Category: Washington Free Beacon

When it comes to politics, historical comparisons aren’t always fair.

On the one hand, our tendency to remember only great leaders can make such comparisons useless. After all, everyone looks underwhelming next to Abraham Lincoln—just ask Stephen A. Douglas.

On the other hand, there’s something illustrative about these comparisons. Because even controlling for Lincoln-level leaders, looking back reminds us that contemporary denizens of Washington, D.C., lack both the intellectual heft and practical wisdom of their predecessors.

In The Statesman as Thinker: Portraits of Greatness, Courage, and Moderation, Daniel J. Mahoney shows us what we’re missing. Mahoney, professor emeritus of political

“Look, Mom, that one has a Christmas tree.” That’s what one of my kids yelled out while we were going with some friends to Teddy Roosevelt Island last winter. It’s true, as they noticed, that the homeless encampments along the Potomac were more scenic and elaborately decorated than the ones in New York City. But the effect has been the same. Over the course of the past two years, cities across the United States have been dotted with people living on the streets. As urban residents retreated from public spaces during the pandemic, homeless populations took over. The effects have

If the leak of Roe v. Wade’s demise was a bang, the left’s commitment to terrorizing Supreme Court justices in their homes went out with a whimper.

The Washington Free Beacon on Friday visited the homes of several conservative justices. Although an armed man had attempted to assassinate Brett Kavanaugh weeks prior, the mood on his Chevy Chase street was tranquil absent an elderly protester and her followers. Police watched as a group of half a dozen protesters, many of them wearing surgical masks, chalked pro-choice slogans on the sidewalk and marched back and forth with signs. The most

On one extraordinary February night in 1979, three television networks went to war. It was the Sunday night of sweeps week, when ad rates for the upcoming season were set, and CBS decided to go for the gold by running Gone with the Wind, the most popular movie ever made. Rather than surrender to this mighty gambit, NBC decided to play hardball—and scheduled One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a huge box-office success that had won the best picture Oscar three years earlier.

And what did ABC do? It chose to air a made-for-television movie made in just

A group of parents in Maryland’s largest school district have a proposal to prevent school shootings that doesn’t require banning guns.

The group, Vigilance Not Vigils, is calling on Montgomery County to lift its ban on school resource officers—law enforcement agents assigned to respond to emergencies in local schools. The district defunded its resource officer program in March 2021, following complaints that officers disproportionately arrested minority students. Montgomery County Public Schools have seen an uptick in violent incidents since the district pulled resource officers, including the county’s first school shooting in January.

Montgomery County replaced resource officers with community engagement

Hardly anyone was shocked to learn that President Joe Biden is so cognitively impaired that members of his staff are printing out official note cards with detailed instructions to help him carry out his daily tasks. On Thursday, for example, White House photographers caught a glimpse of a card outlining the “sequence of events” for a discussion about offshore wind energy. “YOU enter the Roosevelt Room and say hello to participants. YOU take YOUR seat,” the card instructs.

In addition to these event-specific note cards, Biden also carries a general “cheat sheet” to help him get through the day without

A coalition of 20 black congresswomen, led by “Squad” member Ayanna Pressley (D., Mass.), on Thursday wrote a letter to President Joe Biden that urged him to declare a public health emergency in anticipation of a Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

The Court on Friday overturned the seminal 1973 abortion-rights decision.

The congresswomen urged the president to use “any and all executive authorities” to work against the Court’s decision—including “declaring a public health emergency and national emergency.”

The Court’s decision does not prohibit abortion but rather returns the issue to the states, a majority of which

The Supreme Court overturned its landmark Roe v. Wade decision Friday, ending constitutional protection for abortion.

The historic decision ends constitutional protections for abortion and returns regulation of the procedure to the states. Justice Samuel Alito delivered the majority opinion for five justices over dissents from the liberal trio. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote a separate opinion declining to overturn Roe but upholding new restrictions on abortion.

“Abortion presents a profound moral question,” the decision reads. “The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule

A New York school district is standing by a sex-ed lesson that instructed students to discuss terms such as “face fuck,” “coochie slayer,” and “professional raw dogger.”

The Croton-Harmon school district says its teachers should discuss these sexual terms, which were part of a lesson plan this month for a district high school’s 10th grade health class, so that students can learn “the importance of using respectful language” about sex. A photo of these phrases on a classroom whiteboard, which also included “ejaculate and evacuate,” “bust one in me,” and “rearrange my insides,” circulated on social media, sparking outrage from

Princeton University ignored extensive exculpatory evidence in its investigation of Joshua Katz, the tenured classics professor axed last month over alleged actions related to his consensual relationship with a former student.

Announcing the unceremonious dismissal, Princeton said Katz had dissuaded the former student from participating in a 2018 probe into the affair and discouraged her from “seeking mental health care” while she was an undergraduate. Both findings were based on excerpts of a voluminous email correspondence between Katz and the alumna, exchanged over 13 years, in which she sent him professions of love, allegations of “abuse,” and threats of suicide.