Tag: Conservative

Commentary: The American Right Can Learn from Orbán’s Big Win

Michigan Star Staff
Viktor Orbán

Viktor Orbán has crushed the Left, again. 

The Hungarian leader won his fourth consecutive term in office on Sunday, defying pollsters who had predicted a competitive race and delivering a crushing blow to the “united” Hungarian opposition, a dog’s breakfast coalition of six parties ranging from the Greens to a former far-right party with neo-Nazi associations, which he defeated by a 53-35 percent margin. In total, right-wing parties captured approximately 60 percent of the vote compared to about 36 percent for left-wing parties. 

For some Americans it may seem strange that so many on the American Right are paying attention to the political developments in a country less than a quarter the size of my home state of Montana and with a population of just 10 million. This confusion, however, betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the strategic importance of Hungary to the post-liberal Right, an importance to which I can personally testify, having recently concluded a five-week research trip to Hungary in the run-up to the election. 

During my time as a visiting fellow at the Danube Institute, a Hungarian think tank, I had the opportunity to interact with a number of Hungarian political leaders including the prime minister, and to discover what is certainly the world’s most important and most controversial experiment in Christian Democracy.

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Commentary: America Is Not Divided, It’s Being Hijacked

Michigan Star Staff

It seems lately like everywhere, on both the Right and the Left, we are hearing a chorus of voices tell us America is hopelessly divided and on the brink of a second civil war.

The level of rancor and incivility characterizing much of our contemporary political dialogue appears to confirm as much on a daily basis. It appears Left and Right have arrived at irreconcilable worldviews, disagreeing on first principles, core convictions, specific policy choices and ultimate ends. Increasingly, they seem unable to see eye to eye even when it comes to pure matters of fact.

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Michigan Conservative Group Files for Declaratory Ruling on Gov. Whitmer Recall Fundraising

The Center Square
Gretchen Whitmer

The Michigan Freedom Fund is seeking answers from Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson related to her decision to allow Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to disburse questionable campaign donations to other Democratic candidates.

The conservative MFF filed a formal request Friday for a declaratory judgment from Benson – who, like Whitmer, is a Democrat – over $3.4 million collected from 119 large donors. Michigan Campaign Finance law limits individual donations to $7,150, but allows an exemption to accept unlimited contributions if a governor is facing a recall attempt.

At the time Whitmer accepted the contributions, there was no active recall effort.

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Justice Breyer to Retire From Supreme Court: Report

Admin
Justice Stephen Breyer

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer will step down from his post at the end of the court’s current term, according to a report from NBC News.

Breyer is one of the three remaining Democrat-appointed justices on the high court. Should he retire, it will present President Biden with an opportunity to appoint a liberal-leaning justice who could sit on the court for many years to come, and for the moment, preserve the 6-3 split between conservative-leaning and liberal-leaning justices.

Breyer, who is 83, is the oldest member of the court. He had faced consistent pressure from liberal groups to retire, especially following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose passing allowed then-President Donald Trump to appoint Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

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Commentary: The Republican Party’s Multiethnic, Working-Class Coalition Is Taking Shape

Michigan Star Staff

In the 2016 Republican Party presidential primary, decades of dissonance between the party’s aggrieved grassroots and its blinkered elite spilled out into the open. For years, the chasm widened between the GOP’s heartland base, the river valley-dwelling “Somewheres” from David Goodhart’s 2017 book, The Road to Somewhere, and the party’s bicoastal “Anywhere” rulers. The foot-soldier Republican “Somewheres,” disproportionately church-attending and victimized by job outsourcing and the opioid crisis, felt betrayed by the more secular, ideologically inflexible Republican “Anywheres.”

Donald Trump, lifelong conservative “outsider” and populist dissenter from bicoastal “Anywhere” orthodoxy on issues pertaining to trade, immigration, and China, coasted to the GOP’s presidential nomination. He did so notwithstanding the all-hands-on-deck pushback from leading right-leaning “Anywhere” bastions, encapsulated by National Review magazine’s dedication of an entire issue to, “Against Trump.” Trump’s subsequent victory in the 2016 general election sent the conservative intellectual movement, as well as the Republican Party itself, into a deep state of introspection.

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Academic Journal Publishes Hoax on Conservative Takeover of Higher Ed

Michigan Star Staff
Man speaking in front of crowd

A prestigious academic journal has egg on its face for publishing a hoax paper that claimed to find widespread concerns about “undue” conservative influence in higher education.

“Right-wing money strongly appears to induce faculty and administrators … to believe that they are pressured to hire and promote people they regard as inferior candidates, to promote ideas they regard as poor, and to suppress people and ideas they regard as superior,” according to the abstract in Higher Education Quarterly.

Peer reviewers failed to perform basic due diligence on the paper submitted in April and approved in October, neglecting, for example, to verify that authors “Sage Owens” and “Kal Alvers-Lynde III” were UCLA professors as they claimed. Owens even used an encrypted email service for correspondence with the journal.

