When ideology replaces meritocracy or provides immunity from the consequences of illegal behavior, systemic mediocrity follows. Under toxic National Socialism, Stalinism, and Maoism, millions of cronies and grifters mouthed party lines in hopes that their approved ideology would allow them to advance their careers and excuse their lawbreaking.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Americans overwhelmingly supported Ukraine — as they did with Israel after Oct. 7. No wonder: Ukraine was surprise attacked by Russia, and Israel was by Hamas.

Prior to Oct. 7, there were roughly 2 million Arab citizens of Israel but no Jewish citizens in Gaza. Gazans in 2006 voted in Hamas to rule them. It summarily executed its Palestinian Authority rivals. Hamas canceled all future scheduled elections. It established a dictatorship and diverted hundreds of billions of dollars in international aid to build a vast underground labyrinth of military installations. “Collateral damage” Hamas began the war by deliberately targeting civilians. It massacred them on October 7 when it invaded Israel during a time of peace and holidays. It sent more than 7,000 rockets into Israeli cities for the sole purpose of killing noncombatants. It has no vocabulary for the collateral damage of Israeli civilians, since it believes any Jewish death under any circumstances is cause for celebration.

Some 8 to 10 million illegal aliens from all over the world, as expected, have flooded across the border since President Joe Biden took office. A demagogic candidate Biden, remember, in 2019 invited those massing at the southern border to "surge" into the United States without specifying that they first needed legal sanction: "We immediately surge to the border all those seeking asylum."...

The horrific murder of Laken Riley by a repeated felony offender and illegal alien Jose Ibarra, 26, a Venezuelan citizen, was preventable -- had federal immigration laws simply been enforced by the Biden administration. When called out in his recent State of the Union address, President Joe Biden referenced the deceased Riley. But Biden misidentified her as "Lincoln Riley" -- the USC football coach!...

"We can bear neither our diseases nor their remedies." So shrugged the ancient historian Livy (59 B.C.-17 A.D.) of the long decline of Roman national character that, in his age, finally ended the Roman Republic. Like a patient whose medicine proves worse than the disease, Livy lamented that the Romans knew that they had become corrupt and lawless...

One state prosecutor and one civilian plaintiff have already won huge fines and damages from former President Donald Trump that may, with legal costs, exceed $500 million. Trump awaits further civil and criminal liability in three other federal, state, and local indictments...

The Ukrainian and Israeli wars are similar and yet also different conflicts -- but in more ways than we can imagine. Ukraine was invaded by a huge Russian state, with a population three-and-a-half times greater, a gross national product 10 times larger, and an area 30 times its size...

In 2021, President Joe Biden opened wide an inherited, secure southern border that had finally stopped mass illegal immigration. When he overturned former President Donald Trump's efforts, a planned flood of over 8 million illegal immigrants entered the U.S...

The post-Joe McCarthy era and the candidacy of Barry Goldwater once prompted liberal political scientist Richard Hofstadter to chronicle a supposedly long-standing right-wing "paranoid style" of conspiracy-fed extremism. But far more common, especially in the 21st century, has been a left-wing, hysterical style of inventing scandals and manipulating perceived tensions for political advantage...

When faced with the possible return of former President Donald Trump, the current agenda of the Democratic Party is summed up simply as "We had to destroy democracy to save it." The effort shares a common theme: Any means necessary are justified to prevent the people from choosing their own president, given the fear that a majority might vote to elect Trump...

At the end of the year, we are on the razor's edge of many things that soon may blow up. Americans are far beyond President Joe Biden's serial untruths of some eight years that he never discussed Hunter Biden's various get-rich-quick schemes. All were predicated on the perception of foreign interests purchasing from the Biden family the influence of then-senator, vice president, and possibly soon-to-be President Joe Biden...

The abject narcissism of the insular Left is startling. They apparently believe the American public is amnesiac enough to forget what leftists once did, now that they're doing the utter opposite. And they assume we are to discount their hypocrisy and self-absorption simply because they self-identify as erudite and moral and assume their opponents are irredeemable and deplorable...

Nihilism is the religion of the Left. Anarchy is now at the core of the new Democratic Party. If the Left wished radically to alter the demography of the U.S., it could have expanded legal immigration through legislation or the courts. Instead, it simply erased the border and dynamited federal immigration law...

After Oct. 7, the public was shocked at what they saw and heard on America's campuses. Americans knew previously they were intolerant, left wing, and increasingly non-meritocratic. But immediately after Oct. 7 -- and even before the response of the Israeli Defense Forces -- the sheer student delight on news of the mass murdering of Israeli victims seemed akin more to 1930s Germany than contemporary America...

Oct. 7 should have been an open-and-shut case of moral condemnation. During peace and holiday, invading Hamas gunmen murdered, tortured, mass raped, decapitated, and mutilated some 1,200 Israelis. The vast majority were unarmed women, children, infants, and the elderly...

Proportionality in war is a synonym for lethal stalemate, if not defeat. When two sides go at it with roughly equal forces, weapons, and strategies, the result is often a horrific deadlock -- like the four years of toxic trench warfare on the Western Front of World War I that resulted in 12 million fatalities...

The population of Israel is about 10 million. This represents about half of the world's Jewish people. The founding idea of modern Israel was to offer a sanctuary for Jews in their biblical home in the Middle East, in the aftermath of Nazi Germany's mass murder of 6 million Jews...

There is something surreal, even sick about the current Gazan war. Throughout European and American cities and campuses, tens of thousands of Middle East immigrants and students, and radical leftists chant nonstop "Free Palestine from the River to the Sea."...

Few Romans in the late decades of their 5th-century A.D. empire celebrated their newfound "diversity" of marauding Goths, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Huns, and Vandals. These tribes en masse had crossed the unsecured Rhine and Danube borders to harvest Roman bounty without a care about what had created it...

Iran understandably believes it is riding quite high. It is flush with cash. It hints it almost has the bomb — and might use it soon. The Iranians are bragging about their new tyrannical allies like Russia and China. Iran boasts of now being the self-proclaimed leader of jihad on behalf of all Muslims. It gloats that it is feeding the Russian war-machine by exporting its own drones...

One unexpected blowback from the medieval Hamas's barbaric murdering of hundreds of Israeli civilians is the revelation of current global amorality. More than 20 Harvard university identity politics groups pledged their support to the Hamas murderers -- to the utter silence for days of Harvard President Claudine Gay...

One common denominator that explains why previously successful societies implode is their descent into fantasies. A collective denial prevents even discussion of existential threats and their solutions. Something like that is happening in the United States. Eight million illegal immigrants have entered the United States by the deliberate erasure of the southern border...

Most Americans understandably favor the Ukrainian resistance against Russian President Vladimir Putin's naked 2022 aggression. Yet for Ukraine to break the current deadlock — our generation's Verdun with perhaps 600,000 combined casualties so far — and "win" the war, it apparently must have the military wherewithal to hit targets inside Russia...

