ConservativeOpinion.com

09/05/2026

"There is something oddly revealing about the modern Democratic Party’s relationship with Barack Obama. Democrats still admire him, still summon him for campaigns, still place him in the same soft-focus category as Joe Biden whenever they wish to contrast Democratic “decency” with the chaos of Donald Trump. But almost nobody in the party seems interested in becoming the next Obama, or even looking for one. In an era where mere partisanship is not rewarded nearly as much as unrestricted warfare on the other side, Obama, with his stubborn insistence that Republicans are opponents but not enemies, that America is better when we are all together (how quaint!), and that it is flawed but nevertheless worth preserving, has become less a political model than a political credential, a familiar and comforting symbol of the pre-Trump era rather than a blueprint for the Democratic future."

"For while Obama was a liberal, the new generation is Leftist, and there are important distinctions. The former is still tethered to certain norms in a tug-of-war with the Right that keeps things relatively centered; hence Obama’s belief that America needs “to have two healthy parties.” But the latter finds those very norms to be repugnant, and like all radical movements, it wants permanent one-party rule, and the humiliation of its opponents. Obama, in that sense, was not the first of a new breed, but the last of the old guard."

There is something oddly revealing about the modern Democratic Party’s relationship with Barack Obama. Democrats still admire him, still summon him for campaigns, still place him in the same soft-focus category as Joe Biden whenever they wish to contrast Democratic “decency” with the chaos of ...

08/05/2026

08/05/2026

Maybe Mamdani should create a government airline.

Spirit Airlines, the ultra-low-cost flyer that shut down operations last weekend, was often the butt of jokes. But while it may have been the laughingstock of the skies, a raft of heartfelt tributes rolled in after Spirit announced its closure — even from former naysayers. There was plenty of concern for Spirit’s newly unemployed airline workers; nearly 17,000 people lost their jobs. There was also genuine mourning for an airline that filled an essential economic niche.

With its infamously no-frills policies, Spirit offered a lifeline for travelers who otherwise couldn’t afford to fly.

“I shared in the mourning,” writes Vanessa Ogle. “I grew up next to a Superfund site, and my mom and I both worked in fast food. I moved to New York as a teenager, and when I could afford to travel home on my Domino’s salary, it was courtesy of Spirit. It’s the airline I took in college to afford visits home to rural Michigan, and the airline I took when I visited my mom in the hospital just before she unexpectedly passed away.”

Read Ogle on how Spirit’s closure is going to have very real consequences for many Americans who simply may not be able to fly without another low-cost alternative: https://nymag.visitlink.me/JZ_zhP

06/05/2026

One of the laziest habits of the Left is demanding virtue from everyone else. They complain about low wages, but rarely starts businesses to pay unusually high wages. How many politicians demanding higher wages actually employ anybody? Liberals say the rich should pay more in taxes, but affluent liberals do not voluntarily overpay the IRS. They say more aid should go to every fashionable cause, but too often treat compassion as something to be funded by someone else. Even the violent rhetoric is outsourced: not “I will do this,” but “I wish someone else would.” It is moral responsibility without personal sacrifice.

But we conservatives should be careful, because the Right has its own version of this. We praise family values while letting screens raise our children, and we ingest violent or vulgar media. We extol personal responsibility while blaming the government for our problems. We worship free markets until our own industry wants protection. We talk about virtue, discipline, and civilization, but often outsource the hard work of preserving those things to politicians, pastors, schools, or “the culture.”

It's all well and good to criticize Leftism, but we must be careful about demanding goodness collectively without practicing it personally.

06/05/2026

I’m starting to think that the Democrats put Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on the Supreme Court just to strengthen their own argument against lifetime appointments.

04/05/2026

I saw the new "The Devil Wears Prada" movie over the weekend. Here's my review: "There are few cinematic experiences more deflating than watching a sequel to a beloved film and realizing, somewhere between the first and second act, that no one involved had the faintest idea why they were making it, other than to have a good time while cashing in. Such is the fate of The Devil Wears Prada 2, a picture packed with unexplored potential, yet so curiously inert that it seems to exist solely because its predecessor once did.

In the original The Devil Wears Prada, the title is not merely a bit of clever branding, it is the entire thesis, a warning, alerting us to the Faustian bargain within. 'The Devil' signals temptation and descent. Anne Hathaway’s Andrea does not simply accept a job, she is offered a deal: career, access, status, in exchange for something far less visible and far more valuable. That is why the film hums with tension. It is not about fashion. It is Faust in couture...

And because we are dealing here with the devil, it is fitting that the antidote is biblical: the classic warning, 'What does it profit a man,' or woman, 'to gain the world and lose one’s soul?' (Mark 8:36). Christ asks the question rhetorically, but Andrea answers it anyway, and answers correctly.