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Conservative Think Tank Sues California over Forced Diversity Quotas on Corporate Boards

Michigan Star Staff
Assembly member Shirley Weber

A conservative think tank is suing California to block a law that will force race, gender and sexual orientation quotas on corporate boards of publicly held companies located in the state.

The suit, National Center for Public Policy Research v. Weber, was filed against California Secretary of State Shirley Weber Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California.

The free market think tank argues that AB 979 perpetuates discrimination by treating people based on fixed characteristics rather than individual merits. Specifically, the law requires that all publicly held companies headquartered in California must meet a quota of female board members or be fined. Beginning in 2022, the law will extend to board quotas based on race and sexual orientation.

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Media and Higher Education Establishments Jeer New University That Challenges Academic Groupthink

Michigan Star Staff

Epic clown show.” “The best cancel culture grift yet.” “A Bible college for libertarians.”

And perhaps most damning: a “conservative university.”

A newly created university is facing an onslaught of accusations, assumptions and jeers from the higher education and media establishments for its self-described mission to build an institution “dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth.”

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Commentary: Parent and School Board Tensions Could Be Eased by School Choice

Michigan Star Staff
Young girl in pink long sleeve writing

Public education has been under the microscope lately, especially since many states shut down in-person learning last year during the COVID-19 pandemic. With children learning from home via technology, many parents had the chance to hear what their children’s teachers were saying—and they didn’t always like it. In fact, many were downright disturbed by what public schools were teaching their children.

Parents should not be forced to sit by and watch as their children get indoctrinated with progressive ideas they don’t agree with. Assuming it is legitimate for the government—that is, the taxpayers—to fund education, the government should distribute those funds directly to parents in the form of vouchers and allow them to choose where to educate their children. Not only would this allow for more choice in schools, but it would also reduce much of the conflict we are seeing today between parents and school boards across the country.

A common response to voucher proposals is that they would allow parents to use taxpayer dollars to send their children to private religious schools, thus violating separation of church and state. In other words, atheists and progressives argue that they should not have to financially support schools that teach students religious worldviews.

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Conservative Education Journalist Reaches Generation Z, Has 141,000 Followers on TikTok

Michigan Star Staff

Despite polls that suggest Generation Z leans further to the left than older Americans, one conservative education journalist has managed to gather a large following on TikTok.

Every day, Chrissy Clark, a Campus Reform alumna and current Daily Caller contributor and self-described education reporter, posts minute-long videos on the social media application covering the five underreported news stories that Americans should know.

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Commentary: When the Regular Joes Shrugged

Michigan Star Staff

Until recently, conservatives were the party of business. They defended the business world not as a necessary evil or because of its efficiencies, but because they thought it exemplified an enterprising, individualist morality. It respected rights of contract, served as an arena for creativity, and allowed socially useful competition. Even now, Republicans condemn the Left’s programs as creeping socialism, seemingly forgetful of the last decade in which corporations became the vanguard of the cultural revolution.

Part of American conservatives’ embrace of capitalism comes from its historically central place in American life. Americans had tamed the wilderness and become an industrial powerhouse by the middle of the 20th century. Most of this activity was rooted neither in the pursuit of glory nor religious conviction—as, perhaps, with Spanish colonialism—but by ordinary economic self-interest, the spirit of Yankee ingenuity.

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University of Minnesota Beats First Amendment Challenge to ‘Heckler’s Veto’ Against Ben Shapiro Event

Michigan Star Staff
Ben Shapiro speaking

Sixteen minutes after learning that a University of Minnesota student group booked conservative commentator Ben Shapiro to speak at its main campus in Minneapolis, then-president Eric Kaler declared, “I do not want this in the middle of campus.”

All he knew at that point, four months before the February 2018 event, was that Shapiro was “a right wing speaker and he made some appearances on other campuses.”

Citing security needs, the university ended up putting Shapiro in a venue on its St. Paul campus, far from student housing. Demand far exceeded capacity, and a regent accused the university of passing over a larger venue on the main campus that was easier to secure.

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Student Government Nominee ‘Canceled’ over Social Media Posts Expressing Conservative Values

Michigan Star Staff

A junior nominated for a position on Auburn University’s student government was successfully shot down because he expressed Christian and conservative beliefs on social media.

Stephen Morris was nominated for the position of chief justice of Auburn University’s Student Government Association. To his surprise, at the session where his nomination was to be taken up, held remotely over video, several members of the student senate strongly opposed his nomination.

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Conservative Sorority Student Banned over TikTok Video Says Louisiana State University Ignored Her Bias Complaint

Michigan Star Staff
Emily Hines of Louisiana State University

After her sorority at Louisiana State University kicked her out, Emily Hines says the school ignored her request for the incident to be investigated for possible bias.

Alpha Phi, a Greek Life organization independent of LSU, revoked Hines’ membership in April over her TikTok video that criticized Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine for her transgender identity. The seven-second video featured the Bee Gees’ song “More Than a Woman.”

