RealClearPolitics Articles

Minnesota wasn’t always a fixture in the national news cycle. Now, it seems every month there is a new headline about Minnesota. This time, it involves a mob of protestors assaulting a conservative journalist. If Minnesotans want to end the trend of political violence plaguing their state, they must take a stand against incidents like these. Last month, Savanah Hernandez, a journalist with TPUSA, was mobbed and assaulted while filming an anti-ICE protest in Minneapolis. Hernandez makes a living covering controversial events, so documenting this protest is nothing new for her. Things...

The dawn of the AI era has sparked a wide range of reactions, from exhilaration over the technology’s capabilities to deep distress.  Such responses to a new communicative tool are nothing new, and indeed, AI presents new and unique challenges that will require deep thought and sensitivity. But a heavy-handed congressional response that erodes longstanding American freedoms isn’t the answer. The Senate Judiciary Committee’s markup and passage last week of SB 3062, the GUARD Act, shows the substantial risk that Congress’s “do something” energy poses to...

On Wednesday, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett revealed that the White House is contemplating issuing an executive order that would regulate and evaluate AI models similar to how the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) evaluates new food and drugs. This is a good idea that deserves serious consideration. Here is why. During this 10-year expansion of artificial intelligence, there are several major concerns with AI cybersecurity that haven’t been fully addressed. There is the use of AI to attack a cyber asset (adversarial), and there are attacks on AI tools like chatbots...

In 1921, Woodrow Wilson, the first of America's four transformative progressive presidents, became the first president to remain in Washington and make the nation's capital his permanent home after leaving office. In very mild defense of the man who did more than any other to establish the administrative state and thus pervert America's carefully constructed constitutional design, Wilson had suffered a debilitating stroke two years prior that left him partially paralyzed and nearly blind. He died just a few years later, in 1924. Barack Obama, the nation's fourth transformative progressive...

Knowingly or not, President Donald Trump, in his decision to attack Iran, has embarked on a foreign policy that has been, on and off, both persistent and controversial in the great English-speaking nations. You can trace it back at least to the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89: the ouster of King James II of England and his replacement by his son-in-law and nephew William, Prince of Orange, and his daughter Mary, as William III and Mary II. These events had wide-ranging consequences, even in England's North Atlantic seaboard colonies. They were commemorated in the founding of our second-oldest...

We are back in an era of hard resource power and Mahanian sea power. Geography matters again. Chokepoints matter again. Energy, food, minerals, and shipping routes matter again. And above all of it still sits American monetary power, reinforcing advantages that the United States and the wider Western Hemisphere possess in abundance. So, what is the real meaning of Operation Epic Fury? Epic Fury is not about Iran, except in the most superficial sense. Iran is the trigger, not the subject. The subject is power: who has it, who depends on it, and who discovers in a crisis that he owns less of it...

Fraud in government programs is often treated like an urban legend -- something that happens in faraway blue cities run by corrupt political machines. But the truth is more unsettling: Some of the most brazen theft of taxpayer money is happening in places governed by Republicans, right under their noses. Consider Ohio. At one address in Columbus, investigators found 94 different companies registered in the same building. The windows were covered. The offices appeared empty. Yet, according to The Daily Wire investigative team led by Luke Rosiak, that single address has billed taxpayers more...

Data centers are big buildings full of machines that process what we do on our phones and computers. AI requires even more computing power, so companies are eager to build more data centers. The usual suspects are freaking out. "We must stop it!" says Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. "Slow it down!" demands Sen. Bernie Sanders. Data centers do use lots of power, and water to cool them down because their computers generate heat. One center can use as much power and water as a small town. "Uses resources like a madman!" says one protester in my new video. Last year, protesters blocked or stalled...

For months, polling and prediction markets have forecast that Democrats will retake the House, but that Republicans will retain control of the Senate. However, recently, the prediction markets have moved toward the Senate being a toss-up. The latest RCP Senate Map lists eight toss up states and three in the Leans category. These 11 states are where the battle for the Senate will be decided. RealClearPolitics Polling in Michigan is still in flux because of a hotly contested primary that will likely result in a runoff. All we have right now are a couple of hypothetical matchups, which do...

