Donald Trump is waging a nonstop, all-encompassing war against progressive culture, in magnitude analogous to what 19th-century Germans once called a Kulturkampf. As a result, not even former President George W. Bush has incurred the degree of hatred from the left that is now directed at Trump. For most of his time in office, Trump, his family, his…

On May 23 of this year, President Trump gave Attorney General Bill Barr "full and complete authority" to declassify information relating to the actions of the FBI and intelligence community in investigating the 2016 Trump campaign. Granting Barr that authority "will help ensure that all Americans learn the truth about the events that…

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is desperate to translate the British public's June 2016 vote to leave the European Union into a concrete Brexit. But the real issue is far older and more important than whether 52 percent of Britain finally became understandably aggrieved by the increasingly anti-democratic and German-controlled European Union…

Mark Sanford, the former representative and governor of South Carolina, has now joined former representative Joe Walsh and former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld in challenging President Trump for the 2020 Republican presidential nomination. Of course they have no chance. But the hope of some Democrats and NeverTrumpers is that a primary challenge…

One wishes the media would stop using absurdly lazy phrases like "mandatory gun buybacks." Unless the politician they're talking about is in the business of selling firearms, it's impossible for him to "buy back" anything. No government official — not Joe Biden, not Beto O'Rourke, not any of the candidates who now support…

I sometimes ponder which among the political left’s subgroups tends to be the most unsavory.    Granted, there’s a great deal of overlap among those subgroups.  Nevertheless, they are in some ways discrete and distinguishable.  In terms of transparent insincerity, the climate alarmists maintain a wide lead. …

World War II ended 74 years ago. But even in the 21st century, the lasting effects endure, both psychological and material. After all, the war took more than 60 million lives, redrew the map of Europe and ended with the Soviet Union and the United States locked in a Cold War of nuclear superpowers. Japan and South Korea should logically remain natural…

The new report from the Justice Department inspector general proves beyond any doubt that fired FBI Director James Comey leaked sensitive law enforcement material in the Trump-Russia investigation. Doing so set a "dangerous example" for the bureau's other employees, Inspector General Michael Horowitz wrote. Still, Comey's supporters have…

Last week, entrepreneur and philanthropist David Koch passed away at the age of 79.  In an unsurprising yet nevertheless bleak register of the state of contemporary culture, seedier elements of the political left, who ironically accuse Donald Trump of degrading societal discourse, erupted in a ghoulish celebratory chorus.   For example…

So far, four Democratic presidential candidates — Eric Swalwell, John Hickenlooper, Seth Moulton and Jay Inslee — have dropped out of the 2020 race. What is amazing is that the number is only four, and that 21 Democrats are still running. Of the 21 still in the race, 14 are polling below 2.0 percent in the RealClearPolitics average…

What factors usually re-elect or throw out incumbent presidents? The economy counts most. Recessions, or at least chronic economic pessimism, sink incumbents. Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush were tagged with sluggish growth, high unemployment and a sense of perceived stagnation — and were easily defeated. The 2008 financial…

There will be much to learn in Inspector General Michael Horowitz's upcoming report on the Trump-Russia investigation, but most of it will likely boil down to just two questions: One, how much did the Obama Justice Department spy on the Trump campaign? And two, was it justified? Many Democrats would immediately protest the word "spying."…

Here are the ages that the top presidential candidates will be on Inauguration Day, 2021: Bernie Sanders, 79; Joe Biden, 78; Donald Trump, 74; and Elizabeth Warren, 71. If Sanders were elected and served two terms, he would be in office until age 87. If Biden did the same, he would serve until 86. If President Trump were re-elected, he would serve…

This week, Democratic Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro, who chairs the presidential campaign of his twin brother, Julian, tweeted the names and employers of more than 40 San Antonians who maxed out their donations to President Donald Trump's reelection campaign. Mind you, the federal maximum is $2,800 per individual, so we're not talking about nefarious…

Democrats by 2004 had become obsessed with defeating incumbent President George W. Bush. Four years earlier, in the 2000 election, Bush had won the Electoral College but lost the popular vote. Democrats were still furious that Bush supposedly had been "selected" by the Supreme Court over the contested vote tally in Florida rather than "…

