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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 ...

Billionaires playing a game they can’t win

The frenzy of the gift-giving season is over. Children have received their toys. Billionaires, too. Do you remember that old bumper sticker that said, “He who dies with the most toys wins. More money, more things is winning at the Game of Life”? Topping the Forbes list of billionaires, the ones who can afford the most toys, are Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison. And how have they shown their holiday spirit over the years? Musk threatened to leave Tesla unless the board granted him a pay package potentially worth over $1 trillion, roughly the annual GDP ...

Still pampering Pelosi

Nancy Pelosi may be retiring from Congress, but no one should expect the DNC media to stop treating her as a most glorious political figure. She draws deep bows wherever she goes. She’s always the Best Ever. On CBS’s “Sunday Morning” in early 2024, substitute host Tracy Smith announced Pelosi “has a new book out, ‘The Art of Power’ — an art which Nancy Pelosi is something of a master.” After Pelosi bizarrely suggested Joe Biden could go on Mount Rushmore, Stahl just had to follow up with flattery: “If there were a Mount Rushmore for Speakers of the House, Nancy ...