Category: Commentary

Commentary: EPA Enhances Federalism, Takes Aim at Costly Oil and Natural Gas Regulations

RealClearWire
Lee Zeldin

President Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is taking another step toward restoring a more practical balance between environmental protection, economic opportunity, and the role of the states.

Last week, on Oct. 27, the President and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced proposed revisions to federal oil and natural gas regulations under the Clean Air Act, commonly known as OOOOb/c. The proposal reconsiders several requirements finalized in 2024 and, according to EPA, could reduce regulatory costs by $45 billion while allowing an estimated 210 million additional barrels of oil and 1.41 trillion cubic feet of natural gas to be produced.

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Commentary: Big Tech Needs to Follow Tennessee’s Lead on Kids’ Online Safety

Star News Contributor
kid phone

Parents across Tennessee sent a clear message in this election: they want leaders who will stand up to Big Tech and keep our state the best place in America to live, work and raise a family. 

Governor-elect Marsha Blackburn has led on keeping Big Tech accountable in Congress and she will do the same as Governor of Tennessee. She spent years in Washington taking on the most powerful companies in the world, often when it was unpopular – putting parents who lost children to online predators and sextortion front and center. Senator Blackburn’s Kids Online Safety Act, co-authored with Senator Richard Blumenthal, would require platforms to build in safety by design, enable the strongest protections for minors by default, and give parents real tools to manage what their kids see. Tech companies resisted tooth and nail, but her bill passed the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee with an overwhelming bipartisan majority. Blackburn extended the same protective instinct to Tennessee’s artists and creators through the NO FAKES Act.

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Commentary: The Weaponization Ledger Comes Due

American Greatness
Merrick Garland

In the space of two weeks in October, federal agents searched the Washington residence of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) under a judge’s warrant, and two former senior FBI officials surrendered on charges that they lied to Congress about the Bureau’s Hunter Biden investigations. Furthermore, former FBI director James Comey is fighting a federal indictment in North Carolina and, as of October 26, a third set of federal charges in Washington accusing him of directing a classified leak to the press. Former CIA director John Brennan’s own lawyers have disclosed that prosecutors formally told him he is a grand jury target.

The response from Democrats has been a single word, repeated at every podium: weaponization. One hundred seventy-five of them even issued a joint response complaining about the “weaponization of law enforcement” after a pre-dawn FBI raid was conducted on the Washington, D.C., residence of Ilhan Elmi (Omar) under a warrant signed by a Democrat-appointed judge who donated to the Clintons. The evidence must be strong with that one, Obi-Wan!

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Commentary: Midterm Election Incoherences, Misadventures, and Paradoxes

American Greatness
Donald Trump

In June 2022, the price of gasoline topped $5 a gallon and stayed around $4 a gallon through October, on the eve of the midterms. It is currently about $4.30.

The inflation rate in 2022 hit a 40-year high of 9.1 percent—and would average 5.1 percent over Joe Biden’s four-year tenure. The 2026 inflation rate is estimated to be about 3.5 percent and, over the first two years of the second Trump administration, will likely average around 3 percent. GDP for the third quarter of 2026 is higher than it was in the same quarter of 2022. The poverty rate is now lower and the annual family income higher than in November 2022.

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Commentary: Daylight Saving Time’s Mixed Results

The Conversation

This weekend, public service announcements will remind us daylight saving time is over. This means you have to set your clocks backwards an hour at 2 a.m. on November 1.

The practice of resetting clocks is not designed for farmers, whose plows follow the sun regardless of what time clocks say it is. And it does not create extra daylight – it simply shifts when the sun rises and sets relative to society’s regular schedule and routines.

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Commentary: Halloween’s Roots in the Christian Tradition

The Conversation
Person decorating with candles and pumpkins

Conventional wisdom holds that Halloween is essentially a secular and pagan holiday, the result of the Christian Church appropriating an ancient Celtic harvest festival. But one strain of critical opinion tends to the view that the holiday was thoroughly Christian from the start.

In the church calendar, Halloween (All Hallows’ Eve) is the beginning of a triduum of holidays commemorating the dead, continuing with All Saints’ Day on November 1 and All Souls’ Day on November 2. It was common practice among the early Christians to commemorate the deaths of various martyrs at the places of their demise. In the 9th century Pope Gregory IV decided that the time had come for a single universal feast to commemorate all the saints, as well as a day to pray for one’s deceased loved ones. The pope chose a time of year—the end of harvest and the beginning of winter—when many people’s thoughts naturally turned to the idea of death.

