RICH LOWRY: Trump defends the West — and the Left screams foul. To be a leftist is to oppose the West. It’s all part of the Gramscian Damage.

PEGGY NOONAN: Trump’s Defining Speech:

The White House description of Donald Trump’s speech Thursday in Warsaw was simply, “Remarks by President Trump to the People of Poland.” In truth, Mr. Trump’s remarks were directed at the people of the world. Six months into his first term of office, Mr. Trump finally offered the core of what could become a governing philosophy. It is a determined and affirmative defense of the Western tradition.

To be sure, Mr. Trump’s speech also contained several pointed and welcome foreign-policy statements. He assured Poland it would not be held hostage to a single supplier of energy, meaning Russia. He exhorted Russia to stop destabilizing Ukraine “and elsewhere,” to stop supporting Syria and Iran and “instead join the community of responsible nations.” He explicitly committed to NATO’s Article 5 on mutual defense.

But—and this shocked Washington—the speech aimed higher. Like the best presidential speeches, it contained affirmations of ideas and principles and related them to the current political moment. “Americans, Poles and the nations of Europe value individual freedom and sovereignty,” he said. This was more than a speech, though. It was an argument. One might even call it an apologia for the West. . . .

This is a warning to the West and a call to action. By remembering the Poles’ invocation of God, Mr. Trump is clearly aligning himself with the same warning issued to Europe some years ago by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict.

Cardinal Ratzinger’s argument was that Europe needed to recognize that its turn toward aggressive secularism posed a real threat to its survival. In Mr. Trump’s formulation of that threat, we are obliged to “confront forces, whether they come from inside or out, from the South or the East, that threaten over time to undermine these values and to erase the bonds of culture, faith and tradition that make us who we are.” He warned about a “lack of pride and confidence in our values.”

Mr. Trump is taking a clear stand against the kind of gauzy globalism and vague multiculturalism represented by the worldview of, say, Barack Obama and most contemporary Western intellectuals, who are willing, even eager, to concede the argument to critics of the West’s traditions.

This is the speech Mr. Trump should have given to introduce himself to the world at his Inauguration.

Actually, if you go back and read that speech, they’re not as different as you might think.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: Tax Policy In The Trump Administration.

POLITICS IN 2017: Katy cookie store reverses decision to suspend employee after he paid for police officer’s order.

A young man was temporarily suspended after he offered to pay for an on-duty police officer’s order, which upset a family who witnessed the act.

The man is an employee at Great American Cookies at Katy Mills Mall, where he was working Sunday. During his shift, an officer approached the store and placed an order. His mother said her son purchased it with his own money, and the officer thanked him before walking away.

A family who was in line behind the officer allegedly became upset because he would not pay for their order, too.

Hmm. I’d like to know more about who these people were. They don’t sound very nice:

The next family walked up and said “are you going to buy mine too?” My son replied with “I’m sorry I bought his because he is wearing a badge”…… then this customer started verbally attacking him, calling my son a racist, & threatened to beat him up. His wife threatened to go back there and slap him.. The middle aged man sat down his little daughter and tried to come behind the counter to attack him. Thankfully his coworker defused the situation. The man then said “I will get you fired”.

Nice to see Great American Cookies come to its senses, though it’s disturbing that senior management wanted him fired, not suspended.

HAMILTON AND LAW SCHOOL DEANING.

HOW BAD ARE THINGS FOR THE MEDIA? THIS BAD. TV networks hide bad ratings with typos, report says: TV networks will intentionally misspell the names of shows when submitting episodes with poor viewership to Nielsen, reports The Wall Street Journal. “This fools the system into separating that airing out as a different show and keeping it from affecting the correctly-spelled show’s average overall rating.”

RICH LOWRY: TRUMP IS WINNING THE IMMIGRATION DEBATE.

With his penchant for tweeted insults and GIFs, Donald Trump will never be mistaken for a master of the sweet art of persuasion. Yet he is clearly winning the public argument on the issue of immigration.

He isn’t doing it through sustained, careful attention. He tweeted the other day that the media will eventually have to cover his success at the border, even though he himself has devoted more energy to his war with CNN than promoting the reduction in illegal border crossings.

No, it is the sheer fact of his November victory, and the data showing the importance of the issue of immigration to it, that has begun to shift the intellectual climate.

It had been assumed, even by many Republicans like Sen. John McCain, that opposition to amnesty and higher levels of legal immigration would doom the GOP to minority status forevermore. Trump blew up this conventional wisdom.

Now, intellectuals on the center-left are calling for Democrats to rethink the party’s orthodoxy on immigration, which has become more and more hostile to enforcement and to any skepticism about current high levels of immigration.

The swing here was enormous. A Trump defeat in November after running on an exaggerated version of immigration restriction would have sent Republicans scurrying back to the comfortable, corporate-friendly cliches about so-called comprehensive immigration reform. And if Hillary Clinton had won on a platform that doubled down on Obama’s executive amnesties, serious immigration enforcement would have lost its political legitimacy.

Trump probably wouldn’t have won without running so directly into the teeth of the elite consensus.

That’s true. Plus: “The pull of the left’s cosmopolitanism is strong. In an attack on Beinart, Dylan Matthews of Vox argues that the left’s egalitarianism can’t stop at the nation’s borders—’it means a strong presumption in favor of open immigration.'”

