ActRight

After years of using cries of "federalism!" to challenge the Obama administration, the tone, predictably, has shifted to one of cooperation and opportunity.

Reddit is being regularly manipulated by large financial services companies with fake accounts and fake upvotes via seemingly ordinary internet marketing agencies.

Protesters storm Republican town hall events, Trump rolls back Obama's transgender bathroom policy, and Democrats debate who should lead them -- plus, the mailbag!

Residents of rundown Rinkeby, where nine out of ten residents are immigrants, say they live in fear, as Swedish politicians and police officers admitted that 'Trump was right'.

Joining C-SPAN’s Washington Journal on Thursday, David Frum accused President Donald Trump of being primarily motivated by desires of self-empowerment and self-enrichment. Unlike ideologically-driven dictators and authoritarians of the 20th century, contemporary autocrats, he said contemporary autocrats like Trump are more motivated by materialism and an appetite for power.

Remy finds common ground between Trump supporters and protesters at the inauguration. Parody of "Closer" by The Chainsmokers Written and Performed by Remy. M...

A man has been spared jail after he spat in a nine-month-old baby’s face and shouted ‘white people shouldn’t breed’. Rezzas Abdulla targeted Layla-Jean in her pushchair last January in South Shields while she was out with her

A man is behind bars after fatally shooting an Indian American engineer and injuring two others at a bar in Olathe, Kan., Feb. 22, in an alleged hate crime.

It is a standard part of just the usual standard economics that trade deficits do not matter. We have Adam Smith telling us that nothing is more ridiculous than concerns about the balance of trade--and we should note that near all of modern economics is either footnotes to Smith or [...]

Organizers kicked off conservatives’ annual Washington summit Thursday with a clear message to the so-called “alt-right”: you’re not with us.

The Conservatives unseat Labour in the Copeland by-election as Labour holds Stoke-on-Trent Central.

DNC senior adviser blasts Trump's decision to revoke Obama federal guidelines that allowed public school students to use restrooms and other facilities corresponding to their gender identity, saying that transgender kids have been left vulnerable #Tucker

On Wednesday, I wrote a piece at National Review concerning the troubling phenomenon of conservatives buying into the legitimacy and decency of people simply because the left hates those people. In introducing that article, I offered a scenario: David Duke has been invited to a private campus. Radical leftist protesters show up and get themselves pepper sprayed. Does this mean inviting Duke was worthwhile? Naturally, my answer was no.

"We refuse to take orders from a government that puts bigots into power."

This is a story about a well-intended photo op that had some good in it and some bad. It involves Tampa Bay's most famous face, one of its most struggling schools, and perhaps a blind spot when it comes to how little boys and girls view the world and how the world views them.

Guest CommentaryWhile the White House retreats from assertive foreign policy, Russia and China have stepped in to fill that power vacuum.

Why is President Trump keeping DACA, an Obama-era program that's delivered thousands of undocumented children into the hands of traffickers? 

Zac Petkanas, DNC Senior Advisor and science skeptic believes anyone can reassign their gender but Tucker Carlson of Fox News disagrees. Twitter: https://twi...

