When Conservatives Oppose ‘Religious Freedom’

On March 28, Pamela Geller, co-founder of the group Stop Islamization of America, wrote a column on Breitbart that offered Donald Trump some advice: “Clean house.” Paul “Ryan has got to go. James Comey, too,” she urged. Then she added a more obscure name: “What’s Eric Treene still doing there?” Treene, the Special Counsel for Religious Discrimination in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, is ...

2017-04-17T09:30:17-04:00By |

Trump’s Establishment Approach to Syria

Why did Donald Trump, who won the GOP nomination, in part, by bucking his party’s interventionist foreign policy establishment, thrill it on Friday by launching missile strikes against the government of Bashar Assad? Why did the most unconventional of presidents respond to his first foreign policy crisis in such a conventional way? …

2017-04-17T09:20:08-04:00By |

The Dangers of Blaming Trump for Anti-Semitism

At a press conference in mid-February, Donald Trump said something that was, even for him, astonishing. He predicted that when authorities discovered the perpetrators of the anti-Semitic attacks that had broken out since his election, “It won’t be my people,” who had committed them. “It will be the people on the other side.” He repeated the thought later that month, reportedly telling state attorneys general ...

2017-03-30T12:29:46-04:00By |

America’s Most Prominent Anti-Muslim Activist Is Welcome at the White House

On Monday night, Brigitte Gabriel, head of ACT for America, tweeted that she was, “In D.C, preparing for my meeting at the White House. What topics would you like me to address?” Among the replies: “Ban sharia law from US,”, “Officially identify Islam as a political system and not a ‘religion’” and “ask how we can get islam [sic] ed out our schools & universities?” ...

2017-03-30T12:24:08-04:00By |

The Denationalization of American Muslims

On March 6, the zoning board in Bayonne, New Jersey, down a request to convert an old warehouse into a mosque. Such denials are happening with increasing frequency in the United States. In the 10 years between 2000 and 2010, the Justice Department intervened seven times against local communities that prevented Muslims from building mosques or other religious institutions. In the six years between 2010 ...

2017-03-20T21:59:49-04:00By |

Breaking Faith

Over the past decade, pollsters charted something remarkable: Americans—long known for their piety—were fleeing organized religion in increasing numbers. The vast majority still believed in God. But the share that rejected any religious affiliation was growing fast, rising from 6 percent in 1992 to 22 percent in 2014. Among Millennials, the figure was 35 percent. …

2017-03-14T17:11:10-04:00By |

Why Trump Is Accusing Obama of Wiretapping

Why, last Saturday, did President Trump accuse former President Obama of wiretapping him? In its story tracing the accusation from Mark Levin’s radio show to Breitbart’s front page to Trump’s Twitter Feed, The New York Times offered a theory: Trump wanted to distract the press from bad news. …

2017-03-14T17:04:27-04:00By |

A Violent Attack on Free Speech at Middlebury

My fellow liberals, please watch the following video. It suggests that something has gone badly wrong on the campus left. The events leading up to the video are as follows. One of the student groups at Middlebury College is called The American Enterprise Club. According to its website, the Club aims “to promote … free enterprise, a limited federal government, a strong national defense.” In ...

2017-03-06T18:34:01-05:00By |

Trump Scapegoats Unauthorized Immigrants for Crime

Donald Trump is worried about violence by unauthorized immigrants. When he spoke before a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night, he invited three relatives of people that unauthorized immigrants had killed to attend as his guests. In that speech, he called for the Department of Homeland Security to create an office focused on the victims of immigrant crime. And in a January 25 executive ...

2017-03-06T18:28:10-05:00By |

Why Is Trump Silent on Islamophobic Attacks?

Last week President Trump condemned attacks against American Jews, which is good. So why won’t he condemn attacks against American Muslims? Why is there so little political pressure on him to do so? Numerically, the problem appears roughly similar. In the ten days following Trump’s victory, the Southern Poverty Law Center chronicled one hundred attacks—or threatened attacks—against American Jews and 49 against American Muslims. In ...

2017-02-27T21:00:58-05:00By |
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