April 25, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Last Monday, April 22, was Earth Day, which found me in Washington DC doing a program at the American Enterprise Institute on environmental progress along with Roger Pielke Jr. If you missed the livestream, the video of the entire event is now up. It’s almost 90 minutes long in total, but my portion of the program is just the first 25 minutes or so.
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April 25, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Right now we are hearing that crime—especially homicide—is falling (just like inflation—heh), suggesting that the runaway crime of recent years was somehow an epiphenomena of Covid. Here’s the chart getting wide circulation: These data are likely correct, but there is reason to doubt that crime overall is falling, for the simple reason that lots of people have lost confidence in law enforcement and prosecution and no longer report many crimes
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April 25, 2024 — Steven Hayward
The Atlantic today has posted up an article from George Packer that, as John Podhoretz noted on Twitter, you could have read in Commentary at any point for the last 35 years. The fact that this is appearing in The Atlantic perhaps marks a turning point in established liberal opinion, but will college administrators and trustees take note and do anything about it? It’s a long piece, but here are
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April 25, 2024 — Steven Hayward
The saga of how state-run radio (better known as NPR) continues to fester, despite the best attempts of NPR’s new apparatchick, Katherine Maher, to suggest her previous hostile comments about free speech, her “my trutherism,” and her Democratic partisanship are all “taken out of context.” (Understand that for the contemporary left, “context” is everything, so claiming something anyone says is “taken out of context” is not a denial that they
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April 24, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Normally I expect that Jon Stewart, freshly back hosting The Daily Show on Mondays, will use his show to bash Trump. But this week he surprised by using a 15-minute opening segment to bash the media’s coverage of the Trump trial going on right now in Manhattan. I have to say it is pretty effective at making the media look stupid. It goes off the rails when he brings on
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April 24, 2024 — Steven Hayward
It is tempting to suggest that the best of all worlds is for Trump to be tied down in the courtroom, where he can’t let fly with one of his frequent provocations, while Joe Biden gets out and campaigns more, reminding Americans that he is a doddering fool. The big story last week was that Biden is the comeback kid! The polls have closed, with some putting Biden back in
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April 24, 2024 — Steven Hayward
As we watch our most elite universities circle the drain by capitulating to a mob indistinguishable from the German professoriate that cheered on the Nazi Party in the 1920s and 1930s, I offer our quote for the day from our friend Inez Feltscher Stepman: “Sorry I have no patience for people continually surprised by what’s going on in Columbia and across university campuses like what did you think would happen
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April 23, 2024 — Steven Hayward
As you may know, the supposed slow-growth of wages since the early 1970s has long been a cause-celebre among the left’s equity crowd. It is usually attributed to lower income tax rates, or the demonic powers of “neoliberalism.” One factor that is seldom considered, at least by the mainstream media and the celebrated egalitarian academics like Thomas Piketty, is the role the sharp rise of economy-wide government regulation that began
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April 22, 2024 — Steven Hayward
One of the most interesting aspects of the current political scene is the polling evidence showing Donald Trump gaining strength among minority voters, which is causing panic among Democrats. Why is this happening? Explanations run the full spectrum, from inflation to wokery, but here’s some curious evidence (from an Economist/YouGov survey) that it may be as simple as having children: Chaser—while we’re looking at Trump-Biden surveys, this one is fun
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April 20, 2024 — Steven Hayward
So I’m just going to come right out and say it: in the privacy of the voting booth in November, Bill Maher is going to vote for Trump. The only question is whether he will admit it directly, or continue, between rote Trump denunciations, to provide strong hints week after week, like yesterday’s rant about pedophilia in Hollywood. Along the way he says, “Governor DeSantis was right” about Disney. C’mon
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April 20, 2024 — Steven Hayward
This week’s ad-free episode is probably better thought of as a Two Whisky Happy Hour, because John Yoo is away on a lecture- and Philly-cheesesteak-procurement tour back east, and Lucretia is also out of action this weekend, too, though she appears in this episode by proxy, so to speak. So two whiskies it is. Last weekend, Lucretia and I offered a keynote duo-presentation for Ammo Grrrll’s annual CommenterCon conference in
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April 20, 2024 — Steven Hayward
This is the week we learned at long last about Joe Biden’s forgotten uncle “Bosey,” who secretly received the congressional medal of honor for single-handledly subduing an entire tribe of New Guinea cannibals before single-handedly defeating the Japanese at Hiroshima, while rescuing Corn Pop’s eventual father while he was at it. (Apparently “don’t” wasn’t a word in his vocabulary.) What other Ripley’s-worthy family secrets is Joe from Scranton withholding from
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April 19, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Next Monday, April 22, is Earth Day. Again. But on Monday I’ll be “returning to the scene of the crime,” in a manner of speaking, to revisit the annual Earth Day project I carried on for nearly 20 years starting way back in 1994: the Index of Leading Environmental Indicators. Back when I started doing that annual report, The Economist magazine suggested that claiming the environment is a cause for
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April 19, 2024 — Steven Hayward
It’s not exactly news that a large portion of Democrats are anti-Israel, but it now appears to be a majority. The latest Gallup survey shows Israel with net negative sympathy among Democrats for the first time. This marks the end of bipartisan support for Israel in American politics. Will this change historic voting patterns? As Trump likes to say, we’ll have to see what happens.
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April 18, 2024 — Steven Hayward
As I have been half-joking for months now, it must be discouraging for the climatistas to turn out to block a road, deface a museum, or commit some other nihilistic act, only to find the pro-Hamas protestors got up earlier and beat you to the bridge or the airport. That will teach the climatistas to sleep in! So the climatistas have had to step up their game, in today’s case,
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April 18, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Joe Biden is back doing what Democrats always do—engage in class warfare, demanding that the rich “pay their fair share.” On the very rare occasions a reporters asks a Democrat to offer a precise definition of what “fair share” is, Democrats change the subject, because what “fair share” always means is “more.” (But don’t ever accuse liberals of being greedy for other people’s money, because they think it belongs to
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April 18, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Yesterday we noted the exchange in the House hearing with Columbia University president Minouche Shafik in which she was asked about the use of the term “folx” in Columbia University’s School of Social Work. President Shafik professed ignorance of the term, but this is very likely an outright lie, as the term has been catching on in academia for a long time, like “Latinx.” Here, perhaps, is a clue to
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