Mona Charen

It’s important in a democracy that the losing side grapple with its defeat and learn the right lessons for next time. A certain amount of reflection and self-criticism is healthy, but we’ve blown past that point and are in danger of over-interpreting the 2024 results.  Despite headlines proclaiming the GOP won in a “rout” or…

How is everybody coping with the decline of America? I’ll tell you how I’m doing in a bit, but first I have a few observations about Thanksgiving. I wish I had a dime for every time I’ve heard someone declare that Thanksgiving is their favorite holiday. I used to say it myself, before I realized…

While all eyes are on Mar-a-Lago and the goons Trump is nominating to besmirch high government offices, there is another potential threat looming to the rule of law, and it comes not from MAGAworld but from the sitting president. I’m referring to the possibility that President Joe Biden might pardon his son Hunter Biden. Ana…

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…