RealClearPolitics Articles

CARLSBAD, Calif. — Ty Humes knew he was stepping into the still-raging school reopening battle when he decided in late April to apply for an open trustee position on the local school board where he lives in North County San Diego. But the 14-year district resident, a successful businessman, biotech entrepreneur, community volunteer and father of two, didn’t realize he would be placing a union target on his back by taking on the mostly volunteer position. It boasts a meager $400-a-month stipend.   Three weeks ago, Humes was unanimously appointed to the vacant trustee seat on...

Good morning, it’s Tuesday, May 18, 2021. Thirty-five years ago today, a commencement speaker at the UC-Berkeley school of business enthralled the graduating class by giving them permission to indulge their least altruistic instincts. It was probably predictable that a corporate raider nicknamed “Ivan the Terrible” would go beyond the typical platitudes of a graduation speech, and Ivan Boesky didn’t disappoint. It was okay, he told them, to be greedy. But is that really what Boesky said that day? I’ll have more on this in a moment. I’ve written about it...

When you meditate for a moment on what the left expects honest and decent people to believe, you confront the world of absurdities and lies in which we live. The left demands we believe and announce that men menstruate and give birth, and that it is in no way unfair to girls and women when biological men compete in girls' and women's sports. In tens of thousands of American schools, students are brainwashed to believe that America was not founded in 1776 but in 1619, the year the first Africans were brought to North America as indentured servants or slaves. This is the "1619 Project" lie: It...

CANONSBURG, PA. -- Thirty years ago, Jason Capps was a young man with ambition, but when he looked around this town near Pittsburgh, where he grew up, all he saw were opportunities slipping away. The coal mines where his father worked were dying; the glass, steel and manufacturing industries were on their last legs. In 1987, when Capps graduated from high school, the unemployment rate was at a staggering 12%. "My ability to carve out a future here was limited at best, impossible at worst," he said. "So I left." Capps, 51, became a chef and traveled the country honing his skills. But then an...

"Israel is Winning Battles, Hamas is Winning the War." So ran the headline in the Jerusalem Post atop an analysis of the Gaza war, which began, "The IDF is registering great achievements in Operation Guardian of the Walls, but meanwhile the house appears to be collapsing from within." Hard to disagree. Consider this New York Times commentary about Israel's prime minister from the runner-up to the Democratic presidential nominee in the primaries of 2016 and 2020, Sen. Bernie Sanders: "Mr. Netanyahu has cultivated an increasingly intolerant and authoritarian type of racist nationalism...

Good morning, it’s Monday, May 17, 2021. Forty-eight years ago today, the American people were riveted by a spectacle that would result in the end of a presidency. With North Carolina Democrat Samuel J. Ervin Jr. presiding and Tennessee Republican Howard H. Baker Jr. serving as co-chairman, the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities commenced its much-anticipated public hearings. Sam Ervin’s record on race relations wouldn’t fully pass muster today: 76 years old at the time of the Watergate hearings, he was a product of his time in a segregated South....

Let's not kid ourselves. Former -- yes, former -- President Donald Trump wants to run for president in 2024, and so he shall. The story some Republicans like to tell themselves -- that Trump will not run again for the White House because he knows he can't win and he's smart enough to see the glory in being a GOP kingmaker -- is wishful thinking. Trump is enjoying leaving his plans unclear so he can lure various GOP hopefuls to Mar-a-Lago to kiss his ring. Later, Trump can use their courtship against them. He'll run because he only gets the ego-slathering adulation he craves at a campaign...

U.S. foreign policy -- from the founding era to the present moment -- revolves around a recurring debate about the diplomatic means for securing freedom. As the nation grew and the world changed, it was necessary to revise and refine the understanding of America’s role in international affairs and the character and extent of the nation’s alliances. With the rise -- and rising awareness of -- the worldwide China challenge, the question of how best to conceive of and manage the U.S. alliance system to secure freedom has taken on renewed urgency. The nation’s founding...

In the lead-up to Pennsylvania’s primary, which takes place Tuesday, Gov. Tom Wolf and his administration have injected partisanship into what had been a non-political aspect of state government. Earlier this year, the state legislature passed three amendments for voters to consider in the primary. The executive branch has a clerical duty to summarize such ballot questions for voters in neutral, descriptive language. Question 3 was an equal rights provision with bipartisan support that received unobjectionable wording. Questions 1 and 2, however, concern limits on the governor’s...

