September 30, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Settle in with your best chilled Hungarian dessert wine and Philly cheese steak for this cosmopolitan issue, which finds John Yoo—host for this week’s episode—tired out from looting in his home town of Philadelphia, while Lucretia and Steve are together in Budapest carrying on with more conspiracies against the international rules-based order. John gives us on-scene reports from ground-zero of the “recreational shopping” going on in Philadelphia, plus an update
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September 30, 2023 — Steven Hayward
As several observers have already mentioned, the Senate’s new Fetterman-friendly dress code, which made casual Friday look like the prom, lasted less than a Half-Scaramucci (Washington’s new favorite measure of time, though I’m holding out for a revival of “fortnight”). Speaking of someone not wearing any clothes, Justin Trudeau looks pretty foolish not noticing an actual Nazi in his midst, having been so good at spotting them among Canadian truckers
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September 29, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Separately we’ll savor the schadenfreude of the completely predictable and expected implosion of Ibram X. Kendi, and especially how the identity-politics left is turning on him. Hopefully the equally fraudulent Robin DiAngelo will be next. But for now, take in a revealing bit from one of Kendi’s black critics just now, Tyler Austin Harper of Bates College, who wrote candidly in the New York Times back in June: Nearly every
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September 29, 2023 — Steven Hayward
It is still not clear whether we might have a “government shutdown” because of dissent among House Republicans on our mangled budget process, but it is worth repeating something that has been pointed out before: the hysteria over a “government shutdown” is overdone. Think back to past government shutdown: Were your local schools still open? Did your local police still patrol the streets, and were your state and local courts
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September 28, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Oil prices are spiking right now, which is somewhat odd since the European economy is slowing along with China, and America’s economy is sluggish. The chief reason is thought to be discipline by Saudi Arabia and some other producers (Russia?), but one factor that should be included is Joe Biden’s relentless hostility to domestic oil production. This hasn’t stopped the domestic oil industry from achieving near record production just now
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September 28, 2023 — Steven Hayward
• Missed the GOP debate since it went off in the middle of the night over here in central Europe, but I have caught a couple of highlights on Twitter that have me amused. First, this from Vivek Ramaswamy: Zero-based budgeting? Where have I heard this idea before? Oh that’s right—it was a centerpiece of Jimmy Carter’s 1976 campaign. And he got nowhere with it once in the White House.
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September 28, 2023 — Steven Hayward
My assignment early this week was to offer some comments on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) at a day long conference at Mathias Corvinus Collegium, featuring a distinguished international cast of academics. Nowadays we see all around us the promiscuous claims that any good thing a liberal can dream up is asserted to be a “fundamental human right,” and while the
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September 27, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Nature magazine reported yesterday on an effort in Europe to safeguard “academic freedom” from “crackdowns” on said freedom “in eastern and Central Europe.” (“Threats to research freedom have been seen in some countries in the European Union, such as Hungary, Poland and Sweden, over the past decade.”) So the Eurocrats want to have some kind of centralized diktat from Brussels to prevent elected governments from governing their public universities. I’m
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September 27, 2023 — Steven Hayward
With apologies to the old British farce “No Sex Please—We’re British!”, apparently academic anthropology wants to do a humorless remake. (Did I even need to include “humorless” after “academic anthropology”?) I would have thought that case studies in sex lives was a rather integral part of anthropology, at least it seemed that way when Margaret Mead was the hot anthropologist of her day, a forerunner of the over-rated Jared Diamond.
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September 26, 2023 — Steven Hayward
The four-minute excerpt on Twitter of Heather Mac Donald’s appearance with me at Berkeley Law three weeks ago has racked up 1.5 million views, and is still spreading. At one point separately in the program I walked through the differences in high SAT scores for math, shown in the first figure below. The BLM crowd heckled that the tests are biased or don’t measure true “merit.” Of course, this objection
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September 26, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Pointing out liberal hypocrisy, like the head of Chicago’s teachers union that sends her own child to a private school, or the private jet-hopping lifestyles of climate cultists like John Kerry, has become such a simple pastime that it is by now a bore. But once and a while one of the elite let the mask slip and offer the candid reason why they excuse themselves from the same standards
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September 25, 2023 — Steven Hayward
As John noted yesterday, recent polls show public approval of the Biden Administration’s handling of immigration and border security is about 23 percent, which means Biden isn’t even holding a majority of Democrats. As to the claim that “the border is secure,” Mark Perry provides, as always, this handy visual refutation: Looking ahead to next year’s campaign, I hope Republicans will have the wit to recreate Pete Wilson’s highly effective
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September 25, 2023 — Steven Hayward
BUDAPEST, September 25: I’ve been so overbooked in Budapest that I haven’t had time to file any foreign dispatches, and I have a lot to catch up on. I spent most of Saturday at a small roundtable convened by the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs, which was devoted to exploring American and Hungarian perspectives on a variety of issues. The meeting was off-the-record and under Chatham House rules, so I
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September 24, 2023 — Steven Hayward
In my most recent New York Post column, I note that while nearly all politicians stretch the truth and often tell outright falsehoods, Joe Biden abuses the privilege to such an extreme that it would seem to indicate something deeply wrong with him. But I go on to suggest that what he really represents is not so much a psychological problem as much as the apotheosis of leftist philosophy in
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September 24, 2023 — Steven Hayward
• Gavin Newsom is running. His surprise veto of the gender identity bill, coming on top of his previous tough talk on immigration, shows he is already tacking to the center. It’s only a matter of time now. One or two more polls like today’s Washington Post poll and Democratic panic will reach critical mass. What about Kamala, you say? Surprising that no one has figured out that Newsom also
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September 23, 2023 — Steven Hayward
This circuitious episode, hosted by me in Budapest with John Yoo in Dallas and Lucretia in her undisclosed desert location, starts off with the entirely predictable news that David Brooks drinks his whisky on the rocks (insert shudders and horror here), and quickly moves on to the news that hasn’t broken yet, so we’ll fix it: Gavin Newson is running for president. We know—he hasn’t offically announced, but he’s behaving
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September 23, 2023 — Steven Hayward
How do you lose an advanced fighter jet? A metaphor of our incompetent times perhaps? Almost as incompetent at John Fetterman’s tailor and valet. Almost as incompetent as Joe Biden’s brain. Almost as incompetent as Kamala Harris. And who knew that Bob Menendez was a gold bug—a real hard money guy? I can tell you from my temporary outpost in Budapest that even dour Hungarians are wondering how the U.S.
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