The macabre aspects which have grown up around Halloween in modern times—the emphasis on witches, ghosts and other ghoulish figures, the glorification of gore and violence—have led many people to doubt its Christian character and many Christians to shun it. Yet according to some historians, these demonic elements of the holiday originated from a distinctively medieval Christian idea of exorcising evil by ridiculing it. Christian theology holds that Jesus conquered sin and death; and death loses its sting precisely when one is able to laugh at it.

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Commentary: Europe’s Riots Are the Bill Coming Due for Socialism and Globalism

American Greatness
French protest

I recently spoke at Chatham House in London, one of Europe’s leading globalist think tanks—and hostile territory for American conservatives. While there, I heard firsthand some of the factors and the stark denialism behind the horrific riots that erupted in France and other European countries this month.

What began in late September as student blockades of overcrowded, understaffed high schools in the Paris suburbs exploded on October 17 and 18 into some of the worst violence France has seen in decades. More than half a million people marched against rising living costs and failing public services. Rioters, many carrying Palestinian flags, torched cars and a town hall, damaged or looted at least 3,000 businesses, and injured more than 500 police officers. Nearly 2,400 people were arrested, and the government imposed curfews in parts of Paris and other cities. Similar protests spread to Belgium and Italy.

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Commentary: Affordability Is the Economic Test Washington Can’t Ignore

The Daily Signal
taxes

Midterms are often used to understand the mood of the country, and this one is no different. As we barrel toward Election Day, many commenters say that this year’s midterms are a referendum on the economy—and affordability is certainly top of mind for households across the nation.

Americans don’t experience the economy in spreadsheets or monthly reports. They experience it at the grocery store, at the gas pump, and when they calculate whether they can afford a mortgage payment at today’s interest rates and home prices.  

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Commentary: Washington’s Drug Price Controls Threaten Medical Innovation

Star News Contributor

Tennesseans deserve access to reliable, safe, and affordable treatment options. After more than four years since the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) was signed into law under the Biden administration, it’s time for lawmakers to admit that the results are a disaster for the healthcare industry and patient access – along with long-term medical innovation and research and development.

Four years ago the IRA gave the federal government unprecedented control to set prices for certain Medicare prescriptions. Now it’s back for more. Earlier this year, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) proposed a rule to expand that control.

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Commentary: The Ukrainian Gordian Knot

American Greatness
Trump and Ukraine

After crossing with his army into Asia, Alexander the Great stopped at Gordium (in modern-day Turkey). He approached the famous Gordian knot—a tangled mass of bark tying an ox cart to a pole, so intricate and tight that no one could unravel it. When told that anyone who could untie the mess would rule all of Asia, Alexander simply pulled out his sword and cut through it—solving the problem and fulfilling the prophecy.

The Ukraine war may be our Gordian knot, but—in our current nuclear age—it is dangerous to cut rather than unravel it.

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Commentary: When Nonprofit Hospitals Take More Than They Give, Everyone Pays

Star News Contributor
Doctor patient

When my parents arrived in the United States from Cuba, they brought almost nothing with them except a hard-earned distrust of institutions that take the public’s money in the name of the public good. Castro’s Cuba was full of them. I still know one when I see it.

American nonprofit hospitals warrant that same scrutiny. They collect roughly $37.4 billion each year in federal, state, and local tax breaks. In exchange, they are expected to provide free care to qualified patients and to invest in the health of the neighborhoods they serve. Many of them unfortunately don’t.

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Commentary: Trump’s Deportations Are Making America Safer

The Daily Signal
ICE arrest

The restoration of law and order in America is happening in large part because of President Donald Trump, in particular, his insistence that immigration laws be enforced and criminal illegal aliens be deported.

The administration should double and triple down on this message. America’s return to normalcy is contingent on making border security and deportations a top priority.

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Commentary: El-Sayed Invokes JFK to Divert Questions About Muslim Brotherhood Ties

American Greatness
Abdul El Sayed

Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed recently tried to shut down questions about his family’s documented ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and his own reluctance to draw clear lines on radical Islamist networks by invoking John F. Kennedy’s 1960 campaign. Kennedy faced suspicion that, as a Catholic, he might answer to the Vatican rather than the Constitution. El-Sayed’s comparison does not hold.

He is not being targeted simply for being Muslim. He is facing legitimate questions about national security, ideology, and fitness for the Senate that any candidate with this record would face. His refusal to answer them directly is the problem.