Well, if Trump can get the Dems to double down on open borders, while also calling Western Civilization fascism and praising Jihad, he could take 45 states in 2020.

NY TIMES DISCOVERS SOVIET COMMUNISM NOT SO GOOD:

Earl Browder concluded that the American-Soviet alliance of World War II would continue after the defeat of Nazi Germany. For this reason, in 1944, he boldly engineered the transformation of the C.P.U.S.A. into a pressure group designed to work within the Democratic Party.

What’s oddly missing in this all-too-late discovery? You can start with any mention of Walter Duranty,  the Moscow Bureau Chief of The New York Times from 1922 to 1936. The New York Times would not admit to his being a pawn of the U.S.S.R. and publishing Stalinist propaganda in The Times until 1990.

DON SURBER: Trump Speech Shows Why They Hate Us. And him.

THIS COLLOQUY makes me think that morale among “mainstream journalists” must be awfully low.

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IT’S NOT JUST POLICE OFFICERS WHO ARE GETTING CAUGHT OUT BY PERVASIVE CAMERAS: Sheriff exposes white, liberal columnist’s traffic stop tale for the lie that it is.

So is journalism that much worse in 2017, or are they just getting caught more often?

BOB MCMANUS: Comrade de Blasio doesn’t care about New York.

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MICKEY KAUS BUSTS PETER BEINART FOR HYPOCRISY:

See, when you start with the axiom that Trump’s a racist fascist, it’s easy to interpret everything he says as racist fascism.

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO POLITICAL SCIENCE PROF. CHARLES LIPSON: Trump’s Powerful Speech In Poland. “It was everything the Poles had hoped for, and more. They remember, with a shudder, how President Obama tried to buy goodwill from the Russians in 2009 by reneging on the United States’ promise to Poland to install an anti-missile defense system. Obama got nothing in return, and the Poles were left twisting.”

RANDY BARNETT WOULD BE AN EXCELLENT REPLACEMENT: D.C. Circuit Judge Janice Rogers Brown to step down.

MEANWHILE, CNN CLAIMS THAT AN AMUSING GIF IS INCITING VIOLENCE: Man arrested for making threats to Senator Ernst (R-Iowa).

DEMOCRATS: WE’RE THINKING, WE’RE THINKING! Which Is Worse, Nuclear Annihilation or Donald Trump?

HEY HEY, HO HO, WESTERN CIV HAS GOT TO GO: Some of the critics of Trump’s Warsaw speech reject the idea of the greatness of Western Civilization.

WILLIAM GENSERT ECHOES KURT SCHLICHTER: The Left is really hating the new rules.

WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS JEZEBEL. Jezebel Rants: Mixed-Race Couples in Movies Promote ‘White Supremacy.’

NEWS YOU CAN USE: You’re using your nonstick pans all wrong — here’s the right way to care for your pans. Well, most of this is pretty obvious. I endorse the part about using olive oil or butter instead of cooking spray. I have to say, we’ve had our ScanPans for several years — which are supposed to be safe for metal utensils — and they’re still just as nonstick as when new. I haven’t had any other pans that did as well.

MARTIN DAUBNEY: Will Darwinism Kill Feminism?

Using all her mighty intellect, Prof Inhorn proffered, “Maybe women need to be prepared to be more open to the idea of a relationship with someone not as educated”.

At this point, most men will probably be face-palming to the point of whiplash, slugging scotch directly from the bottle or changing their Tinder settings to exclude late-30s careerists.

But the professor is onto something, only she’s looking down the wrong end of the telescope. So, allow me to mansplain.

On the manosphere, hypergamy – the concept that women will only cynically “marry up” in terms of status and wealth – is a recurrent bone of contention.

Yet the comments under the Telegraph piece show this cynicism is bleeding hard into the mainstream.

Having forlornly waited decades for Mr Right, haunted by the tick-tock of their biological clocks, these women instead now want a Mr Right Now. Who’s basically a walking sperm donor.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, many men don’t want to play that game – especially those ultra-desirable, highly-educated, alpha males these women covet.

What the Yale team have spectacularly failed to grasp is that these men aren’t intimidated by these careerists. Increasingly, they just don’t want them. But why not?

Related: “Marriage is essential to the feminist dream of having it all, they just don’t want to waste a day more of their youth and fertility on their husbands than absolutely necessary.”

Weird that men aren’t all-in for this. Sexism, I guess.

Plus: Karol Markowicz: The Best Time To Get Pregnant Is Right Now. “You’re having a child, not dying (kicking the bucket), so why do you need a bucket list? Since when do we have this strange notion that having a family is what we do when we’re all done having a life? . . . There’s this idea that there comes a point in your life when everything can pause for a bit as you take time off to have a baby, secure in your finances and the knowledge your career will pick up right where it left off. It doesn’t actually work like that — for women or men.”

AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI, IT’S ALL DOUBLE STANDARDS ALL THE TIME, APPARENTLY: Mizzou will ban students from using ID credit cards to buy nonacademic items from campus store, saying it will promote better spending habits. But students can still buy campus massages with their IDs and use their credit cards for other things.