But the sequel, astonishingly, dispenses with all of this. There is no temptation, no bargain, no descent, only vague professional errands dressed up as a plot. Andrea is no longer asked to choose between competing visions of herself. She is asked, at most, to be helpful here and there. The devil has not merely been softened, he has been written out of the story entirely, and what remains is a film that remembers the wardrobe but forgets the wager."

The rest of the review is in the comments section.

02/05/2026

There’s a great Calvin and Hobbes where Calvin asks his mother what’s for dinner, hears “tortellini,” and immediately spirals into a full-blown meltdown, treating it like a personal betrayal and a near human rights violation, only for the final panel to show him with a dictionary, quietly looking up what tortellini actually is.

It is hard to think of a better metaphor for the way a large segment of our political discourse now operates. Consider the reaction to Louisiana v. Callais, where our friends on the Left tell us, with absolute certainty and maximum volume, that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 has been gutted and that the country is careening back toward Jim Crow, because everything to them has to be catastrophized into an existential threat to life itself. Yet the people making these claims almost never pause to engage with what the law actually does or what the Court actually said, because that's not politically useful. The Voting Rights Act prohibits racial discrimination in voting, full stop. Literacy tests, poll taxes, intimidation, and the other tools of exclusion that once defined parts of this country, and were used specifically to prevent African-Americans from voting, remain illegal and unthinkable. Thanks to the VRA, tens of millions of minorities gained the right to vote and were actually able to cast those votes. None of that is at issue here, and none of it has been undone, despite the fearmongering.

What is at issue is a far narrower and more intellectually honest question, one the Court itself has been grappling with for years: how to reconcile a statute that sometimes requires race-conscious districting, with a Constitution that is deeply suspicious of racial classifications. After Allen v. Milligan (2023), Louisiana was effectively told it may need to draw an additional majority-Black district to comply with federal law. It did so, and was then sued for relying too heavily on race in drawing that very district. That is not a talking point; it is a genuine doctrinal tension. States are being told, on the one hand, not to dilute minority voting strength, and on the other, not to sort citizens by race. When those commands collide, there is no easy answer, only line-drawing, and hoping the courts will approve those lines, weighing whether those lines incorporate race sufficiently but not excessively.

Now, when there's this much confusion, when the government creates a paradigm this unworkable, you can take either side of the debate in good faith, and serious people do. But what you cannot do, at least not if accuracy matters at all, is skip past the actual legal question and declare that we are witnessing the end of civil rights in America. That kind of rhetoric may feel satisfying, but it is indistinguishable from Calvin’s outrage over a dinner he does not understand, and it tells us far more about the speaker than it does about the law which, if anything, Louisiana v. Callais affirms rather than attacks.

02/05/2026

With the news that Spirit Airlines is going out of business, a truly Golden Age of aviation comes to a close. Not because Spirit was a great airline, obviously, but because no other carrier contributed so generously to the national archive of hilarious social media footage. It was almost like Jerry Springer Air, where what was being sold was really a social experiment:

• Position yourself as the Walmart of the skies.

• Strip away every civilizing cushion: comfort, space, free bags, flexibility, and dignity.

• Turn an already unpleasant experience into a pressure cooker of fees, hard seats, tight aisles, delays, and petty humiliations.

• Then cram strangers together, add a few exhausted authority figures, some desk clerks with bureaucratic personality disorder who delight in customer dissatisfaction, and a flight crew wholly unequipped for the sociology experiment unfolding before them.
Then just turn on the cameras, grab some popcorn, and watch it all unfold.

Spirit did not sell cheap flights so much as it sold air travel stripped of every civilizing cushion. It was like the Stanford Prison Experiment from the early 1970s, which studied how ordinary people would behave if placed in a simulated prison environment.

The “guards” quickly became authoritarian and, in some cases, abusive; the “prisoners” became passive, distressed, and emotionally unstable; and the situation escalated so fast that the experiment had to be shut down after just 6 days (it was supposed to run for 2 weeks).

Spirit, to its credit, lasted a lot longer than that. But the lesson is the same: when you strip away comfort, space, status, and, when you maximize discomfort and minimize basic human dignity, you should not be shocked when the results more than occasionally look like a gate-area episode of Cops.

01/05/2026

🔥URGENT🔥 The Supreme Court's Conservative justices are to blame for gerrymandering that undermines our democracy. It's time to hold them accountable. Click NOW to learn the shocking truth.

Explore the Supreme Court gerrymandering decision and how it impacts the political landscape in America today.

01/05/2026

"Partisan gerrymandering is a shameful tactic used by politicians to manipulate our democracy and the Supreme Court's conservative majority is to blame."

Explore the Supreme Court gerrymandering decision and how it impacts the political landscape in America today.

01/05/2026

Nope, no gerrymandering going on here!