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After two years of relative calm, Ukraine's war with Russian-backed rebels took a deadly and destructive turn this week, leaving besieged towns like Avdiivka without electricity, heat or water.

DailyMail fell for a clear joke in "Fascism Forever" club...

Those who had warned about an uptick in sexism under President Trump may have been on to something. As the era of Trump dawns, some women already are being singled out for criticism and scorn that is tinged with sexist assumptions and seems intended to force them back into roles society decrees are a must for good women. Yet this isn’t a Republican “war on women,” as some predicted. It is, rather, progressives and left-leaning media elites who are targeting conservative women. Take the recent Saturday Night Live skit ridiculing Kellyanne Conway, the first woman to have led a successful Presidential campaign. (Full disclosure: I’ve met Kellyanne professionally.) SNL depicts Conway — the president of a successful polling company she launched at age 29 — as an airhead, a publicity hound, and a gold digger. Never mind that Conway has had plenty of opportunity over the years to pursue political celebrity and instead chose to focus on leading her business, or that she graduated magna cum laude from Trinity College in Washington, D.C., and received a J.D. from George Washington University Law School. Conway’s classic American story of working her way from a modest background to professional and personal success doesn’t fit the media and progressive Left’s stereotype for conservative women, which means she’s fair game for scorn. Were Conway a Democrat who had helped Hillary Clinton become the first female President, she now would be a revered feminist icon. There would be glowing profiles in the weeklies and flattering photo spreads in women’s magazines. Conway would be heralded as a role model and as a trailblazing woman. Her frank statements about the challenges of balancing work and family life would be billed as brave indictments of women’s struggles in the workplace, rather than as evidence that she is, somehow, anti-working woman. But since Conway isn’t advancing the feminist political agenda, the supposedly enlightened Left overlooks her accomplishments and recasts her in whatever cartoonish conservative stereotype it finds convenient. The Left’s double standard on women is also evident in their treatment of the new First Lady, Melania Trump. Out are commentators swooning over Michelle Obama’s dresses. In are condescending memes and twitter rants implying that Melania has been duped into a relationship with Donald Trump and cannot possibly mean it when she says she supports and loves her husband. As The Atlantic has written, Melania Trump poses a real conflict for feminists and those on the left: “The ‘poor little rich girl’ treatments in that sense do indeed engage in a kind of concern-trolling. Yet they are also decidedly feminist in their tone. The jokes pivot on the idea that Melania Trump is miserable and cornered, and therefore pitiable, in part because the alternative requires imagining a woman who is happy with her husband — that is, a woman who refuses to be as offended as they are at ‘grab them by the pussy’ and ‘such a nasty woman’ and ‘Miss Piggy.’ The alternative requires seeing her as a woman who tolerates such talk, and who Stands By Her Man in the fullest, Wynettiest sense — a woman who has, according to the mandates of choice feminism, made a choice, even if it chafes uncomfortably against the ideals of progressive feminism more broadly. It’s grimly amusing that feminists now have such difficulty imagining a woman happy with her husband, even when he has behaved badly, to the point they would deny her free agency. They clearly didn’t mind a woman “standing by her man” when that man was a Democratic president. Bill Clinton’s decades of demeaning treatment of women, including his treatment of his wife, were studiously overlooked because Mr. Clinton claimed to support the feminist political agenda. Mrs. Clinton’s loyalty to her husband was therefore not a sign of weakness or evidence she was a hapless dupe, but rather a badge of honor signifying service to the greater cause. Mrs. Clinton parlayed that sentiment into a Senate seat and two runs for the White House. One might think Hillary Clinton’s background as a woman who rode her husband’s coattails would have made her an awkward feminist heroine. But it didn’t, because today’s progressive feminism isn’t so much about women and their accomplishments as it is about raw political power. Support the progressive agenda on reproduction, health care, and workplace regulations, and a politician can literally get away with crimes against women — as opposed to mere words — and still be a “feminist” in good standing. But fail to fall in lockstep with the feminist platform, and you’re a traitor to women, simple as that. Kellyanne Conway and Melania Trump are hardly shrinking violets: They can take whatever hate the Left throws at them, cloaked as humor or not. This includes barbs that, in another context, women’s-studies scholars would label not just as dreaded “microaggressions” but as rank sexism. Ultimately, these attacks tell us nothing about Conway or Trump; but they do reveal an awful lot about the hypocrisy of their critics. — Carrie Lukas is the managing director of the Independent Women’s Forum and vice president for policy of the Independent Women’s Voice. This article was originally published at Acculturated.