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Commentary: The DSA’s Rising Influence Threatens Public Safety

The Daily Signal
Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Abdul El-Sayed

As we approach the 2026 midterm elections, Americans concerned about public safety must confront a growing and dangerous trend: the increasing influence of the Democratic Socialists of America within the Democratic Party.

While the DSA markets itself as a movement for “economic justice,” its platform includes abolishing police, closing prisons, and opening national borders—policies that would dismantle the institutions that keep our communities safe.

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Commentary: America’s Midterms Present a Choice Between Two Visions

American Greatness
people voting

There are two ways of looking at the midterms, now less than three weeks away.

One is as a simple referendum on the issues and politicians of the day. The other involves a far deeper conflict of visions (as Thomas Sowell puts it): socialism versus capitalism, intrusive versus limited government, and the destruction of time-honored institutions and traditions versus their preservation and renewal.

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Commentary: Trump’s Tariffs and Tax Cuts Spark Manufacturing Renaissance

American Greatness
Trump and workers

by Peter Navarro   America is in the midst of a manufacturing renaissance. Unprecedented in its speed, it is driven by Trump’s tariffs and factory-targeted tax cuts. Companies can now expense 100 percent of the cost of building a factory on American soil instead of depreciating those costs over 39 years. The year you pour the concrete is the year you write it off. For a chief financial officer deciding where to build the next plant, that one provision changes the location decision. The Trump tariffs are a protective wall. President Trump has said, If you are a foreign company and you want to avoid our tariffs, build here. Invest here. Hire here. You can see the Trump manufacturing renaissance in the macro data, in the micro data, and along highways across flyover country. Start with the macro. In the Biden administration’s last two years, America lost 230,000 manufacturing jobs. Since December 2025, American manufacturers have added 72,000 jobs, with factory payrolls rising in each of the last four months through September. Through most of 2023 and 2024, the ISM Manufacturing Index languished below 50, the line between contraction and expansion. In January it climbed back above 50, where it…

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Commentary: Trump’s Attempt to Stop Illegal Aliens’ Influence on the U.S. Census

The Daily Torch

Americans are well aware of the issues that stem from allowing large numbers of illegal aliens into the United States, from cheap foreign labor to abuse of welfare systems and legitimate concerns about illegal voting. But there is another glaring issue that illegal immigration causes, and President Donald Trump and his administration are proposing a way to fix it before 2030.

Illegal aliens are currently counted in the United States Census — the census count that is used to form a population baseline for each state and allocate U.S. House seats and Electoral College power among the 50 states every ten years. 

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Commentary: The Sidelining of the Working Man

American Greatness
blue collar work

The American work ethic was never simply about making money. It was a moral code: work hard, keep your word, master a skill, provide for your family, and leave the next generation better off. Alexis de Tocqueville observed it firsthand in the 1830s, noting that in democratic America “everybody works, and work opens a way to everything,” a sharp contrast to European aristocracies where idleness carried prestige. America became the land of opportunity by fusing that culture with liberty, property rights, open markets, and an unusual respect for ordinary labor. The man who built things, drove routes, and came home dirty was not a lesser citizen. He was the point.

I started working when I was twelve. In New England, that means you follow the seasons: mowing lawns in summer, raking leaves in fall, shoveling driveways in winter. All cash. All informal. Nobody asked for a resume. You showed up, you worked, and you got paid. Before I set foot in a college classroom, I’d been a busboy, a barback, a gas station attendant, a mailroom clerk, and a locker room attendant. None of those jobs was glamorous. All of them taught me something money can’t buy: what it means to earn your own way. That ethic now feels like a relic.

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Commentary: The Splendor of Rural America

American Greatness
rural America

The other day, I found myself facing two decisions. The first of these was whether I could take the time off work to drive four hours—two hours up and two hours back—for an event lasting less than twenty minutes. Given that the event in question was my son’s cross-country meet, it wasn’t a hard decision. He’s my youngest, after all, and in another blink of an eye, he’ll be done running high school meets and off doing something else, something I can’t take the afternoon off work to go watch, whether I want to or not. I’d have been a fool not to go.

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Commentary: Remembering the Courage of Christopher Columbus

Admin

Today we remember the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, who in October 1492 landed in the Bahamas and became the first Western European to discover what the Europeans would call the New World.

