Commentary

“It’s better to be the United States’ enemy than its friend.” Foreign officials tell me this is their perception under the Biden Administration, which has a strange habit of appeasing our adversaries while holding our allies to impossible standards. It’s bad foreign policy, plain and simple. Moreover, it’s encouraging chaos in our region. Just look at what’s happening in the Dominican Republic. The Caribbean nation is facing extraordinary migratory pressure from neighboring Haiti, which has all but collapsed into anarchy. President Luis Abinader has made it clear he will protect Dominican sovereignty by enforcing deportations. Yet the Biden Administration, influenced by radical left-wing groups like Amnesty International, is pushing him to accept three million Haitians at any moment.

The latest Harvard Youth Poll reveals President Joe Biden has lost significant ground with voters under thirty compared to four years ago, with a 20-point decline among young men. While young Americans give Biden low marks on foreign policy and economic issues including inflation, housing, and the job market, immigration is a leading factor in young people’s departure from Democrats.  Biden currently leads Trump by thirteen percentage points (50 percent to 37 percent) among registered voters under thirty in the Harvard Youth Poll, a slightly higher margin than he has led by in other recent polls that include young people as a subset.

When Dexter Reed died in a shootout with Chicago police on March 21, the incident was quickly grafted onto a narrative that began in 2014 after a policeman killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. – namely, that the U.S. faces an epidemic of violence by unbridled cops who do not believe black lives matter. "Killing of Dexter Reed raises questions about Chicago police reform. 'The message is, go in guns blazing,'" blared a headline in the Chicago Sun-Times. Reed’s death joins a long list of police shootings that have received wide media coverage and political scrutiny – especially those involving African Americans. Over the years, many police departments embraced reforms, including the use of bodycams, to document incidents – an effort bolstered by a public eager to use smartphones to record the behavior of cops. In 2015, the Washington Post created a database logging every person shot dead by police in the U.S.

Over at Compact magazine on Tuesday, Nina Power wrote "The Trans Reckoning Is Here," and, as evidence, she cited a report by a British pediatrician named Hilary Cass written for the National Health Service that upturned the faux-scientific basis on which that country has embarked on normalizing "gender-affirming care."

In the past, teachers' unions concentrated on fighting to keep all teachers employed—competent or otherwise—laying off teachers by seniority when necessary and soaking taxpayers every chance they could. While those activities are still part of their mission, they have, over time, increasingly delved into the political/social realm, promoting Black Lives Matter, Critical Race Theory, DEI, class warfare, gender-bending, etc. And their current level of engagement is staggering. Americans for Fair Treatment, a national nonprofit organization that educates public employees about their rights in a unionized workplace, recently released a report detailing the National Education Association’s (NEA) financial filings from Sept. 1, 2022, through Aug. 31, 2023.

In 1967, I had the privilege of studying criminal law at Yale University. The teacher was a superpower in the field named Joe Goldstein. After a short time, we got to a series of cases where a prosecutor had empaneled a grand jury and gotten an indictment against some poor soul — almost always poverty-stricken and often black — who had either no evidence against him (and he was almost always male). That poor soul usually was convicted. He went to prison and that was that.

The 'whistleblower' who sparked Donald Trump's first impeachment was deeply involved in the political maneuverings behind Biden-family business schemes in Ukraine that Trump wanted probed, newly obtained emails from former Vice President Joe Biden’s office reveal. In 2019, then-National Intelligence Council analyst Eric Ciaramella touched off a political firestorm when he anonymously accused Trump of linking military aid for Ukraine to a demand for an investigation into alleged Biden corruption in that country.

The newest buzzword in politics is “Lawfare,” the effort to cripple political opponents through legal initiatives, preferably by bringing criminal cases. Today’s favorite target is former President Trump, who has been indicted in various state and federal jurisdictions for some ninety-one felonies. Amazingly, Wikipedia’s current “Lawfare” entry goes into great detail concerning the term’s origins and current application – defining Lawfare as “the use of legal systems and institutions to damage or delegitimize an opponent, or to deter an individual's usage of their legal rights” without any mention whatsoever of its current use against Trump.

In July 2023, Joshua Youngerman was arrested in California on five misdemeanors for his participation in the events of January 6. According to charging documents, Youngerman entered the Capitol at 2:37 p.m. — 20 minutes after the House went into recess amid the escalating chaos — through an open door as Capitol Police stood by. He exited […]

August came early to the nation’s capital with last week's round of March inflation data. The late summer weather in Washington, D.C., is notoriously hot and sticky, two accurate descriptors of the latest price increases facing families and businesses alike. Inflation is stubbornly high, and the Biden administration's spendthrift public policies are to blame. In the past 12 months, consumer prices rose 3.5 percent, the second month of accelerating annual inflation. In March alone, prices rose 0.4 percent. That may not sound like much, but it’s actually terrible. If that monthly inflation rate holds steady, prices will double in less than 16 years.

The election of Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana to Speaker of the House has thrown into stark relief the difference between what one might call “personal conservatives” and those of us who consider ourselves to be part of the conservative movement, or movement conservatives. There’s no doubt that Speaker Johnson lives his life according to a set of conservative principles: He’s a church-going man known for his personal rectitude; he married his wife in a “covenant marriage;” as a lawyer he advocated a constitutional “textualist” approach to his cases; he spent many years actively involved in advancing the Right-to-Life; he opposes same sex marriages, and in 2015 he took one of his daughters to a purity ball.

As Americans pay their taxes today, an historic event will begin in New York City. In a moment worthy of “On the Waterfront,” the great movie about corruption and brutality in New York, the New York system will attempt to judicially destroy the chosen champion of more than 80 million Americans.

Monday, April 15, 2024, is not only Tax Day in the United States.  It is also the day that this country will take another fateful step towards banana republic-like tyranny.  For it is the day that New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg—or, to give him his full title, "Soros-funded District Attorney Alvin Bragg"—will begin his 34-count felony trial against Donald Trump. Exactly what is the presumptive Republican nominee for president charged with by the Biden Department of Justice?  Paying Stormy Daniels—or to give her the invariable epithet, "porn star Stormy Daniels" (think "swift-footed Achilles," "gray-eyed Athena")—to keep quiet about an alleged sexual encounter in 2006 (which Trump has consistently denied).

Recently, I asked my fifth graders if they enjoyed writing in cursive. Students at the all-boys Catholic school where I work start training in cursive penmanship in third grade, so my students had been practicing it for the better part of three years. I expected them to say that it is boring, that they do not like it, but they all said that they preferred cursive to printing. One boy explained that it allows him to develop his ideas more easily. Another one liked the way the strokes of the pencil obey the natural movement of his hand and shoulder. Most surprising of all: They all find writing in cursive fun. Cursive penmanship is a dying art. History professor and former president of Harvard Drew Gilpin Faust wrote an essay in 2022 lamenting that Generation Z never learned cursive. She acknowledges that “the decline in cursive seems inevitable. Writing is, after all, a technology, and most technologies are sooner or later surpassed and replaced.”

by Carrie Sheffield   “There is an important body of conservative thought that is now nearly or completely absent on the faculties of many eminent universities,” former Harvard University President Derek Bok wrote in Harvard Magazine following Hamas’ terrorist attacks Oct. 7 in Israel and the ensuing campus chaos. He recommends “some immediate progress by trying to hire conservatives as visiting […]