Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. A Serious Foreign Policy and an Unserious President President Trump celebrated the 18th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks a few days early this year by announcing that he had planned to hold personal negotiations with the top leadership of the Taliban–and to do so at […]
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Tweet 10-289
Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. Tweet 10-289 Donald Trump has give us a strange couple of weeks. First, he canceled a state visit to Denmark in a snit because the Danish prime minister refused to entertain the idea of selling us Greenland. The idea of acquiring Greenland, by the way, is not […]
The Terms of Surrender
Shock-jock radio host and former Congressman Joe Walsh has been gaining a lot of attention recently for his planned primary challenge against Donald Trump. I doubt this is because anyone seriously thinks that Walsh—with limited name recognition, no deep pockets, and no large base of support to mobilize—is going to mount a credible challenge for […]
Flying Chernobyl
Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. One Country, One System The protests in Hong Kong continue to produce inspiring stories of courage. Here is one about Rupert Hogg, the CEO of Hong Kong’s Cathay Pacific Airways. According to local Hong Kong media reports, Beijing authorities asked Hogg to hand over a list of […]
Conservatives Lose Their Word
Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. The Death of the Tea Party The Tea Party movement of ten years ago is now comprehensively dead. How do we know that? Because Republicans and Democrats in Congress just got together on a budget deal that approves deficits in excess of $1 trillion forever—at a time […]
Declaring Independence from Independence
The big question about the impact of Donald Trump on the Republican Party is: will he be an aberration, a temporary departure from the normal rhetorical style and ideological composite of late-20th-Century conservatism—or will he usher in a “new normal,” a new baseline for what the party stands for and what it will tolerate? We’re […]
Political Chaos Theory
“Chaos theory,” at least in the popular version, is the study of unstable systems that can rapidly reach a tipping point where massive and radical change occurs—the point at which a seemingly stable equilibrium careens toward dangerous extremes. Both major political parties experienced a chaos theory moment over the weekend, in which the balance we […]
Fascism with Communist Slogans
Ayn Rand once predicted that we were going to end up with “a fascist system with communist slogans.” This has been going through my mind as I’ve been watching the Democratic Party primary contest. No, it’s not quite fascism, not yet, nor is it quite communism (except maybe for Bernie). Yet most of the Democratic […]
Gem-Flecked Rubbish
Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. In Defense of “Safe Spaces” For a movement obsessed with “safe spaces,” the left sure doesn’t want anybody to have one. I posted a little while ago about a bizarre leftist campaign to purge political wrongthinkers from the realm of knitting, of all places. Now the website […]
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A Reader’s Guide to Atlas Shrugged
- Salon of the Refused, Episode 16 December 11, 2019
- What If the World Isn’t Ending? December 9, 2019
- The Call Is Coming from Inside the House December 4, 2019
- Ayn Rand Is for Adolescents November 30, 2019
- The Triumph of the Will November 26, 2019
- The Parasite That Kills Its Hostess November 18, 2012
- Radical New York City Democrats December 31, 2013
- Confessions of a Reluctant Culture Warrior December 20, 2014
- Pathological Altruism July 3, 2013
- The 25 Craziest Things Said at the Democratic Debate October 14, 2015
“The Culture War Comes for the Kids”
Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. The Infowars Presidency While I’ve been wrapping up work on my book (I might have mentioned it), some interesting things were happening out in the world, so I’m going to start getting caught up on the latest news in this edition. The big thing that happened is […]