ActRight

A look at the judicial record of the judge in Trump's crosshairs.

CNN used some very noticeable video editing to transfigure Hillary Clinton on Wednesday's New Day. Correspondent Jeff Zeleny ran footage from the Democratic presidential candidate's victory speech on Tuesday night that transformed Mrs. Clinton into a glowing figure. He hyped how Mrs. Clinton was "savoring a triumph in her long Democratic primary fight — exactly eight years after extinguishing her first trailblazing campaign."

This week, Koozie is on vacation, so the guys try to make it through an episode on their own. We talk Miss USA, riots outside a Trump rally, Game of Thrones, NBA Finals, Sand Volleyball, and we close

Culture of corruption.

A student at North Carolina State University was hounded by his school’s Greek life organizations for posting conservative-leaning content on his social media accounts, but ultimately dodged impeachment after agreeing to undergo a variety of university-sanctioned punishments.

More than three years after it admitted to targeting tea party groups for intrusive scrutiny, the IRS has finally released a near-complete list of the organizations it snagged in a political dragnet.

For years, the left has been desperate to paint conservatives as the real danger to civil society. Back in 2009, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security called conservatives a threat to safety. In a report, it stated that those who oppose abortion and illegal immigration represent a serious domestic terror threat.

No...not at all.

Paul Ryan is a disappointment. That’s more difficult for me to write than it should be. My approach to politicians has generally been similar to that of lab researchers to their test animals: Do not get too attached. For scientists, it’s a lot easier to stick a guinea pig with a needle if you know it as “test subject 43A” than if you know it as “Mr. Fluffy.” For the columnist, it’s easier to twist the knife if you don’t feel personally invested. #ad#But philosophically and temperamentally, I’ve long felt that Ryan is my kind of politician, and that judgment didn’t change after getting to know him (which is rare, given how most politicians are all too human). His vision for government’s role and the kind of party the GOP should be has always resonated with me, even if I didn’t agree with him on every policy or vote. For those reasons I wasn’t just pleased that he held the line against Donald Trump, I was proud. And for those reasons, his endorsement of Trump was a true disappointment. On May 5, Ryan announced that he wasn’t ready to endorse. Trump instantly retorted: “I am not ready to support Speaker Ryan’s agenda.” Ryan is no naïf. His stance was both strategic and principled. We were told that he was giving his GOP caucus “cover” so they wouldn’t all have to bend the knee to King Trump at once. Moreover, Ryan implied that he was holding out in order to push Trump in a more conservative direction; the businessman would have to show good faith and rein in his antics in exchange for party unity. GOP apparatchiks reassured the scattered holdouts, particularly among donors, that Trump would soon stop the scorched-earth insults and histrionics and get on board with the GOP agenda. Even Trump’s supporters, such as Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, insisted that the presumptive nominee would “get better.” But Trump never showed signs of improvement. He attacked New Mexico’s popular Republican governor, Susana Martinez, for the effrontery of not supporting him. And he vilified the Indiana-born judge in his Trump University fraud case for being a “Mexican.” “You think I’m going to change?” Trump asked reporters at a positively unhinged news conference last week. “I’m not changing.” Yet Ryan endorsed him anyway. Admittedly, Ryan’s endorsement was about as grudging as possible. He announced it on Thursday in a local Wisconsin newspaper. In a video interview with the Associated Press, he showed all the sincerity of a POW muttering into a captor’s camera. Ryan said he was “confident” that Trump would help him advance his agenda. Alas, he didn’t blink “just kidding” in Morse code. In throwing his support to Trump, Ryan made two mistakes. The first was tactical. Because Trump did nothing to earn Ryan’s endorsement, the presumptive nominee may conclude that he needn’t negotiate with the GOP establishment; he can just count on its eventual submission.