Mona Charen

It never ends. The press still does not know how to handle the avalanche of lies that is MAGA’s chief contribution to our national life. I understand, sort of. It’s dull and time-consuming to bird-dog every false accusation, wild assertion or factual misstatement that comes out of Trumpland. “They’re controlling the weather” is just the…

When my friend David French — New York Times columnist, pro-life evangelical, and lifelong conservative — announced that he would be voting for Kamala Harris, it was like dropping a Porterhouse steak amid a pride of lions. The Dispatch’s Jonah Goldberg wrote a rebuttal, asserting, among other things, that “endorsements trigger an instinctual desire to…

If Kamala Harris becomes the first woman president, her first accomplishment could well have already happened — elevating and honoring the positive side of masculinity. Tim Walz, whose politics are to the left of most Americans and certainly most swing voters, has been welcomed not as a box-checking, progressive pick, but as a Midwestern dad…

Within minutes of President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 race, Sen. Tom Cotton leaped onto X to declare that “Joe Biden succumbed to a coup by Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and Hollywood donors, ignoring millions of Democratic primary votes. Donald Trump took a bullet for democracy.” Radio host Erick Erickson was even more creative,…

“Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.” — Proverbs 16:18 President Joe Biden, who earned our respect and affection over the past four years, is now trying our souls. In an interview on a Philadelphia radio show, he mumbled that he was proud to be “the first Black woman to serve…

One of the saddest fables people comforted themselves with over the past eight years was the one about the strength of American institutions: The voters could elevate an unfit, malevolent demagogue, but our checks and balances were robust; our institutions would prevent any serious damage. Over the course of these years, one institution after another…

The governor of Louisiana just signed a law that will require all public classrooms in the state — from kindergarten to universities — to post the Ten Commandments “on a poster or framed document at least 11 inches by 14 inches … in easily readable font.”  For the first time since Reconstruction, Louisiana has a…

I am not a fan of hidden microphone ambushes. It’s sneaky and dishonest. The kind of ambush that journalist and activist Lauren Windsor pulled off at the recent Supreme Court Historical Society dinner was particularly unseemly because she posed as a conservative activist type and attempted to lead the witnesses – Supreme Court justices and…

Here are Trump’s words from that infamous April 2020 press conference about Covid:“So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light. … And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other…

Within the past few days, student protesters occupied Hamilton Hall at Columbia University and then were forcibly removed by New York police. I knew that building well when I was an undergrad there in the 1970s. Columbia, like most colleges, tended left. The campus had become notorious in 1968 for its protests. By the time…