Parents, children, and supporters of school choice have cause to celebrate this National Charter Schools Week.
Charter schools earned the top two spots on a list of the best high schools in America, according to a recent report by U.S. News & World Report. And, of the top 100 public high schools, charter schools claimed 19 spots—10 in Arizona alone—despite accounting for only 8% of all public schools in the country.
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Special Counsel Jack Smith was supposed to be basking in glory right now.
In his ideal world, Smith would be hot off a quick conviction of Donald Trump in Washington, D.C. for the former president’s alleged role in the events of January 6 and attempts to “overturn” the 2020 election. The special counsel then would have immediately moved his victorious prosecutors to Palm Beach for the summer to prepare for Trump’s second federal trial related to allegedly stealing national defense information and impeding the Department of Justice’s investigation.
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There is only one word to describe the result of President Biden’s foreign policy: chaos.
Just consider how we have seen the Biden administration treat Israel, one of America’s closest and most important allies.
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by Lee Rizzuto In today’s political discourse, conversations about saving our nation and its future are increasingly common. Key issues such as border security, increasing crime, economic stability, and rising inflation dominate headlines. However, amidst these pressing concerns, there is a critical, yet often overlooked, issue that demands our immediate attention. Ronald Reagan famously said, “The family has always been the cornerstone of American society.” We are witnessing in America, a systematic erosion of that cornerstone. Family values are defined as the principles which allow one man and one woman the opportunity to marry, have children, and earn a living to pay for the care and raising of their children – in short, family values are laid out early in our nation’s founding – life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Across America, there is a palpable sense of concern as these core principles are under threat. Divisive ideologies that preach blatant falsehoods have infiltrated our communities, our schools, our homes, our minds, our children’s minds. A man cannot become a woman and vice versa – a biological truth, yet one that is treated as bigotry by those seeking to destroy the cornerstones of society. Those spreading these falsehoods…
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Joe Biden polls at or below 40 percent approval. Historically, such unpopularity has made it almost impossible for a president to be reelected.
His age advances by the hour. His voice falters, his memory fades, and his gait is reduced to short steps, with his arms, winglike and in tandem, offering balance.
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In previous years, people might have missed the irony. But not now—not after the meteoric rise of women’s basketball.
When the WNBA champs visited the White House last week, reporters didn’t cover it out of obligation. They covered it because it was a real story. And President Joe Biden’s betrayal of girls sports only made it more of one.
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With “Teacher Appreciation Week” now behind us, it’s crucial that we pay close heed to the well-being of the students, and the news is not good. Gen Z-ers and the newest crop—Generation Alpha—are struggling, and schools are the focal point of the problem.
A new report from Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation surveyed more than 1,000 Gen Z students between the ages of 12 and 18 and found that just 48 percent of those enrolled in middle or high school felt motivated to go to school. Only half said they do something interesting in school every day. On a similar note, a new EdChoice survey reveals that 64 percent of teens said that school is boring, and 30 percent feel that it is a waste of time.
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Telehealth has become a health care gamechanger for tens of millions of Americans.
We all know the time and effort an in-person health visit takes – travel to the appointment, time off work, hours spent in an office, follow ups that require us to do the whole process over again. But telehealth expansion in the post-COVID world has changed everything.
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Panic mode is setting in for President Joe Biden and his struggling 2024 reelection bid as poll after poll shows Biden consistently trailing in swing states and nationally as albatross consumer inflation continues to outpace incomes for millions of Americans.
A nationwide Financial Times-Michigan Ross poll taken May 2 to May 6 found a whopping 58 percent of registered voters disapproved of Biden’s handling of the economy. Only 28 percent approved.
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Americans can be forgiven for suffering from whiplash regarding law and order.
In recent weeks the Biden administration and many news outlets, including USA Today and The Hill, have touted declines in violent crime statistics to argue that America is becoming a safer place.
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When former Soviet KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov defected to the West from Russia, he set about exposing the strategies used within the KGB to spread propaganda and keep the Soviet people in line with the agenda of their political overlords. There were myriad tactics employed in this campaign of what today has been labeled mis- or dis-information.
