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Over sixty percent of California voters went for Hillary Clinton -- a margin of more than 4 million votes over Donald Trump. Since Clinton's defeat, the state seems to have become unhinged over Trump's unexpected election. "Calexit" supporters brag that they will have enough signatures to qualify for a ballot measure calling for California's secession from the United States. Some California officials have talked of the state not remitting its legally obligated tax dollars to the federal government. They talk of expanding its sanctuary cities into an entire sanctuary state that would nullify federal immigration law. Californians also now talk...

In truth, we are on the cusp of a great experiment. For decades, conservatives, both traditional and pro-growth supply-siders, have preached that deregulation, reasonable and predictable Federal Reserve interest rates, reduced government, a radically simplified and pruned-back tax code, new incentives for investment, an open energy market, and a can-do psychological landscape that encourages entrepreneurship will make the economy soar at rates of 4 percent GDP and more. We shall soon see. If Trump unleashes American know-how and strengthens the economy, then his cultural and domestic agendas, as well as his personal demeanor and language, however radical and jarring, will...

Furor has arisen over President-elect Donald Trump's charges that our intelligence agencies are politicized. Spare us the outrage. For decades, directors of intelligence agencies have often quite inappropriately massaged their assessments to fit administration agendas. Careerists at these agencies naturally want to continue working from one administration to the next in "the king is dead; long live the king!" style. So they make the necessary political adjustments, which are sometimes quite at odds with their own agency's findings and to the detriment of national security. The result is often confusion -- and misinformation passed off as authoritative intelligence. After Barack...

Last week in Chicago, a white special-needs teenager was held captive by four black youths. The victim was bound, gagged, tortured, forced to drink toilet water, partially scalped, and subject to racially and politically motivated verbal abuse. The perpetrators streamed portions of their violent savagery on Facebook. After the victim escaped from his assailants and was found on the streets by a police officer, a Chicago police commander initially said he was unsure whether the attack constituted a hate crime -- as if that distinction might calibrate the crime's viciousness. President Obama was likewise initially hesitant to label this cruelty...

The Middle East surrounding democratic Israel is a nightmare. Half a million have died amid the moonscape ruins of Syria. A once-stable Iraq was overrun by the Islamic State. The Arab Spring, U.S. support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the coup of General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to regain control of Egypt, and the bombing of Libya all have left North Africa in turmoil. Iran has been empowered by the U.S.-brokered deal and will still become nuclear. Russian President Vladimir Putin's bombers blast civilians not far from Israel's borders. Democrats are considering Rep. Keith Ellison as the next chairman of...

President-elect Donald Trump probably will not often communicate with the nation via traditional press conferences. Nor will Trump likely field many questions from New York/Washington journalists. What we know as "the media" never imagined a Trump victory. It has become unhinged... ...the fading establishment media is now distrusted by a majority of the public, according to Gallup — and becoming irrelevant even among progressives. Once upon a time in the 1960s, all the iconic news anchors, from Walter Cronkite to David Brinkley, were liberal. But they at least hid their inherent biases behind a professional veneer that allowed them to...

President-elect Donald Trump probably will not often communicate with the nation via traditional press conferences. Nor will Trump likely field many questions from New York/Washington journalists. What we know as "the media" never imagined a Trump victory. It has become unhinged at the reality of a Trump presidency. No wonder the fading establishment media is now distrusted by a majority of the public, according to Gallup -- and becoming irrelevant even among progressives. Once upon a time in the 1960s, all the iconic news anchors, from Walter Cronkite to David Brinkley, were liberal. But they at least hid their inherent...

<p>What would happen if conservatives started to change the words we use for political ends?</p> <p>Throughout history, revolutionaries of all stripes have warped the meaning of words to subvert reality.</p> <p>And now here we go again, with another effort — spearheaded by the media and universities — to use any linguistic means necessary to achieve political ends.</p>

The Democratic Party handed Donald Trump a rare opportunity to make radical changes to the electoral map that could last for years to come. First, the Democrats gave Trump a great gift by completing the ongoing radicalization of their party under President Obama. After 2008, it was no longer a party of the working and middle classes, but a lopsided political pyramid. On top were the cynical elites who turned up in the WikiLeaks John Podesta email trove: self-important media members, Ivy League grandees, Silicon Valley billionaires, Wall Street plutocrats and coastal corridor snobs. They talk left-wing but live royally....

There were a lot of losers in this election, well beyond Hillary Clinton and the smug, incompetent pollsters and know-it-all, groupthink pundits who embarrassed themselves. From hacked email troves we received a glimpse of the bankrupt values of Washington journalists, lawyers, politicians, lobbyists and wealthy donors. Despite their brand-name Ivy League degrees and 1 percenter resumes, dozens of the highly paid grandees who run our country and shape our news appear petty and spiteful -- and clueless about the America that exists beyond their Beltway habitat. Leveraging rich people for favors and money seems an obsession. They brag about...

