ActRight

Welcome to the Party of Trump. Check your conservatism at the door.

A U.S. Navy admiral received a standing ovation for calling out Colin Kaepernick at an event commemorating the 75th anniversary of Pearl Harbor.

How do you define 'grievance?'

Is it true that 97% of climate scientists agree that climate change is real? Where does the 97% figure come from? And if it is true, do they agree on both th...

Advocates fear that programs in a dozen states might be used by a Trump administration to bolster deportations aims.

President Obama said his biggest policy disappointment as president was not passing gun control laws, according to an interview CNN aired Wednesday evening. If you ask me where has been the one area where I feel that I've been most frustrated and most stymied, it is the fact that the United States of America is the one advanced nation on Earth in which we do not have sufficient common sense gun safety laws, Obama told Fareed Zakaria in the TV special, The Legacy of Barack Obama. Despite national anger following mass shootings throughout his two terms, Obama was unable to convince Congress to pass legislation that would change those policies, including enhancing background checks and not selling firearms at gun shows and other venues. Obama was adamant in the days following the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newton, Conn., that he had done all he could to keep the U.S. afloat in the midst of other challenges, including the auto and bank bailout, and did not have the support to push a controversial gun bill now. Obama's frustration prompted him to take executive action in January 2016.

Everything’s fine, according to the top Democrat in the Senate. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), the 77-year-old Senate minority leader who is less than a month away from leaving government, wants his party to…

The FBI is investigating a Huffington Post scribe for joking about “destroying Trump ballots” at a Washington, DC, voting site, the reporter claimed. Nick Baumann said it all began with a joke that…

A panel of state judges just taught New York City students a clear-cut lesson: It’s OK to cheat on tests. Yep: That’s message from the Appellate Division decision that upheld a lower court’s ruling…

Freedom Caucus Rep. says GOP leaders worked with Pelosi to kill the impeachment vote.

Bill fixes a long-standing problem WASHINGTON – Today, the U.S. House of Representatives passed, as amended, H.R. 5790, the Federal Bureau of Investigation Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act of 2016 (404-0). The bill clarifies Congress’s intent to protect FBI whistleblowers who make disclosures to managers and supervisors in their chain of command, bringing the agency in line …

“.@JoeNBC on Trump's picks: This will be the most conservative Repub. cabinet since Hoover... if all these go through”

Last week, President-elect Donald Trump re-emphasized the approach he will take in enforcing the nation's immigration laws, which is much different from the manner of enforcement utilized by President Barack Obama.

In 2015, Federal Reserve Board economist Justin Pierce and Yale School of Management professor Peter Schott submitted a draft paper which concluded that the Uni

After eight years of blaming America’s problems on George W. Bush, the press that got the election wrong is rolling out a new line — that President Obama is handing President-elect Donald Trump a b…

INDIANAPOLIS ? Robert James stood outside the Carrier plant just before the president-elect addressed workers at the refrigeration and heating assembly plant. “I feel a great swing of emotion…

President Barack Obama declared at a speech Tuesday at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, FL that presidents shouldn't retaliate against their critics.

Economy: Pop quiz: Attach the correct name — either liberal President Obama or conservative Vice President-elect Mike Pence — to the following quotes. "The free market is the greatest force for economic progress in human history. It's led to a prosperity and a standard of living unmat

New information from Wikileaks is about to shake up the Republican world. Republicans in name only, anyway. An email from John Podesta to Huma Abedin that was released as document number 1078645 is about to turn the speculation that certain prominent Republicans who opposed Donald Trump into the truth that they were, in fact, not…

The lowest performing medical centers are clustered in Tennessee and Texas; many of the highest are in the Northeast and upper Midwest.

Clip from PRIMO NUTMEG #55: Green Party Vice Presidential nominee Ajamu Baraka discusses the influence of billionaire George Soros on left wing American poli...