One of the most effective tools for subjugation in the former Soviet Union was known as “demoralization,” which Bezmenov explained this way:
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Mere days after Columbia’s president testified the university was doing “everything it can” against antisemitism, extremist protestors took over the campus, threatening and attacking Jewish students, encouraging others to become “martyrs” like the Hamas terrorists who committed the Oct. 7 massacre, and calling for Oct. 7 to become “every day” for Jews worldwide. After Jewish community leaders called for Jewish students to leave Columbia, President Shafik moved all classes online.
Now, similar antisemitic extremism is spreading to other campuses, including Harvard, the University of Southern California, Yale, and Princeton. The police are getting involved. The protests are being praised by Iran’s Ayatollah and even Hamas.
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A few days ago, in examining Harvard’s problems and the ghost of its deposed and disgraced former president Claudine Gay, this column wrote: “Education is supposed to be about reading, writing, and arithmetic—even at the college level. Once upon a time, and not that long ago, students at college read the classics to gain knowledge, learned to write stylish prose, and, for those scientifically minded, studied mathematics and became scientists.”
A critic wrote in—as readers are encouraged to do:
This is a window onto a big topic. It’s true that education is about the three Rs. But it is also true that there must be a purpose to learning those Rs. There’s actually nothing formally, and technically, wrong with “Educating students who will create . . . a more just and equitable world.” The real question is, What are justice & equity? They would like it to mean taking our stuff and giving it to other people, after keeping their share. But, to paraphrase the Grinch, Justice, perhaps, means a little bit more . . . . In any case, without a sense of purpose, or with a misdirected sense of purpose, the University will never right itself. And as this is the largest questing of Meaning, it is really a religious question that, having turned their backs on religion, they are utterly incapable of engaging, let alone answering.
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Recently, Democrats at both federal and state levels have passed or are considering regulations that will grant government health coverage to illegal residents.
Bad move for both illegals and legal residents.
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None of the five civil and criminal cases currently lodged against former President Donald Trump have ever had merit. They were all predicated on using the law to injure his re-election candidacy—given a widespread derangement syndrome among the left and a fear they cannot entrust a Trump/Biden election to the people.
These criminal and civil trials are merely the continuation of extra-legal efforts of the last eight years to destroy a presidential candidate in lieu of opposing him in transparent elections.
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It’s no secret that there’s a divide between urban and rural communities in America right now. Whether it’s the proclamation of “white rural rage” or stereotypes of uneducated country dwellers, rural communities are often misunderstood.
But just like urban life has its ups and downs, country living has its own advantages, values, traditions, and lifestyles we can learn from.
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President Biden’s 2025 budget proposal provides a salient reminder that he is no moderate, despite his attempts to position himself as one.
Biden’s tax proposals would effectively increase the top federal marginal tax rate on long-term capital gains to 44.6%, a record high since the tax was enacted in the 1920s. As a result, taxes paid on long-term capital gains would reach levels above 50% in some states after accounting for state capital gains taxes. Biden also proposed increasing the corporate income tax rate from 21% to 28% and presented a 25% tax on unrealized capital gains for individuals whose net worth exceeds $100 million.
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Monday, a week ago, Holocaust Day was marked by solemn remembrances in Israel and in Jewish communities around the world. It was marked in the U.S., as has been customary, by a presidential address, where Biden said nothing that would garner more than perfunctory notice.
Turns out that that was by design. For Biden had already approved a decision that gives cheer to the shade of Hitler and all his modern wanna-be-s — embargoing any arms to Israel that would allow them to keep Hamas from surviving intact and reasserting its plan for death to Israel.