​ As the Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein put it, “If Ryan can’t stand up to candidate Trump, why should we expect he’d stand up to a President Trump?” Ryan also jeopardized the party’s long game. Ryan understands better than most that the biggest hurdle for conservatives is how their motivations are perceived. If someone starts out thinking you’re greedy, mean-spirited, or bigoted, they’re not going to listen to your 10-point plan. Ryan has been fighting that perception all his political life. Trump often embraces that perception, proving conservatism’s harshest critics right. For example, the Left says conservatives support “wars for oil.” Trump says that “taking the oil” of Iraq and Libya should be a top priority. Democrats claim that conservative immigration and national security policies stem from animosity toward Latinos and Muslims. Ryan’s honest retort to such claims is that he abhors identity politics. Meanwhile, Trump is perfectly comfortable saying that an American judge’s Latino heritage is disqualifying. On Sunday, he said the same might hold for Muslim judges. From entitlements to trade to the First Amendment, Trump has made it clear that his vision of government isn’t Ryan’s. And the gulf in temperament and tone between the two men is wider and deeper than the Marianas Trench. Trump, then, poses an Aesopian challenge to Ryan; the scorpion must sting the frog because that is its nature. The only way to avoid the sting is not to ally yourself with the scorpion in the first place. Trump will fade one day, but even Ryan’s halfhearted embrace of Trumpism makes it more likely Ryanism will fade too. — Jonah Goldberg is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior editor of National Review​. You can write to him by e-mail at [email protected], or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2016 Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Last week, President Obama became the target of mockery when he descended into Porky Pig protestations at the divisiveness of presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump. After tripping over his words while trying to gain his footing, Obama finally settled on a line of attack: “If we turn against each other based on divisions of race or religion, if we fall for a bunch of ‘okey doke’ just because it sounds funny or the tweets are provocative, then we’re not going to build on the progress we started.” Meanwhile, across the country, likely Obama supporters rioted at a Trump event in San Jose, Calif., waving Mexican flags, burning American ones, assaulting Trump supporters, and generally engaging in mayhem. #ad#The same day, Trump labeled a judge presiding over his civil trial as unfit for his job. “I’m building a wall,” said Trump. “It’s an inherent conflict of interest.” What, pray tell, was that inherent conflict of interest? Trump said that the judge was “Mexican” (he was born in Indiana, to Mexican parents). Two days later, Trump told Fox News’s Jeanine Pirro, “Barack Obama has been a terrible president, but he’s been a tremendous divider. He has divided this country from rich and poor, black and white — he has divided this country like no president in my opinion, almost ever . . . I will bring people together.” So, who’s right? They’re both right. Obama, like it or not, leads a coalition of tribes. Trump, like it or not, leads a competing coalition of tribes. The Founders weep in their graves. The Founders were scholars of both Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Hobbes argued that the state of nature — primitive society — revolved around a war of “every man against every man.” In such a state, life was awful: “No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” The only solution to such chaos, said Hobbes, was the Leviathan: the state, which is “but an artificial man; though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defense it was intended; and in which, the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body.” Hobbesian theory has prevailed throughout human history: Tribal societies either remain in a constant state of war with each other, or they are overthrown by a powerful government. Jared Diamond writes that “tribal warfare tends to be chronic, because there are not strong central governments that can enforce peace.” Those strong central governments often arise, says Francis Fukuyama, thanks to the advent of religion, which unites tribes across family boundaries. The rise of powerful leadership leads to both tyranny and to peace. The Founders were scholars of both Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. But in Western societies, such tyranny cannot last. After generations of tyranny — after tribalism gives way to Judeo-Christian teachings enforced through government — citizens begin to question why a tyrant is necessary. They begin to ask John Locke’s question: In a state of nature, we had rights from one another; what gives the tyrant power to invade those rights? Is prevention of violence a rationale for full government control, or were governments created to protect our rights? Our Founders came down on the side of Locke; as they stated in the Declaration of Independence, “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” But the Founders still feared tribalism. They called it “faction” in The Federalist Papers, and were truly worried about the seizure of the mechanism of government in order to benefit one group over another. They may have agreed with Locke over Hobbes about the proper extent of government power, but they never believed