‘Progressive” is a funny word. It is what the self-consciously center-left element in American politics started calling itself after the word “liberal” was made into a term of abuse by the center-right element in American politics, which is made up mainly of liberals. Funny little eccentricities of the language: There are among our so-called liberal Democrats few surviving liberals and a rapidly declining number of democrats. And, thanks to the efforts of such excellent gentlemen as Jonah Goldberg and Glenn Beck in explaining the ugly history of American progressivism, “progressive” has become a term of abuse, too, especially on the talk-radio/cable-news right, which is why some people get so very upset when you point out that Donald Trump is a progressive. The anti-Trump Right has an interest in establishing that conservatism is not Trump-ism, but there is more to it than that. Trump’s progressivism has to be understood in the context of his political and ideological forebears, many of whom our contemporary self-proclaimed progressives do not wish to claim, among them George Wallace and the segregationist Southern Democrats who lorded over American domestic politics between the Great Depression and the Reagan era. Let me begin by anticipating a complaint: Progressives will complain that one cannot in good faith describe Trump as a progressive because contemporary progressives do not much like him, and indeed oppose him strongly, even to the point of unreason. That opposition, however, is not rooted in deep disagreements over policy or ideology but in pure tribalism. Donald Trump thinks that free-trade deals are depressing American wages and that an “open borders” immigration regime is the work of Wall Street and big-business interests trying to undermine the American working class. So does Bernie Sanders. Trump, sitting on his golden toilet on Fifth Avenue, somehow emerged as the tribune of the rural working classes, while Sanders, who represents one of the whitest and most rural states, was the favorite of urban cosmopolitans — which is weird enough, but consider that they did it while pushing policy agendas that were substantially identical in many fundamental ways. But the fact that a candidate pushing classic progressivism rubs most progressives the wrong way does not alter his commitment to progressivism, which is to say, to the preference for the political regimentation of society over laissez-faire economic policies and organic social development. The central public-policy question of American progressivism, as Walter Nugent puts it in his useful Progressivism: A Very Short Introduction (part of an Oxford University Press series of “Very Short Introductions”) from the beginning has been: “How could economic life be made fair again?” Classical progressives, he writes, “favored using some form and degree of government . . . to regulate economic problems, ameliorate social ills, and reconcile change with tradition.” The first two are still very much the central concerns of progressives, though reconciling change with tradition has been thrown overboard in these days of prosecuting nonconformist bakers as civil-rights villains. Woodrow Wilson, the father of American progressivism, would no doubt have vexed modern progressives with his backward and primitive racial views — views that were backward and primitive even by the standards of his time. Those “conservative” Southern Democrats were in the main recognizable as modern progressives, as indeed was George Wallace: They were supporters of social insurance and welfare-state programs; minimum-wage laws and much (but not all) other pro-labor regulation, with Wallace being an energetic opponent of right-to-work laws; they supported the trust-busting and anti-monopoly projects and generally favored a strong regulatory hand on business, particularly on international trade and banking; Southern segregationists such as Wallace and Theodore Bilbo were notoriously fond of extravagant public-works spending, and, as governor, Bilbo was a notable champion of progressive measures such as compulsory education, bank regulation, and public-health projects. This stands in broad contrast to the conservative Republicans of the era, who were for their part mainly recognizable as modern conservatives: anti-tax, anti-spending, anti–New Deal, small-government men, including arch-conservatives such as “Mr. Republican” Robert Taft, who also attempted to put together a far-reaching civil-rights bill in 1946 — a project scuttled by progressives. But don’t take my word for it: You can read Ira Katznelson on this stuff, or Ta-Nahesi Coates, or dozens of left-leaning scholars — or, even better, you can go back and look at the actual records of those segregationist Democrats on issues like the creation of Social Security, the Davis-Bacon Act, bank regulations, etc. Progressivism is not a set of cultural inclinations but a body of public-policy views. The point of all this is not to argue that modern progressives ought to be tarred with the racism of their intellectual forebears, much less to suggest that modern progressives are in the main racists, covertly or