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by Roger Kimball Some time ago, I participated in a conference about “policing in an age of terror.” One big topic was the place of informed hunches in the armory of the police. Was it okay, or was it culpably racist, for the police to act on educated hunches when going about their jobs? Should they “profile” certain groups of people and, in some circumstances and in some neighborhoods, “stop and frisk” people they thought looked suspicious? Well, the heart, as Pascal famously assured us, has its reasons that reason does not know. About this, as about most things, Pascal was right. But what does it tell us about “rational hunches” or “policing in the age of terror?” Before I endeavor to answer those impossible questions, I should acquaint you with my qualifications for intervening on this large topic. My short-form disclosure is: I have none. I am not a lawyer, judge, or police officer. I am not even an academic. In terms of qualifications, I am like the man on the Manhattan omnibus or subway — a chap I shall revert to later. That is, I bring no specialized or professional knowledge to the table, merely the advantages…
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Imagine a scientist who decided to reject every scientific experiment or study that had come before him and would trust only scientific principles that he demonstrated with his own experiments.
Naturally, he would completely handicap himself. In his arrogance, he’d accomplish very little with his science, since he’d be hard at work re-demonstrating every scientific discovery ever made, many of which build on each other. He could never hope to repeat what generations of scientists (many of them much smarter than he) had accomplished over hundreds of years. But if he wasn’t willing to accept their testimony, writings, and conclusions, he’d have no other choice.
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New battleground state polling shows Georgia firmly back in the camp of former President Donald Trump with a commanding double-digit lead (49 percent to 39 percent) in a head-to-head race vs. Joe Biden.
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At just 11 years old, I watched as a midwife cared for my mother and delivered my baby sister. A spark burst into a flame inside of me, and I knew from that moment on that I wanted to be a part of the beauty and wonder of birth and be a mother myself one day.
One of the most rewarding aspects of my now almost 40-year career as a nurse and a midwife has been seeing women tap into their truest potential as they become mothers.
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Nearly two years after Nina Jankowicz briefly led the Disinformation Governance Board at the Department of Homeland Security, she’s launched an organization demanding transparency and the public release of documents about the public debate on disinformation. An interesting move, likely without true transparency in mind.
My organization, Americans for Prosperity Foundation, has spent the same two years fighting DHS for documents on the federal board Jankowicz managed. We’re filing a second lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act to fight continued government stonewalling of our requests. Thus far, DHS has refused to provide unredacted versions of documents that outline its purported authorities to regulate disinformation. Nor will the agency release more information about its work on misinformation related to “irregular migration” and “Ukraine” before the board was disbanded in August 2022.
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The House of Representatives finally acted Wednesday to remedy an injustice that has been getting worse as the number of illegal aliens coming into the United States has skyrocketed: the distortion caused by including noncitizens when determining how many House members each state gets.
The House passed HR 7109, the Equal Representation Act, to mandate a citizenship question on the census form and use of only the citizen population in the apportionment formula for representation applied after every census.
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At both the federal and state levels, elected leaders are paying more attention to national security threats stemming from Chinese-owned real estate in the United States.
The totality of Chinese-owned real estate in the United States remains unknown and, under current law, is unknowable. For agricultural land, Chinese-owned acreage reportedly only constitutes a small share of the United States’ total, but has increased rapidly in recent years, suggesting a growing threat that would best be managed now before it turns into a significant problem.
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U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon may have just indefinitely postponed Donald Trump’s espionage and obstruction trial but that doesn’t mean her federal courtroom in Fort Pierce, Florida will lie dormant over the next few months.
In officially vacating the existing May 20 trial date—an impossibility considering the defendant will be in a Manhattan courtroom for the foreseeable future—Cannon declined to set another date, calling it “imprudent” at this stage of the process. She noted a “myriad” of unresolved matters in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s 42-count indictment against the former president and his two co-defendants, Mar-a-Lago employees Waltine Nauta and Carlos De Olivera, for willfully retaining national defense information and attempting to impede the government’s investigation.
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For the past several months, the public has been inundated by polls. national polls, state polls, issue polls. Yet, the 64-dollar question remains: Who is winning for President, Trump or Biden?
Over the past two months, the two presumptive nominees have swapped first place multiple times with Trump mostly in the advantage. So, the short answer is that the race is so close that neither is really ahead, at least we cannot say who is ahead in that national ballot test with high certainty. Trump is probably ahead very narrowly and has been since February.
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Scan news accounts of anti-Israel campus and street protestors. Read their demands and manifestos. Collate the confusion after October 7 from the Biden administration.
