History
January 29, 2026 — Scott Johnson
January 27 was International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Multiple BBC presenters covered the day with no reference to the Jews and subsequently apologized for the — what’s the word? — omission. It wasn’t an oversight. When John posted the item about the BBC’s observance of the occasion, I thought I can top that! Below is the statement posted on Vice President Vance’s X account. Today we remember the millions of lives
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January 19, 2026 — Scott Johnson
When Martin Luther King, Jr., brought his nonviolent campaign against segregation to Bull Connor’s Birmingham, he laid siege to the bastion of Jim Crow. In Birmingham between 1957 and 1962, black homes and churches had been subjected to a series of horrific bombings intended to terrorize the community. In April 1963 King answered the call to bring his campaign to Birmingham. When King landed in jail on Good Friday for
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January 12, 2026 — Scott Johnson
While I was driving to visit a friend in Minneapolis this past Friday morning, National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry called me to ask how Minnesota lost its mind. Now that is a timely question. I gave Rich my thoughts off the cuff and forwarded him my 2020 Power Line post “Revolutionary theater in Minneapolis.” I asked Rich this afternoon if he found my comments helpful. “Like any discerning reader,” he
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December 31, 2025 — Scott Johnson
Laurence Cooper is professor of political science at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. He is the author, most recently, of Dreaming of Justice, Waking to Wisdom: Rousseau’s Philosophic Life (2023, University of Chicago Press). For the past five years or so I have studied the classics of political philosophy together with him and former Claremont Institute Chairman Bruce Sanborn weekly over lunch. Larry is our gifted teacher. I asked him
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December 27, 2025 — Scott Johnson
Earlier this week the Wall Street Journal published Rick Richman’s review of Jewish Roots of American Liberty: The Impact of Hebraic Ideas on the American Story, edited by Wilfred McClay and Stuart Halpern and published by Encounter. Professor McClay holds the Victor Davis Hanson Chair in Classical History and Western Civilization at Hillsdale College. Rabbi Halpern serves as senior advisor to the provost at Yeshiva University. Rick Richman’s review appears
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December 19, 2025 — Scott Johnson
A sick thread now runs through the conservative movement. It runs from Candace Owens to Tucker Carlson and Carlson’s friends. One can see one symptom of the sickness in its treatement of the Jews. The sickness should be called out, confronted, and refuted. Ben Shapiro has an argument to make against the sickness. That’s what he did in the case he made against Tucker Carlson at the Heritage Foundation. There
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December 17, 2025 — Scott Johnson
Legendary Commentary editor and author Norman Podhoretz died last night at the age of 95. John Podhoretz pays first tribute to his father here. Mr. Podhoretz served as an inspiration to me for-roughly-ever. His turn to conservatism and support of Ronald Reagan made Commentary a magazine of world-historic import. When Power Line had a moment in the sun after Rathergate, I expressed the debt I felt to him in a
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December 11, 2025 — Scott Johnson
My law school classmate and friend Barry Anderson went on to serve with distinction on the Minnesota Supreme Court. He wrote me this morning to say I had appropriately praised Senator Cruz on the anti-Semitism front and to recommend “his great remarks at the Federalist Society national lawyers conference. He called out the offenders in [strong] language.” The Federalist Society has posted video of the Hon. Robert H. Bork Memorial
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December 11, 2025 — Scott Johnson
Seven years ago we celebrated a week of Charles — Charles Kesler, Dengler-Dykema Distinguished Professor of Government at Clarmeont McKenna College, editor of the Claremont Review of Books, long-time friend and tutor — for his receipt of one of 2018’s Bradley Prize awards along with Allen Guelzo and Jason Riley. Video of the event is posted here on Vimeo. Charles is a gentleman, scholar, author, teacher, editor, advocate of America
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December 4, 2025 — Scott Johnson
The reader who clicked on “Personal & confidential: William A. Rusher” has outed himself. Rusher biographer David Frisk wrote to comment on my quotation of the striking Yeats poem Rusher had recited when I saw him debate the colorless Massachusetts liberal Rep. Michael Harrington at Dartmouth in 1971 or 1972: Many thanks for your post about William Rusher at Power Line. In my biography If Not Us, Who? William Rusher,
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November 27, 2025 — Scott Johnson
Paul A. Rahe holds the Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in the Western Heritage at Hillsdale College’s Van Andel Graduate School of Statesmanship and is one of the country’s most distinguished scholars of history and politics. His personal site is here. In view of his study of Republics Ancient and Modern, Professor Rahe is the academy’s foremost authority on the history of republics. Although his subsequent work
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November 26, 2025 — Scott Johnson
The death of William F. Buckley, Jr. on February 27, 2008, deprived the modern American conservative movement of its founder, for Buckley was preeminently the founding statesman of the movement that gained its political expression first in Barry Goldwater and then Ronald Reagan. When Buckley founded National Review in 1955 at the age of 29, he lit the fire that sparked the movement. Yesterday was the centennial anniversary of his
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November 23, 2025 — Scott Johnson
I want to recommend Kentucky State professor of political science Wilfred Reilly’s Pacific Research Institute post “The Slavers Call for Reparations – We Go ‘On Metaphor Alert’ Again, as AU and EU Debate History.” Here are Professor Reilly’s “Key takeaways” (links omitted): We recently saw the push for reparations take an international turn. During their annual late-spring meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, leaders of the African Union “launched a new
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November 19, 2025 — Scott Johnson
In the course of his long descent into the gutter, Tucker Carlson has taken another look into 9/11. When he posted his five-part 9/11 Files “truther” series earlier this year, I thought of the 2006 book Popular Mechanics had published debunking the 9/11 conspiracy theories. This year on 9/11, by the way, Popular Mechanics revisted the subject. James Meigs was the editor of Popular Mechanics when it first took up
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November 16, 2025 — Scott Johnson
Robert S. Wistrich was the Neuburger Professor of European and Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the director of the university’s Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism. He may also have been the leading academic authority on anti-Semitism. Witness his histories A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism From Antiquity to the Global Jihad (2010) and From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The Left, The Jews and Israel (2012).
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November 14, 2025 — Scott Johnson
Mediaite’s Isaac Schorr notes that in the latest episode of Tucker Carlson’s show, which was dedicated to denouncing Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro, Carlson observed that Dietrich Bonhoeffer lost his way resisting Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime. “Once you start calling people Nazis,” Carlson remarked, “we really have no choice but to start shooting them. To be Dietrich Bonhoeffer and sort of reach the end of reason, or even
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November 13, 2025 — Scott Johnson
Ken Burns has made both great documentaries and pitiful documentaries. I thought I might inadvertently kill Power Line writing obsessively about his 18-hour “history” of the Vietnam War in which he regurgitated all the propaganda I eagerly imbibed over the years 1968-1975. After a decade of work, Burns’s six-part documentary The American Revolution is to debut November 16 on PBS. I understand it will also be made available for viewing
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