Since early 2021 we have witnessed somewhere between 7 and 8 million illegal entries across the now nonexistent U.S. southern border. The more the border vanished, the more federal immigration law was rendered inert, and the more Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas spun fantasies that the "border is secure." He is now written off as a veritable "Baghdad Bob" propagandist...

When the progressive woke revolution took over traditional America, matters soon reached the level of the ridiculous. Take the following examples of woke craziness and hypocrisy, perhaps last best witnessed during Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution. The Biden administration from its outset wished to neuter immigration law. It sought to alter radically the demography of the U.S. by stopping the border wall and allowing into the United States anyone who could walk across the southern border...

What shameless act or felonious activity was not evidenced on Hunter Biden's laptop? Racist attitudes toward Asians? Soliciting prostitution? Felonious use of drugs? Photographed nudity and perverse sex? Admissions to illicit foreign shakedowns? Hunter all but accused his own father, President Joe Biden, of also being on the foreign take: "I hope you all can do what I did and pay for everything for this entire family ... Unlike Pop I won't make you give me half your salary."...

Joe Biden lied repeatedly when he claimed he knew nothing of his son Hunter's influence-peddling businesses. The president further prevaricated that he had no involvement in Hunter's various shake down schemes. Yet, the media continued to misinform by serially ignoring these facts...

Despite years of Biden family and media disinformation, we are finally learning that President Joe Biden really did fire Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin for looking into state corruption involving the oil company Burisma and Hunter Biden -- and ultimately Joe Biden himself...

Imagine if the United States treated China in the same way it does us? What if American companies simply ignored Chinese copyrights and patents, and stole Chinese ideas, inventions and intellectual property, as they pleased and with impunity? What if the American government targeted Chinese industries by dumping competing American export products at below the cost of production — to bankrupt Chinese competitors and corner their markets?...

Britain slept in the 1930s as an inevitable war with Hitler loomed. A lonely Winston Churchill had only a few courageous partners to oppose the appeasement and incompetence of his conservative colleague Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. One of the most stalwart truth-tellers was a now little-remembered politico and public servant -- Leo Amery, a polymath and conservative member of Parliament...

Two sets of laws now operate in an increasingly unrecognizable America. Consider the matter of unlawfully removing and storing classified papers. Donald Trump may go to prison for removing contested White House files to his home. So far, Joe Biden seems exempt from just such legal jeopardy...

Current polls, pundits, and politicos insist that the 2024 race is a sure rematch between former President Donald Trump and incumbent President Joe Biden. It may well turn out that way. But in past election cycles, summer polls 15 months before the general election usually did not mean much...

The end of affirmative action was inevitable. The only surprise was that such intentions gone terribly wrong lasted so long. First, supporters of racial preferences always pushed back the goal posts for the program's success. Was institutionalized reverse bias to last 20 years, 60 years, or ad infinitum?...

President Joe Biden, the Biden grifting conglomerate, the Department of Justice, and the FBI under its fourth consecutive weaponized director, are in danger of subverting the American system of law. They are in various ways undermining the tradition of self-reported income tax computation and voluntary compliance...

Wokeness was envisioned as a new reboot of the coalition of the oppressed. Those purportedly victimized by traditional America would find "intersectional" solidarity in their victimhood owing to the supposed sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia and other alleged American sins, past and present...

Walt Nauta is a 10-year veteran of the Navy and served as an aide to former President Donald Trump both in and out of office. Special Counsel Jack Smith has now indicted him for allegedly "making false statements in interviews with the FBI." The indictment's subtext is that Nauta refused to cooperate with, and turn state's evidence to, the special counsel in its efforts to convict Trump...

Seventy-nine years ago this week, the Allies assaulted the Normandy beaches on D-Day, June 6, 1944. Their invasion marked the largest amphibious landing since the Persians under Xerxes invaded the Greek mainland in 480 B.C. Nearly 160,000 American, British, and Canadian soldiers stormed five beaches of Nazi-occupied France. The plan was to liberate western Europe after four years of occupation, push into Germany, and end the Nazi regime...

Conservatives and traditionalists are often exasperated at the ongoing woke cultural revolution in their midst. How can America be turned upside down, as it is, when there is little public support for the things happening around us? They don't see much backing for the current border policy and illegal immigration, yet it continues...

The Left is waging a full-fledged cultural revolution against traditional America. And the Maoist results are often as absurd as they are terrifying. Special-counsel John Durham just issued his final report on wrongdoing within the FBI, CIA, and the Department of Justice...

The most recent liberal ABC News/Washington Post poll showed President Joe Biden's approval rating at 36% -- the lowest in history for a president at this point in his first term. Biden's low popularity is no mystery. He inherited energy independence, affordable gas prices, historically low interest rates, low inflation, calm overseas, a low crime rate, and a largely closed border with legal-only immigration...

Recently, there has been a spate of horrific murders. The killers, whether committing mass shootings or single homicides, are hard to stereotype. They can be clearly either mentally ill or simply innately evil. They can kill for revenge, for ideological purposes, out of hatred, for notoriety -- or for no known reason at all...

The old cultural imperialism was supposedly greedy corporatism like Disneyland, McDonald's, and Starbucks sprouting up worldwide to supplant local competitors. But these businesses spread because they appealed to freewill consumer demand abroad. They were not imposed top down...

Fox News is reeling, both financially and with respect to its talent, after being drawn into a long lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems. The network just settled for an astounding $787.5 million and soon after released Tucker Carlson, the network's highest-rated host...

President Joe Biden is now 80 years old. He will be 82 when he campaigns for the 2024 presidency -- and a clearly debilitated 86 should he be elected and fill out his second term. He has been in government for over a half-century. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and current representative from California is 83...

Why is French President Emmanuel Macron cozying up to China while trashing his oldest ally, the United States? Why is there suddenly talk of discarding the dollar as the global currency? Why are Japan and India shrugging that they cannot follow the United States' lead in boycotting Russian oil?...

A transgender Tennessee mass shooter this week executed three adults and three nine-year-old children at a Nashville private Christian school. Supposedly she left behind her a manifesto justifying her mass murdering. As of this writing, law enforcement officials have declined to make the document public...

Ukrainians, and many Europeans and Americans, are defining an envisioned Ukrainian victory as the complete expulsion of all Russians from its 2013 borders. Or, as a Ukrainian national security chief put it, the war ends with Ukrainian tanks in Red Square. ...

When Constantinople finally fell to the Ottomans on Tuesday, May 29, 1453, the Byzantine Empire and its capital had up to that point survived for 1,000 years beyond the fall of the Western Empire at Rome. Always outnumbered in a sea of enemies, the Byzantines' survival had depended on its realist diplomacy of dividing its enemies, avoiding military quagmires, and ensuring constant deterrence...

Recently there were some remarkable online videos of a Portland, Oregon good Samaritan confronting shoplifters and forcing them to dump loads of their pilfered goods. More stunning, however, was the sheer outrage -- of the thieves! They pouted. They screamed. They resisted. How dare anyone stop them from stealing anything they wished...

