ActRight

President Donald Trump's top White House counselor asked Americans to buy Ivanka Trump's fashion line, potentially violating federal government ethics rules.

Värnhem School in central Malmö received a special prize for accepting the most refugees. Today the school is surrounded by ...

Republicans should do everything in their power to ensure that Sen. Elizabeth Warren is the new leader of the Democratic Party.

The Democratic Party isn’t interested in an electoral autopsy. The slow-motion disaster of its search for a new Democratic National Committee chair proves it. Unlike the Republicans, who commission…

Ah, Identity politics at it's best! Like, Subscribe, Comment or Donate at: https://www.patreon.com/30CoinsMediaGroup if you enjoyed Copyright © 2016 30 Coins...

Alarmed and feeling powerless, more liberals are turning to fake news, while President Trump tries to redefine what the term means.

Editor's Note: Every day, President Trump or his administration says, does, or tweets something that is declared or implied to be unprecedented. Often these claims are false. When these claims arise, we turn to our in-house encyclopedia, Michael Barone. Below is his first installment in a regular series titled, Precedented. *** Donald Trump's tweet criticizing Nordstrom is being attacked in some quarters as an improper use of presidential power, an infringement of the rights of a corporation, an attempt to increase the wealth of the Trump family. To which one sensible response is: lighten up. Donald Trump didn't go to the trouble of running for president in order to bolster the profits of his daughter's clothing line, and his tweet just gives some free publicity to a retailer whose upscale clientele is more likely to be pleased than to be repelled by removal of the Ivanka clothes from the premises. After all, Nordstrom made its decision, willing to assume any downside risk and perhaps eager to reap any upside advantage.

At this moment, I am on assignment in Europe, a continent that, like America, seems more screwed-up with every visit. To escape the insanity that threatens to engulf us all, this morning I decided to work remotely from a small French town. Hammering away on my laptop, I sat down to enjoy a nice brea…

