November 13, 2026 — John Hinderaker

Advice to Trump Administration: Stonewall

Featured image Democrats are promising to spend the next two years investigating the Trump administration. How should the administration respond? In the same way the Obama administration did. Republicans controlled the House for most of the Obama terms, and the Senate for the last two years. While they were nowhere near as obsessive as the Democrats, Republicans launched plenty of investigations. How did Obama react to them? The FBI: Still Stonewalling. FBI »
November 13, 2026 — Scott Johnson

My semi-viral tweet

Featured imageMy daughter Eliana was invited to appear before a huge crowd at the Jewish Federations of North America General Assembly that concluded this past Tuesday evening in the District of Columbia. She was paired off with David Axelrod in a discusion moderated by JFNA president and CEO Eric Fingerhut. The subject was the meaning of the midterms for American Jews. The video turned up for me when I was on »
November 13, 2026 — Scott Johnson

Required reading

Featured imageThese columns and essays have rotated off our Picks, but I would like to encourage readers to pause over them. I have added only a few brief comments: Nathan Pinkoski, “Primer: The Islamist Threat to American Communities, Center for Renewing America (May 7, 2025). Everything Pinkoski writes is worth reading. This one warrants repeated rereading. Nathan Pinkoski and Éric Zemmour, “France’s Riots Are a Warning for the West,” Commonplace Substack »
November 13, 2026 — Scott Johnson

The case against Ilhan Omar

Featured imageSpeaking of required reading, I recommend Ben Weingarten’s meticulously reported American Mind column “The Case Against Ilhan Omar.” Ben wrote the book on Omar — the aptly titled American Ingrate: Ilhan Omar and the Progressive-Islamist Takeover of the Democratic Party (2020). In the book, however, Ben does not undertake a study of Omar’s father, whose story I believe has some bearing on the current investigation of Omar. In this column »
November 12, 2026 — Bill Glahn

Gas prices keep falling

Featured imageThe national average for regular gasoline fell more than 3 cents/gallon again yesterday and sits just above $3,90 a gallon. That’s an 8 cent drop over 2 days, 2o cents in the past week and 45 cents in the past month. It’s in free-fall. Diesel is also down over 3 cents yesterday. Fuel prices have not been this low since early July. Apparently, this is also happening north of the »
November 12, 2026 — John Hinderaker

What’s News?

Featured imageNo doubt you have heard about the University of Mississippi coeds who made monkey noises as they passed by an apartment occupied by several black students. How could you not? It was a major national news story, reported everywhere. It is reasonable to ask, why? Why is it news that a couple of (likely drunken) college students made monkey noises? Was that really one of the 1,000 most important things »
November 12, 2026 — John Hinderaker

How the Dems Did It

Featured imageThe main key to this year’s election was obviously Donald Trump’s unpopularity, but there was more to it than that. The Democrats employed effective tactics to drive turnout to unprecedented levels for a midterm election. Van Jones described one of their important strategies, and it was the first thing Rita Panahi asked me about on her show last night. The Democrats dominated social media in the weeks leading up to »
November 12, 2026 — Scott Johnson

How bad was it?

Featured imageYesterday afternoon I wrote that the midterm elections represented a near extinction-level event for the Republican Party. In short order the Mississippi Senate race was called for Scott Colum. The AP story reporting the outcome is here. Scott who? Scott Colum. He defeated GOP incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith. As the AP headline has it, he will be Mississippi’s first black Senator since Reconstruction. His election was so doubtful that RCP never »
November 11, 2026 — John Hinderaker

You Can’t Say That!

Featured imageIn France, Michel Houellebecq, author of the 2015 novel Submission, is facing a possible prison sentence for insulting Islam: Houellebecq, now 70, faces up to a year in prison and/or a 45,000 euro fine for “complicity in provoking discrimination, hatred or violence” against Muslims for comments made during a 2022 interview. So what did he say? Speaking with philosopher Michel Onfray for Front Populaire, Houellebecq “described Muslims as a threat »
November 11, 2026 — Scott Johnson

What happened in the midterms

Featured imageAs they turned out, the midterms were a near extinction-level event for the Republican Party. I urge interested readers to check out Jeff Anderson’s review of relevant exit polls in the American Mind column “What happened in the midterms.” Do take in his support for this conclusion: If this election can be summed up in a single exit-poll question, it might be this one: “Do you think Congress is doing »
November 11, 2026 — Scott Johnson

A salute on Veterans Day

Featured imageToday is Veterans Day. I’m thinking about the late Leo Thorsness. Leo was the native Minnesotan who served in Vietnam and was awarded the Medal of Honor for one helluva mission he flew in 1967, a few days before he was shot down and captured. Every ounce of the courage he displayed on his Medal of Honor Mission was required to endure his six years of confinement in the Hanoi »
November 12, 2026 — Scott Johnson

Vance yanked off Iran file

Featured imageOnly yesterday the Wall Street Journal reported that “Vance Considers Direct Talks With Iran Hard-Liner in Push to End War.” I thought you have got to be kidding me. Is that because he did such a good job with the Memorandum of Understanding that has served us so poorly? Under a story with three bylines the Journal took us inside the mind of Vice President Vance himself: Vice President JD »
November 12, 2026 — Scott Johnson

Wherever green is worn

Featured imageIn his great poem “Easter, 1916,” William Butler Yeats memorably asserted: I write it out in a verse— MacDonagh and MacBride And Connolly and Pearse Now and in time to be, Wherever green is worn, Are changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born. Well, times have changed, and not for the better. Ireland has turned into a cesspool of anti-Semitic hatred. “MacDonagh and MacBride and Connolly and Pearse” are »
November 12, 2026 — Scott Johnson

Personal & confidential: Meryl Streep

Featured imageI woke up overnight to find The Deer Hunter playing on TCM. It is just wrapping up as I write. Watching it brought back an old memory I haven’t thought of for a long time. I started writing for The Dartmouth daily newspaper as a reviewer in the fall term of my freshman year and continued to write for the paper until I graduated. I reviewed plays, books, and films. »
November 11, 2026 — Bill Glahn

Biggest gas price drop in 18 years

Featured imageYesterday saw the biggest one-day drop in the price of gasoline in eighteen (18) years. That would have been during the financial collapse of 2008. According to AAA, the national average price for regular stands at 3.94 per gallon, down almost four cents from yesterday. From my local station this morning: The average national price is down more than 18 cents from a week ago and 42 cents from a »
November 11, 2026 — John Hinderaker

The Return of Wokism

Featured imageI don’t know, maybe it never went away. In any event, wokism has now penetrated every nook and cranny of our society, including yarn shops: A St. Louis Park yarn shop has pulled all of its Harry Potter merchandise and publicly apologized to customers for selling kits themed around the best-selling book series. Needle & Skein, a knitting and crochet shop on Excelsior Boulevard, posted the apology on Facebook Monday »
November 11, 2026 — Scott Johnson

Long-term rental

Featured imageIn a race that reflects the gravity of the GOP midterm debacle, Democrat LaKesha Womack defeated Republican incumbent Tim Moore in North Carolina’s 14th Congressional District by more than 6.000 votes. Womack’s victory celebration may have been crimped by a pending criminal case charging her with failing to return a rented 2019 Toyota 2019 Corolla worth $20,000 from a Budget Car Rental location in Charlotte. Womack was served a felony »