that tribalism had disappeared. That is why they attempted to create a government pitting faction against faction, cutting the Gordian knot of tyranny and tribalism with checks and balances. As James Madison famously wrote in Federalist No. 51: If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions. It was a brilliant solution to an intractable problem — so long as it worked. It no longer does. Tribalism has had its revenge. It began with the decline of American religion in the 1950s. As religion declined, Americans looked for new sources of community — and in the 1960s, the Marxist Left provided Americans communal meaning in ethnic and racial solidarity. Even as America began to move beyond its historic racism, the Left hijacked the conversation around race and divvied Americans up into subgroups of ethnic haves and have-nots. City governments became playgrounds for racial factions taking control of government and expanding their power. Student groups divided along racial and sexual lines. The social fabric frayed. The unrest of the 1960s and 1970s provoked a law-and-order backlash — a desire for a government that would tamp down the unrest and restore order. For three decades, Americans rejected tribalism as a mode of politics (Ronald Reagan believed in universal human freedoms, and Bill Clinton famously rejected Sister Souljah’s race-baiting). Not surprisingly, the rejection of 1960s tribalism ushered in an era of smaller government dedicated toward the proposition that constitutional checks and balances were the best protection against tyranny. And then came the Obama presidency. President Obama’s tribal politics have crippled America. Americans hoped that Obama — after campaigning on the notion that he would provide the capstone to America’s non-tribalism — would heal our wounds and move our country beyond racial politics. He, in his own persona, was to be a racial unifier. He represented the hope that America could reject tribalism in favor of American universalism. Instead, Obama has rejected checks and balances as a matter of principle, and has used tribalism to grow his own power. By cobbling together a coalition of racial and ethnic interest groups, Obama knew he could maximize the power of the government to act on their behalf. And so his Department of Justice has crippled police departments based solely on the race of police officers. He constantly suggests that America has an inborn, unfixable problem with racism. He poses as a rejection of the Founding ideology. Donald Trump is the counter-reaction. But he is not a Reaganesque or even Bill Clinton-esque counter-reaction. He, like Obama, is tribal. His tribalism is the tribalism of Pat Buchanan, who suggested in 2011 what appears to be Donald Trump’s electoral strategy: “to increase the GOP share of the white Christian vote and increase the turnout of that vote by specific appeals to social, cultural, and moral issues, and for equal justice for the emerging white minority.” “Why should Republicans be ashamed to represent the progeny of the men who founded, built, and defended America since her birth as a nation?” Buchanan asked, concluding that “white anger is a legitimate response to racial injustices done to white people.” Instead of attempting to set checks and balances to prevent faction, instead of attempting to educate Americans in our Founding principles, this philosophy focuses on tribalism of a different sort, making the crucial error of linking skin color to culture. And so we may have reached the end of the era of small government. As tribalism rises, Americans look again to the strongman. We begin the cycle anew. But first, we feel the rage of riots in San Jose and Ferguson, and the spiteful glee of the white-nationalist alt-right. We watch contests between tribal figures like Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. We wonder which tribe will win, even as America disintegrates before us. — Ben Shapiro is the editor-in-chief of the DailyWire.com.

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The mother of a special needs child wrote a powerful letter to the doctor who suggested she get an abortion after a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome.

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The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence president Dan Gross boasted that gun control is a central plank of Hillary Clinton's campaign.

Reporters have received angry calls and emails, the AP said.

Every Friday night comedian Bill Maher puts on a show with an interesting mix of guests. But this past Friday, Maher repeated a claim he often makes that was finally smacked down by Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Namely, Maher said that conservatives are consistently more anti-science than liberals. That’s bullshit.

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Detroit Free Press editorial page editor Stephen Henderson called for violent retribution against legislators who support charter schools.