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Suiting up for the session

Finally, it is 2026 and things will begin ramping up from here as the new 60-day legislative session kicks off next week with the gaveling in of the House of Delegates and state Senate, and Gov. Patrick Morrisey’s second State of the State address. The West Virginia Press Association’s annual Legislative Lookahead is this Friday at the Culture Center in Charleston. The event serves as the kickoff for those in print, TV, radio, and non-profit news preparing for their statehouse coverage.  Reporters will hear from legislative majority and minority leadership, executive branch ...

Foundation

As December 2025 draws to a close, we find ourselves at a historic milestone. One fourth of the 21st Century is now behind us. For many, the last 25 years have flown by, as it inevitably does, but with a speed that’s hard to fathom. Even so, the years in West Virginia have been marked by progress. At the dawn of this millennium, West Virginia faced what many called “insurmountable” financial hurdles. Our state had massive unfunded liabilities in retirement plans maintained for schoolteachers and other state retirees. We were, quite literally, mortgaging our future to pay for ...

Harvard is saying yes to discrimination

At Harvard University today, professors who teach Western history “are” history. James Hankins, a specialist in Renaissance thought, was one of the last holdouts. Now Hankins, who has just published a hefty book that teaches what Harvard doesn’t — “The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition. Vol. 1” — has decamped for the University of Florida’s Hamilton School of Classical and Civic Education. It’s not the warmer weather that’s drawn him away from Cambridge, Massachusetts. It’s the contrast in intellectual climates: frozen and dead, where ...

Wish list for 2026

Listening to the usual legacy media suspects, one might think 2025 was an apocalyptic wasteland of sorts — an authoritarian fever dream brought on by the return of Donald J. Trump to the Oval Office. The reality looked very different. This past year was, in many ways, a pretty great and clarifying one. Let’s take stock of what happened when our government remembered whom it serves, as well as what unfinished business remains as we flip the calendar. First, the obvious: Political sanity was restored to the nation’s capital. After years of leftist elite-driven chaos — wide-open ...

Endangered diplomacy

Diplomacy, Donald Trump-style, is becoming increasingly ad hoc. Pick the day, and you can never be sure whether he will stick to a policy or change course. From Venezuela to Ukraine, he swerves from position to position. And he is unpredictable on whose lead he will follow. Will it be Secretary of State Marco Rubio or special advisor Steve Witkoff who shapes the response? Ukraine particularly mirrors this approach to foreign policy. One minute, he is on the phone with Vladimir Putin; the next, he is hosting Vladimir Zelensky. Trump praises both and boasts of progress, while the ...

Predictions of doom

While campaigning, President Donald Trump said, “We’re a nation in decline.” Now that he’s president, the left agrees. “We are witnessing the collapse and implosion of the American empire,” says Cornell West. Are the predictors of doom correct? Will America collapse like so many civilizations before us? If we don’t learn from history, says historian Johan Norberg, that might happen. “It’s a clash within every civilization on whether they should keep going, be open to innovation and progress, or whether they should retreat and decline,” he says in my new ...