The Ukraine mess is daily looking more like the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939, a meat grinder that took 500,000 lives. That three-year conflict became a savage proxy war and prelude for the belligerents of World War II. The Ukraine battlefield is proving to be a similar laboratory of death. New lethal weaponry and tactics are introduced, modified -- and always improved -- from drones to guided missiles to internet-fed artillery...

A recent epidemic of airline near misses deserves both attention and reflection. In mid-December, a San Francisco-bound United Airlines Boeing 777-200 airliner, just a little over a minute after taking off from Maui, Hawaii, suddenly dived. It lost more than half its altitude and came within 800 feet of crashing into the Pacific Ocean before pulling up...

After listening to the State of the Union address, Americans know why the latest Reuters poll has President Joe Biden at 41% approval. Vice President Kamala Harris polls even lower -- despite the obsequious efforts of the most biased media in history that has, in effect, merged with the Democratic Party...

Recently an unarmed 29-year-old African American, Tyre Nichols, was brutally beaten to death by five Black Memphis police officers. They were charged with murder. All belonged to a special crime unit known as the Scorpions. Both the victimizers and victim were Black. The Memphis police chief is Black. The assistant police chief is Black...

Former President Donald Trump for now certainly seems to have had more documents labeled "classified" at Mar-a-Lago in Florida than did President Joe Biden at his various homes in Delaware. Yet otherwise, the comparisons between the two cases, contrary to popular punditry, hardly favor Biden...

Left-wing Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador recently praised a visiting President Joe Biden: "Just imagine: There are 40 million Mexicans in the United States -- 40 million who were born here in Mexico, (or) who are the children of people who were born in Mexico!"...

Did someone or something seize control of the United States? What happened to the U.S. border? Where did it go? Who erased it? Why and how did 5 million people enter our country illegally? Did Congress secretly repeal our immigration laws? Did President Joe Biden issue an executive order allowing foreign nationals to walk across the border and reside in the United States as they pleased?...

The old antisemitism was more a right-wing than a left-wing phenomenon -- perhaps best personified by the now-withered Ku Klux Klan. A new antisemitism followed from the campus leftism of the 1960s. It arose from and was masked by a general hatred of Israel, following the Jewish state's incredible victory in the 1967 Six-Day War...

In a famous exchange in the The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway wrote: "How did you go bankrupt?" Bill asked. "Two ways," Mike said. "Gradually, then suddenly." "Gradually" and "suddenly" applies to higher education's implosion. During the 1990s "culture wars" universities were warned that their chronic tuition hikes above the rate of inflation were unsustainable...

Before the midterm November elections, Sam Bankman-Fried was a left-wing billionaire heartthrob. He properly grew up on the Stanford campus, where his parents were well-known left-wing activist law professors. He went to a tony prep school and on to MIT...

Team Trump has sometimes compared former President Donald Trump's current quest for a non-sequential second term to two-term President Grover Cleveland's similar three election bids. Cleveland remains our only elected president (1884) to have lost a reelection bid (1888) -- in a disputed vote -- only to be reelected four years later in 1892...

First, you would surrender our prior energy independence. Reduce new gas and oil leases on federal lands to the lowest levels of any president in history. Cut back production at precisely the time the world is emerging from a two-year lockdown with pent-up consumer demand...

Who or what was responsible for the Republican nationwide collapse in the midterms? After all, pundits, politicos, and pollsters all predicted a "red tsunami." Moreover, the average loss of any president in his first midterm is 25 House seats. And when his approval sinks to or below 43% -- in the fashion of President Joe Biden -- the loss, on average, expands to over 40 seats...

What, if anything, did the midterms tell us about the country — other than underwhelming Republicans could still take the House and Senate? During the COVID-19 lockdowns, American elections radically changed to mail-in and early voting. They did so in a wild variety of state-by-state ways. Add ranked voting and a required majority margin to the mess and the result is that once cherished Election Day balloting becomes increasingly irrelevant...

As the midterms approach, one way of looking at America's current disaster is that we, the American people, were lab rats. And since 2021, the Left were the mad scientists, eager to try out their crackpot leftist experiments on us. The result is that the housing market is tottering on the verge of collapse...

Our two parties have both changed, and that explains why one will win, and one lose in the midterm elections. The old Democrats have faded away after being overwhelmed by radicals and socialists. Moderates who once embraced former President Bill Clinton's opportunistic "third way" are now either irrelevant or nonexistent...

A Democratic myth has arisen that former President Donald Trump's denial of the accuracy of the 2020 vote was "unprecedented." Unfortunately, the history of U.S. elections is often a story of both legitimate and illegitimate election denialism. The 1800, 1824, 1876, and 1960 elections were all understandably questioned. In some of these cases, a partisan House of Representatives decided the winner...

The Left used to accuse imperialist, resource-hungry Yanquis in Washington of cutting selfish deals with illiberal dictatorships in Latin America to grab their natural resources. How odd then that President Joe Biden is now begging the despicable Maduro regime in Venezuela -- corrupt, murderous, and anti-American -- to produce more of its oil solely to send northward to America...

President Joe Biden, the nominal head of the Democratic Party, is 79. But he increasingly acts and sounds 89. Recently, Biden has pivoted repeatedly on stage with his arm outstretched to shake the hand -- of someone not there. On one recent occasion Biden called out for Rep. Jackie Walorski, R-Ind., who passed away in a car crash in early August. He was insistent, shouting to the crowd, "Jackie, are you here? Where's Jackie? I think she wasn't going to be here -- to help make this a reality."...

Civilization is fragile. It hinges on ensuring the stuff of life. To be able to eat, to move about, to have shelter, to be free from state or tribal coercion, to be secure abroad, and safe at home -- only that allows cultures to be freed from the daily drudgery of mere survival...

Martha's Vineyard has been all over the news. The tony resort community so loves aiding and comforting the undocumented immigrants who were flown in from Florida that it hugged them -- for all of 48 hours. Oddly, the Left became unhinged when red-state governors -- whose states the last two years were flooded with some 3 million people who entered the country illegally -- finally decided to spread welcoming chores among affluent blue-state communities...

Russia started the war with Ukraine in late February with a shock-and-awe effort to grab Kyiv. It failed both to decapitate the government and absorb half the country in one fell swoop. Soon the conflict descended into a war of attrition in Eastern Ukraine over the occupied majority Russian-speaking borderlands...

The United States obsesses over whether biological men can compete in women's sports as transgender females. Crime is spiking at levels not seen in 40 years. But some consider it racist to suggest that arrests, indictments, convictions, and incarcerations deter crime...

When the original strain of COVID-19 arrived in spring 2020, a pandemic soon swept the country. By far most survived COVID. But hundreds of thousands did not. American deaths now number well over 1 million. Amid the tragedy, there initially was some hope that the pernicious effects of the disease would all disappear upon recovery among the nearly 99% who survived the initial infection...

