One of the most durable conspiracy theories of our times finds Vladimir Putin recruiting a billionaire media personality named Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency. In some iterations of the tale, Trump is willingly serving his Kremlin comrades; in others, he is merely the victim of kompromat. In every version, he is an asset of a hostile government…

"We’ve never seen such a brazen attack on U.S. citizens."   That was the disquieting observation of security expert and University of San Diego professor David Shirk, referring to last week’s barbaric massacre of three women and six children by drug cartel gunmen just south of the United States-Mexico border.  For…

WARNING: Parts of this column may bear strong resemblance to my earlier columns when Michael Bloomberg toyed with running for president, because with Bloomberg, history has a way of repeating itself. Every four years, Michael Bloomberg hears something virtually no other American hears: a groundswell of support for a Michael Bloomberg presidential…

On Wednesday, the curtain rises on the House's impeachment show, featuring State Department career diplomats William Taylor Jr. and George Kent as the first witnesses. Mainstream media outlets claim Taylor and Kent have "damning evidence" that President Donald Trump delayed military aid to Ukraine in a quid pro quo to pressure the Ukrainian…

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi insists the impeachment procedures adopted last Thursday are "the fairest possible." Don't believe it. In truth, a provision slyly added at the last minute is all but certain to deprive President Donald Trump of the ability to defend himself. Expect a one-sided propaganda circus with Intelligence Committee Chairman…

The July 25 call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Vlodomyr Zelensky is the central piece of evidence in the Democratic drive to remove the president from office. "That call was a smoking gun," Speaker Nancy Pelosi said after House Democrats voted to formalize their impeachment inquiry. Trump has repeatedly said the call was…

For a town that leaks like a sieve, Washington has done an astonishingly effective job keeping from the American public the name of the anonymous “whistleblower" who triggered impeachment proceedings against President Trump — even though his identity is an open secret inside the Beltway. More than two months after the official filed…

There's no doubt Democrats in Washington are hell-bent on impeaching President Trump over the Ukraine matter. But after weeks of polling, it is still unclear precisely what Americans outside the Beltway think. Much depends on how pollsters ask their questions. Some are straightforward, while others are a bit more complicated. But in the last few weeks…

President Donald Trump has repeatedly slammed the secret impeachment hearings in the Capitol basement as "a totally compromised kangaroo court." Sounds like Speaker Nancy Pelosi got the message. On Monday, she announced the full House will vote to formally launch impeachment proceedings, which will be out in the open instead of in the dark…

Property rights, as most Americans understand, provide the foundation for our free market system.  As the familiar adage goes, you’ll never see someone taking a rental car to the car wash.  Without skin in the game, innovation and investment evaporate, and people’s natural right to enjoy the fruits of their labor withers. …

House Democrats are grilling a stream of disgruntled career diplomats in a basement hearing room of the Capitol. The hearings are supposed to be secret, but — no surprise — Democrats leak snippets of the testimony daily. They're hoping it will add up to a case for impeaching President Donald Trump. So far, all the testimony actually…

NBA superstar LeBron James says Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey was "misinformed" and "wasn't educated on the situation at hand" when he tweeted in support of Hong Kong's freedom demonstrations. Morey's sin was sharing an image of a slogan that read: "Fight for freedom. Stand with Hong Kong." Even though the…

A little over 40 years ago, Chinese Communist strongman and reformer Deng Xiaoping began 15 years of sweeping economic reforms. They were designed to end the disastrous, even murderous planned economy of Mao Zedong, who died in 1976. The results of Deng's revolution astonished the world. In four decades, China went from a backward basket case to the…

Not long ago, House Republicans complained that Democrats imposed excessive secrecy on interviews conducted as part of the drive to impeach President Trump. Now, the situation appears to have gotten worse. The recent interview of Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, marked a new point — a low point, as Republicans see…

This week, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Innovation Policy Center (GIPC) debuted its first Innovation and Creativity Access Barometer, which offers a new, unique and invaluable resource for political leaders, policy makers, scholars and citizens worldwide.  Amid our increasingly knowledge-based and internationally competitive global…

Many of the stories about the gods and heroes of Greek mythology were compiled during Greek Dark Ages. Impoverished tribes passed down oral traditions that originated after the fall of the lost palatial civilizations of the Mycenaean Greeks. Dark Age Greeks tried to make sense of the massive ruins of their forgotten forbearers' monumental palaces…

There have so far been two hearings in the House Democrats' effort to impeach President Donald Trump over the Ukraine matter. Both have been held in secret. One was last Thursday, the other Friday, and the public does not know what was said in either. Two more are scheduled for this week, and they will be held behind closed doors, too. The hearings…

In these times of near civil war, Americans agree on almost nothing. Yet sometime in 2019, almost all of America finally got "woke" on China. For years, our leaders had yawned about Silk Road neo-imperialism in Africa and Asia, and gross abuses of human rights against Chinese religious minorities and political dissidents. Almost every assumption…

"No one is above the law," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as she announced the Democratic effort to impeach President Donald Trump over the Ukraine matter. The phrase has become a Democratic mantra in the new impeachment push. But it could, in the end, serve to highlight the weakness of the Democratic strategy. The reason is, by stressing…

The American founders institutionalized the best of a long Western tradition of representative government with the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. These contracts outlined the rare privileges and responsibilities of new American citizens. Yet the concept of citizenship is being assaulted on the premodern side by the legal blending of mere residency…

The life of the Trump-Ukraine affair can be measured in days, and the most basic facts of the matter are still unknown. Yet many Democrats and their allies in the media are already renewing their calls for the impeachment of President Trump. By doing so, they are observing one of the lessons of the Trump-Russia investigation: Act before finding out…

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…