We are in the midst of an epic media freakout. It is a subset of a larger liberal panic over Donald Trump’s strength in the general election. The mood of the center-left is, “America, how dare you?” The outraged incomprehension is seeping into and, increasingly, driving the coverage of the race. The freakout began a […]

Someone dares call it treason. Hillary Clinton used the occasion of the New York-area bombings to accuse Donald Trump of providing “aid and comfort” to ISIS. This speaks both to her desperation as polls show a tightening race and her foolish misunderstanding of what drives ISIS and other Islamic radicals. Clinton makes it sound like […]

If you aren’t seriously contemplating the biggest black swan event in American electoral history, you aren’t paying attention. Fifteen months ago, Donald Trump was a reality-TV star with a spotty business record and a weird penchant for proclaiming that he was on the verge of running for president. Now, he’s perhaps a few big breaks […]

If Julian Assange plays this right, he just might score an invitation to CPAC next year. The notorious WikiLeaks founder would have to attend the Conservative Political Action Conference remotely because he is still holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, avoiding a rape investigation in Sweden and fearing extradition to the United States […]

Donald Trump’s speech in Arizona has occasioned wailing and rending of garments among the commentariat and “respectable” people everywhere. At bottom, the cause of the freakout is simple: Trump believes in immigration laws, and the country’s elite really doesn’t. Minus a few trademark excesses that are too ingrained in the Trump shtick to abandon at […]

Behold the kinder, gentler Donald Trump. The latest of Trump’s “pivots” is more far-reaching than a stab at greater message discipline. It is an effort to make him more appealing to minorities and college-educated whites by adopting a more inclusive message. It is an attempt to engineer on the fly a “compassionate populism.” Someone at […]

Donald Trump is running a top-notch campaign to be a conservative media celebrity. Unfortunately for him, and especially for the Republican Party, this isn’t the same thing as running a good, or even minimally competent, campaign for president. From the beginning, Trump has been the candidate by and for the Entertainment Right — the talk-radio […]

It’s funny how coincidences work. In 2010, as much as $7 million was dropped on the deck of the Maran Centaurus, an oil tanker captured by Somali pirates, and the brigands happened to free the crew. In 1997, Walter Kwok, the son of extravagantly wealthy Chinese businessman, was found alive in a wooden box after […]

The Democratic Party has perhaps never been so radical or so conventional. The Democrats are now to the left of President Barack Obama and are desperately trying to placate the teary-eyed, obstreperous shock troops of the Bernie Sanders Revolution, yet they also are portraying themselves as the party of sobriety and traditional political norms. This […]