My friend Lawrence W. Reed is one of Earth’s biggest optimists. The legendary free-market scholar recalls flipping his vehicle at age 26 on an icy Michigan road in February 1980. As he rolled over inside his Ford Fairmont, he smiled: “Hey, I’ll get a new car out of this!”
Thus, his recent essay for the Foundation for Economic Education, of which he is president emeritus, is a surprise. Reed has gone from cheerful to chilly.
Read the full story
The Arizona-based Goldwater Institute (GI) released a report Tuesday detailing a potentially alarming aspect of some public state university’s hiring processes, requiring faculty to pledge support for progressive ideologies.
“Universities should be safe havens for free expression, but in Arizona and across the country, progressives are using diversity statement requirements as a political litmus test to enforce intellectual and political conformity in support of leftist dogmas like Critical Race Theory and CRT-based terminology such as ‘intersectional personal identities,'” according to an email from the GI.
Read the full story
A few weeks ago, Exxon announced that it was banning the display of Pride and BLM flags at its headquarters in Houston. There was a ripple of unhappiness, but nothing was burned down, the media attention was muted, and the world went about its business as before.
Across the country, school board elections are tossing out woke ideologues and partisans of critical race theory and replacing what amounts to gay pornography in the curriculum with more wholesome fare. The Biden Administration keeps running into roadblocks, most recently a judicial order halting its efforts to rescind Title 42, a Trump-era emergency order that turned away would-be immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. A few days ago, Biden’s absurd Disinformation Governance Board was shuttered and its pathetic director, Nina Jankowicz, sucked back into the memory hole whence she came.
Read the full story
Despite polls that suggest Generation Z leans further to the left than older Americans, one conservative education journalist has managed to gather a large following on TikTok.
Every day, Chrissy Clark, a Campus Reform alumna and current Daily Caller contributor and self-described education reporter, posts minute-long videos on the social media application covering the five underreported news stories that Americans should know.
Read the full story
When Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock sought Georgia’s U.S. Senate seats, both of which they won in special-election runoffs this January, there was little expectation they would match the centrism of fellow Peach State Democrats who held those seats before.
In 2017, when Ossoff initially ran unsuccessfully for Georgia’s 6th congressional district against Republican Karen Handel, Matthew Yglesias, then of the left-wing website Vox, observed that Ossoff’s message—support for abortion, aggressive anti-climate-change legislation and expanded healthcare programs—was “a lot more liberal than what you heard recently in Georgia.”
Read the full story
America’s Founders understood that political change is inevitable. They thought it must come about through constitutional mechanisms, with the consent of the governed, and must never infringe on the natural rights of citizens. Progressives – rejecting the idea that any rights, including the right of consent to government, are natural – accept no such limits. Progressivism insists that the principled American constitutionalism of fixed natural rights and limited and dispersed powers must be overturned and replaced by an organic, evolutionary model of the Constitution. Historical progress should be facilitated by experts dedicated to the expansion of the public sphere and political control – especially at the national level. As progressivism has grown into modern liberalism, the commitment to extra-constitutional “progress” is broadly shared across elite political, academic, legal, and religious circles. Politics is thus increasingly identified with a mix of activism, expertise, and the desire for “change.”
Read the full story
Where did Antifa youth rioting in the streets receive their intellectual and ethical bearings? Why are the First and Second Amendments no longer fully operative? How did the general population become nearly ignorant of their Constitution, history, and the hallmarks of their culture? Why do employers no longer equate a bachelor’s degree with competency in oral and written communications, basic computation, and reasoning? How in the 21st century did race and ethnicity come to define who we are rather than become incidental to our individual personas? In answering all these questions, we always seem to return to higher education – the font of much of our contemporary malaise.
Read the full story
Monday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio to weigh in on the several Democratic losses that suffered by being too progressive.
Read the full story
Last week in a dinner speech at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., Princeton professor Robert George had some advice for social and religious conservatives: “You must fight.”
Read the full story
by Victor Davis Hanson Progressives do not see the United States as an exceptional uniter of factions and tribes into a cohesive whole – each citizen subordinating his tribal, ethnic, and religious affinities to a shared Americanism, emblemized by our national motto e pluribus unum. Instead, they prefer e uno plures: out of one nation arise many innately different and separate peoples. Progressivism’s signature brand is now tribalism: all of us in different ways are victims of a white male Christian heterosexual patriarchy – or a current 20 percent hierarchy that past and present has supposedly oppressed anyone not like themselves. In contrast, our differences define who we are, and are not incidental to the content of our characters. The salad bowl, not the melting pot, is the new national creed. America is to be a conglomeration of competing tribal parties in the fashion of the Balkans, Rwanda, or contemporary Iraq. How does the relative victimhood work politically? Progressive elites (oddly often white, but “woke,” males) serve as umpires who adjudicate familial spats and intersectional fractures. Like good cowboys, they ride herd, directing the squabbling and snorting flock in the right direction without losing too many strays on the way to…
Read the full story
by Jeff Minick In January I resolved to read Will and Ariel Durant’s magnum opus The Story Of Civilization before the end of the year. It is now early November, and I have finished Volume X of this series, Rousseau and Revolution, meaning I should fulfill my self-imposed obligation under deadline. The Durants devoted the last three of these eleven volumes to the period 1715-1815. A casual observer of The Story Of Civilization might wonder why these chroniclers of world civilization spent so much ink and energy on so limited a spectrum of time and place. Were they simply enamored with the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the age of Napoleon? Not at all. At the end of Rousseau and Revolution, the Durants remark, “So we end our survey, in these last two volumes, of the century whose conflicts and achievements are still active in the life of mankind today.” (Despite this farewell, the Durants added a final volume, The Age of Napoleon.) The Durants examined the political, philosophical, and scientific whirl of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution and understood the grip of that age on our present-day politics and culture. Its philosophers, statesmen, and scientists—Catherine the Great,…
Read the full story
After weeks of hand-wringing and over a half-million dollars spent in “security precautions,” Ben Shapiro was finally allowed to deliver his speech at the taxpayer-funded University of California, Berkeley Thursday. Once known as a prestigious institution that could have their pick of the best in academia and scholars in the world, UC Berkeley was birthplace of the free speech movement in the 1960s – a beacon of the best and brightest. Since then, as the locals know, Berkeley has shamefully descended to a frightfully expensive and middling school, a product of generations of the unique, hard-left progressivism found in the San Francisco Bay area of California. But the prestige earned so many years ago has not yet completely faded, which is how Shapiro, along with an entourage of security amid a crowd of police arrived to say his peace in a speech he titled, “Say No to Campus Thuggery.” Ben Shapiro was in top form, rattling off his remarks in his trademark rapid-fire cadence. He gave generously of his time and stuck around at the end for an extended question-and-answer period. One exchange in particular that caught my attention was a student’s challenge to Shapiro’s position opposing abortion. “Why exactly…
Read the full story