2 million “gotaways” who evaded the Border Patrol, our televisions have been bombarded for weeks with ads claiming that a President Harris will be tough on the border.
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Abundant and affordable energy drives America’s powerful and productive economy. That’s been true throughout our nation’s history, and America’s recent achievement of energy independence provides the most concrete illustration of that fact.
But to keep our nation firing on all eight cylinders, we need government policies that prioritize providing adequate, reliable and secure domestic energy supplies.
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The 2023-2024 campaign season is not just the strangest on record, it’s also arguably the most anti-democratic.
Ostensibly, the Democratic Party has claimed over the last decade that Donald Trump posed a continued and existential threat to the republic.
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Jon Graft is on a mission to reignite the passion for learning by pushing a long-denigrated classroom practice: vocational education.
The superintendent of the Butler Tech District of high schools in Ohio is a leader in the growing movement to revive public education, marred by low test scores and high absenteeism, through a hands-on approach to learning that prepares students for careers in today’s tech-driven economy. Traditionally a means of funneling disadvantaged kids into outdated shop classes and dead-end jobs, vocational education is being reimagined by Graft and others in sophisticated career and technical education (CTE) programs nationwide, offering high school students of all academic abilities training in healthcare, computer science, engineering, skilled trades, and even the arts.
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The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) signed into law by President Donald Trump on Dec. 22, 2017, provided across-the-board income tax cuts for all income levels as well as significant tax relief for American taxpayers. However, most of the tax relief expires on Dec. 31, 2025, which will result in significant tax hikes for most Americans in 2026.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress are calling for new legislation in 2025 to make the TCJA tax cuts permanent. But this will only be possible with three election results this November: (1) Trump wins the presidency; (2) Republicans gain majority control of the Senate; and (3) Republicans maintain majority control of the House of Representatives. Failure to achieve a victory sweep for the presidency and both houses of Congress would be devastating for Americans’ pocketbooks, given Democrat animus towards extending the TCJA tax cuts.
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This week, the National Association of Scholars (“NAS”) and the Heritage Foundation are sponsoring a panel discussion on diversity ideology in higher education. A number of reports have recently been published on the topic, with most documenting monies spent by state universities on “diversity, equity and inclusion” (“DEI“). The Maryland affiliate of the National Association of Scholars released the most recent such report this summer, but the Virginia affiliate issued one last year, while Idaho, North Carolina, Maine, and Tennessee produced similar documents before that.
The Maryland report reminds state officials that “diversity” is usually a cover for race-based practices that are now likely illegal under the 2023 United States Supreme Court case, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (or “SFFA”). That opinion found that racial preferences in university admissions were a violation of federal civil rights laws and also the Constitution’s Equal Protection clause. SFFA means that any race-based practice in college is presumptively unlawful. As the Court said, “Eliminating discrimination means eliminating all of it … distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their nature odious.”
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Ever since early 2021, Americans have watched as illegal aliens have flooded across the Southwest border unimpeded. They have read with horror the accounts of innocent Americans victimized by those here unlawfully. They have seen family and friends die after being poisoned by fentanyl coming across the border. And the Biden-Harris administration has largely done nothing.
Yet now, following a few months of somewhat-reduced numbers of apprehensions between ports of entry along the Southwest border, the Biden-Harris administration is taking a victory lap. Such premature celebration, however, ignores the reality of the continuing nature of this crisis.
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Kamala’s “surging” poll numbers are a lot of hot air.
A close analysis of the data shows that Donald Trump continues to maintain a dominant position in this election. After factoring in the systematic pro-Democrat bias in polling data, Trump comes out decisively in the lead. As it stands now, Trump will likely win every swing state and the national popular vote.
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In a recent interview, World Energy Council Secretary General Angela Wilkinson told me that one of the main impediments to the energy transition today is a lack of what she calls “systems thinking.”
“Energy transitions are a change in the organization of society,” she pointed out. “They’re not a simple case of swapping out one technology for another and everything else stays the same. Yet, we have this very simplistic narrative that we can take the oil system, we can put renewables in, it’s going to happen immediately, and nothing else will change. It’s like saying we’re going to take your thighbone out, but we’d like you to run a marathon.”
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Even the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post could not stomach the new proposal from Kamala Harris to place price controls on food. The headline of the opinion piece from Catherine Rampell read:
“When your opponent calls you a ‘communist,’ maybe don’t try price controls?”
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“Projection” is a Freudian psychological term. It describes a particular defensive mechanism, when people, often unconsciously, attribute their own (usually undesirable) behaviors to others who do not have them.
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In the 1920s, a term was coined that is very appropriate for what is taking place in America today: red fascism. It was a term that likely originated with an Italian anarchist, Luigi Fabbri, who wrote in 1922 that “‘red fascists’ is the name that has recently been given to those Bolshevik communists who are most inclined to espouse fascism’s methods for use against their adversaries.” This description and behavior of course should not come as a surprise to anyone. Socialism is intrinsic to both communism and fascism, as both are movements of the left with a massive, oppressive, and powerful State central to achieving their goals.