otherwise. Rather, the point is to establish the opposite: Progressivism is not a set of cultural inclinations but a body of public-policy views, mainly economic, along with related assumptions about the role and capacities of government. The contemporary Left’s attempt to define “conservative” as bigotry and “progressivism” as liberation from such bigotry is juvenile, and it is historically illiterate. The American Left is for all practical purposes entirely progressive, which is to say, entirely committed to a managerial view of the role of government rooted in implacable, indeed irrational, hostility to the laissez-faire posture. But there is a progressive element within the Right as well: William F. Buckley (himself no stranger to the practical uses of populism) and National Review opposed Wallace energetically, but not all conservatives did. And the same dynamic played out with Trump, with one important difference. Trump won. #share#He is not, to be sure, a poisonous racist on the Wallace model. He is not a Pat Buchanan–style culture warrior, either, being more of a Twitter troll. He may or may not be as crazy as H. Ross Perot, the prior presidential candidate he most closely resembles, and what he actually will do in office is anybody’s guess. But we should try to understand where it is we find ourselves on the political spectrum. Trump may be culturally attached to the Right — or, more precisely, the Right may be culturally attached to Trump — but everything he has said and done thus far points to his being a progressive in the ancient mold of Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and, yes, George Wallace and Theodore Bilbo. He means to put trade, and probably much more than trade, under political discipline. He means to stand between buyers and sellers with his hand out, making demands. He has expressed a longing for Keynesian stimulus projects, mercantilism, income redistribution, Bismarckian welfare-statism, and the consolidation of political power within the executive. He may talk like Archie Bunker, but politically he is Barack Obama rebranded for talk radio. If we take him at his word, this is shaping up to be a case of talk right, govern left. Power-worshiping Republicans are going along with this as quickly and as cravenly as they can. And power-worshiping Republicans are going along with this as quickly and as cravenly as they can. Mike Pence has declared himself a fundamental opponent of free markets. Quondam conservatives such as Henry Olsen of the Ethics and Public Policy Center defend instances of pure crony capitalism such as the Carrier bailout, insisting that free-market advocates must stomach these in the name of doing what is “politically sustainable.” Pro-lifers and immigration hawks spent many years listening to similar demands that they abandon their principles in the name of popularity, but tastes change, politics changes, and the electorate is fickle at best. There was a time not long ago when Republicans complained that, with Democrats in possession of the White House and the Senate, they controlled “only one half of one third of the government,” as Darrell Issa put it. Republicans now control the entirety of the elected federal government and on a good day can win at the Supreme Court, too. But conservatives — here meaning the people who believe in limited government, laissez-faire, free trade, free enterprise, a shrewd and steady national-security policy — may not control even that one half of one third that Issa found inadequate. #related#And who is in control? A man with Otto von Bismarck’s conception of the state and Ed Anger’s temperament, George Wallace without the experience in office. Him and a great many self-abasing hangers-on hypnotized by the prospect of power like Narcissus in a house of mirrors. Conservatives said that the great triumph of the Reagan years was a Democratic party so chastened that it nominated Bill Clinton, the reluctant welfare reformer and free-trader who by his own rueful reckoning pursued the policies of an Eisenhower Republican. The great triumph of the Obama years, for progressives, anyway, is a Republican party so debased that it happily embraces Trump and Trump-ism. I wonder if Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are smart enough to appreciate the scale and significance of their victory. — Kevin D. Williamson is National Review’s roving correspondent.

His passing comment that he found abortion to be wrong caused a female student to complain that his words had ‘triggered’ her such that she felt ‘unsafe’

Who's better at cleaning house, The Left or the Right? This video brought to you by: Roberto Heese Pigeon Natalie Waugh John Medlar Declan McDonnell That Guy...

Tuesday's deadly terror attack in Brussels, Belgium was yet another Islamic terror attack that has occurred during President Barack Obama's administration. Obama's weakness on the world stage and failure to even utter the words "radical Islamic terrorism" has emboldened the Islamic jihadist movement and has caused their evil expansion and growth. Here is the complete list of Islamic terror attacks that have occurred under Obama's watch.