Tag Archives | China

Salon of the Refused, Episode 4

Announcement by , December 4, 2018

Episode 4 of my video and podcast series, Salon of the Refused, is now available. I talk to Scott Lincicome about President Trump’s trade war. The conversation includes: why tariff power was delegated to the president, how trade changes jobs instead of taking them away, and how Flashdance and Bruce Springsteen explain Donald Trump’s trade policy. […]

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Fast Times at Ben Trovato High

Commentary by , December 4, 2018

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. Let No More Be Heard of Confidence in Man I speculated a while back that the legal problems of Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, might come back to haunt the president–and lead to “The Clinton Impeachment Rerun We Didn’t Want But Probably Deserve.” It looks […]

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The New Counterculture

Commentary by , September 24, 2018

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. The New Counterculture Partisanship makes people into idiots. The Brett Kavanaugh media circus is providing us with plenty of examples, and I’ll cite just one on each side. On the left, I give you Hawaii Senator Mazie Hirono, who was asked, “Doesn’t Kavanaugh have the same presumption […]

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World News Roundup

Commentary by , September 17, 2018

American politics is more of a circus than usual these days, and aside from distracting us from the really important domestic issues–the growing economy, but also this administration’s total failure to rein in government spending and debt–it also distracts us from what is going on in the rest of the world. So I decided it […]

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Collusion

Commentary by , August 2, 2018

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. Rule by Executive Order During his final years in office, Barack Obama leaned heavily on attempts to bypass an uncooperative Congress and use “a pen and a phone” to achieve his goals by executive order, whether or not he had the authority to do so. A few […]

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Who Stole Self-Esteem?

Commentary by , July 12, 2018

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. Who Stole Self-Esteem? How did “self-esteem” become a pejorative associated with the most contemptible trends in contemporary culture? How did it turn from an earned expression of self-respect to an all-purpose form of coddling for the incompetent? The phenomenon should not be such a surprise. Ayn Rand […]

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IT-Backed Authoritarianism

Commentary by , June 8, 2018

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. “IT-Backed Authoritarianism” If you want to know where Google’s social-engineering aspirations are headed, you don’t need to look to the future. Look to China’s “social credit system,” a merger of Western-style financial credit scores with a more nebulous and politicized measure of a citizen’s orderliness—and political loyalty. […]

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A Giant Effigy of Marx

Feature Article by , May 15, 2018

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. Jaw-Jaw Is Better Than War-War I recently responded to a claim, reflecting the conventional wisdom of the Trump-era right, that “ideas and persuasion are insufficient” for the pitched culture war we are currently in. This is often expressed in the conviction that scribblers like me are useless […]

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Marco Rubio Blows with the Trumpian Wind

Feature Article by , April 26, 2018

The big question since Donald Trump captured the Republican presidential nomination is: will he capture the party, too? Will his unique ideological combination—such as it is—change the outlook of the party as a whole? And for how long? One good measure of this is Senator Marco Rubio. Why Rubio? Because he really, really wants to […]

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An Intellectual Eats a Chicken Sandwich

Commentary by , April 15, 2018

Five Things You Need to Read Today Here is your latest update, for subscribers only, recommending five stories that are worth catching. 1. Trump Can’t Either Win Or Go Home President Trump has announced American air strikes against the Assad regime in Syria, in partnership with Britain and France. The airstrikes are for one night […]

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