It's the first in a series of actions to reverse environmental regulations

The left burns down Berkeley, we welcome special guest California Assemblyman Mike Gatto to discuss the nature of capitalism, and we check the mailbag!

NBC News erroneously reported Wednesday that Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch opposed allowing military recruiters on campus while he was a

Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch easily won the support of top Democratic senators for a lifetime appointment to the bench ... in 2006. What a difference a decade makes.

Two Republican senators who said they would not vote to support Betsy DeVos Wednesday have a friendly history with teachers unions. Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Republican Sen. Sus

Democrats Continue To Calls For Violence On Tuesday Democratic Senator Time Kaine told the Morning Joe in an interview that ...

Trump advisers Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller’s view of immigration goes far past Trump wanting to keeping out "bad people."

Milo Yiannopoulos just had his event cancelled at UC Berkley. I was going to make a completely different video but I experienced something similar at UC Davi...

“If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view - NO FEDERAL FUNDS?”

Imgur: The most awesome images on the Internet.

Video shows people in black masks hurling metal crowd dividers through windows as fights break out

President Trump said he planned to repeal the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits churches from engaging in political activity at the risk of losing their tax-exempt status.

Students at UC Berkeley were not happy that Milo Yiannopolous was scheduled to speak at their campus, so they smashed ATM machines and started fires.

George Orwell’s dystopian classic '1984' is back in vogue—but to understand what's happening in our world, we need less Big Brother and more Aldous Huxley.

Glenn Beck TV & Radio Host) joins Dave Rubin to discuss his views on the left, the right, mainstream media, and much more. ***Subscribe: http://www.youtube.c...

This week the Boy Scouts bent completely to left-wing activists, announcing girls who identify as ‘transgender boys’ will be accepted among their troops.

President Trump vowed Thursday to “defend and protect” religious liberty on multiple fronts – describing his recent immigration executive order as part of that goal – during his first appearance as president at the traditional National Prayer Breakfast.

If properly understood and marshaled, they “can be a liberal democracy's strongest bulwark against the dangers posed by intolerant social movements.”

Two Republican senators — Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski and Maine’s Susan Collins — have declared that they intend to vote against Betsy DeVos, putting Donald Trump’s nominee for Education secretary at risk of failing confirmation. Murkowski and Collins, and any other Republicans who might be on the fence, should think twice before giving America’s teachers’ unions a huge victory. There is no shortage of problems to address when it comes to the American educational system, but the central and urgent problem is the spectacular expansion of the federal government’s role in local education decisions. For going on 20 years, through both Republican and Democratic administrations, the federal government has more and more aggressively insinuated itself into the day-to-day workings of school districts and classrooms.  In the last few years, there has been modest rollback at the state level, as states and municipalities, aiming to break the longstanding, union-backed public-school monopoly, have created new opportunities for school choice. Much of that progress is thanks to Betsy DeVos. In 1993, she and her husband (who, among other philanthropic roles, is on the board of the National Review Institute) helped put in place Michigan’s charter-school law. In 2010, DeVos took that work nationwide with her American Federation for Children, arguably the most effective education-reform organization in the country. Its extraordinary success in local and state-level legislative races has led to significant reform-oriented legislation in states across the U.S. The success of these efforts has underscored just how ineffective the public-school monopoly has become, and the teachers’ unions are now scrambling to maintain their stranglehold on the system. To what depths they’re willing to descend has been clear in their treatment of DeVos. National Education Association president Lily Eskelsen Garcia has said that DeVos is “dangerously unqualified” and that she is designing to “harm our students,” while the president of the Michigan Education Association said that DeVos is beholden to a “disastrous ideology.” The New York Times and other major publications have sought to bolster these accusations by declaring DeVos’s charter-school program in Detroit a failure, misrepresenting the data to make their case. And, of course, Democrats subjected DeVos to the longest, most intense questioning of any secretary-of-Education nominee in recent memory, after which left-leaning media misrepresented her reasonable responses to (generally hostile) questions as the ravings of a kook. For instance, they warped her belief that states and municipalities should be able to make determinations about their own security needs into a meme about shooting grizzly bears. If DeVos goes down, teachers’ unions will have significantly more power to dictate President Trump’s next nomination. That two Republicans have been browbeaten into endorsing these accusations demonstrates just how strong the teachers’ unions remain, and they’ll be further emboldened if they manage to sink DeVos’s nomination. Surely Republicans realize that if DeVos goes down, those unions will have significantly more power to dictate President Trump’s next nomination. In that event, the nominee who results would probably be far less interested in doing anything to rock the boat. Republicans are right to want to hold President Trump’s nominees to the highest standard. But Murkowski and Collins’s dissent, stoked by fears of losing their NEA campaign contributions, is not in the nation’s interest; it’s in their own. Republicans have an opportunity to significantly advance the cause of educational freedom nationwide. This is no time to fold.