Here are ten of their most common untruths about October 7 and the war that followed.
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Like so many Americanos, I’m spending more time than I should listening to news out of Manhattan, where the local prosecutor there has charged the leading Republican candidate for president with 34 felony counts of being Donald Trump. I challenge anyone to find more than this in the charges and specifications. I really should ration myself on trial news. I could even take a day off. I’m beginning to know how Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day must have felt as though the news out of the trial is pretty much the same from day to day.
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Since 1960, Democrats have won the popular vote in 10 out of the last 16 presidential elections, and thanks to a combination of historical realignment (beginning during the 1930s), presidential coattails and the incumbency advantage, have also won U.S. House majorities in 11 out of those 16 contests, oftentimes with super majorities.
The modern story over U.S. House control, and therefore legislatively shaping the society of laws we live in presently, begins in 1932 when Franklin Roosevelt and Democrats utterly crushed Herbert Hoover’s reelection bid, winning 57.4 percent of the popular vote and 42 states to Hoover’s meager 39.6 percent and 6 states.
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We are in the midst of a presidential campaign year. It’s supposed to be the Super Bowl for political junkies like me. But it feels strange and muted, and, so far, its vibe is uncomfortably similar to 2020.
The 2020 election was strange because of COVID, which became a pretext to change the rules in order to rig the outcome. This time, there is no such excuse for a “basement campaign.” It’s true that Biden is old, feeble, and unpopular. And Trump has been sidelined, quite deliberately, by a malicious New York judge who won’t allow him to travel and conduct his signature rallies. The problem, however, now infects all electoral politics.
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Four law enforcement officers were shot dead in Charlotte, North Carolina, last week. On hearing the news, I was reminded of my mother’s frequent warnings about police work. Her message? Steer clear. With her husband and her brother patrolling the mean streets of Newark, she didn’t need the added anxiety of having her sons do the same. Today, for the children and spouses of police officers, that anxiety must be unbearable — and not just because of the obvious danger.
You may not have heard of the Charlotte shooting. It vanished from the national news in a flash. Despite the magnitude of the offense, within two or three days the national media had dropped the story cold.
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With Washington, DC, more bitterly divided than ever under the Biden administration, the American people are once again fed up with the state of our nation’s politics.
Who can blame them? In poll after poll, the American people have clearly stated their highest priorities: illegal immigration, lousy leadership, rampant inflation and economic decline. But the Biden administration hasn’t just ignored these issues – they’ve actively made each of them worse.
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During the two months since President Biden delivered his State of the Union address, a wide variety of legacy news outlets have been at pains to portray an infinitesimal improvement in his polling as a shift of momentum in the presidential race. Last week, for example, USA Today breathlessly reported that “Trump and Biden are ‘darn near even’ in the 2024 election.” If this was meant to provide moral sustenance for worried Democrats it was thin gruel indeed. Biden is an incumbent president struggling to keep up with a challenger most of whose time and money has been devoted to fighting off a ruthless lawfare campaign. Moreover, if history is any guide, it’s probable that the polls understate the strength of Trump’s support.
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The current radical and often violent protests on mostly blue-state, supposedly elite campuses have exposed in toxic fashion what the left has become. And yet, in a paradoxical fashion, the campus insanity has offered the nation some moral clarity.
What’s surprising is not that the demonstrators are violent and nihilist, but that they are, on the one hand, so openly and crudely anti-Semitic, racist, and anti-American, and yet on the other hand, so passive-aggressive, narcissistic, and weepy.
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It is the picture that launched a thousand pearl-clutching articles.
A few weeks after the armed FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago in August 2022, the Department of Justice released a stunning photograph depicting alleged contraband seized from Donald Trump’s Palm Beach estate that day; the image showed colored sheets representing scary classification levels attached to files purportedly discovered in Trump’s private office.