The late spring scenario of a massive GOP win -- in historic proportions analogous to 1938, 1994, or 2010 -- is said now to be "iffy." The Left boasts that it now has a chance at keeping the House, with even better odds for maintaining control over the Senate...

As President Joe Biden's polls stagnate and the midterms approach, we are now serially treated to yet another progressive melodrama about the dangers of a supposed impending radical right-wing violent takeover. This time the alleged threat is a Neanderthal desire for a "civil war."...

The FBI is dissolving before our eyes into a rogue security service akin to those in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. Take the FBI's deliberately asymmetrical application of the law. This week the bureau surprise-raided the home of former President Donald Trump -- an historical first...

For years, European policymakers had assured the world that the relatively rapid "transition" to "green" energy was the world's preordained future -- regardless of the costs. Accordingly, many European Union governments followed the advice of green experts. They eagerly shut down coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants to transition immediately to "renewable energy."...

Five months after Russia invaded Ukraine, the war is now reduced to one of attrition. The current dirty, grinding slog is fought mostly with artillery and rockets. Everything from Ukraine's shopping centers to apartment buildings -- and the civilians in them -- are Russian targets...

The Left should be ecstatic that President Joe Biden has given them everything they wanted. The Left likes inflation. It reduces the value of old money by printing lots of new money. Those richer who have it, lose the value of their money; those poorer who don't have any money, suddenly do...

In a run-up to what is likely to be a 2024 presidential bid, California Governor Gavin Newsom hit upon the bizarre idea of boasting in commercials that California is America's true "free" state. Part of his ad campaign is to attack Florida -- currently run by Newsom's possible rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis...

"Help wanted" and "Now hiring" signs are everywhere. Flights, construction projects, and health care services are delayed -- or unavailable -- due to labor shortages. Hourly and monthly wages spiral. There is a growing disequilibrium between the number of available jobs and the declining pool of workers needed to fill them...

Modern progressives assume moral and intellectual authority. Consequently, their supposedly superior ends naturally justify almost any means necessary to achieve them. Among the elite, the Democrats' "blue-wall" states were once considered a testament to the wisdom of the Electoral College. When that wall crumbled in 2016 to Donald Trump, the Electoral College suddenly was blasted as a relic of our anti-democratic founders...

Republican pundits and conservative activists are debating whether they can win in 2024 with the successful Trump agenda, but without the controversial former President Donald Trump as their nominee. The Democrats have a similar, but far more serious dilemma with President Joe Biden as the Democratic Party's nominee in 2024...

Congress should investigate fully the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol -- and similar recent riots at iconic federal sites. But unfortunately, it never will. Why not? The current committee is not bipartisan. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., forbade Republican nominees traditionally selected by the House minority leader to serve on the committee...

I recently led a group of about 100 citizens to tour Israel for nearly two weeks. Before returning to the United States, all participants had to indicate their vaccination status and take a COVID-19 test for reentry. Anxieties swept the group as Israeli testers swabbed them...

Former President Donald Trump has signaled he will announce his presidential intentions after the November midterm elections. Yet his record of endorsements is quite mixed. By the sheer numbers of winning primary candidates his stamp of approval is impressive, but in a few of the most important races, not so much...

As the nation sinks inexplicably into self-created crisis after crisis, debate rages whether President Joe Biden is incompetent, mean-spirited, or an ideologue who feels the country's mess is his success. A second national discussion revolves around who actually is overseeing the current national catastrophe, given Biden's frequent bewilderment and cognitive challenges...

If an administration deliberately wished to cause havoc on the border, to ensure fuel was nearly unaffordable, to create a crime wave, to spark 1970s hyperinflation, and to rekindle racial tensions, what would it have done differently than what President Joe Biden has done?...

Americans are now entering uncharted, revolutionary territory. They may witness things over the next five months that once would have seemed unimaginable. Until the Ukrainian conflict, we had never witnessed a major land war inside Europe directly involving a nuclear power...

Court packing -- the attempt to enlarge the size of the Supreme Court for short-term political purposes -- used to be a dirty word in the history of American jurisprudence. The tradition of a nine-person Supreme Court is now 153 years old. The last attempt to expand it for political gain was President Franklin Roosevelt's failed effort in 1937. FDR's gambit was so blatantly political that even his overwhelming Democratic majority in Congress rebuffed him...

Elon Musk has finally managed to buy Twitter. And the moment he did, the enraged Left flipped out. Abruptly leftists began trashing their favorite electronic communications platform as the domain of the nation's elite, professional classes. Had they just discovered that they had been racists and privileged users all this time?...

America these last 14 months resembles a dystopia. It is becoming partly the world of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and partly the poet Homer's land of the Lotus-Eaters. Nothing seems to be working. And no one in control seems to care. The once secure border of 2020 vanished. Two-million people have crossed the southern border illegally in the last 12 months. Millions more are on the way...

Americans, like the planet's other 7.5 billion people, are not prone to talk or think much about nuclear weapons. Of course, some of us are old enough to remember how "mutually assured destruction," or MAD, was supposed to ensure the general peace. Some recall the eerie Cold War-era nuclear bomb movies like "Dr. Strangelove" or "Fail Safe" or the more recent post-nuclear Armageddon films like "The Book of Eli."...

Even a truncated Russian Federation has four times the pre-war population of Ukraine. It enjoys well over 10 times the Ukrainian gross domestic product. Russia covers almost 30 times Ukraine's area. And how does Ukraine expel Russian troops from its borders when its Western allies must put particular restrictions on their life-giving military and financial aid?...

There are several historical referents we should keep in mind about Ukraine war. First, no-fly zones. Lots of Westerners are calling for NATO aircraft to establish a no-fly zone above Ukraine to stop Russian bombing of Ukrainian cities. That is a terrible idea. Russian planes can still launch missiles from the nearby airspace of Russia and Belarus. No nation in history has declared a no-fly zone against an adversarial nuclear power...

President Joe Biden believes Ukraine war will mark the start of a "new world order." In the middle of the COVID pandemic, Klaus Schwab and global elites likewise announced a "great reset." Accordingly, the nations of the world would have to surrender their sovereignty to an international body of experts. They would enlighten us on taxes, diversity, and green policies...

One -- Reassuring an enemy what one will not do ensures that the enemy will do just that and more. Unpredictability and occasional enigmatic silence bolster deterrence. But President Joe Biden's predictable reassurance to Russian President Vladimir Putin that he will show restraint means Putin likely will not...

Thousands are dying from Russian missiles and bombs in the suburbs of Ukraine. In response, the Biden Administration's climate-change envoy, multimillionaire and private-jet-owning John Kerry, laments that Russian President Vladimir Putin might no longer remain his partner in reducing global warming...

The Democrats will suffer historic losses in the November midterms. This disaster for their party will come about not just because of the Afghanistan debacle, an appeased Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine, the destruction of the southern border, the supply chain mess, or their support for critical race theory demagoguery...

