Syndicated columns

President Donald Trump is in the United Kingdom for a state visit, where he is expected to again lecture that country's leaders about their civil and criminal policies on what should be free speech.

The First Amendment is in a sorry state, especially on college campuses. A survey of students released Sept. 9 from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression shows a steady decline in support for free speech – with a new high of 34% saying that using violence to stop a campus speech is acceptable in some cases.

Fox News host Brian Kilmeade recently apologized for an “extremely callous remark” where he said that homeless people who experience mental illness and refuse treatment should be executed.

A guy I knew in college once told me, as I struggled to make a point in a dorm lounge argument, that I had “the verbal acuity of shampoo.” The put-down was so devastating that it immediately ended discussion. I think of the line nearly every time I fumble for a word or write a bad sentence.

Has Russia’s President Vladimir Putin finally overplayed his hand by challenging NATO? It’s too soon to know, but some signs are emerging that the U.S. and Europe may be ready to apply the kind of sustained pressure needed to persuade him he has – and that his own interests would lie in ending the war in Ukraine.

Russia’s drone incursion into Poland overnight, forcing NATO fighter jets to scramble and shoot down some of the drones, was an enormous escalation by President Vladimir Putin of Russia. And for those of us in the West, it was a test.

President Donald Trump implied this week that he doesn’t consider domestic violence a crime. “Much lesser things – things that take place in the home – they call crime,” he complained during remarks at the Museum of the Bible in Washington on Monday. “If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say this was a crime.”

On a tranquil, sun-dappled afternoon in New Haven, Connecticutt, the day before the killing of Charlie Kirk on a university campus more than 2,000 miles west, Yale University hosted a ceremony at which the U.S. Postal Service unveiled a commemorative stamp honoring the 100th anniversary of the birth of a Yale man in whose large footsteps Kirk had walked. William F. Buckley Jr., who died in 2008 at age 82, would have recognized the 31-year-old Kirk as a kindred spirit.

The foundation of a free society is the ability to participate in politics without fear of violence. To lose that is to risk losing everything. Charlie Kirk – and his family – just lost everything. As a country, we came a step closer to losing everything, too.

Rob Malley, who has worked on Middle East policy in every Democratic administration since Bill Clinton’s, can’t say exactly when he became convinced that the quest for a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine was doomed.

Support for Judge Mary Logan

On paper, these are good times for the U.S. economy. The latest GDP numbers show growth was at 3.3% in the second quarter. Business investment is up. The unemployment rate remains low, and the inflation rate is reasonable.

Vaccine policy in the U.S. is rapidly dividing into two opposing camps: state leaders who are prioritizing access to shots, and those who are taking increasingly aggressive steps to undermine confidence in them.

WASHINGTON – On Wednesday, as one of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims spoke outside the Capitol, pleading for government candor, fighter jets roared overhead, briefly drowning her out. Thomas Massie, the rogue Republican member of Congress who’d organized the news conference along with Democrat Ro Khanna, found the timing suspicious.

I was working in El Salvador when President Nayib Bukele declared a state of exception. In 2022, after a sudden spike in homicides, he suspended due process and sent soldiers into neighborhoods. Overnight, thousands were detained. Many were guilty. Many were not.