The American Spectator

Welcome back to the world of Mike Holman. If this is your first stop, here’s what you need to know: Mike Holman is the independent journalist, podcaster, and inveterate maker-of-enemies at the center of Scott McKay’s bitingly satirical thriller series — four novels (so far) chronicling one man’s habit of ending up in the middle of the very stories the rest of the media is too scared, too compromised, or too incurious to tell.

By many indicators, American higher education is having its biggest crisis in the two-thirds of a century in which I have been involved with universities as a student or faculty member. The sector is very dependent on resources provided by its primary customers, students, and by state governments, and also federal government and private sector grants, contracts, and student loans.

The folkloric tandem of July and August ends, and relaxing September arrives. The September vacationer hates people but loves the places everyone else visits during the rest of the summer. They hate lines, outrageous prices, and crowded festivals.

Mao Zedong, known as the “Great Helmsman,” was the most important founder of the People’s Republic of China. Nevertheless, after his death in 1976, the Chinese Communist Party tolerated criticism of his legacy. Even the CCP admitted that Mao had made mistakes, though it still claimed that he was 70 percent correct. Unfortunately, this minimal honesty in government has since disappeared.

Before the advent of television, and now other and far more intrusive forms of mass media, it was hard for slogans to get any traction. Yes, you might see a bit of parroting going on in newspapers, whose writers, under the pressure of daily deadlines, might naturally reach for whatever handy phrases were in the air.

Suffice it to say, no one will ever mistake President Trump’s ability to respond on point to way-off-base critics.

Ukraine’s static war front has gone electronic. Even as news headlines focused on the dynamic U.S. air campaign over Iran, a threshold moment in military history was playing out in the frozen trenches of eastern Ukraine. For the first time, soldiers were surrendering to robots.

Gloria Steinem died this week at 92, and this weekend I’ll bet you won’t find a single legacy corporate media outlet willing to print anything but hagiography about her. And that’s a shame, but of course it’s typical.

The Department of Homeland Security announced 50,925 arrests of illegal aliens for August. The roundup amounts to the largest number of illegal aliens arrested in a single month in U.S. history. Those who headed for the exits included murderers, child molesters, and Milo Yiannopoulos. Has a presidential administration ever fulfilled a campaign promise as thoroughly as the second Trump administration does on illegal immigration? (RELATED: Team Trump Is Touting Its Wins.

During the course of researching so many books on Ronald Reagan, I’ve thought to myself numerous times: Wow, that would make a great movie. My colleague Mark Joseph thought the same. One day in 2004, he called about making one of my Reagan books a movie. Twenty years later, the movie became reality, based on my 2006 work, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, starring Dennis Quaid.