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by Stuart Scheller Do general officers have an obligation to publicly tell the truth? I have an interesting perspective on this question. Currently, the Marine Corps teaches my story at the E-8 seminar (senior enlisted school). If you remember, I was the Marine officer who, via video, made a plea for accountability from military leaders who purposely abandoned Bagram airbase, American citizens and American military sacrifices. Shortly thereafter, I was fired, placed in solitary confinement and kicked out of the military short of my retirement. My story is not used to discuss leadership failures and operational mistakes during the Afghan withdrawal, but as a case study on why not to publicly criticize leadership. Military culture clearly signals: Making leadership look bad is far more dangerous than obediently failing. To date, not a single military leader assumes accountability for their failures at the end of Afghanistan. CNN recently published an article titled, “New evidence challenges the Pentagon’s account of a horrific attack as the US withdrew from Afghanistan.” It offers new video evidence and first-hand accounts of a significant gunfight following the suicide bomb attack in Kabul, during the American withdrawal. The article illustrates more facts contradicting the current political administration, and,…
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Like every major college protest since the 1960s, the pro-Palestinian — which is to say, the anti-Israel — protests sweeping college campuses today have early and often been compared with the protests of that annus horribilis, 1968. There are plenty of similarities but also plenty of differences. History repeats itself as student and faculty protestors align themselves with the totalitarians. Then it was the Viet Cong, Mao, and the Khmer Rouge. Today it is the Sunni Muslim terrorist group Hamas, the main puppet master of the “pro-Palestinian” agitators.
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For most of our lifetimes, classically liberal economics so dominated the Right that nobody wondered if conservatives were abandoning free markets. In recent years, though, a new generation of conservative thinkers—more traditionalist, populist, or nationalist than libertarian—has challenged the utility and even the morality of laissez faire economic policy.
We welcome their questions and critiques, as they have compelled American conservatives to have a long overdue conversation about the market, the family, and the state. But the blunt truth is the movement cannot abandon free markets. The moral and practical case for free enterprise is as necessary today as it was when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher used it to rescue their nations’ economies and win the Cold War.
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Higher education is sinking lower and lower. That’s bad news for our country, which has benefited enormously from having the world’s best system of higher education. And it’s bad news for Democrats, who face a tight election. Their party is closely tied to education at all levels, especially at elite universities. It is the party of experts, after all, and the party of the left. Universities are both. Moreover, since the Democrats control the Executive Branch, the public holds them primarily accountable for ensuring social order. Their failures are obvious to the average voter. That’s bound to hurt Democratic Party candidates in November.
Parents with children in college or expected to matriculate soon have every right to expect their kids can learn in peace, hear diverse viewpoints, and speak freely without threats, intimidation, or indoctrination. That’s true whether the parents are Jewish or not. Decent Americans won’t tolerate threats against Jewish students any more than they would tolerate them against blacks, Muslims, Christians, or Asian Americans. Yet they now see those threats against Jewish students every day, and, at many universities, they don’t see administrators standing up for their rights.
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The specter of stagflation has returned. The monthly jobs report released Friday showed only 175,000 jobs were created last month, well below the recent average and expectations.
More than half of new jobs were created in the unproductive government and quasi-government healthcare and social services sectors that don’t generate growth. Average wages grew at a slower rate than inflation, meaning Americans’ real wages and living standards are declining.
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In an increasing online world, people are lonelier than ever, especially men. In a 2021 study, 15 percent of men reported having no close friends, up from only three percent in the early 1990s. Perhaps more alarmingly, 28 percent of young men (under 30 years old) reported not having any close social connections.
As a man, I can speak to this deficit of male friendship. Many of us can say hello in passing, talk about the weather, and maybe discuss the latest sports news, but how many of our connections truly care about us and would be there when we need them?
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Top Biden administration officials worked with the National Archives to develop Special Counsel Jack Smith’s case against Donald Trump involving the former president’s alleged mishandling of classified material, according to recently unsealed court documents in the case pending in southern Florida.
More than 300 pages of newly unredacted exhibits, containing emails and other correspondence related to the early stages of the hunt for presidential papers, challenge public statements by Joe Biden about what he knew and when he knew it regarding the case against his political rival.