When Columbus and his crew of approximately 200 sailors left Spain in three crowded ships – the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria – they set their sails toward an unknown horizon. They expected to discover a trade route to India. (Most Europeans at the time knew the earth was round – but they were unaware of the North and South American continents.) Instead of finding a route to Southeast Asia, Columbus and his crew landed on a continent of new opportunities. Columbus’s accidental discovery opened a permanent passage across the Atlantic and redrew the known map of the world.

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Commentary: Trust, but Verify the Machines

American Greatness
AI

On September 29, President Trump put the heads of the biggest names in American AI in one room, and six of them signed a one-page safety accord: Google’s Sundar Pichai, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, and xAI’s Elon Musk. I’m bullish on what these machines will do for us, and I think the accord points the right way. Industry should move first, and Washington shouldn’t write rules for technology it barely understands. But I gave every fund manager who told me his books were fine the same scrutiny I’m applying here. A pledge to police yourself works only when the people carrying the risk can check the work.

The upside deserves the lead, and biology comes first. In 2024, the Nobel committee honored David Baker for computational protein design and Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for protein structure prediction. Researchers are now building virtual cells, models that predict how a cell responds to a drug, a gene edit, or a disease process before anyone touches a pipette. The Arc Institute’s STATE was trained on roughly 270 million cells to forecast those responses. Its Evo 2 learned from 9.3 trillion nucleotides and showed better than 90 percent accuracy on the effects of BRCA1 mutations, and its code and weights are public, so any lab can test the claims. DeepMind’s AlphaGenome reads up to 1 million DNA letters at once and targets the 98 percent of the genome that sits outside protein-coding regions. Wet-lab validation stays indispensable, and the STATE’s own builders call it “just the first version.” If these tools hold up, they shorten the road from hypothesis to experiment.

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Commentary: Correctly Understanding the ‘Stupidity’ of the Left

RealClearWire
Ice Out protest

by Greg Salsbury   A long list of prominent conservatives have referred to leftists and Democrats as dumb, stupid, incompetent, crazy, and insane. In 2007, Ann Coulter wrote the book “If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans.” Both Rush Limbaugh and President Trump regularly referred to Democrats as “Dumbocrats.” More recently, the leader of the House Freedom Caucus called Democrats “the crazy party,” and JD Vance framed the contrast between the parties as “common sense vs. crazy.” Matt Margolis titled a piece in PJ Media this year “Democrats Are Too Stupid to Heed This Warning,” and posited that somewhere between the 1990s and today, the Democratic Party lost its mind. Some of this stuff gets a chuckle, but conservatives need to be careful with this narrative. Conservatives need to understand that this tactic can not only contradict the more serious messages they’re trying to convey about leftist policies, it can also remove responsibility from leftists for their malevolence. Consider a recent interview in which Representative Jim Jordan explained that the left’s open-border policy was part of a shrewd, long-term plan to bring in new Democrat constituents, with sanctuary-city policies as another step in that plan. Yet in the same…

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Commentary: Fixing Failing U.S. Schools

The Daily Signal
students questions

On Sept. 28, The New York Times published a story titled 30 Ideas for Fixing U.S. Schools, Ranked by Experts. The subhead read, “Math and reading scores are in a decade-long slump. We asked three dozen experts: What could turn things around?”

The pundits went through a litany of ways to improve America’s schools. They placed great importance on small-group tutoring, teaching the “science of reading,” expanding universal pre-K, and other measures.

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Marsha Blackburn Commentary: Help Is on the Way for Tennessee Families

Star News Contributor
Marsha Blackburn campaign event

Families are working hard, but too often they are finding that their paychecks do not go as far as they once did. Young Tennesseans are wondering whether they will ever be able to afford a home of their own. Seniors who spent decades working, saving and building a life in Tennessee are worried about whether they can afford to stay in the homes they worked so hard to purchase.

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Commentary: The Left Has a Political Violence Problem

The Daily Signal
left wing protest

They say politics can be murder. For a disturbing number of Americans on the Left, that seems to be an adage taken literally.

A new poll from the progressive Center for Strategic Politics indicates just how far some Democrat voters are willing to go to see President Donald Trump removed from power. Or, as the pollsters somewhat mutedly put it, “Democrats want Trump out by (almost) any means necessary.”

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Commentary: The AI Race Is Becoming a Race for Power

RealClearWire
AI

When Interior Secretary Doug Burgum toured LG’s manufacturing facility in Lansing, Michigan, last month, he wasn’t just checking in on an auto parts plant. He was carefully watching a plant originally built to make only electric vehicle batteries expand into battery production that can store power for the electric grid, a shift that could help America power the AI boom and compete with China.

