Politics

Progressive journalist Mehdi Hasan recently went viral for his “debate” with 20 so-called conservatives on the popular YouTube channel Jubilee. The program is formatted such that Hasan makes a claim, and then his opponents, seated in a circle around him, race each other to the chair opposite Hasan when they wish to refute a claim. When the claim, “Donald Trump is defying the US Constitution” came up, contestants lunged for the chair – not to deny the claim, but to dismiss the Constitution outright. Hasan, it seems, was ready to argue that Trump is defying the Constitution, but he was utterly unprepared to defend the document on its merits. We shouldn’t read too much into this gathering of the chronically online.

In the pantheon of American bureaucracies, none have guarded their prerogatives more jealously – or become more allergic to reform – than the State Department. And so, predictably, when the Trump administration moved in recent weeks to cut the agency’s workforce by 15 percent, Washington’s political and media class protested in unison. But strip away the histrionics, and something else emerges: a much-needed effort to realign the State Department with the America it’s supposed to represent. No one celebrates the pain of sudden job loss. Many of the terminated employees were sincere public servants (some of whom I count as personal acquaintances).

This month, Congress put school-choice funding on offer to the states as part of the Big Beautiful Bill. Progressives have bashed the provision for the harm they claim school choice will do to under-resourced school districts. But the program saps not a dollar from public schools, which shows the protest for what it is: elitist bluster. The same progressives who fumbled their schools’ Covid responses, instituted woke curriculum and pushed adolescent gender transitioning should not decree to parents which school is best for their children. Public schools have not earned Americans’ trust over these past few years; many private schools have. Under the new measure, families can receive a tax credit for donations to an approved scholarship-granting nonprofit organization.

Tulsi Gabbard's declassification of documents that support the view that the intelligence community engaged in a deliberate conspiracy to target the incoming president with false or dubious claims is truly explosive – unless you deliberately choose to ignore it. Surprise, surprise – the same people who helped manufacture and propagate these claims in the first place are sticking to their guns, with the normal veterans of the CNN octobox.