Author: Ben Shapiro

This week, the city of San Bernardino, Calif., went bankrupt. It followed hot on the heels of Vallejo and Stockton, Calif. And they’ll be followed, no doubt, by Los Angeles — and then, shortly after that, by California. Let’s take a look at the numbers. San Bernardino has an annual budget of $258 million; it […]

“There is no good government but what is republican,” John Adams wrote. “(T)he very definition of a republic is ‘an empire of laws, and not of men.’” Adams meant that a government in which law is applied at the discretion of powerful people is a bad government. The law must be applied in a straightforward, […]

Remember when President Obama inspired Americans with such tired bromides as, “There are no red states or blue states, just the United States”? Remember when Obama declared that Americans had to pull together, because what united us was stronger than what divided us? Yeah, not so much. President Obama’s re-election campaign has been an exercise […]

In California, the mayor of a major city has decided that it’s time to renegotiate union pensions, which are bankrupting the municipality; more specifically, he wants to raise the retirement age. The governor of the state wants to revamp the welfare system, forcing people to get back to work within two years rather than four. […]

Back in 2008, after a hard-fought primary battle against then-Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., then-Sen. Barack Obama had a choice: he could put her on the ticket as his vice presidential nominee, thereby healing the rift that had torn apart the Democratic Party or he could go another direction. He chose Joe Biden over Clinton — […]

This week, Lila Rose’s indispensable Live Action released undercover video showing a young woman entering Planned Parenthood and discussing her desire to get an abortion if her prospective child will be female. The Planned Parenthood employee, ever eager to help, says she’ll do her best to be of aid, encouraging the young woman to use […]

Cory Booker is, by most accounts, a reasonable man. He went to Stanford and Oxford, as well as Yale Law School; now he’s the mayor of Newark. He’s also African-American. That last fact is only important because liberals have made it so. Booker has been a strong backer of President Obama — so strong, in […]

According to President Obama, he’s a historic figure. That’s no figure of speech. This week, journalist Seth Mandel discovered that President Obama had authorized his staff to add his name to the biographies of former presidents from Calvin Coolidge to George W. Bush on the White House website. For example, Calvin Coolidge, it now states […]

This week, Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan essentially endorsed same-sex marriage. The Obama campaign, however, wary of minority and blue-collar voters, promptly announced that President Obama was against same-sex marriage — sort of — but that his position was “evolving.” Like a flower waiting to bloom, eventually Obama?s support for […]

President Barack Obama hates bullying. That’s why he took time out in the middle of a Congressional election cycle — in peak season, actually — to cut a video for a little-known group called the It Gets Better Project. The It Gets Better Project was designed to protect children, particularly lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender […]

America is a land of class mobility. That’s what makes America a magnet destination for people all over the world: Come to America and make something of yourself. If you want great welfare benefits, try to bust into Europe; if you want to work for a living and get rich, come to the United States. […]

For months, we’ve heard the chattering class tell us that Mitt Romney was the only acceptable Republican nominee. He was the only candidate who could beat Barack Obama; he was the only one smart enough, savvy enough, and milquetoast enough to defeat Obama in a general election. While Newt Gingrich was too hot and Rick […]

America’s constitutional structure is built on checks and balances. The idea behind these checks and balances is simple: We want interest counteracting interest, ego counteracting ego. We don’t want any one person to gain too much power — or any one faction or any one way of thought. Gridlock, for lack of a better word, […]

The facts of the Trayvon Martin case are still unclear. But that hasn’t stopped the all-knowing, all-seeing President Obama from voicing his opinion of the situation. “You know,” said Obama, “if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon. All of us have to do some soul-searching to figure out how does something like this […]

With President Obama’s approval rating hovering at 49 percent according to the latest Rasmussen tracking poll, it is becoming increasingly clear that he is a formidable threat for re-election. Gas prices are through the roof, the economy remains in shambles, the situation in the Middle East has never been so tenuous and yet nearly half […]

The verdict is in: The mainstream media believes that Derrick Bell is not a story. They believe it so deeply that they’ve had members of the Breitbart.com team on national television repeatedly; they’ve spent thousands of words covering it; and they’ve mentioned it on radio and the Internet incessantly. All to say that there’s nothing […]

I recently became editor-at-large of Andrew Breitbart’s empire, but I first met Andrew when he was still the unnamed other half of Matt Drudge’s monster website. The year was 2001. I’d just entered college at UCLA, and after seeing the anti-Israel bias of the student newspaper, The Daily Bruin, I had become their token conservative […]

President Obama apologized this week for the U.S. military’s accidental burning of Qurans in Afghanistan. “I wish to express my deep regret for the reported incident,” said Obama. “I extend to you and the Afghan people my sincere apologies. … We will take the appropriate steps to avoid any recurrence, to include holding accountable those […]

In 2008, Rick Santorum spoke at Ave Maria University in Florida. There, he tackled the crucial issue of moral decline in America and did so in explicitly religious language. “Satan has his sights on the United States of America,” he said. “Satan is attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, […]

In 1831, Henry Clay formed a new political party. He called it the Whig Party. His goal was to ensure Jeffersonian democracy and fight President Andrew Jackson, a Democrat. Over the course of the next 20 years, the Whig Party achieved several presidential victories. But as slavery assumed more and more national importance in the […]

This week marked the 39th anniversary of the greatest American moral tragedy of the 20th century: Roe v. Wade. And yet the left cheered this anniversary with the enthusiasm of an intoxicated teenager stumbling on a free copy of Penthouse. Planned Parenthood, which rakes in millions each year by performing abortions, asked via Twitter, “How […]

Mitt Romney is an enormous squish. On the squish scale, he falls somewhere between Jabba the Hut and Slimer from Ghostbusters. He can’t be trusted on conservative philosophy, and he can’t be trusted to act as a principled conservative while in office. And that may be the best thing for the conservative movement. Since the […]

Much of the conservative punditocracy has declared that Mitt Romney is the consensus conservative candidate. If he is, he’s the least consensual consensus candidate in modern political history — the man can’t break 25 percent with a sledgehammer. While his supporters shout from the hills that Romney essentially tied for the win in Iowa, his […]

In North Carolina this week, a young man named Mostafa Kamel Hendi hit upon a plan to make ends meet in this rotten economy: He decided to knock over a local gold store. Tape shows this determined and enterprising flower of American youth strolling into the store, hoodie over his head, and then gesturing to […]

In the Meredith Wilson musical “The Music Man,” a small Iowan town faces the sinister wiles of a big city con man, Harold Hill. In introducing themselves, they sing, “We could stand touchin’ noses / For a week at a time / And never see eye-to-eye. But what the heck, you’re welcome, / Join us […]

Last week in Boston, a seven-year-old boy named Mark got into a fight with a bully. The bully put his hands around the boy’s throat and began to squeeze. That’s when Mark fought back; he kicked his aggressor right in the family jewels. In a normal society, we’d celebrate Mark. Throw him a ticker tape […]

This week, in Oakland, Calif., America saw yet another stellar example of the glories of diversity. At a taping of a rap music video in that fair city, eight people, including a one-year-old child, were shot. When a classical music video goes wrong, somebody busts a string. When a rap music video goes wrong, somebody […]

When the Israeli government captured Nazi mass murderer Adolf Eichmann, journalist Hannah Arendt was struck by the fact that Eichmann appeared to be a nondescript accountant type. He was not highly intelligent, and he did not appear to be particularly vicious. This led Arendt to the conclusion that anyone could, under the right ideological circumstances, […]