July 20, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Forget Mean Girls. The Mod Squad is a better appellation for the Fearsome Foursome who dominate the House Democratic Caucus. The premise of the original Mod Squad was described as “taking three rebellious, disaffected young social outcasts and convincing them to work as unarmed undercover detectives as an alternative to being incarcerated.” Now we just elect such people to Congress—incarceration of a different kind—and sit back with a yuuuge bucket
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July 19, 2019 — Steven Hayward
A specter is haunting . . . well, just about everybody: the specter of a revival of nationalism. This week I attended the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, which was sponsored by the brand new Edmund Burke Institute. As Christopher DeMuth put it, “who knew that the next big thing would be the nation-state?” Of course if you say you are in favor of “nationalism” these days, right away critics
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July 18, 2019 — Steven Hayward
I can imagine Trump at some point next year getting up and saying, “Never before in all our history have these forces [the media and the opposition party] been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.” Actually those are the words of President Franklin Roosevelt in his last major campaign speech before the 1936 election. FDR
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July 17, 2019 — Steven Hayward
And now it is Tom Friedman’s turn to panic about the Democrats’ sharp turn to the left. Savor some yummy samples from his column yesterday: I’m struck at how many people have come up to me recently and said, “Trump’s going to get re-elected, isn’t he?” And in each case, when I drilled down to ask why, I bumped into the Democratic presidential debates in June. I think a lot
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July 14, 2019 — Steven Hayward
What’s this? Trouble in Democratland? Several reliably liberal media mouthpieces are noting the growing hold of identity politics extremism in the Democratic Party, and are sounding the alarm. Let’s start with Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, who offers the best headline of the week yesterday, “Scaling Wokeback Mountain.” About AOC attacking Speaker Pelosi, Dowd says: She slimed the speaker, who has spent her life fighting for the downtrodden
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July 13, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Some weeks an obvious theme suggests itself. Then there are weeks like this when everything seems to be spinning out of control. A leftist Democrats accuses a powerful white politician of being a racist. Ho-hum—except the person being accused is Nancy Pelosi! Cue schadenfreude music, and pass the popcorn. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton is back in the news again, and for the same reason he usually gets back into the news.
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July 12, 2019 — Steven Hayward
[Language/explicit content warning for this item!] There was a charming show on Nickelodeon a few years back called “The Adventures of Pete and Pete,” and somehow that show title came back to me when I stumbled across the news today that The New Republic, a former magazine, had published Friday morning a shockingly bad article by a gay writer attacking Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Sample: All this makes Mary Pete different
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July 12, 2019 — Steven Hayward
One of my teachers in graduate school, the great constitutional historian Leonard Levy, insisted that “a history must serve its readers with explanations that suit the horizons of their curiosity and with writing that entertains and stirs them.” No one exemplifies that vivid style of biography and history better than Andrew Roberts. I caught up with Andrew in San Francisco this week, where we had a wide-ranging conversation about Churchill,
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July 12, 2019 — Steven Hayward
The week Secretary of State Mike Pompeo unveiled the new Commission on Unalienable Rights, to be chaired by the distinguished Harvard Law professor Mary Ann Glendon, the author of, among other fine books, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse. Glendon’s book is a classic for explaining how the idea of individual rights has been rubbished by the modern conceptions of “human rights,” which in practice are any good (health
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July 10, 2019 — Steven Hayward
We’re written here before many times about the growing and deserved renown of Sir Roger Scruton, and today we have some important news about Sir Roger. Back in April the New Statesman magazine ran a scurrilous attack on Sir Roger that was shabby even by the low standards of the British political press. The New Statesman deliberately quoted Sir Roger out of context and/or incompletely in a ham-handed effort to
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July 9, 2019 — Steven Hayward
I got a large response from my latest whimsical Tweet yesterday: But who needs it, since most of the scandals of higher education today are out in plain sight? Such as this announcement for a brand new “Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Minor” at the University of Denver, which reads like a parody: The new Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) minor brings together the best of what the University has to
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July 8, 2019 — Steven Hayward
It’s a really tough time to be a liberal Progressive. One bit of evidence appears right now in The New Yorker, where Harvard Law professor Jeannie Suk Gersen worries that the Supreme Court might actually rein in the administrative state. This, she assures us, would produce a “parade of horrors” (actual quote). Let’s start with this passage: For the better part of a century, the Court has permitted Congress to delegate
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July 8, 2019 — Steven Hayward
I am certain that underneath South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s very smooth and polished presentation is a deep leftist of some kind. And now he has provided us with an important clue of just what kind of president he might be—a portrait that he apparently approves: Let’s see, let’s see—who does this remind me of? Oh that’s right. This guy: I’ve always wanted to stick a piece of bubble gum
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July 7, 2019 — Steven Hayward
• The lede for this story has to rank right up close to the NY Post‘s famous headline, “Headless Body in Topless Bar”: Lesbian mother who fled with sperm donor arrested A British woman who left her wife in Canada for their sperm donor and allegedly abducted their child has been arrested after landing an inflatable rubber dinghy in the Channel Islands. Though I admit I may not fully comprehend
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July 6, 2019 — Steven Hayward
The news media and Trump-haters everywhere are on DefCon1 over Trump’s latest supposed verbal confusion, in which he reveals the long-held secret that the Continental Army of 1775 secured the nation’s airports from the British. They haven’t had this much outrage since the infamous “covfefe” tweet. It prompted Jim Acosta to embarrass himself once again (I know—a daily occurrence). Now I think this just shows the far-sightedness of the Founding
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July 4, 2019 — Steven Hayward
By popular demand from listeners, we’re bringing back “Lucretia,” Power Line’s International Woman of Mystery, on this special edition for the July 4 holiday. Many listeners asked us to offer up mini-tutorials on various aspects of the American Founding and political thought in general, so we break down the Declaration of Independence, drawing notice to five key features—including how some of the specific indictments against King George III remain highly
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July 3, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Readers may recall some years back when John posted an item that began “George W. Bush is a political genius,” and naturally readers with an irony-poor diet (there are vitamins for this!) took him literally. So when I suggest that Trump is a political genius, I run the same risk. Especially since you don’t really need to be a genius to exploit the growing madness of the American left. The
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