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“Signposts on the Road to Hell”

Commentary by , September 9, 2020

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. The Humanitarian with the Molotov Cocktail My article on looting and property rights is now up at The Bulwark, where it’s getting a fair bit of attention. I’m not the only one taking on this issue. At The Atlantic, Graeme Wood offers a scathing review of Vicky […]

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“The Very Heart and Soul of Conservatism”

Commentary by , September 1, 2020

Republican Convention Roundup, Part 2 The debate over what Democrats should do about the race riots is heating up. I happily took a break from Twitter for a while to avoid the unhinged responses to my own piece in The Bulwark urging the Democrats to get on top of the issue. Among the saner pundits, […]

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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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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 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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“Poof into Thin Air”

Commentary by , August 1, 2020

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. “Poof into Thin Air” Whatever else we may get distracted by, there is one vast overhanging fact that affects everything about politics, the economy, education, and just about everything else this year: the coronavirus pandemic. And the biggest fact about this big fact is the monumental failure […]

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Little Green Men

Commentary by , July 24, 2020

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. Little Green Men Down in the polls by ten points, Donald Trump has clearly decided to run on a “law and order” platform, billing himself as the antidote to chaos. It’s not a bad strategy, given the riots in the early weeks of the “Black Lives Matter” […]

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The Silent Majority

Commentary by , July 16, 2020

Scenes from a Moral Panic, Part 2 I ended the previous installment by saying we should look for signs of resistance to the current moral panic. I will start by reminding you not to expect much from politicians, who are generally a poor source if you’re looking for moral courage. The Man in the Middle […]

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