Consider where we are right now in this country: some people have said that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are the farthest left ticket ever run by the Democrat Party in this country’s history. That’s not quite correct. “Leftist” has lost some of its meaning because more traditional liberals are on the left. Harris and Walz are so far left they’re actually off the charts and into neo-Marxist territory. If for nothing else, their strong advocacy for the Green New Deal plants them firmly in that Marxism camp.
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Amid the many battles over how to improve American schools, it’s often forgotten that what’s taught in the classroom is but one component of ensuring that students receive a high-quality education; it’s also important to remove barriers to children’s learning.
And the idea to remove one major impediment – cell phones in K-12 schools – has gained significant traction over the past year, most recently in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
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Vice-presidential picks generally balance a ticket, but Kamala Harris’ selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate does anything but. And American Catholics and others who care about the poor and vulnerable should be alarmed.
Consider their attacks against their states’ life-affirming pregnancy care centers. For me, this issue is more than political. It’s personal. Like many Catholics across the country, I volunteer at our local pregnancy centers. I’m the medical director for the centers run by the Archdiocese of Miami and I read their fetal ultrasounds. Helping families and expectant mothers through my work there is one of the most rewarding ways in which I practice medicine.
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Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrating into everyday life – as chatbots, digital assistants, and internet search guides, for example. These artificial intelligence (AI) systems – which consume large amounts of text data to learn associations – can create all sorts of written material when prompted and can ably converse with users. LLMs’ growing power and omnipresence mean that they exert increasing influence on society and culture.
So it’s of great import that these artificial intelligence systems remain neutral when it comes to complicated political issues. Unfortunately, according to a new analysis recently published to PLoS ONE, this doesn’t seem to be the case.
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As a journalist, it’s easy to turn around copy on any of the public policy and political debates of the day, but I struggle to write about religious issues in a meaningful way. My American Spectator columns detail the usual insanity in the California Capitol and Washington, DC, but what can I say about matters of faith, where my usual tool — reason — isn’t entirely useful?
I grew up Jewish, the son of a Nazi Holocaust survivor. Our religion was important, but I was raised in a secular home where religious observance didn’t reflect any deep expression of faith. That led me on a journey to try to make sense of this inexplicable world.
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English philosopher Antony Flew once commented that Islam was “best described in a Marxian way as the uniting and justifying ideology of Arab imperialism.”
This is a rather provocative notion, but it’s not as implausible as it seems.
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The National Educators Association, the largest teachers union in America, is “fired up” for Kamala Harris’s VP nominee, Tim Walz. “Gov. Walz is known as the ‘Education Governor,’” wrote NEA President Becky Pringle, “because he has been an unwavering champion for public school students and educators, and an ally for working families and unions. As a high school teacher and NEA member, Walz is committed to uplifting our public schools.”
The NEA’s endorsement should be worrisome for Americans who are actually concerned about the state of education in this country: for years, the NEA has put radical politics above children.
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“I will be a vice president who never forgets where he came from.”
Cast off by a drug-addled mother, raised by a discipline-demanding, f-bomb-wielding Mamaw, J.D. Vance’s inspirational story is one of lost potential reclaimed. If Vance is elected and remembers where he came from, this country has much to look forward to – because his redemptive story envelopes millions of Americans.
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The already-long 2024 presidential campaign has become the strangest in modern history.
Here are ten unanswered questions that illustrate how and why we’ve entered this bizarro world:
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Vice President Kamala Harris’ selection of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her vice presidential candidate seems to be a case of ideological birds of a feather flocking together. In the wake of the selection, Walz has received considerable criticism for his deception and dissembling regarding his military service. He merits equally great criticism for his ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Here are ten things that you did not know about Tim Walz and the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
First, Walz claimed that he was in the PRC during the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Square Massacre. One of the authors interviewed him in 2014 when he made this statement, and he later repeated the same falsehood to the media. In reality, Walz did not enter China until September 1989, several months after the massacre. He entered China from Hong Kong as part of the WorldTeach program, which was sponsored by the Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID). HIID was known for being very pro-PRC and had trained many high-ranking Chinese officials. Later, HIID received many millions of dollars from the PRC.
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It has become a truism among right-of-center voters in America that as the percentage of non-Hispanic whites in the population decreases, the percentage of registered Democrats increases. This truism is shared, of course, by the progressive left in America. That might lead one to conclude that if Democrats wanted to turn America into a one-party nation, they would do everything in their power to increase the percentage of voters who are not “non-Hispanic whites.”