When I first met former North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory during the summer of 2017, he was still fresh off of his 2016 election loss, when North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper prevailed by approximately 10,000 votes. We spoke often in those days, as he recounted stories from his time in office with the idea that we might one day compile them — the building blocks for a potential memoir about a political career unduly cut short by a policy decision whipped into a national frenzy. Perhaps he was one of the earliest casualties of this now-pervasive trend of...

Republican Rep. Liz Cheney is out as Republican conference chair in the House of Representatives. The story has dominated American news outlets over the past week. Most Americans are probably hard-pressed to care about the story, but to the political press in the United States, the story has mattered deeply. This past Tuesday night, as rockets rained down on Tel Aviv from Gaza, the press was focused on Cheney's pending ouster, which happened Wednesday morning. On Wednesday afternoon, while President Joe Biden was holding a press conference about the Colonial Pipeline shutdown, MSNBC was...

Five years ago next month, British voters, in the largest turnout ever, voted to leave the European Union by a 52% to 48% margin. It was an unexpected result, and a harbinger of Donald Trump's even more unexpected election as president five months later. In both countries, key votes were cast by white non-college graduates. In the U.S., blue-collar Democrats in Pennsylvania and the Midwest switched to Trump. In the U.K., working-class voters long loyal to Labour joined leading Conservatives in supporting Brexit. Supposedly ascendant coalitions of metropolitan professionals and racial and...

President Biden spoke at the White House earlier this week to address an unsettling national trend – millions of jobs going unfilled in an economy still struggling to right itself. The president couldn’t deny the existence of the paradox: His own administration’s numbers show that millions of Americans are drawing unemployment while millions of jobs are going unfilled. But he and his top economic officials dismissed the most obvious explanation for April’s dismal job numbers – generous unemployment benefits eroding the incentive to work. “We don’t see...

On taking the oath of office, Jan. 20, Joe Biden may not have realized it, but history had dealt him a pair of aces. The COVID-19 pandemic had reached its apex, infecting a quarter of a million Americans every day. Yet, due to the discovery and distribution of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, the incidence of infections had crested and was about to turn sharply down. By May, the infection rate had fallen 80%, as had the death toll. Thanks to the Operation Warp Speed program driven by President Donald Trump, the country made amazing strides in Biden's first 100 days toward solving the major...

In certain ways, it must be fun to be a left-winger. Pushing for any policy that seems socially just without the constraint of how it actually works out for people (i.e., ignoring the horrors left behind in socialism's wake throughout history) makes things a whole lot easier. Sounds fun, too. Just going with your heart and hoping for the best must be liberating. But the most fun leftists have must be when they sit around to talk about some of the dumb ways conservatives talk. Language is, of course, crucial in a political debate. The left understands this better than the right. The left is...

Growing inflation concerns, violence in the Middle East and gas stations sans gas: Republicans love the script the news cycle just handed them because it feels like an easy, low-budget summer reboot. They are desperate to cast Joe Biden as Jimmy Carter, and they point to a cyber-blocked fuel pipeline as the clearest evidence yet of a nation losing ground. Of course, the president rejects the portrayal. “We’re going to get through this as we always do: as Americans, and we’re going to do it together,” Biden promised Thursday at the White House, “and it’s...

The front page of the May 13 Washington Times was sobering. "President Biden's second 100 days are off to a woeful start, including a gas shortage for much of the East Coast, a surge of inflation, a slowdown in hiring despite a record number of job openings, renewed fighting in the Middle East and an unresolved border crisis," it read. But the rest of the news media? They're obsessing over how terrible (and terribly split) the Republicans are. One party is engaged in a "civil war," and the other is forever portrayed as a placid pool of calm. This is how you know the "news" today is whatever...

Good morning, it’s Friday, May 14, 2021, the day of the week when I reprise quotations intended to be uplifting or educational. Today’s, as promised, comes from Abraham Lincoln -- but during the Mexican-American War. Rarely discussed in American politics today, that conflict was a momentous event in the evolution of the two countries. It cost Mexico the potential wealth of California and most of what we know as the American Southwest, as well as much prestige and self-confidence -- not to mention the lives of thousands of soldiers and civilians. On the other side of the border,...

While the past year brought America difficult challenges, the light at the end of the tunnel grows brighter every day, thanks to the endurance and heroism of our frontline workers. When the pandemic first struck, the trucking and freight rail industries didn’t stand down. We rolled up our sleeves and worked together to keep the nation’s supply lines open and the critical goods that households and communities rely on moving.  Now we’re asking lawmakers to show the same cooperative spirit, cast aside divisions, and forge a path towards sustainable, user-funded...