By 2008, America was politically split nearly 50/50 as it had been in 2000 and 2004. The Democrats took a gamble and nominated Barack Obama, who became the first young, Northern, liberal president since John F. Kennedy narrowly won in 1960. Democrats had believed that the unique racial heritage, youth, and rhetorical skills of Obama would help him avoid the fate of previous failed Northern liberal candidates Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, and John Kerry. Given 21st-century demography, Democrats rejected the conventional wisdom that only a conservative Democrat with a Southern accent could win the popular vote (e.g., Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Al Gore). Moreover, Obama mostly ran on pretty normal Democratic policies rather than a hard-left agenda. His platform included opposition to gay marriage, promises to balance the budget, and a bipartisan foreign policy. Instead, what followed was a veritable “hope and change” revolution not seen since the 1930s. Obama pursued a staunchly progressive agenda — one that went well beyond the relatively centrist policies upon which he had campaigned. The media cheered and signed on. Soon, the border effectively was left open. Pen-and-phone executive orders offered immigrant amnesties. The Senate was bypassed on a treaty with Iran and an intervention in Libya. Political correctness under the Obama administration led to euphemisms that no longer reflected reality. Poorly conceived reset policy with Russia and a pivot to Asia both failed. The Middle East was aflame. The Iran deal was sold through an echo chamber of deliberate misrepresentations. The national debt nearly doubled during Obama’s two terms. Overregulation, higher taxes, near-zero interest rates, and the scapegoating of big businesses slowed economic recovery. Economic growth never reached 3 percent in any year of the Obama presidency — the first time that had happened since Herbert Hoover’s presidency. A revolutionary federal absorption of health care failed to fulfill Obama’s promises and soon proved unviable. Culturally, the iconic symbols of the Obama revolution were the “you didn’t build that” approach to businesses and an assumption that race/class/gender would forever drive American politics, favorably so for the Democrats. Then, Hillary Clinton’s unexpected defeat and the election of outsider Donald Trump sealed the fate of the Obama Revolution. For all the hysteria over the bluntness of the mercurial Trump, his agenda marks a return to what used to be seen as fairly normal, as the U.S. goes from hard left back to the populist center. Trump promises not just to reverse almost immediately all of Obama’s policies, but to do so in a pragmatic fashion that does not seem to be guided by any orthodox or consistently conservative ideology. Trade deals and jobs are Trump’s obsessions — mostly for the benefit of blue-collar America. In normal times, Trumpism — again, the agenda as opposed to Trump the person — might be old hat. He calls for full-bore gas and oil development, a common culture in lieu of identity politics, secure borders, deregulation, tax reform, a Jacksonian foreign policy, nationalist trade deals in places of globalization, and traditionalist values. In normal times, Trumpism — again, the agenda as opposed to Trump the person — might be old hat. But after the last eight years, his correction has enraged millions. Yet securing national borders seems pretty orthodox. In an age of anti-Western terrorism, placing temporary holds on would-be immigrants from war-torn zones until they can be vetted is hardly radical. Expecting “sanctuary cities” to follow federal laws rather than embrace the nullification strategies of the secessionist Old Confederacy is a return to the laws of the Constitution. Using the term “radical Islamic terror” in place of “workplace violence” or “man-caused disasters” is sensible, not subversive. Insisting that NATO members meet their long-ignored defense-spending obligations is not provocative but overdue. Assuming that both the European Union and the United Nations are imploding is empirical, not unhinged. Questioning the secret side agreements of the Iran deal or failed Russian reset is facing reality. Making the Environmental Protection Agency follow laws rather than make laws is the way it always was supposed to be. Unapologetically siding with Israel, the only free and democratic country in the Middle East, used to be standard U.S. policy until Obama was elected. Issuing executive orders has not been seen as revolutionary for the past few years — until now. Expecting the media to report the news rather than massage it to fit progressive agendas makes sense. In the past, proclaiming Obama a “sort of god” or the smartest man ever to enter the presidency was not normal journalistic practice. Freezing federal hiring, clamping down on lobbyists, and auditing big bureaucracies — after the Obama-era IRS, VA, GSA, EPA, State Department, and Secret Service scandals — are overdue. Half the country is having a hard time adjusting to Trumpism, confusing Trump’s often unorthodox and grating style with his otherwise practical and mostly centrist agenda. In sum, Trump seems a revolutionary, but that is only because he is loudly undoing a revolution. — 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.

“What I see is…”

The U.S. Treasury Department on Thursday eased sanctions on