Hillary Clinton's never-ending shenanigans in 2015-2016 could be summarized as an attempted slow-motion coup. Four years of national hysteria, a divided nation, and dangerous new tensions with Russia were some of the wages of Clinton's machinations...

What ultimately destroyed the evil empires of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were bankrupt dogmas. Crackpot ideology destroyed free expression. It ruined meritocracy and ensured unequal application of the laws -- and so paved the way for far worse. The Nazi idea of a superior Aryan race adjudicated everything from physics to tank design. Soviet commissars did the same, subordinating rational thought to communist agendas...

One way of understanding the 2009-2014 Obama Administration policy of "reset" with Vladimir Putin's Russia is to recall two iconic incidents. The first was the 2009 "reset." Newly appointed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that she would pursue a "reset" detente with Russia. America would relax the prior Bush Administration's mild ostracism of Russia after its 2008 invasion of Georgia and softly start anew...

Americans want an autonomous Ukraine to survive. They hope the West can stop Russian President Vladimir Putin's strangulation of both Ukraine and NATO. Yet Americans do not want their troops to venture across the world to Europe's backyard to fight nuclear Russia to ensure that Ukraine stays independent...

In modern times, as in ancient Rome, several nations have suffered a "systems collapse." The term describes the sudden inability of once-prosperous populations to continue with what had ensured the good life as they knew it. Abruptly, the population cannot buy, or even find, once plentiful necessities. They feel their streets are unsafe. Laws go unenforced or are enforced inequitably. Every day things stop working. The government turns from reliable to capricious if not hostile...

From the moment COVID-19 appeared, the pandemic became inseparable from politics. Political frenzy was inevitable since the SARS-CoV-2 virus may have escaped from a level-4 security virology lab in Wuhan, China. The rapid-fire spread soon threatened to indict the Chinese communist government for nearly destroying the world economy and killing millions...

The last two years have seen an unprecedented escalation in a decades-long war on the American past. But there are lots of logical flaws in attacking prior generations in U.S. history. Critics assume their own judgmental generation is morally superior to those of the past. So, they use their own standards to condemn the mute dead who supposedly do not measure up to them...

What is behind recent pessimistic appraisals of democracy's future, from Hillary Clinton, Adam Schiff, Brian Williams and other elite intellectuals, media personalities, and politicians on the Left? Some are warning about its possible erosion in 2024. Others predict democracy's downturn as early 2022, with scary scenarios of "autocracy" and Trump "coups."...

The "woke" movement was giddy after Jan. 20, 2021. The Left controlled both houses of Congress. Joe Biden was drafted as the necessary veneer of 1980s Democratic normality to ram through an otherwise hard Left agenda. All the major cultural, financial, economic, entertainment, and media institutions had played various roles in seeing former President Donald Trump not just defeated, but also impeached, twice. He was written off as persona non grata after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol...

In a recent online exchange, the YouTuber Casey Neistat posted his fury after his car was broken into and the contents stolen. Los Angeles, he railed, was turning into a "3rd-world [expletive]-hole of a city." The multimillionaire actor Seth Rogen chastised Neistat for his anger...

Millions of citizens long ago concluded that professional sports, academia, and entertainment were no longer disinterested institutions, but far Left and deliberately hostile to Middle America. Yet American conservatives still adamantly supported the nation's traditional investigatory, intelligence, and military agencies -- especially when they came under budgetary or cultural attacks...

The Washington, D.C.-based Federal Bureau of Investigation has lost all credibility as a disinterested investigatory agency. Now we learn from a whistleblower the agency was allegedly investigating moms and dads worried about the teaching of critical race theory in their kids' schools...

"History will figure that out on its own." That is what Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) recently replied to Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. In a heated congressional exchange, Fauci derided the idea the COVID-19 pandemic was due to the leak of a dangerous virus, engineered in the Chinese Wuhan virology lab — and in part funded by U.S. health agencies, on the prompt of Fauci himself...

In a controversial passage in Plato's "Republic," Socrates introduced the idea of the "noble lie" ("gennaios pseudos"). A majestic fiction, he says, could sometimes serve society by persuading uninformed citizens of something good for them. Ever since, many prevaricators have used the excuse that they lied for the common good...

Sheer chaos and anarchy on the border? Afghanistan — the most humiliating defeat in recent U.S. military history? A labor-starved supply chain in shambles and holiday shelves emptying out? The worst inflation in 30 years that seems soon ready to match Carter-era levels?...

In A.D., 286 the Roman emperor Diocletian split in half the huge Roman Empire administratively -- and peacefully -- under the control of two emperors. A Western empire included much of modern-day Western Europe and northwest Africa. The Eastern half controlled Eastern Europe and parts of Asia and northeastern Africa...

Only a little more than half of the current world's 7 billion people are citizens of fully consensual governments. That lucky 50% alone enjoys constitutionally protected freedoms. Most are also Western. Or at least they reside in nations that have become "Westernized."...

"Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."...

Deterrence is the ancient ability to scare somebody off from hurting you, your friends or your interests -- without a major war. Desire peace? Then be prepared for war. Or so the Romans believed. It's an easily understood concept in the abstract. But deterrence still remains a mystical quality in the concrete since it is only acquired with difficulty and yet easily forfeited...

The scientific method used to govern much of popular American thinking. In empirical fashion, scientists advised us to examine evidence and data, and then by induction come to rational hypotheses. The enemies of "science" were politics, superstition, bias and deduction...

California once was run by conservatives and mostly centrist Democrats. True paleo-liberal governors such as Pat Brown greatly expanded the welfare state. But they also believed in pushing integration and building freeways, dams, aqueducts and power plants, while preventing forest fires, directing the mentally ill into state hospitals, and ensuring the state enhanced the housing, timber, oil and gas, nuclear and agricultural industries...

The American-nurtured Afghan military of the last 20 years that had suffered thousands of prior casualties evaporated in a few hours in the encirclement of Kabul. Enlistees apparently calculated that their own meager chances with the premodern Taliban were still better than fighting as a dependency of the postmodern United States -- despite its powerful diversity training programs...

Americans are growing angrier by the day, but in a way different from prior sagebrush revolts such as the 1960s Silent Majority or the tea party movement over a decade ago. The rage this time is not just fueled by conservatives. For the first time in their lives, Americans of all classes and races are starting to fear a self-created apocalypse that threatens their family's safety and the American way of life...

Most Americans were as indifferent to the U.S. women's soccer team's recent loss to Sweden in the Olympics as they were excited about the team's World Cup win in 2019. In between was the team's nonstop politicking, from whining about compensation to virtue-signaling their disrespect for the United States. The celebrity face of the team, perennial scold Megan Rapinoe, is going the way of teenage grouch Greta Thunberg, becoming more pinched the more she is tuned out...

In the old days, Democrats had predictable agendas, supposedly focused on individual rights, the “little guy” and distrust of the military-industrial complex. The left, often on spec, blasted the wealthy, whether the “lucre” was self-made or inherited. ...

