The National Review can’t get enough of Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and it’s easy to see why: DeSantis drooler in chief Rich Lowry’s review of DeSantis’ bad boy with a Harvard sheen swagger bears the following subhead: “A glimpse at what Trumpism without Trump can look like.” Okay, to some of us that can…
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CRT v. Anti-CRT: Wait, Wait! You’re BOTH Right! Occasionally.
OCTOBER 6, 2022 UPDATE: In the course of this report—somewhere in the middle—I discuss crime data from the FBI. I should have pointed out that these data are estimates rather than complete tallies. We don’t know, for example, that there were 10,440 homicides in the U.S. in 2020, although the FBI says we do. I…
Moral, moral, who’s got a moral? Well, just about everyone, it seems.
Can we all agree on a few “facts”? Tucker Carlson is an unscrupulous, racist rabble-rouser. Tucker Carlson had nothing to do with the murders in Buffalo. Black nationalists and other “woke” folks frequently picture white, “capitalist” civilization as the worst and most oppressive in history, entirely worthy of violent overthrow and, quite possibly, only remediable…
The Benedict Strategy, Spinoza Edition
I don’t know if you’re up on Rod Dreher, who moans and groans with varying degrees of accuracy regarding the woke folks over at the American Conservative. Rod, a floridly passionate Christian, seems to have undergone several denominational makeovers, rejecting the Catholic Church to settle, I think, somewhere in the fields of Eastern Orthodoxy. Awhile…
Literature R Us Special Conspiracy Edition: Mohammed Bin Salman, Graeme Wood, Jeffrey Goldberg, and Eugene Volokh! Oh, yeah, and Rothschild space lasers too!
Seriously, those Rothschild space lasers are a bitch! They zapped me a couple of years ago, and I’ve been incredibly stupid ever since. So here’s the deal. A couple of days ago, the Atlantic ran a long article by Graeme Wood on Saudi Kingfish Mohammed Bin Salman, Absolute Power, based, according to Wood, on three…
Political Notes from All Over
Turnout, Turnout, Turnout! Why Democrats love it and Republicans hate it. Ruy Teixeira, a Democratic political centrist after my own heart, has a post up at his Substack blog, The Liberal Patriot, How Not to Build a Coalition, arguing, correctly, in my opinion, “High turnout is just not the magic key to Democratic victories the…
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. surprises the heck out of me
He sure the heck does. In his stunningly prescient 1997 essay, Has Democracy a Future? (Foreign Affairs—may be behind a paywall), bow-tied, martini-sippin’ Artie,1 whom I frequently dismissed as the jerkiest of knee-jerk liberals, essentially writes the future as us young folks have lived it in the 21st century. The Arthur Schlesinger I read always…
Democrats in disarray! Who could have seen this coming?
Well, who but everyone? Yes, Joe Biden and his Merry Band have been hit with lots of bad news beyond their control, like the D variant, which put the kibosh on the back to new normal celebrations of last spring, and the continuing flood of desperate immigrants, and the rise in gas prices, and inflation…
Let’s all hope Terry McAuliffe doesn’t get what he deserves for uncritically embracing Virginia’s all too woke education lobby
There was a time—there was a long time—during both the Clinton and Obama administrations when the Democratic neoliberal establishment did not much care for the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, regarding them, correctly, as enemies of educational reform, more interested in protecting bad teachers than helping struggling students. Well, that was…
Colin Powell, a four-star disappointment
The death of Colin Powell at age 84 has brought forth lots of eulogies and a few accurate criticisms, like this one, posted at Forever Wars by Spencer Ackerman, author of Reign of Terror How The 9/11 Era Destabilized America And Produced Trump. Ackerman focuses almost exclusively on what one might call the “mysterious incident…