Despite being told that the organization does not side with political views,” Hines told The College Fix she believes the decision was politically motivated.

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Conservative Sues Twitter, California Officials, and Biden Campaign Consultants For Colluding to Deplatform Him

Michigan Star Staff
Screen cap of Fox News interview

Conservative political commentator and attorney Rogan O’Handley is suing former California Secretary of State and now U.S. Senator Alex Padilla, current Calif. SoS Shirley Weber, Twitter, Team Biden campaign consultants SKDK, and others, for coordinating to deplatform him from Twitter after he tweeted his concerns about the 2020 election.

The Center for American Liberty in conjunction with the Dhillon Law Group, Inc. filed the federal civil rights lawsuit on Thursday in the United States District Court in Central California.

O’Handley spent years developing a verified Twitter account with 440,000 followers only to find his account permanently suspended at the direction of the Secretary of State’s office, according to a press release from Center for American Liberty.

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Commentary: Article Pulled from Campus Newspaper after Quoting Students Who Defended a Conservative Professor

Michigan Star Staff
Person holding newspaper inside of cafe

As a student journalist, I have been taught to try to get multiple perspectives on an issue and ensure that the subjects of our articles are treated fairly.

I’ve written 13 articles in the past three years for the campus paper, but The Oracle spiked my last one because, I believe, it included quotes that defended Andrew Donadio, a conservative nursing professor.

Donadio has faced a targeted campaign from two of his fellow professors over his support for Tennessee Tech’s Turning Point USA chapter as well as his opposition, as a Putnam County Commissioner, to renaming a local middle school sports team.

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‘I Will Not Be Canceled’: Conservative Regent Fights Back After Censure Vote from University of Michigan

Michigan Star Staff
Ron Weiser

Administrators censured a conservative University of Michigan regent after he made controversial comments about Democratic state leadership, despite similar comments from left-leaning students and faculty.

Ron Weiser — who became a regent in 2016 and is currently serving as chairman of the Michigan Republican Party — called Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, and Attorney General Dana Nessel “witches” and suggested that they be burned at the stake.

Weiser is the first regent to be censured in the university’s 200-year history.

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Commentary: Latinos Increasingly Leaning Conservative

Michigan Star Staff

According to a new study conducted by the Democratically aligned research firm Equis Labs,  former President Donald  Trump succeeded in peeling away significant amounts of Latino support, and not just in conservative-leaning geographic areas.

The post-election analysis by Equis found that certain demographics within the Latino electorate had proved increasingly willing to embrace Mr. Trump as the 2020 campaign went on, including conservative Latinas and those with a relatively low level of political engagement.

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Commentary: Is an Alliance Possible Between the Conservatives and the Libertarians?

Michigan Star Staff

In a recent column, I argued that libertarians should stop supporting third-party candidates and join our side in an effort to stand up to the Left. In response, writing for the Orange County Register and Reason, libertarian writer Steven Greenhut contended that although conservatives and libertarians have been allies on many issues in the past, “now we’re like residents of different planets.”

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MCC to Host Trump 2020 Cannonball Run on October 11

Jordyn Pair

The Michigan Conservative Coalition (MCC) has announced the Michigan Trump 2020 Cannonball Run, a Trump rally taking place on October 11.

The rally’s route will stretch from the Ohio and Indiana borders via Interstate-75 and US 131, respectively, and will end at the Mackinac Bridge. Participants are asked to their cars, trucks, van, motorcycle or other highway-legal vehicle to enter their closest highway entrance to drive on either I-75 or US 131 along the route. The MCC’s suggested drive is for one hour north and then reverse course and drive an hour south.

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Project Veritas Exposes Rampant Anti-Conservative Bias of Facebook’s Content Moderators: ‘I Am Going to Delete Them for Terrorism’

Anthony Gockowski

A shocking new undercover video from Project Veritas exposes the rampant anti-conservative bias of Facebook’s content moderators, the employees who are responsible for deciding what posts are censored.

Zach McElroy, a former Facebook employee who worked as a content moderator in Tampa, Florida, told Project Veritas that he’s willing to testify before Congress about Facebook’s bias against Trump supporters and conservative causes.

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The Battleground State Report: Leahy and Kellett Ponder, Are All 50 States Now Battleground States?’

JCarr

In a specific discussion on Friday’s Battleground State Report with Michael Patrick Leahy and Doug Kellett – a one-hour radio show from Star News Digital Media in the early stages of national weekend syndication roll out – Leahy and Kellett discussed the potential that all states could become battleground states. They explained that states now seemed divided by urban versus country, suburban versus rural, and also female versus male.

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Commentary: The Multiculturalist Left Demands We Provide America’s Greatness to Everyone But Ourselves

Michigan Star Staff

The Trump versus “the squad” brouhaha merely affirms what pundits have been saying since Trump’s MAGA movement swept up the American Right in 2016: American politics, from here on out, is American nationalism versus multiculturalism. A drift on the American Right towards nationalism, and deeper polarization between multiculturalism and nationalism, seems inexorable.

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