How often during the last year of wokeness have middle- and lower-class Americans listened to multimillionaires of all races and genders lecture them on their various pathologies and oppressions? University presidents with million-dollar salaries virtue-signal on the cheap their own sort of "unearned white privilege."...

Traditionalist and conservative America once was the U.S. military's greatest defender. Bipartisan conservatives in Congress ensured generous Pentagon budgets. When generals, active or retired, became controversial, conservative America usually could be counted on to stick with them...

There are lots of reasons why wokeism spread like wildfire once America lost its collective mind during the pandemic, quarantine, self-induced recession and rioting of 2020. Wokeism was never really about racism, sexism or other isms. For some, it illustrated a psychological pathology of projection: transferring one's own prejudices onto others in order to alleviate or mask them...

For over a year, the American establishment and media have ostracized anyone who dared to connect the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Then, suddenly and without apologies for their past demagoguery, "journalists" and "experts" conceded the Wuhan lab may well have been the most likely genesis...

Starry-eyed radicals in the 1960s and 1970s dreamed that they either were going to take over America or destroy it. One of their favorite mottos was "Change it or lose it," even as protests focused on drugs, music, race, class, sex, fashion -- almost anything and everything...

During America's first-ever national lockdown, thousands of unelected bureaucrats, as well as federal and state governments, assumed enormous powers not usually accorded to them. They picked and chose which businesses could stay open without much rationale. They sent the infected into nursing homes occupied by the weak and vulnerable...

The COVID-19 pandemic is ending with mass vaccinations. So is the national quarantine. The rioting, looting and arson that began in the summer of 2020 is finally sputtering out. The acrimony over the 2020 election is fading. Trump Derangement Syndrome became abstract when Donald Trump left office and was ostracized from social media...

With more than 3,000 rockets having been fired into Israel by Hamas recently, the Democratic Party seems paralyzed over how to respond to the latest Middle East war. It is not just that they fear that "The Squad," Black Lives Matter, the shock troops of antifa, and woke institutions such as academia and the media are now unapologetically anti-Israel. ...

Human nature stays the same across time and space. That is why there used to be predictable political, economic and social behavior that all countries understood. The supply of money governs inflation. Print it without either greater productivity or more goods and services, and the currency cheapens. Yet America apparently rejects that primordial truism...

What ultimately ended the nihilist Soviet system? Was it not that Russians finally tired of the Kremlin’s lies and hypocrisies that permeated every facet of their falsified lives? Here are 10 symptoms of Sovietism. Ask yourself whether we are headed down this same road to perdition...

Nothing is stranger than the contemporary American university. Not long ago, Americans used to idolize their universities. Indeed, in science, math, engineering, medicine and business, many of these meritocratic departments and schools remain among the top-ranked in the world...

As Americans know from their own illustrious history, any nation's well-being hinges on only a few factors. Its prosperity, freedom and overall stability depend on its constitutional and political stability. A secure currency and financial order are also essential, as is a strong military...

Wars often arise from uncertainty. When strong countries appear weak, truly weaker ones take risks they otherwise would not. Sloppy braggadocio and serial promises of restraint can trigger wars, too. Empty tough talk can needlessly egg on aggressors. But mouthing utopian bromides convinces bullies that their targets are too sophisticated to counter aggression...

Ed Bastian made $17 million in 2019 as chief executive officer of Delta Air Lines, Georgia’s largest employer. Bastian just blasted Georgia’s new voting law. He thinks it is racist to require the same sort of ID to vote that Delta requires for its passengers to check in. ...

There are 10 new ideas that are changing America, maybe permanently. 1) Money is a construct. It can be created from thin air. Annual deficits and aggregate national debt no longer matter much. Prior presidents ran up huge annual deficits, but at least there were some concessions that the money was real and had to be paid back. ...

Last week in Anchorage, Alaska, Chinese diplomats dressed down Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan. Both seem stunned by the broadsides. Not since newly elected President John Kennedy was humiliated at the Vienna summit in June 1961 by USSR strongman Nikita Khrushchev have American diplomats been so roughly manhandled by a Communist government...

The U.S. military has turned its wrath inward on Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin expressed his "revulsion" after Carlson questioned the role of women in combat. Keeping women mostly out of combat had been the U.S. military's centuries-long orthodoxy until just a few years ago...

Six weeks ago, Americans were assured that Donald Trump had left the presidency disgraced and forever ruined politically. Trump was the first president to be impeached twice, and first to be tried as a private citizen when out of office. He was the first to be impeached without the chief justice of the United States presiding over his trial...

"Si Monumentum Requiris, Circumaudi." Rush Limbaugh created modern national talk radio as we now know it. For over three decades he kept at rapt attention -- live from noon to 3 p.m. on weekdays -- the largest conservative audience in broadcast history. More than 15 million tuned in each week...

The Democratically controlled Senate spends thousands of collective hours conducting an impeachment trial against a president who is no longer president. The acquittal is predetermined, as in the first impeachment effort a year ago -- and known to be so to the Democratic prosecutors...

The corruption of the Renaissance Church prompted the Reformation, which in turn sparked a Counter-Reformation of reformist, and more zealous, Catholics. The cultural excesses and economic recklessness of the Roaring '20s were followed by the bleak, dour and impoverished years of the Great Depression...

The new AT age -- "After Trump" -- began on either Election Day, Nov. 3, or on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20. But either way, reality as we had known it for four years has been abruptly reinvented. Pfizer had hinted that a vaccine could be ready in late October. Then, mysteriously, it wasn't. Then, stranger still, it appeared -- a few days after Election Day...

The newly formed President's Advisory 1776 Commission just released its report. The group was chaired by Churchill historian and Hillsdale College President Dr. Larry P. Arnn. The vice chair was Dr. Carol M. Swain, a retired professor of political science. (Full disclosure: I was a member of the commission.)...

Two days after the 2020 election, a defiant Kathy Griffin retweeted the notorious picture of her holding a prop that looked like the bloody head of a decapitated Donald Trump. Earlier last year, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, tweeted out a call to his followers to destroy Israel. Both tweets passed the censorship rules of Twitter's 20-something judges in San Francisco...

Amid the current hysteria of toppling statues and renaming things, we keep mindlessly expanding the cancel culture. We are now seeing efforts to ban classics of Western and American literature. These hallowed texts are suddenly being declared racist or sexist by preening moralists...

The year 2020 is now commonly dubbed the annus horribilis -- "the horrible year." The last 10 months certainly have been awful. But then so was 1968, when both Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. The Tet Offensive escalated the Vietnam War and tore America apart. Race and anti-war riots rocked our major cities. Protesters fought with police at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. A new influenza virus, H3N2 (the "Hong Kong flu"), killed some 100,000 Americans...

After Nov. 3, the meaning of some words and concepts abruptly changed. Have you noticed how new realities have replaced old ones? Media cross-examination of the president is now an out-of-date idea. The time for gotcha questions has come and gone. Why ask a president whether he is a traitor or a crook when you can focus on his favorite flavor of milkshake or compliment him on his socks?...