The liberals at Mediaite.com gushed over the latest anti-conservative comedy from NBC: "Kash Patel Gets Absolutely Smoked in Punishing SNL Sendup By Aziz Ansari: 'I'm the First Indian Person to Suck at Their Job!'" After another vomitous episode of Colin Jost badly attempting to turn Pete Hegseth into a villainous-jock character from "Revenge of the Nerds," this "cold open" skit on "Saturday Night Live" turned to Indian comedian Aziz Ansari punishing his fellow Indian American as a dolt. "You guys should not be reporting the lies and the gossip, you should be reporting on the historic nature...

Candidates vying to succeed California’s term-limited Gov. Gavin Newsom squared off Tuesday in a CNN-hosted debate, with former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra drawing the most pointed jabs from rivals on both sides of the aisle. In the most dynamic debate yet, five Democrats and two Republicans jockeyed for airtime while taking shots at each other constantly as they tried to gain traction on the issues of affordability, health care, immigration, and housing in the final weeks of a messy and still wide-open primary. Becerra, who has recently climbed in polls following...

A Secret Service Uniformed Division officer was arrested early Monday for allegedly masturbating naked on the sixth floor of the DoubleTree hotel near the Miami airport. Police arrested John Spillman, 33, shortly after midnight Monday morning after hotel security called them. The Miami-Dade Sheriff’s office responded and caught him in the act with his pants “lowered and masturbating” in the sixth-floor hallway, according to the arrest affidavit. A victim told police that she was in the lobby when Spillman allegedly followed her and another upstairs and immediately entered a...

Jerome Powell is finished as Federal Reserve Board chairman, but he has time left in his term, so he is sticking around. He would be only the third chair in history to stay, and he says, “My concern is legal attacks on the Fed, which threaten our ability to conduct monetary policy without considering political factors.” Cry me a river. So-called “Fed independence” has morphed from an arcane academic argument into dinner-table talking points. Apparently, the Fed wants to be left alone to do whatever it wants. Unfortunately, in the past 18 years, Fed policy has had more...

Health officials in South Carolina recently declared the 2026 Spartanburg County measles outbreak over. The outbreak involved nearly 1,000 cases, the largest in the U.S. in more than 30 years. For those who follow that and other 2025-2026 outbreaks, a number of lessons should serve to revise the current narrative around the status of measles in the US measles outbreaks.   First: Large-scale population displacement resulting in relocation of the unvaccinated contributes to outbreaks. Although public health officials do not routinely record “country of origin” of measles...

The man just won't leave the stage. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell announced last week that he's going to remain on the Federal Reserve Board until 2028 even as he by law surrenders his chairmanship. The announcement came even after President Donald Trump agreed to drop his unwise lawsuit against Powell for funding a $2 billion new Taj Mahal building down the street from the White House. Powell will be the first Fed chair to stay on the Fed's Board of Directors in 50 years. This isn't the way it's done. It's bad form. Only once did he come within spitting distance of his inflation target....

Are America's college students doing to themselves what the Chinese Communist state does to its citizens? An Ivy League professor -- an old-fashioned liberal who actually cares about free speech -- recently warned me about what's happening in classrooms like his. He encourages class discussion of the great books he teaches in class -- but students are afraid to speak, not because they're afraid of the professor but because they fear each other. Communist regimes have tried to stamp out dissent for more than a century. Tyrants and totalitarians have always tried to sow suspicion among...

The Trump administration is restoring the core value of equal opportunity to civil rights enforcement. It is eviscerating the race-baiting, intersectional policies of the Biden and Obama administrations, and giving substance to the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services (2025) that whites, men, and heterosexuals are not held to a higher standard in discrimination cases. This is a time for rejoicing, tempered by concern that the administration will not have time to complete its work, and that its reliance on executive orders, rather than...

The Supreme Court decides cases. But it also decides when to decide them – and that timing can be just as consequential as the ruling itself. Now we have a real-world example. In a closely watched decision last week, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Louisiana’s creation of a second majority-black congressional district violated the Constitution, holding that race cannot be used too heavily in drawing political maps, even to comply with the Voting Rights Act. Reasonable people can agree with that conclusion. The Constitution promises equal protection under the law, and the idea...

When the National Park Service recently removed signs that had made George Washington the most heavily criticized individual at Independence Park, critics accused the Trump administration of “censorship.” Now that the Park Service has unveiled replacement signs, the administration stands accused of “whitewashing” and “sanitizing” history. In truth, the Trump administration is rescuing a prominent historical site from radical activists and presenting American history in a much more accurate, nuanced, and informative way – just in time for the...