Because they are so rare — and I mean unicorn rare — positive bureaucratic experiences stand out in my mind. In 2001, I went into a driver’s-license office in Montgomery County, Pa., and was greeted by a middle-aged man wearing about 40 pieces of Masonic swag (I later learned he was a Catholic!) who asked me what brought me in. I said I needed to trade in a Texas driver’s license for a Pennsylvania license. He gave me a form to fill out, asked me a couple of questions, took my money, and that was that. Perhaps it was a Masonic plot. But if the Illuminati can get me through the DMV in less than 15 minutes, then bring on the Illuminati, the Bilderbergers, and the reptilian shape-shifters, too. I’ve got places to be. I had a similarly pleasant surprise in Europe last summer. I am that guy who shows up at the airport a minimum of two hours before boarding time, because the only thing I hate more than waiting is being late. The French were threatening to go on strike, as they do weekly, and my hopes for the efficiency of the Italian public sector were not very high. But compared with entering or leaving the United States via JFK, it was a snap. It did not quite make sense — I was asked for my passport about two more times than seemed necessary — but it didn’t take a minute. I had similar experiences in the Netherlands, where one expects such efficiency, and in Spain, where one does not. Maybe there is something of the old royalist or Napoleonic attitude that survives in Europe, which approaches the matter of bureaucracy with a certain dignity. Whereas their American counterparts alternate between acting like they’re hustling $6 appletinis at TGI Friday’s (“Hello, my name is Caitlyn, and I’ll be taking care of you today. Are we ready for our rectal probe?”) and acting like they’re going to shoot you in the face (Hello, TSA!) the front-line agents of European bureaucracy are aloof and maybe just a little bit contemptuous, but efficient. There is a sense of pride in position, something that we just don’t have in the United States, where being an assistant vice principal is socially one step down from being a rodeo clown. (And, no, I didn’t tell Ma I was a newspaper editor; she thought I was a piano-player in a whorehouse.) There are weird ideological fault lines in American public life: People such as Barack Obama, whose own children would never be expected to forsake Sidwell Friends and darken the doorway of a public school, care much more deeply about the “public” part of “public education” than they do about the “education” part, hence their hysterical reaction to the nomination of school-reformer Betsy DeVos as secretary of education. No one seriously doubts that many students, especially poor children from poor families in poor neighborhoods, would be better served if their parents had some real choice about where they were educated — including the choice to attend the private schools that Democratic elected officials so often choose for their own children — but there is some reason to believe that school-choice programs would erode what they call the “public” nature of education, by which they mean the monopolistic nature of our schools. A variation on that (familiar to any libertarian) is the fact that our progressive friends get so worked up about purported abuses in privately run prisons; the same kinds of abuses (and worse) exist in the publicly run institutions — consider the many horrors of Rikers Island, where not long ago a homeless veteran was roasted to death by unionized government employees — but private prisons present the Left with a special horror, because progressives recognize the need to lock people in cages from time to time (for, say, the crime of holding nonconformist views on global warming) but object deeply to the profit motive. From kindergarten to solitary confinement: Fine, so long as you don’t interact with the private sector at some point during the course of that life sentence. Though conservatives are sometimes tempted to simply reverse that attitude, their high regard for some parts of the public sector (military, police, etc.) generally keeps them from going absurdly far down that road. But conservative respect for the gun-toting and uniform-wearing parts of the public sector has its drawbacks, too: Are we so sure that the unhappy people of Ferguson, Mo. or Baltimore or Los Angeles are entirely wrong about the character and efficacy of their police agencies? Are we quite sure that the Pentagon’s procurement agents are all as pious as St. Francis? Our progressive friends who demand a Scandinavian scope of government have very little to say about achieving a Scandinavian standard of government. If we are to have a political exchange that amounts to something more than an imaginary exchange between two polar positions held by almost no one in the 21st century United States (Bismarckian étatism vs. Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism, or Thomas Hobbes vs. Ayn Rand) then we have to pay some attention not only to the size and the scope of the state’s agencies but also to whether they are any good at what we ask them to do. Moralistic egalitarian arguments for a uniform system of public education will never be persuasive to people who know about Atlanta, or to people who are familiar with the stark differences in school quality that can be seen by walking a mile, or to people who know about the “rubber rooms” of New York. Our progressive friends who demand a Scandinavian scope of government have very little to say about achieving a Scandinavian standard of government, or even a Canadian one, as though competence could simply be assumed in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. They talk about the postwar years as though the only thing that has changed since the Eisenhower administration is the top marginal income-tax rate. Americans do not much trust their government, for good reason. And this has immediate, important real-world consequences. For example: It can be difficult to distinguish between hysteria about Islam and well-founded concern about Muslim immigration into the United States, but who seriously thinks that our public institutions are up to the job of properly investigating tens of thousands (or more) refugees, asylum-seekers, and ordinary immigrants every year? If Donald Trump’s temporary order seems to you unreasonable, ask yourself what the next-best option is and how much confidence we should have in it. The U.S. government has been flubbing the problem of radicals crossing our borders since Lee Harvey Oswald was simmering in Minsk. How many terrorists and school shooters were already on the authorities’ radar, and had been for years, before they committed spectacular atrocities? A half-dozen examples come to mind. That is not confidence-inspiring, and Americans do not lack faith in their public institutions because they listen to too much talk radio or read the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. They lack confidence in their public institutions because they go to the driver’s-license office from time to time, because they see disability fraud and Medicaid fraud all around them, because they know crooked cops and incompetent teachers, because their memories may be short but are not so short that they have forgotten the Clintons exist. Generally speaking, I walk into a government office a Bill Buckley conservative and walk out ready to join a militia in Idaho. My temperament, fortunately for the republic, is not everyone’s. But we should not underestimate how effective competence is as an antidote to political radicalism and angry populism of either the left-wing or right-wing variety. No one ever will be elected president for asking why it takes two hours for an American to get back into his own country through JFK but six minutes to pass through Barajas in Madrid, or why a law-abiding regular guy has to provide a birth certificate, Social Security card, and additional photo ID to go about his ordinary business as a citizen while we cannot enforce the law against illegal aliens. — Kevin D. Williamson is National Review’s roving correspondent.

The leaders took out a full-page ad in The Washington Post.

President Trump went after Senator Richard Blumenthal for saying his Supreme Court nominee had lamented his broadsides against the judiciary.

Party officials are having a painful discussion about the state and local losses that occurred on his watch.