Lost in most of the coverage of President Trump’s decision to rescind the Obama administration’s transgender mandates is a fundamental legal reality — the Trump administration just relinquished federal authority over gender-identity policy in the nation’s federally funded schools and colleges. In other words, Trump was less authoritarian than Obama. And that’s not the only case. Consider the following examples where his administration, through policy or personnel, appears to be signaling that the executive branch intends to become less intrusive in American life and more accountable to internal and external critique. Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, a man known not just for his intellect and integrity but also for his powerful legal argument against executive-branch overreach. Based on his previous legal writings, if Gorsuch had his way, the federal bureaucracy could well face the most dramatic check on its authority since the early days of the New Deal. By overturning judicial precedents that currently require judicial deference to agency legal interpretations, the Court could put a stop to the current practice of presidents and bureaucrats steadily (and vastly) expanding their powers by constantly broadening their interpretations of existing legal statutes. For example, the EPA has dramatically expanded its control over the American economy even without Congress passing significant new environmental legislation. Instead, the EPA keeps revising its interpretation of decades-old statutes like the Clean Air Act, using those new interpretations to enact a host of comprehensive new regulations. If Gorsuch’s argument wins the day, the legislative branch would be forced to step up at the expense of the executive, no matter how “authoritarian” a president tried to be. Trump nominated H. R. McMaster to replace Michael Flynn as his national-security adviser. McMaster made his name as a warrior on battlefields in the Gulf War and the Iraq War, but he made his name as a scholar by writing a book, Dereliction of Duty, that strongly condemned Vietnam-era generals for simply rolling over in the face of Johnson-administration blunders and excesses. In his view, military leaders owe their civilian commander in chief honest and courageous counsel — even when a president may not want to hear their words. When the Ninth Circuit blocked Trump’s immigration executive order (which was certainly an aggressive assertion of presidential power), he responded differently from the Obama administration when it faced similar judicial setbacks. Rather than race to the Supreme Court in the attempt to expand presidential authority, it backed up (yes, amid considerable presidential bluster) and told the Ninth Circuit that it intends to rewrite and rework the order to address the most serious judicial concerns and roll back its scope. Authoritarianism is defined by how a president exercises power, not by the rightness of his goals. Indeed, if you peel back the layer of leftist critiques of Trump’s early actions and early hires, they contain a surprising amount of alarmism over the rollback of governmental power. Education activists are terrified that Betsy DeVos will take children out of government schools or roll back government mandates regarding campus sexual-assault tribunals. Environmentalists are terrified that Scott Pruitt will make the EPA less activist. Civil-rights lawyers are alarmed at the notion that Jeff Sessions will inject the federal government into fewer state and local disputes over everything from school bathrooms to police traffic stops. A president is “authoritarian” not when he’s angry or impulsive or incompetent or tweets too much. He’s authoritarian when he seeks to expand his own power beyond constitutional limits. In this regard, the Obama administration — though far more polite and restrained in most of its public comments — was truly one of our more authoritarian. Obama exercised his so-called prosecutorial discretion not just to waive compliance with laws passed by Congress (think of his numerous unilateral delays and waivers of Obamacare deadlines) but also to create entirely new immigration programs such as DACA and DAPA. He sought to roll back First Amendment protections for political speech (through his relentless attacks on Citizens United), tried to force nuns to facilitate access to birth control, and he even tried to inject federal agencies like the Equality Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) into the pastor-selection process, a move blocked by a unanimous Supreme Court. In foreign policy, he waged war without congressional approval and circumvented the Constitution’s treaty provisions to strike a dreadful and consequential deal with Iran. There’s no doubt that Trump has expressed on occasion authoritarian desires or instincts. In the campaign, he expressed his own hostility for the First Amendment, his own love of expansive government eminent-domain takings (even to benefit private corporations), endorsed and encouraged violent responses against protesters, and declared that he alone would fix our nation’s most pressing problems. But so far, not only has an authoritarian presidency not materialized, it’s nowhere on the horizon. Instead, he’s facing a free press that has suddenly (and somewhat cynically) rediscovered its desire to “speak truth to power,” an invigorated, activist judiciary, and a protest movement that’s jamming congressional town halls from coast to coast. This tweet, from Sonny Bunch, is perfect: Donald Trump is such a terrifying fascist dictator that literally no one fears speaking out against him on literally any platform. — Sonny Bunch (@SonnyBunch) February 12, 2017 It was just three weeks ago that David Frum published a much-discussed essay in The Atlantic outlining how Trump could allegedly build an American autocracy. Over at Vox, Ezra Klein wrote at length about how the Founders’ alleged failures laid the groundwork for a “partyocracy.” And now? Trump’s early struggles are leading pundits to ask, “Can Trump help Democrats take back the House?” In the American system, accountability comes at you fast. Liberals were blind to Obama’s authoritarian tendencies in part because they agreed with his goals and in part because their adherence to “living Constitution” theories made the separation of powers far more conditional and situational. But authoritarianism is defined by how a president exercises power, not by the rightness of his goals. It’s early, and things can obviously change, but one month into the new presidency, a trend is emerging — Trump is less authoritarian than the man he replaced. — David French is a staff writer for National Review, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, and an attorney.

Alex Makes a brief but important point about taxes and regulations

The domestic intelligence service has announced an uptick of hundreds in a matter of months. At least one cause of the worrying trend is the ease with which young people can become radicalized online, authorities said.

The liberal viewpoints of most social psychologists means they tend not to study prejudice against groups associated with conservative views

The right must decide who is a real friend, the left manipulates for a Republican split with Trump, and Trump pursues some well-crafted policy!

Left-wing CNN Democrat Chris Cuomo took to Twitter on Thursday to call for "tolerance" from 12-year-old girls and other minors with respect to mentally ill males suffering from gender dysphoria.   

Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris, one of 24 CEOs of the nation's largest manufacturing companies who met with President Donald Trump at the White House on Thursday, said they were "encouraged by the pro-business policies" of the administration, adding that "this is probably the most pro-business administration since the Founding Fathers."