2020 Election
August 26, 2022 — John Hinderaker
That’s what Mollie Hemingway says: The FBI rigged the 2020 election. https://t.co/GjRjMVUY8T — Mollie (@MZHemingway) August 25, 2022 She is talking about the interview that Mark Zuckerberg did with Joe Rogan. It has gotten a great deal of attention; the New York Post, for example, features Kevin McCarthy tweeting about the “bombshell interview on ‘The Joe Rogan Experience'”. Much as I admire Mollie, I think she overstates the case, at
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July 22, 2022 — Steven Hayward
“Lucretia” joins in the fun of my absence with a dunk on the latest instance of soi-disant conservatives pining for the “strange new respect” award from liberals for abandoning a conservative position. My biography of M. Stanton Evans recounts that Stan disliked George Will starting back in the 1970s because “George is always coming up with ‘conservative’ reasons to do some liberal thing.” As usual, Stan was ahead of his time.
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May 16, 2022 — Scott Johnson
The new (Spring) issue of the Claremont Review of Books has just been posted online this morning. I asked the editors if they would make their interview with the great Norman Podhoretz accessible for our readers. Here it is: “Present at the creation.” Subhead: “Norman Podhoretz on the rise of the anti-American left.” The interview opens with a reference to the 2019 CRB interview of Mr. Podhoretz by CRB editor
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April 26, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Jon Levine and Miranda Devine reported in their April 23 New York Post story that “Joe Biden met with Hunter Biden business partner at the White House.” The business partner was Eric Schwerin: “Hunter Biden’s closest business partner made at least 19 visits to the White House and other official locations between 2009 and 2015, including a sitdown with then-Vice President Joe Biden in the West Wing.” Levine and Devine
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April 25, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Last week my pals at the Jack Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research at Berkeley held a panel on “(Why) Are Democrats Losing the Latino Vote?” You may pick up the subtle aspect of the way the question is presented, as lots of progressives think there’s nothing to see in changing hispanic vote patterns—that the results in Florida, for example, are just those Castro-hating Cubans, who aren’t really Latino at all.
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December 12, 2021 — Scott Johnson
I learn via the Washington Examiner that Chris Wallace is leaving FOX News after 18 years. Wallace announced his departure on the broadcast network’s FOX News Sunday this morning. However, I learned of Wallace’s exit via the Examiner because, disgusted by Wallace’s performance in the Trump-Biden debate he “moderated,” I quit watching the show last year. I should have quit long before then because the show had grown bad and
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November 17, 2021 — Scott Johnson
The new (Fall) issue of the Claremont Review of Books is now online and in the mail. I just received the galley on Monday and am in the process of picking out essays and reviews to feature on Power Line, as usual. To kick things off, I have the exchange published in the issue under the rubric of The Disputed Question. The question is the soundness of John Eastman’s memo(s)
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October 11, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Stanley Kurtz calls attention to two developments he says indicate that zoning may be on the cusp of emerging as a high-profile political issue. The first is from Virginia. There, in the midst of the high-stakes McAuliffe vs. Youngkin race for governor, the conservative group Frontiers of Freedom Foundation is running an ad that highlights Terry McAuliffe’s support for Joe Biden’s plans to undercut single-family zoning. The ad, which I
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September 27, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
In 2020, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce endorsed 23 freshmen Democrats for Congress. I’m tempted to say that if Congress enacts the Democrats’ massive spending packages, complete with tax increases and anti-business agenda items, the Chamber will have gotten what it deserves. In fact, I will say it. The Chamber is belatedly trying to avert this disaster and to limit the damage its improvident endorsements caused. It’s warning the Democrats
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July 9, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Michael Barone contends that both political parties are failing to respond to signals in the political marketplace. I think Barone is right and has stated the problem neatly. The market signals to the Republican Party are pretty clear. In 2020, the GOP couldn’t defeat an uninspiring Democrat presidential candidate whose mental capacity obviously is diminished, perhaps significantly. The signals to the Democratic Party aren’t faint, either. They couldn’t defeat an
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June 29, 2021 — John Hinderaker
For some time, William Barr was a hero of the Trump administration. As a result he was reviled by Democrats. But near the end, he had a falling out with Trump, which I take it related mainly to Trump’s insistence on questioning the results of the (highly questionable) 2020 election. Now the enmity between the two men has grown bitter, as Barr is a subject of, and a collaborator in,
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June 6, 2021 — Steven Hayward
The New York Times reports today on an unintentionally hilarious and revealing internal study a consortium of Democrat-aligned consulting groups have produced concerning the fact that aside from Joe Biden, Democrats performed very poorly in the last election. There is special worry over the “overperformance” of Trump and Republicans with hispanics and blacks, which isn’t supposed to happen according to Democratic “emerging demographic majority” dogma that says if “we label
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May 12, 2021 — John Hinderaker
That is what Mollie Hemingway’s forthcoming Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections promises to be. The Federalist has a lengthy description of the book by Mollie herself. You should read it all. Here are some quotes: If questioning the results of a presidential election were a crime, as many have asserted in the wake of the controversial 2020 election and its aftermath, nearly the
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February 13, 2021 — John Hinderaker
Congressman Tom Emmer represents Minnesota’s Sixth District and is part of the GOP leadership team in the House. He heads the NRCC, which had a hugely successful cycle in 2020. Yesterday my organization hosted a zoom event with Congressman Emmer. He talked about the 2020 election and the GOP’s prospects for 2022, about the first three weeks of the Biden administration, and about what we can expect going forward. Emmer
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February 6, 2021 — Scott Johnson
In her young career Minnesota Fifth District Rep. Ilhan Omar has made her mark in a variety of ways. To take one, she was the first member of the Minnesota legislature to take office while married to her brother (her first of three legal, sort of, husbands). Moving on to Congress, to take another, she was the first member of the House of Representatives ever to have been married to
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January 24, 2021 — Steven Hayward
On the podcast this week we discussed John Lott’s statistical analysis of voting anomalies in several key swing states, in which he concluded there were likely around 290,000 fraudulent votes. The difficulty is that the analysis depends on sophisticated regression techniques that are beyond the grasp of most laypeople, and indeed there is a serious critique of Lott’s paper that argues that Lott’s result is largely an artifact of the
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January 13, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
The editors of the Washington Post intoned today that “if the GOP wants reconciliation, it must admit that Mr. Biden won, fair and square.” (Quotation from paper edition) But why in the world would Republicans want to reconcile with Democrats? The GOP and the Democrats are adversaries. They aren’t partners in a marriage or in a family. They aren’t friends. Nor have the Democrats vanquished the Republicans, as, for example,
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