July 5, 2026 — Scott Johnson
Suzy Bogguss returns to town this Wednesday evening for a show in Minneapolis. Anticipating the show brought me back to one of her recordings that fits this special holiday weekend. I thought I would draw on that recording to continue the festivities this morning. Suzy seemed to me to have created a second career for herself when her country star faded, but in January she was inducted into the Grand
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July 4, 2026 — Scott Johnson
President Calvin Coolidge celebrated the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1926, with a speech providing a magisterial review of the history and thought underlying the Declaration. His speech on the occasion deserves to be read and studied in its entirety. The following paragraph, however, is particularly relevant to the challenge that confronts us in the variants of the progressive dogma that pass themselves off today
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July 4, 2026 — Scott Johnson
On July 9, 1858, Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas gave a campaign speech to a raucous throng from the balcony of the Tremont Hotel in Chicago. Abraham Lincoln was in the audience as Douglas prepared to speak. Douglas graciously invited Lincoln to join him on the balcony to listen to the speech. In his speech Douglas sounded the themes of the momentous campaign that Lincoln and Douglas waged that summer and
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July 3, 2026 — Scott Johnson
We will celebrate the Declaration of Independence tomorrow in our accustomed style, quoting Abraham Lincoln and Calvin Coolidge. Implicit in the tributes of Lincoln and Coolidge to the Declaration is an expression of gratitude — for our liberty — to the men who pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to win it. To express our gratitude properly, we need to bring them to mind, recall their names,
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July 2, 2026 — Scott Johnson
Manny Marotta is the “curator” of the X thread 1776 Live — “[l]ive-posting as a reporter embedded in history.” The X thread has been of particular interest over the past few days and should continue in this vein for the foreseeable future. Thomas Paine publishes an open letter in the Pennsylvania Evening Post, under the name “Republicus,” which advocates for the name “United States of America” for the new nation
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July 2, 2026 — Scott Johnson
Melanie Phillips posted her interview with Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster of the British podcast TRIGGERnometry under the title “Realism or Appeasement?” TRIGGERnometry gave it the title “Has Trump surrendered to Iran?” The discussion takes up the possible folly of President Trump’s stalemated war on the Iranian regime. Neither title quite captures the gist of the conversation. Phillips provides this summary at her Substack site: While in London, I was
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July 1, 2026 — Scott Johnson
Rom Braslavski is a former Israeli hostage held in Gaza. He was working as a security guard at the Nova music festival during the October 7 massacre as an active-duty soldier on leave from the Logistics Corps. In captivity he was tortured and assaulted. In the video below he is informed by an Israeli security official that his chief tormentor in captivity — a member of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad
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July 1, 2026 — Scott Johnson
Yesterday in “The Scott Wiener experience” I posted the video of the insane harassment suffered by San Francisco congressional candidate Scott Wiener on the subject of Israel’s mythical “genocide” in Gaza. Wiener long ago sought to rectify his purported shortfall on this point in a struggle session that he posted on X this past January, nearly six months ago (video below). The New York Post covered it here. For years,
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July 1, 2026 — Scott Johnson
The Commie Corridor isn’t just a New York congressional district. It’s the throbbing heart of the Democratic Party. In a Colorado primary yesterday, DSA member Melat Kiros handily defeated 15-term incumbent Diana DeGette in the Colorado’s 1st District. The district covers metropolitan Denver. Kiros handily defeated DeGette, by nearly 10 points with 93 percent of the vote counted. It’s a Democratic district — D+29. Minnesota’s 5th district, represented by Ilhan
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June 30, 2026 — Scott Johnson
There’s something happening in the Strait of Hormuz. What it is ain’t exactly the Jews. I have expressed my doubts about the the Memorandum of Understanding that was to open the Strait. Complications have arisen. Vice President Vance’s negotiating partners do not appear to be operating in good faith’ I read the news today, oh boy: US envoy Steve Witkoff and President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner are in Doha
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June 30, 2026 — Scott Johnson
Frank Dikötter is the author of The People’s Trilogy (“a series of books that document the impact of communism on the lives of ordinary people in China on the basis of new archival material”) and, more recently, China After Mao (2022). Dikötter serves as Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong since 2006 — “one wonders for how much longer,” Tunku Varadarajan added in his Wall Street
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June 30, 2026 — Scott Johnson
The terms of the Memorandum of Understanding to the contrary notwithstanding, the IDF continues at least some of its efforts to remove the threat of Hezbollah from its northern border with Lebanon. Havind discovered a massive underground weapons cache in recent days, the IDF destroyed if on Sunday evening after warning Israelis that the resulting explosion might feel like an earthquake. The explosion could be heard across northern Israel. Now
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June 30, 2026 — Scott Johnson
California state senator Scott Wiener is running for the San Francisco congressional seat that Nancy Pelosi is vacating after 20 terms. She’s leaving big high heels to fill. Wiener seems like he could fill them. He’s far out in all the required respects. However, he was harassed mercilessly by one Dimitry Yakoushkin “for insufficient alacrity in condemning Israel for supposed genocide in Gaza,” as Rich Lowry puts it in a
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June 29, 2026 — Scott Johnson
In this past weekend’s Wall Street Journal Review section Richard Brookhiser reviews four new books on Thomas Jefferson. This should be a big week for Jefferson as we celebrate the semiquincentennial anniversary of his immortal handiwork. As John Adams said in his last words, “Thomas Jefferson still survives.” Jefferson had actually died a few hours earlier, but Adams got it right in the larger sense we observe this week. Along
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June 29, 2026 — Scott Johnson
Miranda Devine assesses the legacy of Barack Obama as seen in The Obama Presidential Center. Her current New York Post column provdes an on-the-scene report from “the Obamination”: [T]he library-that-is-not-a-library is a monument to the self-regarding former president. Obama is the central focus of the entire museum, with enormous portraits and photographs of Barack and Michelle as imperial rulers, and dozens of installations, interactive exhibits and videos depicting his inspirational
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June 28, 2026 — Scott Johnson
What starts in Califoria doesn’t stay in California. A proposed “billionaire tax” has made its way onto the ballot in this year’s election. In “Exit the billionaire,” I looked to Hoover Senior Fellow Joshua Rauh to explain why it would make the state poorer in the long run. Well, as a famous economist once said, in the long run we are all dead. Proponents of the tax will live it
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June 28, 2026 — Scott Johnson
Vice President Vance has bragged about “the deconfliction channel” Washington and Tehran agreed to set up during talks in Switzerland. Representatives from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the US Army’s Central Command are to sit together — where else? — in Qatar: “One of the things we wanted to come out with [was a] channel on the Iranian side [for reducing conflict], which we did,” Vance said in an
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