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The Federal Communications Commission has revived regulations for “net neutrality.” According to FCC chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, “the action we take here is good for consumers, public safety, national security and network investment.” The people have room for doubt and the “neutrality” concept requires some explanation.
The internet developed in fine style long before any such regulation appeared, but in 2015, the FCC reclassified Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from “information services,” to “common carrier services.” The government treated an innovative new technology like a public utility monopoly, in effect turning back the clock to the Communications Act of 1934.
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After I offered a perfectly accurate negative summation of current market/industry conditions when speaking on a business venture I can’t yet discuss (but that will be quite relevant indeed to the interests of our readers), I received an admonishment from my business partner: “Stop complaining about your opportunities!” It’s an even more accurate response than mine.
All too often we spend our time grousing about the state of the world, and yet, the worse things get, the greater the opportunity grows to take control and make them better.
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The prevailing belief in the Democratic Party is that abortion will again be a potent issue against Republicans in this year’s election cycle just as it was in 2022 – and that this time it will not just cost the GOP gaining the majority in the U.S. Senate, but also give Democrats the upper hand in retaining the presidency and winning back the House.
Abortion rights put the brakes on the Republicans’ chances in 2022 when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, eliminating the constitutional right to abortion after almost 50 years; a decision that transformed American politics that year, benefiting Democrats who were on their way to a bruising midterm election defeat.
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Pro-terrorist occupations and protests have exploded across American college campuses—coincidentally, as final exams approached. Many have asked how these Hamas-loving protesters seemed so organized, coordinated, and well-supplied. The source of funding and strategy has been an open question as tent cities and occupations pop up simultaneously at universities across the country.
Reports have begun to emerge that indicate the usual suspects have coordinated everything from tents to strategies to direct cash payments to agitators. This echoes the paid, coordinated riots that occurred in 2020, another presidential election year, after the death of George Floyd and the rise of Black Lives Matter (BLM).
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When I was in college, one of my professors had written her PhD thesis on the cultural aspects of the post-civil-war militias, organizations that would evolve into the National Guard of today. These units proliferated at the time to give men, who lived in the shadow of their fathers’ and grandfathers’ Civil War service, a chance to emulate their exploits. When the Spanish-American War began in 1898, the men of these militias volunteered en masse. They finally had a chance to prove themselves worthy of their forbears and do something daring and dangerous.
My professor suggested that she and other academics were in an analogous situation. For them—and they were almost all on the left—missing out on the 1960s meant they missed out on a period of revolutionary change and ferment. For left-leaning academics, the 1960s was the era of breaking rules, smashing idols, and inventing new ideas and methods to address the abandonment of the old authorities. This period featured the debut of influential prophets of “unmasking” so prevalent in academic life today, such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Herbert Marcuse
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Wisconsin could well determine the next president of the United States. President Trump earned his historic upset victory in 2016 with a win in Wisconsin by only 27,000 votes. Four years later, Biden prevailed there by an even smaller 20,000 vote margin, out of 3.2 million total ballots.
This year’s election figures to be another photo finish. The latest battleground state polling shows Trump up +1% in a multi-candidate field. This polling was commissioned by my populist Right labor organization, the League of American Workers, and queried a sampling of likely voters in Wisconsin that split evenly in 2020 between Trump and Biden.
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The World Health Organization is urging the U.S. and 193 other governments to commit next month to a new global treaty to prevent and manage future pandemics. Current estimates suggest over $31 billion per year will be needed to fund its obligations, a cost most lower income countries cannot afford. But that isn’t the only reason to oppose it. Validating this treaty is a vote for the disastrous policies of the Covid years. Rather than taking time for deep reflection and serious reform, those pushing the pandemic treaty are set on ignoring and institutionalizing the WHO’s mistakes.
From the Spring of 2020, many experts warned that the panic begun in Wuhan’s unprecedented lockdown would cause wide-ranging damage—and indeed they did. School closures deprived a generation of children—especially poor children—of access to basic education. Businesses were shuttered. Vaccine and mask mandates made public health an authoritarian exercise of power devoid of science. Border quarantines promulgated the idea that the rest of the world is unclean.
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