Victor Davis Hanson: Russian spy? Who would have suspected that one of America's leading conservative intellectuals, a prominent historian who is currently a Senior Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, was selling us out to the Russkies? Actually, no one would suspect it because it isn't true. But on today's AM Joy, MSNBC terrorism expert Malcolm Nance bragged: "I know some of the spy-catchers in FBI counter-intelligence, guys who have taken down big names, like Aldrich Ames and Victor Davis Hanson." Nance presumably had in mind Robert Philip Hanssen, a former FBI agent who was convicted in 2001 of spying for...

Another day, another Hillary Clinton bombshell disclosure. This time the scandal comes from disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner's laptop computer, bringing more suggestions of Clinton's sloppy attitude about U.S. intelligence law. Meanwhile, seemingly every day WikiLeaks produces more evidence of the Clinton Foundation leveraging the Clinton State Department for pay-for-play profiteering. At this point, Clinton has trumped former President Richard Nixon's skullduggery -- but without the offset of Nixon's foreign policy accomplishments. Even before the most recent scandals, Clinton's campaign had an eerie resemblance to the Nixon playbook. Compare the election of 2016 to the election of 1972. The favored...

Epic greed, power, and pride: Where’s the bottom? With Bill and Hillary, there’s no telling. What was the Clinton telos? The end point, the aim of all their lying, cheating, criminality, dishonor, and degradation? Given the latest Weiner scandals coming on top of the latest WikiLeaks scandals, we wonder, what did the Clintons really wish to end up as — and why? Are they Goethe’s Faust or tortured souls crushed by the weight of their money bags in Dante’s Fourth Circle of Hell? For a few criminals, remorse comes with old age; but for the Clintons, near-70 was to be...

Hillary Clinton was resting, running out the clock, sitting on a supposed large lead, and hoping that the election was sooner than later. Now after the latest Weiner disclosures, she is crisscrossing the country, terrified of collapsing polls, and wishing that she had three more weeks rather than just one. With the Clintons, farce is the desert to scandal: the profiteering Clinton Foundation as a humanitarian treasure; Hillary the former corporate attorney as child and little-guy crusader; Bill Clinton, both sexual predator and feminist hero. Hillary didn’t just delete e-mails under congressional subpoena; she insisted that some 33,000 e-mails were...

California State Route 99 is the north-south highway that cuts through the great Central Valley. And it has changed little since the mid-1960s. A half-century ago, when the state population was about 18 million -- not nearly 40 million as it is today -- the 99 used to be a high-speed, four-lane marvel. It was a crown jewel in California's cutting-edge freeway system. Not now. The 99 was recently ranked by ValuePenguin (a private consumer research organization) as the deadliest major highway in the nation. Locals who live along its 400-plus miles often go to bed after seeing lurid...

Conservatives should vote for the Republican nominee. Donald Trump needs a unified Republican party in the homestretch if he is to have any chance left of catching Hillary Clinton — along with winning higher percentages of the college-educated and women than currently support him. But even before the latest revelations from an eleven-year-old Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump crudely talked about women, he had long ago in the primaries gratuitously insulted his more moderate rivals and their supporters. He bragged about his lone-wolf candidacy and claimed that his polls were — and would be — always tremendous — contrary...

Pessimists often compare today's troubled America to a tottering late Rome or an insolvent and descending British Empire. But medieval Europe (roughly A.D. 500 to 1450) is the more apt comparison. The medieval world was a nearly 1,000-year period of spectacular, if haphazard, human achievement -- along with endemic insecurity, superstition and two, rather than three, classes. The great medieval universities -- at Bologna, Paris and Oxford -- continued to make strides in science. They were not unlike the medical and engineering schools at Harvard and Stanford. But they were not centers of free thinking. Instead, medieval speech codes were...

This summer, President Obama was often golfing. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were promising to let the world be. The end of summer seemed sleepy, the world relatively calm. The summer of 1914 in Europe also seemed quiet. But on July 28, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip with help from his accomplices, fellow Serbian separatists. That isolated act sparked World War I. In the summer of 1939, most observers thought Adolf Hitler was finally through with his serial bullying. Appeasement supposedly had satiated his once enormous territorial appetites. But on Sept. 1, Nazi...

The Republican dilemma ny Republican has a difficult pathway to the presidency. On the electoral map, expanding blue blobs in coastal and big-city America swamp the conservative geographical sea of red. Big-electoral-vote states such as California, Illinois, New York, and New Jersey are utterly lost before the campaign even begins. The media have devolved into a weird Ministry of Truth. News seems defined now as what information is necessary to release to arrive at correct views. In recent elections, centrists, like John McCain and Mitt Romney – once found useful by the media when running against more-conservative Republicans — were...

In most presidential elections, the two candidates spar over issues. The president campaigns for his party's nominee in hopes of continuing his legacy. Democrats champion liberalism, Republicans conservatism. In numerous press conferences, journalists try to force newsworthy and embarrassing admissions from the two candidates. Not this year. Barack Obama, who less than two years ago dipped to 40% in approval rating, is nowhere to be seen. He seems to know that the more he is absent and quiet, the more the public likes the idea rather than the reality of him as president -- and his approval rating has risen...