ActRight

What lies behind Donald Trump’s nomination victory? Received wisdom among conservatives is that he, the outsider, sensed, marshaled, and came to represent a massive revolt of the Republican rank and file against the “establishment.” This is the narrative: GOP political leaders made promises of all kinds and received in return, during President Obama’s years, major electoral victories that gave them the House, the Senate, twelve new governorships, and 30 state houses. Yet they didn’t deliver. Exit polls consistently showed that a majority of GOP primary voters (60 percent in some states) feel “betrayed” by their leaders. #ad#Not just let down or disappointed. Betrayed. By RINOs who, corrupted by donors and lobbyists, sold out. Did they repeal Obamacare? No. Did they defund Planned Parenthood? No. Did they stop President Obama’s tax-and-spend hyperliberalism? No. Whether from incompetence or venality, they let Obama walk all over them. But then comes the paradox. If insufficient resistance to Obama’s liberalism created this sense of betrayal, why in a field of 17 did Republican voters choose the least conservative candidate? A man who until yesterday was himself a liberal. Who donated money to those very same Democrats to whom the GOP establishment is said to have caved, including Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, and Hillary Clinton. RELATED: Trump, Alack Trump has expressed sympathy for a single-payer system of socialized medicine, far to the left of Obamacare. Trump lists health care as one of the federal government’s three main responsibilities (after national security); Republicans adamantly oppose federal intervention in health care. He also lists education, which Republicans believe should instead be left to the states. As for Planned Parenthood, the very same conservatives who railed against the Republican establishment for failing to defund it now rally around a candidate who sings the praises of its good works (save for the provision of abortion). RELATED: Trump: Something New under the Political Sun More fundamentally, Trump has no affinity whatsoever for the central thrust of modern conservatism — a return to less and smaller government. If the establishment has insufficiently resisted Obama’s Big Government policies, the beneficiary should logically have been the most consistent, indeed most radical, anti-government conservative of the bunch, Ted Cruz. Cruz’s entire career has consisted of promoting tea-party constitutionalism in revolt against party leaders who had joined “the Washington cartel.” Yet when Cruz got to his one-on-one with Trump at the Indiana OK Corral, Republicans chose Trump and his nonconservative, idiosyncratic populism. #share#Which makes Indiana a truly historic inflection point. It marks the most radical transformation of the political philosophy of a major political party in our lifetime. The Democrats continue their trajectory of ever-expansive liberalism from the New Deal through the Great Society through Obama and Clinton today. While the GOP, the nation’s conservative party, its ideology refined and crystallized by Ronald Reagan, has just gone populist. It’s an ideological earthquake. How radical a reorientation? Said Trump last week: “Folks, I’m a conservative. But at this point, who cares?” RELATED: America Needs #NeverTrump Now More than Ever Who cares? Wasn’t caring about conservatism the very essence of the talk-radio, tea-party, grass-roots revolt against the so-called establishment? They cheered Cruz when he led the government shutdown in the name of conservative principles. Yet when the race came down to Cruz and Trump, these opinion-shaping conservatives who once doted on Cruz affected a studied Trump-leaning neutrality. Trump won. True, the charismatically challenged Cruz was up against a prepackaged celebrity, an already famous showman. RELATED: In Case of Trump Nomination, Break Glass True, Trump appealed to the economic anxiety of a squeezed middle class and the status anxiety of a formerly dominant white working class. But the prevailing conservative narrative — of anti-establishment fury — was different and is now exposed as a convenient fable. If Trump is a great big middle finger aimed at a Republican establishment that has abandoned its principles, isn’t it curious that the party has chosen a man without any? Trump doesn’t even pretend to have any, conservative or otherwise. He lauds his own “flexibility,” his freedom from political or philosophical consistency. And he elevates unpredictability to a foreign-policy doctrine. #related#The ideological realignment is stark. On major issues — such as the central question of retaining America’s global pre-eminence as leader of the free world, sustainer of Western alliances, and protector of the post–World War II order — the GOP candidate stands decidedly to the left of the Democrat. And who knows on what else. On entitlements? On health care? On taxes? We will soon find out. But as Trump himself says of being a conservative — at this point, who cares? As of Tuesday night, certainly not the GOP. — Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2016 The Washington Post Writers Group.