Over 60 percent of California voters went for Hillary Clinton — a margin of more than 4 million votes over Donald Trump. Since Clinton’s defeat, the state seems to have become unhinged over Trump’s unexpected election. “Calexit” supporters brag that they will have enough signatures to qualify for a ballot measure calling for California’s secession from the United States. Some California officials have talked of the state not remitting its legally obligated tax dollars to the federal government. They talk of expanding its sanctuary cities into an entire sanctuary state that would nullify federal immigration law. Californians also now talk about the value of the old Confederate idea of “states’ rights.” They whine that their state gives far too much revenue to Washington and gets too little back. Residents boast about how their cool culture has little in common with the rest of the U.S. Some Californians claim the state could easily go it alone, divorced from the United States. Sound a bit familiar? In December 1860, South Carolina seceded from the Union in furor over the election of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln did not receive 50 percent of the popular vote. He espoused values the state insisted did not reflect its own. In eerie irony, liberal California is now mirror-imaging the arguments of reactionary South Carolina and other Southern states that vowed to go it alone in 1860 and 1861. Like California, South Carolina insisted it could nullify federal laws within its state borders. Like California, South Carolina promised to withhold federal revenues. Like California, South Carolina and other Confederate states bragged that their unique economies did not need the Union. They boasted that “King Cotton” had created the wealthiest class in the United States. Silicon Valley now often assumes that Google, Facebook, Apple, and others are near-trillion-dollar companies that are a world unto their own. Like California, South Carolina and other Confederate states bragged that their unique economies did not need the Union. Slavery and the extravagant income from cotton warped the Southern economy and culture. A wealthy plantation elite, with its millions of exploited slaves, ensured that there would be virtually no middle, working, or small-business class. Huge estates were surrounded by the impoverished shacks of servants. Hardscrabble farmers or small businessmen often fled westward to escape the shackles of wealth disparity. The export-dependent Southern elite demanded unfettered free trade. It offered bitter resistance to Northern protectionism. South Carolina elites were opposed to federal infrastructure projects such as the building of roads, canals, bridges, and reservoirs, and other such unwelcome “progress.” Confederates boasted that their antebellum culture was more romantic, natural, pristine, healthy, and moral than was the bustle, grime, and hyper-capitalism of Northern industrialism. Southern aristocrats believed that they were culturally superior — in terms of music, art and literature — to other Americans. Of course, this is 2017, not 1860, and California is super-liberal, not an antebellum slave-owning society. Nonetheless, what is driving California’s current efforts to nullify federal law and the state’s vows to secede from the U.S. are some deeper — and creepy — similarities to the arrogant and blinkered Old South. California is likewise becoming a winner-take-all society. It hosts the largest numbers of impoverished and the greatest number of rich people of any state in the country. Eager for cheap service labor, California has welcomed in nearly a quarter of the nation’s undocumented immigrants. California has more residents living in poverty than any other state. It is home to one third of all the nation’s welfare recipients. The income of California’s wealthy seems to make them immune from the effects of the highest basket of sales, income, and gas taxes in the nation. The poor look to subsidies and social services to get by. Over the last 30 years, California’s middle classes have increasingly fled the state. Gone With the Wind–like wealth disparity in California is shocking to the naked eye. Mostly poor Redwood City looks like it’s on a different planet from tony nearby Atherton or Woodside. California is becoming a reactionary two-tier state of masters and serfs whose culture is as peculiar and out of step with the rest of the country as was the antebellum South’s. The California elite, wishing to keep the natural environment unchanged, opposes internal improvements and sues to stop pipelines, aqueducts, reservoirs, freeways, and affordable housing for the coastal poor. California’s crumbling roads and bridges sometimes resemble those of the old rural South. The state’s public schools remain among the nation’s poorest. Private academies are booming for the offspring of the coastal privileged, just as they did among the plantation class of the South. California, for all its braggadocio, cannot leave the U.S. or continue its states’-rights violations of federal law. It will eventually see that the new president is not its sickness, nor are secession and nullification its cures. Instead, California is becoming a reactionary two-tier state of masters and serfs whose culture is as peculiar and out of step with the rest of the country as was the antebellum South’s. No wonder the state lashes out at the rest of the nation with threatened updated versions of the Old Confederacy’s secession and nullification. But such reactionary Confederate obstructionism is still quite an irony given California’s self-righteous liberal preening. — Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals. You can reach him by e-mailing [email protected]. © 2017 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

On Tuesday, in a self-immolating display of narcissistic stupidity, The Daily Californian – the student newspaper for UC Berkeley – ran an op-ed defending the use of violence in shutting down a speech by alt-right popularizer and professional provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. The op-ed, titled “Violence as self-defense,” was a whole series of op-eds talking about why violence was useful in shutting down political debate.

“It’s almost like a bait and switch," King noted. "Stir up their emotions, use the name of King — and my name is Alveda King — stir up people’s emotions, play

The Young Turks commentator Ana Kasparian is quite arrogant, so I decided to highlight her best worst moments. I don't think she is an idiot in this compilat...

One of the great ironies of the gun control debate is that everyone who calls for gun control still wants a man with a gun protecting him.

Dave Rubin of The Rubin Report used to be a big progressive. He even had a show with The Young Turks! But now he's not a progressive. He has left the left. W...

Obsessed with “racial equity,” St. Paul schools abandoned discipline—and unleashed mayhem.

A Russian man and a Syrian man have been arrested in Germany on allegations of collaborating with the "Islamic State." A series of raids led to 11 similar arrests in Belgium.

Fingerprints are making headlines in Germany. At the height of the refugee crisis, newcomers entered without immigration controls. One result: benefit fraud. It must be stopped, says Joachim Stamp from the FDP.

Has anybody noticed that the Kellyanne Conway and the Trump Administration have been blaming Obama for all their botched policies? Related: Muslim Travel Ban...

Support my work on Patreon: http://ow.ly/3ymWFu PayPal Donations Welcome. Click here: http://goo.gl/NSdOvK Sources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCFgYzf4D...

"What is going on in this country is giving me chills."