Good. For years, Washington treated the electric grid like something that would simply keep working no matter how much we demanded of it. That era is over. Between the AI boom, a manufacturing renaissance, and a Pentagon that needs more power at more bases, the United States is in a race for electrons — one that China is hoping we lose. 

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Commentary: Current High Energy Prices Were Decades In The Making

Daily Caller News Foundation
Gas Station at night

It is a common cliché to say that social media and the deluge of content we consume each day have significantly hampered, if not entirely destroyed, our attention spans. Sometimes it seems like memory itself may be a vestige of a bygone era, when we connected current events to past decisions and, almost like magic, learned to take different actions.

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Commentary: Texas ICE Shootings Deserve More Than a One-Sided Narrative

The Daily Signal
ICE agent

Legacy media outlets have been spinning tall tales about Texas Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in recent months, trying to stoke backlash against immigration enforcement. But they’re not telling the full story.

Two shootings of illegal aliens in particular have garnered extensive coverage: Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston in July and Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez in Austin in September. In both cases, mainstream media cast the men as innocent victims and questioned the agents’ use of force.

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Commentary: GOP Needs to Counter the Left’s Economic Narrative

American Greatness
Donald Trump

In 1992, Bill Clinton won the presidential election partly on the basis of his campaign’s false accusation that George H. W. Bush had overseen “the worst economic performance since the Great Depression.” Or so claimed Clinton’s running mate Al Gore.

James Carville, chief campaign adviser to Clinton/Gore, amplified that message with the constant refrain: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

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Commentary: Varieties of Trump Derangement Syndrome

American Greatness
Trump speaking

One of the philosopher William James’s most popular books is Varieties of Religious Experience. Published in 1902 and subtitled “A Study in Human Nature,” the book is based on James’s Gifford Lectures in natural theology at the University of Edinburgh. It is impressive how many states of mind James is willing to group under the category “religious.” I suspect some people might cavil at the proposition that the book was really an exercise in theology, natural, supernatural, or otherwise. That said, James’s catalogue of heightened, or at least altered, states of mind does have the virtue of reminding us of how wide the spectrum of human experience, not to say eccentricity, is. And it occurs to me that James’s distinction between “healthy-mindedness” and “morbid-mindedness,” set forth in a chapter on “The Sick Soul,” is of particular pertinence at a time, like ours, when the effort to normalize various pathologies seems to be, as we have been taught to say, trending.

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Commentary: It’s Time to Tackle America’s $40 Trillion National Debt

Daily Caller News Foundation
congress spending

There is a reality we must acknowledge to begin moving toward national fiscal solvency and sanity — resources are finite. Accepting this fundamental fact is our Vince Lombardi moment to zero-in on the basics, just as his Green Bay Packers team did after he delivered his famous line, “Gentlemen, this is a football.” They then went on to win the NFL Championship that year.

Getting back-to-basics with our country’s finances means we first must deal with our unsustainable practice of borrowing $2 trillion each year to fill in the gap between spending $7 trillion while only bringing in $5 trillion. Adding $2 trillion to our debt annually over the last decade has quickly doubled our liability from $20 trillion in 2017 to $40 trillion now.

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Commentary: Individualism Versus Collectivism is on the Ballot in November

American Greatness
Vote Here

Six years ago, the rise of the “Bernie bros” supporting avowed socialist candidate Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) raised the question of whether decades of soft indoctrination about the “horrors” of capitalism by the Democrat-media complex and the oft-promised but never delivered benefits of socialism had finally produced enough voters willing to elect their way out of free enterprise.

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Commentary: International Study Shows America’s Education Crisis Is Getting Worse

American Greatness
classroom question

This year’s PISA results show that the United States ranked 13th in reading and science and 27th in math. Reading scores fell by 14 points since the last test in 2022. It’s not just the U.S. that’s moving in the wrong direction. The decline is part of a broader global trend, with the OECD average across 23 countries down 16 points.

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Commentary: The Disingenuous Left-Wing Attacks on Trump’s Housing Policies

American Greatness
home buyers

This past week, Democrats and the mainstream media had their daggers drawn at the Trump administration over high prices for new homes.

Unfortunately, their smear campaign is proving effective. Fewer than two months before the midterm elections, voters are telling pollsters that housing costs are among their top concerns. Voters also say that the administration is tone-deaf to their concerns because, as they put it, mortgages and rents continue to rise.

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