Once you strip away all the hysteria and madness surrounding Donald Trump's presidency, you're left with a policy agenda of a populist, big-government Republican. Whether or not you have a moral or personal case against Trump himself, the president's stated policy positions fall well within the contours of traditional right-left politics. Can the…

If canceling an airline flight could help save the world from a looming existential threat, wouldn’t you gladly do so?  Particularly if the very act of flying was part of the causal sequence creating that existential threat?  Seems like a no-brainer, right?  If you answered, “of course,” then you’re apparently…

Former vice president and current presidential candidate Joe Biden has bragged on two occasions that he would like to beat up President Donald Trump. In March 2018, Biden huffed, "They asked me would I like to debate this gentleman, and I said no. I said, 'If we were in high school, I'd take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him."…

Twenty Democratic presidential candidates will debate Tuesday and Wednesday night. It will be the last time voters will see some of them on a debate stage. The Democratic National Committee's rules for inclusion in early debates — the first from NBC in late June in Miami, and the second from CNN this week in Detroit — were quite…

If Democrats believed that Robert Mueller would provide them with additional ammunition for an impeachment inquiry, they made an extraordinary miscalculation. Not only was Mueller often flustered and unprepared to talk about his own report — we now have to wonder to what extent he was even involved in the day-to-day work of the investigation…

Throughout his lengthy military and public service career, Robert Mueller built a reputation as an honorable man who served his country admirably.  This week, however, his legacy was largely reduced to rubble.  That’s the regrettable but inescapable takeaway from Mueller’s highly-anticipated testimony this week before the House…

Al Franken, the Minnesota Democrat and former "Saturday Night Live" star forced out of the Senate in late 2017 by #MeToo allegations, is back in the news. The New Yorker has published a long article suggesting Franken was "railroaded" — author Jane Mayer's word — and reporting that several of Franken's old…

The Treaty of Versailles was signed in Versailles, France, on June 28, 1919. Neither the winners nor the losers of World War I were happy with the formal conclusion to the bloodbath. The traditional criticism of the treaty is that the victorious French and British democracies did not listen to the pleas of leniency from progressive American President…

The summer season has ripped off the thin scab that covered an American wound, revealing a festering disagreement about the nature and origins of the United States. The San Francisco Board of Education recently voted to paint over, and thus destroy, a 1,600-square-foot mural of George Washington's life in San Francisco's George Washington High School…

Can a candidate who is leading the field by 12 points be weak? That's the question of Joe Biden's run for the Democratic presidential nomination. The fact is, Biden's campaign is showing signs of weakness. So is the candidate himself. And doing push-ups, as Biden suggested he might do to show up President Trump, won't make him any stronger. In mid…

In a recent interview with The New York Times, Attorney General William Barr reiterated his intention to find out why the Obama administration launched an investigation into the Republican Party presidential candidate's campaign during the 2016 campaign. If the political parties in the sentence above were reversed, we would be in the midst of the…

An epidemic of false identities, massaged resumes and warped ancestries has broken out among the current Democratic presidential primary candidates. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) for years claimed Native American ancestry. An embattled Warren ironically took a DNA test that only proved her critics' contention that she was no more of Native American…

The toxicity of the resistance to President Trump has risen in recent days, with the nation's most respected newspapers publishing rationalizations for denying Trump supporters public accommodation and for doxxing career federal employees, while a journalist found himself under physical attack from the so-called anti-fascist group Antifa, which has…

"The United States is running concentration camps on our southern border, and that is what they are." — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In April 1944, two Slovakian Jews named Alfred Wetzler and Rudolf Vrba escaped from Auschwitz and provided two of the first eyewitness accounts of the horrors of the European concentration camps. Both men…

Nine Democratic presidential hopefuls, including front-runners Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, flocked to the Poor People's Moral Action Congress on Monday, each trying to outpander their rivals and promise the most government handouts. It was an alarming spectacle for anyone who works for a living. These Democratic candidates don'…