A half-century ago, progressives used to push limitless free expression, blasting conservatives for their allegedly blinkered traditionalism. They boasted of obliterating once-normal boundaries in art, music and literature to allow nudity, profanity, sexuality and anti-American boilerplate...

There is as yet no known, easily accessible cure for COVID-19. Over the past year, lots of old and new drugs and supplements -- Ivermectin, azithromycin, remdesivir, hydroxychloroquine, vitamin D, vitamin C, zinc, aspirin, Pepcid and others -- have shown at least some anecdotal value in ameliorating the effects of early-stage COVID-19. Clinical physicians treating patients in hospitals often disagree with the research scientists conducting trials on the efficacy of all these treatments...

Donald Trump is nearing a crossroads. Those who allege that he has endangered the tradition of smooth presidential transitions by not conceding immediately after the media declared him the loser suffer amnesia. When Trump was elected in 2016, the Washington establishment lost its collective mind. The top echelon of the FBI and CIA were still spreading a fraudulent Christopher Steele dossier paid for by the campaign of his opponent, Hillary Clinton, and the Democratic National Committee...

Where has the coronavirus gone? Nowhere. The pandemic has gained a second wind, even as it is mysteriously scarcer in postelection headlines. If anything, COVID-19 seems more contagious as cold temperatures arrive, people stay in indoors and perhaps their vitamin D levels taper off...

I once wrote that whenever Donald Trump exits office, he will likely leave as a "tragic hero." Over two millennia ago, the Athenian tragedian Sophocles first described the archetype in his portraits of an angry and old but still fearsome Ajax, and heroic but stubborn and self-fixated Antigone...

A republic is not just a nation of laws. It also relies on its good-faith watchdogs, such as honest pollsters, the media and bipartisan institutions. We still didn't know the final result of Tuesday's presidential election as of Wednesday night. But there are lots of reasons to worry that something in America has gone terribly wrong...

In traditional presidential campaigns, the two major parties offer contrasting ideas and policies. The Democratic and Republican candidates barnstorm the nation to make their cases. Not this year. Democratic nominee Joe Biden is more or less a virtual candidate, mostly communicating from home via Zoom. He offers few detailed alternatives to the first four years of the Trump administration...

The coronavirus, widespread quarantines, an unprecedented self-induced recession, and unchecked rioting, looting and protesting -- all in a presidential election year -- are radically disrupting American habits and behavior. Rents, home prices and office occupancy rates in major cities, especially on the two coasts, are dropping fast. Techies and young professionals have discovered that they can work from home without paying sky-high housing costs in order to be close to the office...

In the 21st century, hallmark American and international institutions have lost much of their prestige and respect. Politics and biases explain the lack of public confidence in organizations and institutions such as the World Health Organization, the Commission on Presidential Debates, the Nobel Peace Prize, the Pulitzer Prizes and the Academy Awards...

California's state legislature just passed, and Gov. Gavin Newsom signed, Assembly Bill 3121 to explore providing reparations to California's African American population -- 155 years after the abolition of slavery. Apparently, when California's one-party government cannot find solutions to current existential crises, it turns to divisive issues that have little to do with the safety and well-being of its 40 million citizens...

The news media until recently had rarely criticized the medical advice of experts -- especially those who worked for federal bureaucracies, international organizations or elite universities. Yet the much-praised Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, has demonstrably weakened the effort to fight COVID-19...

Without common sense in government, civilization cannot continue. After the summer protests and rioting in many large cities, activists demanded a defunding, or at least radical pullbacks, of the police. So-called crime experts often concurred. So some city governments ignored public warnings and diminished their police presence despite a sharp rise in crime in many cities. Looting and arson were often ignored...

In 2017, the liberal Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University found that 93% of CNN's coverage of the Trump administration was negative. The center found similarly negative Trump coverage at other major news outlets...

Almost daily, Greek and Turkish aircraft and ships fight mock battles over disputed oil and gas rights in the eastern Mediterranean. Since the loss of much of the Christian Balkans to the Ottomans in the 15th century, Greece and what would later become modern Turkey have been rivals, outright enemies and often at war...

Joe Biden and his handlers know that he should be out and about, weighing in daily on the issues of the campaign. In impromptu interviews, Biden should be offering alternative plans for dealing with the virus, the lockdown, the economic recovery, the violence and the looting, and racial tensions...

It is hard to tell what the current revolutionary violence in our major cities is all about. So far, hundreds of police have been injured, dozens of people have been killed, and we have seen billions of dollars in property and collateral damage. Ostensibly, many of the summer demonstrations were in protest over the gruesome detention and death of George Floyd while in Minneapolis police custody on May 25...

President Trump recently ordered a 12,000-troop reduction in American military personnel stationed in Germany. That leaves about 24,000 American soldiers still in the country. A little more than half of the troops being withdrawn will return home. The rest will be redeployed to other NATO member nations such as Belgium, Italy and perhaps Baltic and Eastern European countries...

Several of the 2020 Democratic primary candidates favored the abolishment of the Electoral College. Or, as once-confident candidate Elizabeth Warren put it, "I plan to be the last American president to be elected by the Electoral College." Furor over the Electoral College among the left arose from the 2000 and 2016 elections. Al Gore and Hillary Clinton, respectively, won the popular votes. But, like three earlier presidents, they lost the Electoral College voting -- and with it the presidency...

This month marks the 75th anniversary of the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan, at Hiroshima on Aug. 6, and Nagasaki on Aug. 9. Each year, Americans argue about our supposed moral shortcomings for being the only nation to have used an atomic weapon in war...

Cultural suicide used to be a popular diagnosis of why things suddenly just quit. Historians such as Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee cited social cannibalism to explain why once-successful states, institutions and cultures simply died off. Their common explanation was that the arrogance of success ensures lethal consequences. Once elites became pampered and arrogant, they feel exempt from their ancestors' respect for moral and spiritual laws like thrift, moderation and transcendence...

In the 1960s and early '70s, the U.S. was convulsed by massive protests calling for radical changes in the country's attitudes on race, class, gender and sexual orientation. The Vietnam War and widespread college deferments were likely the fuel that ignited prior peaceful civil disobedience...

The National Football League celebrated its 100th anniversary last year. This should be a time of self-congratulation for the brutal sport, which has no similar counterpart outside the United States. The NFL's megaprofits dwarf those of other professional sports in the U.S. The Super Bowl, not the World Series, is America's national sports event...

A TikTok video that recently went viral on social media showed a recent Harvard graduate threatening to stab anyone who said "all lives matter." In her melodrama, she tried to sound intimidating with her histrionics. She won a huge audience as she intended. But her video also came to the attention of the company that was going to give her an internship later this summer, Deloitte, which decided it didn't want to add an intern who threatened to kill strangers who said something she didn't like...

