Our Civil War Pre-Enactment

Feature Article by , September 1, 2020

Living where I do, on the location of a minor skirmish in the Wilderness Campaign, I’ve been to my share of Civil War re-enactments. I’ve always found it a bit of an odd hobby, to want to play-act such a cataclysm of internecine hatred and killing. But perhaps the point was that we can play at it […]

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Biden Needs a Sister Souljah Month

Commentary by , August 28, 2020

I suggested a little while ago that Joe Biden needs a Sister Souljah moment, a reference to an incident in the 1992 presidential campaign when Bill Clinton criticized a race-baiting black rapper. Facing steep odds of winning the White House, Clinton took the chance of slightly alienating the radical wing of the Democratic party for the […]

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The Kenosha Convention

Feature Article by , August 27, 2020

Republican Convention Roundup, Part 1 Jonathan Last makes a good case that the national political conventions this year won’t matter, that they won’t be a turning point in the election. They usually aren’t. To the extent people look at the events and speeches from the conventions, it’s mostly just to rationalize the decision they were […]

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Salon of the Refused, Episode 20

Announcement by , August 25, 2020

Episode 20 of my podcast series, Salon of the Refused, is now available. I talk with Jaroslav Romanchuk, President of the Scientific Research Mises Center in Minsk, about the “Revolution of Order” in Belarus. The conversation includes: the world’s most orderly protest movement, how the coronavirus pandemic fueled the uprising, how a housewife became the […]

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A Grand Illusion

Commentary by , August 21, 2020

Democratic Convention Roundup The Democrats wrapped up their virtual, online convention Thursday night, and I’m sure you watched all of it, right? Of course you didn’t. Nobody does. And a lot of it doesn’t matter, particularly since we’re dealing with someone who is as much of a known quantity as Joe Biden, so we don’t […]

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Anti-Anti-QAnon

Commentary by , August 21, 2020

The Democratic National Convention was a marvel of message discipline. The speeches and events had a clear theme: to portray today’s Democratic party as totally normal, mainstream, non-combative, and not radical at all. In a year of race riots and cancel culture, we may have a lot of reasons to be skeptical of this gauzy […]

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Europe’s Last Dictator

Commentary by , August 16, 2020

World News Roundup America has been very fascinated for the past few years with looking into its own navel and ignoring the rest of the world. Some years ago, I described America’s foreign policy as “Etchasketchistan,” a state in which nobody could predict any more who would be the “hawks” and who would be the […]

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The Birthright Citizenship Candidate

Feature Article by , August 14, 2020

Kamala Harris is not a vice-presidential running mate who makes me any more excited about the thought of voting for Joe Biden. With Donald Trump reverting to the usual last-ditch stunt of a failing president—trying to impose his agenda by executive order—it doesn’t seem helpful for Democrats to embrace a woman whose own campaign for […]

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The Immoral Majority

Commentary by , August 11, 2020

Five Things You Need to Read Today I’ve been diverting a lot of time to other projects for the last week, so I’ve got a lot of news to catch up on. The edition below is the first step. I’ll follow up with a separate update on the collapse of the National Rifle Association and […]

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What if It’s All Burned Down Already?

Feature Article by , August 9, 2020

As it looks increasingly likely that President Trump is going to lose reelection in November, the attention of disgruntled Republicans has moved down the ballot. Hence the “Burn It All Down” debate: To what extent should Trump’s failures be taken out on the rest of the Republican party? Mona Charen, for example, argues that “the […]

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