With a résumé like this, Hillary should apply for work at the Kremlin. She'd fit right in with Putin, reset button in hand.

It’s a practice as American as apple pie—and for good reason.

In a craven act of betrayal, the Indiana GOP has turned a law protecting religious freedom into a law punishing religious freedom.

‘Eleven of California’s 58 counties have registration rates exceeding 100% of the age-eligible citizenry.’   ‘California has the highest rate of inactive registrations of any state in the country. Los Angeles County has the highest number of inactive registrations of any single county in the country’ (Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that it filed a...

George Will’s decision to leave the GOP should be a wake-up call for the leaders of both Democrats and Republicans. For years now, I have been asking voters of all stripes to declare their...

Climate Alarmists Seek to Silence Dissenting Scientists through Legislation

President Obama isn't wrong when he says no terrorist group has pulled off a foreign-directed attack on U.S. soil under his watch, but that claim is heavily caveated to obscure the reality of terrorism in America. Because of the extraordinary courage of our men and women in uniform, and the intelligence officers, law enforcement, and diplomats who support them, no foreign terrorist organization has successfully planned and executed an attack on our homeland these past eight years, the president said during his farewell address in Chicago. He added, Although Boston and Orlando and San Bernardino and Fort Hood remind us about how dangerous radicalization can be, our law enforcement agencies are more effective and vigilant than ever. Technically speaking, Obama's claim regarding attacks on the homeland is not wrong. Since his first inauguration in 2009, no foreign terrorist organization has planned and launched a successful attack on the U.S. from abroad.

One of the first comments on the last thread posed a very perceptive question: 'did we ever have the right, or the means, to stop Iran from building a nuke, short of invasion and 'regime change'?' To the extent that America ever had such a right it was granted by the tacit consent of the 'international community' itself in the aftermath of World War 2 by a planet weary of war.

However rotten and ungovernable you thought the federal swamp was, it really is so much worse. Indeed, it will take a hundred Donald Trumps to carve out all the cancer riddling this federal government. Behold, Rod Rosenstein, the very face of the swamp Leviathan.

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The Department of Homeland Security has started changing the enforcement of immigration laws, focusing on integrating long-term undocumented immigrants instead of deporting them.

BBC is receiving some pushback from free speech advocates after the broadcaster released the latest version of their privacy policy, which included a warning

In what was no doubt a rare moment for all involved, Huffington Post editorial director Howard Fineman noted on MSNBC's

The slippery paradox of free speech

Why Bernie Sanders isn’t socialist enough for many socialists; Donald Trump says he’ll live-tweet Tuesday night’s Democratic debate; Jeb Bush releases his health-care plan; and more.

BAM!

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A Georgia lawmaker proposes a ban that would prohibit women from wearing a burqa and veil that conceal their identity. CNN's Nick Valencia reports.

The Left’s bullying freak-out over Indiana's RFRA betrays a compulsive need to feel morally superior to others.

A new university study warns that the lack of programs to counter radicalization in U.S. prisons risks allowing extremist ideas to spread within the system and beyond.

U.S.—Filled with a sense of nostalgia for the simpler time just several years ago, the nation looked back fondly on the time when everyone said Christians shouldn?t care who marries who, according to sources from around the country. ?Remember when liberals were telling us we shouldn?t care who marries whom, that it was none of ?

On Wednesday evening, CNN reported that Breitbart News chairman Steve Bannon had finally disassociated from their onetime chosen candidate to dethrone Paul Ryan in his Congressional seat, Paul Nehlen. According to Arthur Schwartz, a Bannon advisor, “Nehlen is dead to us.”

Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s office offered to change her position on medical marijuana if a major Florida donor recanted his withering criticism of her, according to emails obtained by POLITICO. The proposal to Orlando trial lawyer John Morgan was straightforward: retract critical statements he made to a reporter...

Arthur C. Brooks says Republicans should revise their rhetoric and speak in moral terms.