The sick left
September 29, 2019 — Scott Johnson
I recently drew the attention of Power Line readers to Professor Gary Saul Morson’s essay “How the great truth dawned.” It leads off the September issue of The New Criterion. Beginning and ending with Solzhenitsyn, it takes up the Gulag, Communism, mass murder, Russian literature, the turn to God and much more. It is a great essay. The New Criterion invited Professor Morson back to deliver its inaugural Circle Lecture
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August 20, 2019 — Scott Johnson
We continue our preview of the new (Summer) issue of the Claremont Review of Books hot off the press. It went into the mail on Monday and is accessible online to subscribers now. Buy an annual subscription including immediate online access here for the modest price of $19.95. If you love trustworthy essays on, and reviews of books about, politics, history, literature and culture, the CRB may be for you.
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July 16, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Rep. Ayanna Pressley is the least known of the four horsewomen of the Democrat apocalypse, but tune into her teaching. She has condensed the doctrine of identity politics that they promote into a totalitarian catechism (video below). Here we have identity politics for dummies — the Democrat variation of the Know Nothing movement. As Lincoln put it: Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a
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July 3, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Steve has heaped deserved ridicule on the left’s hysterical reaction to President Trump’s decision to roll out tanks and other weaponry for a Fourth of July parade in Washington, D.C. As Steve noted, Larry Tribe sees a “chilling resemblance to the days before the Tiananmen Square massacre. Joy Reed thinks Trump is threatening his critics with tanks. But the inspiration for Trump’s parade isn’t China or any other dictatorship. The
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May 25, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Roger Kimball is a man of many parts. He is the author of more than a dozen outstanding books on art, politics, and intellectual history. He is the editor and publisher of The New Criterion. He is the publisher of Encounter Books. He is an eloquent columnist and regular commentator on current events in the Notes & Comments section of the New Criterion as well as other outlets including PJ
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April 18, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
After Attorney General Barr issued his summary of the Mueller report, rabid anti-Trumpers accused him of misstating what Mueller said. It was an odd accusation inasmuch as the critics hadn’t seen the Mueller report. Perhaps some of the anti-Trumpers on Mueller’s team told their friends that Barr didn’t accurately report the special counsel’s conclusion. The allegation was always highly implausible. No one even half as intelligent as Barr would lie
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March 16, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Yesterday, Chelsea Clinton attended a vigil at NYU for those killed in the massacre at a mosque in New Zealand. NYU turned out not to be a “safe space” for Ms. Clinton, who is pregnant. Muslim students berated Clinton, blaming her for the killings. Their theory? They cited a statement she made condemning anti-Semitic remarks following the utterance of such remarks by Rep. Ilhan Omar. In response to someone else’s
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March 9, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Wayne Rooney, arguably the best English soccer player of his generation, now plies his trade in Washington D.C. for DC United. Barron Trump, the president’s youngest son, is a rabid soccer fan (of Arsenal, but we forgive him) who, reportedly, has played for DC United’s youth team. Thus, it came to pass that, at Barron’s urging, Rooney was invited to attend last year’s White House Christmas party. Rooney did attend,
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March 1, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Readers will likely recall my note here last week about the person working a table at Sproul Plaza at Berkeley was assaulted. I received this notification a few hours ago from the administration: Community: Update on Sproul Plaza Assault Case Dear Steven Hayward, Today, an Alameda County Superior Court Judge issued a warrant for the arrest of the suspect in the matter involving a February 19 assault on Sproul Plaza.
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November 28, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Andy Ngo refers to the cable series Portlandia in the conclusion of his chilling Spectator USA column “What’s the matter with Portland?” He writes: “The city has gained a comic reputation as a bastion of wokeness due to the comedy sketch show Portlandia. That’s way off the mark. Real life Portland is much, much worse, and it’s no joke.” His column is published at the Spectator USA together with the
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November 26, 2018 — Steven Hayward
This is wonderful. Only 1:21 long, but you’ll want to watch it five times, and send to all your friends. Especially your Oregonian friends. (Yes, I know, the narrator badly mispronounces “Willamette”—as in the river, but that’s not as bad as the time back when I was a student in DC, and stumbled into a congressman in the Capitol building who seemingly just emerged from a hearing on the effects
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September 30, 2018 — Steven Hayward
I’m deep into the weeds of Edmund Burke these days, in part for a recent lecture at Yale (video to come) and a series of seminars I’ll be doing soon on Burke (podcasts to come, I think), but even reading this great judicious man from more than 200 years ago can’t draw me away from our current catastrophic political scene. One of Burke’s famous essays was “Thoughts on Our Present
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August 14, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
Petula Drorak is a left-liberal writer for the Washington Post. On Sunday, she attended the “Unite the Right” rallies in Washington, D.C., at which, she says, the water and popsicle vendors seemed to outnumber the Unite the Right marchers. Dvorak describes a telling scene: “There they are! Nazis!” someone shouted, as a knot of about two dozen helmeted, masked, jackbooted marchers clomped through the back of the crowd down H
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August 6, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
Sarah Jeong, the New York Times’ latest addition to its editorial board, is a thought leader. She says so herself. In December 2017, Jeong boasted “I was equating Trump to Hitler before it was cool.” A month earlier, this rising journalism star had tweeted “how f**king prescient was I on Trump = Hitler.” It may be cool to equate Trump and Hitler, but it is also extraordinarily stupid. Hitler hated
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August 5, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Sarah Jeong is set to join the New York Times editorial board next month. We have been exploring her “thinking” on matters of current interest, especially including sex and race. To these matters she brings a blunt touch. Say what you will about her, she fits right in with the perpetual hatefest that has consumed the Times in particular and the left generally since the election of Donald Trump as
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August 3, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
Steve has written about the vicious anti-white tweets by Sarah Jeong, the latest addition to the New York Times’ board of editors. But Jeong’s hatefulness extends beyond whites. Amber Athey of the Daily Caller calls attention to tweets by Jeong’s about killing men, and also to tweets in which Jeong called for “banning the police” and expressed her animus towards police officers through profanity. “Cops are a**h***s,” Jeong explained in
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July 7, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
Russia went out of the World Cup today, losing in the quarterfinals to Croatia on penalty kicks after two hours of open play couldn’t separate the teams. I rooted for Croatia, just as I rooted for Spain, the team Russia upset on penalty kicks in the round of 16. Just as I would root for almost any opponent of Russia. I’m anti-Putin. That’s why I haven’t been reporting on the
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