There is evidence to support this truism. For example, in 1970, the population of California was 80 percent non-Hispanic whites, with Republican governor Ronald Reagan and both houses of the state legislature controlled by Republicans. That was the last year Republicans had a trifecta in the state. Today, California’s population of non-Hispanic whites has declined to 34 percent, and the state is under the absolute control of Democrats. They have held both houses of the state legislature since 1997, and apart from Schwarzenegger’s anomalous presence from 2004 through 2010, the state hasn’t had a Republican governor since 1998.
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The media is now working overtime to rewrite the background of the Harris-Walz ticket. With all eyes shifting to Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, they have their work cut out.
Get ready for a new, refined version of Walz, where he is cast as a moderate, pro-worker Midwesterner — meant to balance out Kamala’s left-wing liberalism. But Walz is not that and American steelworkers, their families and the communities surrounding the Twin Metals Mine of Northeast Minnesota know this all too well.
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It is less than 90 days to Election Day, and right on queue the group behind the “Zuck Bucks” campaign of 2020 is back with a new scheme. This time, the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) is doling out millions in grant dollars to rural election administrators in 19 states.
Election officers beware. The group is trying to turn the government offices that run elections into bastions of partisan progressive activism. Election officials striving for nonpartisanship should steer clear.
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In the past four years, approximately 4 million Latino Americans have become eligible to vote, making the Latino population account for 14.7% of all eligible voters. This increasingly independent cohort is up for grabs, and one conservative Latino-focused PAC intends to win them over.
The bloc was a key part of the coalition that helped deliver President Joe Biden to the White House in 2020. In 12 of the 13 states with the largest Latino populations, Latinos supported Biden over former President Donald Trump by a margin of at least two to one. And in nine of the 13 states, that margin was at least three to one. Only in Florida was Biden’s margin less than two to one.
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The recent spate of anti-Israel demonstrations at college campuses could cause déjà vu for North Dakotans, who endured the Dakota Access Pipeline protests in 2016. Like many of the campus protests, the pipeline protests were funded and fueled by big outside groups that showed little concern for the damaging impacts of their actions.
Now, a lawsuit being heard this summer is designed to hold some of these groups responsible for their actions. Energy Transfer, the owner and operator of the pipeline, is suing Greenpeace and other alleged instigators for $300 million for the damages sustained by the company as a result of these protests. The lawsuit claims that these environmental activists spent months spreading false information about the pipeline project and helped fund out-of-state agitators who attacked law enforcement and damaged property during the protests.
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Two weeks ago, three unlikely bedfellows joined forces to announce their intention to cut K-12 chronic absenteeism in half by 2029.
The right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, the left-leaning Education Trust, and the nonprofit organization Attendance Works revealed their plan in Washington, DC. The coalition hopes to combat chronic absenteeism, defined as students missing 10 percent or more of school days in a given academic year, by implementing a variety of initiatives, including home visits and similar interventions. Chronic absenteeism rates more than doubled during and after the Covid response. The goal is to reduce these rates to pre-pandemic levels, or around 13 percent.
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H. L. Mencken apparently never quite said that “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” He said lots of similar things, however, and I like to think he would have been proud of being the sort of chap to whom people attributed such astringent mots.
He would also, I feel sure, regard the theater surrounding the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz campaign as a test case of the proposition.
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Brittney Pearson was a mother of four and 24 weeks pregnant when she was diagnosed with breast cancer—a tragic enough situation. To make a bad situation worse, though, the Sacramento native was pregnant as a surrogate mother for a gay couple.
Upon being informed of the cancer diagnosis, the two men demanded that Pearson abort the child.
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Social-emotional learning (SEL) has been in vogue in education circles for decades. Following its precepts, teachers, counselors, and administrators encourage students to look inward and focus on their feelings. The result?
A generation of young people who can’t stop thinking about their emotions, leaving them incredibly fragile. But that’s not what many of the experts will tell you.
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There is a battle for the soul of America.
The first shots of a long simmering revolt were fired when Democratic Party candidate Barack Obama pledged to “fundamentally transform” America five days prior to his winning the presidency in 2008.
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Ideological litmus tests have no place in higher education. They weaponize loyalty and contradict the university’s purpose of fostering academic inquiry and informed debates. Scholars cannot pursue truth or progress if they are denied academic jobs based on their devotion to a specific political ideology or philosophy.
I applaud states like Florida, Alabama, Wyoming, Tennessee, and Texas that have banned varied Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) requirements that mandate loyalty to its agenda. But we need to go further. Congress can deny federal funding to universities that impose DEI on faculty, administrators, and staff. Conservative lawmakers are already trying to “dismantle” DEI in the federal government and others are currently weighing defunding universities over Title VI violations. They should extend defunding to universities that require DEI.
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Joe Biden won in 2020 on the premise that until the November election, he would pose as good ol’ Joe from Scranton and not scare voters.
So Biden talked about “unity” and “competency.” He erased his prior wild primary pandering to left-wing voters about shutting down fracking and opening the border.
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