Opinion and commentary on news, politics, culture, and policy impact.
The fourth time was the charm for Faizan Zaki, of Allen, Texas, who last Thursday night won the 100th National Spelling Bee. The word that won it for the 13-year-old—who was last year’s runner-up and who had participated twice before that—was eclaircissement, which he spelled without the slightest hesitation. It’s a French noun meaning “the…
Washington, D.C., has become so toxic and corroded in recent years that it should be named an Environmental Protection Agency Superfund site. But President Donald Trump’s new crew has put on their hazmat suits and headed straight into the thick of it, with last week offering several examples of where the crew is hoping to…
I normally avoid reading any United Nations papers lest they trigger my gag reflex. If Florida is where “woke” goes to die, the U.N. is where woke goes to fester and congeal, seeping into bureaucracies and weighing down the rest of the world with the ideological refuse of the West. Imagine my surprise, then, at…
Legacy media outlets can’t decide how to cover a horrific Islamic terrorist attack in Boulder, Colorado, and continue repeating debunked stories straight from Hamas. Arrest and deportation efforts by the second Trump administration cause crocodile tears on and off national television. Pride month brings out the weirdest people on Earth, but notably fewer than in…
Fiscal conservatives lately have argued that the federal government should spend as it did before COVID-19 ruined everything. Thankfully, the global pandemic is a speck in the rearview mirror. Only a few diehards cling bitterly to their masks and grow misty with lockdown nostalgia. Restoring spending to its trajectory in fiscal year 2019—the last before COVID-19 wandered…
Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. There’s been a new development, a new phase in the Ukraine war. I know we’ve talked…
Last month marked the 40th iteration of Operation Tradewinds, a multinational security exercise hosted by U.S. Southern Command in the Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago. Operation Tradewinds brought together 100 personnel from 26 nations, six regional organizations, and multiple U.S. agencies. The goal of the operation: to advance multinational efforts to safeguard international law…
The recent Nature article “Carbon Majors and the Scientific Case for Climate Liability” tries to further the alarmists’ dream of pinning alleged harms of “extreme” weather on the world’s largest producers of fossil fuels. Christopher W. Callahan and Justin S. Mankin, both at Dartmouth College when their article was prepared, accept—without substantiation—climate activists’ position that industrial emissions of…
“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future,” America’s philosopher laureate Yogi Berra once said. Wise counsel, but it’s difficult to see how Harvard wins its war of wills with President Donald Trump. The oldest and most hallowed university in the country decided to fight Trump after he made a series of demands in April, most…
Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. So much has been said about the media, the mainstream media, the legacy media. There’s not…
Five years after the death of George Floyd, the political Left is increasingly embracing violence as legitimate action, aided and abetted by soft-on-crime forces funded by billionaire George Soros. Floyd’s death sparked numerous deaths and other violence, including massive property damage to predominantly black neighborhoods and businesses. The Minneapolis–Saint Paul riots alone saw two people…
Elias Rodriguez’s alleged murderous rampage and the fifth anniversary of George Floyd’s death came four days apart, and these two events may not be as different as you think. They provide a grim omen that the revolutionary violence that shook the nation in the name of “social justice” five years ago is regrouping as anti-Israel mayhem, or worse. That…
DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—There’s something almost poetic about the Democratic Party’s desperation. Faced with a mass exodus of young men from their ranks, the Left’s solution isn’t to rethink their disastrous policies or the cultural rot they’ve championed. Nope, they’ve decided to shell out tens of millions of dollars to study us. Not talk to us. Not…
First came the shocking discovery courtesy of the Oversight Project that nearly every single document put out under President Joe Biden’s signature had been signed by an autopen. Now comes confirmation that Biden was mentally incapacitated his entire term. Both leave unanswered, “Who was really president? Who operated the autopen?” We decided to go straight…
The legacy of Matt Graves, the former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, is now coming into focus, and it’s not pretty. In April, I reported in these pages that from 2018 to 2022, only 1.7% of people arrested on charges of carrying a pistol without a license in the District were sentenced to prison….
Bizarrely, 62% of young Americans hold a “favorable view” of socialism. How can they be so ignorant? Socialism has been tried by lots of countries. It’s failed. It always fails. China prospered somewhat only after they legalized some private enterprise. Perhaps today’s kids are ignorant because they’re too young to remember the fall of the Soviet…
San Francisco’s board of education wanted to let students with failing grades graduate. That is, before fierce opposition made them backtrack. On Tuesday, the city proposed the “Grading for Equity” method. In an effort to promote “bias-resistant and motivational” grading practices, this program sought to eliminate assignments, attendance, or class participation from the grading structure. Instead,…
June 1 marks the 100th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark parental rights decision in Pierce v. Society of Sisters. That historic opinion recognized “the liberty of parents and guardians to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control.” It also famously declared that “the child is not the mere creature of…
“I’m not happy with what [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is doing. He’s killing a lot of people, and I don’t know what the hell happened to Putin,” said President Donald Trump on Truth Social over the holiday weekend. “I’ve always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia, but something has happened to…
Do taxpayers have a constitutional duty to bankroll Harvard University? On MSNBC, David French argued that the Trump administration’s defunding of Harvard is little more than “political retaliation.” In the United States, we don’t sentence people before hearing the verdict, the New York Times columnist said. Ignoring due process is “directly contrary to our constitutional…