When mobs tore down a statue of Ulysses S. Grant and defaced a monument to African American veterans of the Civil War, many people wondered whether the protesters had ever learned anything in high school or college. Did any of these iconoclasts know the difference between Grant and Robert E. Lee? Could they recognize the name "Gettysburg?" Could they even identify the decade in which the Civil War was fought?...

The old 2020 election was supposed to be about many familiar issues. It is not any more. Up until now, the candidates themselves would supposedly be the story in November. The left had cited Trump's tweets and erratic firings as windows into his dark soul...

Unlike coups or political revolutions, cultural revolutions don’t just change governments or leaders. Instead, they try to redefine entire societies. Their leaders call them “holistic” and “systemic.” Cultural revolutionaries attack the very referents of our daily lives. The Jacobins’ so-called Reign of Terror during the French Revolution slaughtered Christian clergy, renamed months and created a new supreme being Reason. Mao cracked down on supposed Western decadence like the wearing of eyeglasses and made peasants forge pot iron and intellectuals wear dunce caps.

The ancient Greeks created new words like "paradox" and "irony" to describe the wide gap between what people profess and assume, and what they actually do and suffer. Remember the blind prophet Teiresias of ancient drama. In the carnage of Athenian tragedy he alone usually ends up foreseeing danger better than did those with keen eyesight...

George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis last week when a police officer used brutally excessive force to arrest him. It was the latest in a string of high-profile cases nationwide in which citizens, most of them African Americans, died from reckless police force. Once again, protests over police brutality turned violent and rioting ensued...

The current U.S. budget deficit could soon exceed a record $4 trillion. The massive borrowing is being driven both by prior budget profligacy and a hurried effort by the Donald Trump administration to pump liquidity into a quarantined America. The shutdown has left the country on the cusp of a self-inflicted economic collapse not seen since the Great Depression...

Red- and blue-state America was already divided before the coronavirus epidemic hit. Globalization had enriched the East Coast and West Coast corridors but hollowed out much in between. The traditional values of small towns and rural counties were increasingly at odds with postmodern lifestyles in the cities...

Seventy-five years ago this month, Germany surrendered, ending the European theater of World War II. At the war's beginning, no one believed Germany would utterly collapse in May 1945. On the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, the day of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, German invaders were on the verge of capturing Moscow. Britain was isolated. London had barely survived a terrible German bombing during the Blitz...

Joe Biden is the apparent Democratic presidential nominee. After all, he had a seemingly insurmountable lead in delegates going into the rescheduled August convention in the postponed Democratic primary race. Biden was winning the nomination largely because he was not the socialist Bernie Sanders, who terrified the Democratic establishment...

Few Americans can remember past vice presidents such as Charles Curtis, Charles Dawes or Thomas Marshall. In more recent memory, almost no one can recall vice presidential nominees who lost such as William Miller, Sargent Shriver or Lloyd Bentsen. John Nance Garner served as Franklin D. ...

The world was a dangerous place before -- and will be after -- the coronavirus pandemic. While Americans debate the proper ongoing response to the virus and argue over the infection's origins, nature and trajectory, they may have tuned out other, often just as scary, news...

We are a few days away from a rendezvous with some tough conclusions about COVID-19. A number of concurrent developments are coming to a head. Most will bring light where so far there was only heat. Greater information about the virus might cause as much acrimony as conciliation. Some experts will be discredited, others reaffirmed...

Marshal Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto commanded the Imperial Japanese Navy in World War II until he was killed in April 1943. Despite the dialogue from the 1970 WWII film "Tora! Tora! Tora!" Yamamoto probably did not say in the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack, "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve."...

A current global myth alleges that America under the Trump administration is not leading the world fight against the coronavirus in its accustomed role as the postwar global leader. Yet the U.S. was the first major nation to issue a travel ban on flights from China, with Donald Trump making that announcement on Jan. 31. That was a bold act. It likely saved thousands endangered by Chinese perfidy and soon became a global model. None of the ban's loud critics are today demanding it be rescinded...

The ancient Greeks believed that true leadership in crisis came down to what they called pronoia -- the Greek word for "strategic foresight." Some statesman, such as Pericles and Themistocles, had it. Most others, such as the often brilliant and charismatic but impulsive Alcibiades, usually did not...

For most of early 2019, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden -- the declared custodian of liberalism who would continue the Obama glory years -- seemed unstoppable. He led all other rivals for months. Biden seemed above the fray. Many Democrats saw the pre-debate and pre-election race for the nomination as more of a Biden coronation than a contest...

The Chinese communist government increasingly poses an existential threat not just to its own 1.4 billion citizens but to the world at large. China is currently in a dangerously chaotic state. And why not, when a premodern authoritarian society leaps wildly into the brave new world of high-tech science in a single generation?...

All political parties and candidates have bad days. But the new progressive Democratic Party had four of its worst days in recent memory in a single week in February. On Feb. 3, the Iowa Caucuses imploded for the first time in their history. The new app-driven counting melted down, discrediting the very idea of caucusing in general...

When candidate Donald Trump campaigned on calling China to account for its trade piracy, observers thought he was either crazy or dangerous. Conventional Washington wisdom had assumed that an ascendant Beijing was almost preordained to world hegemony. Trump's tariffs and polarization of China were considered about the worst thing an American president could do...

An ancient habit of Western elites is a certain selectivity in condemnation. Sometimes Westerners apply critical standards to the West that they would never apply to other nations. My colleague at the Hoover Institution, historian Niall Ferguson, has pointed out that Swedish green-teen celebrity Greta Thunberg might be more effective in her advocacy for reducing carbon emissions by redirecting her animus. ...

Whether by accident or by deliberate osmosis, Israel and the U.S. have adopted similar solutions to their existential problems. Before 2002, during the various Palestinian intifadas, Israel suffered hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries from suicide bombers freely crossing from the West Bank and Gaza into Israel...

Despite its cool Green parties and ambitious wind and solar agendas, Europe remains by far the world's largest importer of oil and natural gas. Oil output in the North Sea and off the coast of Norway is declining, and the European Union is quietly looking for fossil fuel energy anywhere it can find it...

After losing its top strategist, military commander and arch-terrorist, Qassem Suleimani, the Iranian theocracy is weighing responses. One, Iran can quiet down and cease military provocations. After attacking tankers off its coast, destroying an oil refinery in Saudi Arabia, shooting down a U.S. drone and being responsible for the killing and wounding of Americans in Iraq, Iran could now keep quiet...

Seventy-five years ago, at the Battle of the Bulge (fought from Dec. 16, 1944, to Jan. 25, 1945), the United States suffered more casualties than in any other battle in its history. Some 19,000 Americans were killed, 47,500 wounded and 23,000 reported missing...

Former FBI Director James Comey and deputy director Andrew McCabe, former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper have lots of things in common. One, they ran the nation's key intelligence and investigatory agencies under former President Barack Obama. They were deeply involved in the "Russian collusion" hoax. And they participated in the surveillance of the Trump campaign and transition...