Conservatism
November 24, 2024 — John Hinderaker
My organization conducts a quarterly poll of registered voters in Minnesota, the results of which are published in our magazine. The polling is done by Meeting Street Insights. Our pollster was in the field last week, and the results will be published in the January issue of Thinking Minnesota. We asked questions that were intended to help explain why people voted the way they did in this year’s presidential election.
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November 24, 2024 — John Hinderaker
The David Horowitz Freedom Center’s Restoration Weekend wrapped up this morning. This year, it was in Naples, Florida. Restoration Weekend is always a great event. The weekend began in the only possible way: As you can imagine, the mood was celebratory. Speakers included Pete Hegseth, Rep. Byron Donalds, Peter St. Onge, Guy Benson, Daniel Pipes, and many more. I had the privilege of introducing Caroline Glick. Riley Gaines and Geert
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November 17, 2024 — John Hinderaker
Kamala Harris launched her campaign with the claim that she would be bringing the politics of joy. That lasted for about a day and a half. The joy in this year’s campaign came from Donald Trump and his fans. The simple “Trump dance” that he performs to “YMCA”–so simple that I might be able to do it–has swept the country. If you watch a college or pro football game, or
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November 8, 2024 — John Hinderaker
Will the Democrats ever again win a presidential election? This tweet and map are fascinating, based on projections regarding the 2030 census: The 2030 census is going to be a bloodbath for Democrats. This map, without Nevada and the "Blue Wall" would go from 263 to 276 electoral votes. pic.twitter.com/TyJrBsjpDo — Daniel Di Martino 🇺🇸🇻🇪 (@DanielDiMartino) November 9, 2024 A Republican majority without Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin or Nevada. It is
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October 3, 2024 — John Hinderaker
Or you can just listen to it. This edition of the American Experiment podcast, recorded on Tuesday, features a half hour of irreverent conversation on the news of the day by American Experiment’s three youngest staffers. It is followed by me, interviewing Justin Folk, the producer and director of Am I Racist?, as well as other films including What Is a Woman? Justin and I began by reminiscing about the
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September 30, 2024 — Scott Johnson
David Samuels takes up the case of Tucker Carlson in his overlong Tablet essay “Op nation.” Circling around the subject of conspiracy theories, Samuels makes some arguable and some compelling points. When he comes to Tucker Carlson, he is over the target: If you truly believed that America’s fate was about to be decided by the contest between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, the holographic representative of the Democratic Party
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September 28, 2024 — John Hinderaker
Tonight was American Experiment’s Fall Briefing, with Christopher Rufo as our featured speaker. It was an excellent event, with Chris doing a terrific job. The audience loved his speech, because he combined solid substance with plenty of entertainment value. He told great stories about his own activist successes–getting Claudine Gay fired as President of Harvard, taking over Florida’s New College, staring down the leftists, reforming that previously failing school. And
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September 20, 2024 — John Hinderaker
Rich Lowry, Editor of National Review, was on Megyn Kelly’s podcast a couple of days ago. He started to say something about Haitian migrants, and stumbled over the word “migrant,” saying “mig” like you do with immigrant, then corrected himself. Leftists, starting with Media Matters, made the absurd claim that Lowry had said the “N-word,” which he obviously did not. The demand for racism vastly exceeds the supply, which is
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September 12, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Crank pseudo historians must be a dime a dozen. As one such, there’s nothing special about Darryl Cooper. The focus is on Cooper in the episode of Piers Morgan Uncensored posted below. It features Andrew Roberts, Dave Smith, and Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon. It was Dillon’s tweets on X that originally drew my attention to Carlson’s promotion of Cooper and his teaching on World War II. I greatly respect
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September 11, 2024 — John Hinderaker
Dick Cheney has joined his daughter Liz in backing Kamala Harris for president. George W. Bush hasn’t gone quite so far; he is remaining neutral. And Mitt Romney effusively praised Harris’s debate performance, although to my knowledge he hasn’t actually endorsed her yet. John McCain is no longer with us, but if he were still living it is easy to imagine him backing Harris or, at best, staying neutral like
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September 10, 2024 — Scott Johnson
It was Clint Eastwood playing Inspector Harry Callahan who laid down the humbling maxim in Magnum Force (1973): “A man’s got to know his limitations.” Pseudo historian Darryl Cooper abides by Callahan’s maxim in declining to debate real historian Andrew Roberts on the subject of Churchill and World War II. Cooper is sufficiently self-aware to know “how that would go for [him].” That is, it would not go well. A
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September 8, 2024 — Scott Johnson
In his 2019 review/essay on Tucker Carlson in the Claremont Review of Books, Michael Anton reasonably assessed: “Tucker Carlson has become the de facto leader of the conservative movement—assuming any such thing can still be said to exist. He didn’t seek the position. I doubt he wants it. He’d probably disclaim it, in fact. But the mantle settled on him nonetheless…” Perhaps without his show on Fox News, which Anton
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September 5, 2024 — Scott Johnson
I want to add a footnote to my comments here and hereon Tucker Carlson’s interview with Darryl Cooper. The proposition that Tucker is only asking questions as a journalist is a meretricious falsehood. Tucker introduces Cooper as the world’s greatest historian. You may not be familiar with Cooper’s views — I was pleased never to have heard of him — but Carlson is. As anyone who pays the price of
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September 5, 2024 — Scott Johnson
I want to draw attention to Park MacDougald’s take on what he calls “The Tucker Op” in his daily column at Tablet’s The Scroll. He takes account of more weirdness in the Carlson/Cooper hoedown than I did — e.g., Churchill’s alleged installation as prime minister by shadowy “financiers,” the likening of Israelis to the Nazis (“So, the Nazis were misunderstood, but also the Israelis are a bit like the Nazis.
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September 4, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Last year Tucker Carlson devoted the October 9 episode of his X show to the Hamas/Israel war. He opened by searching for “the wise path forward” and asking what we should “do next in this chaotic moment.” For some reason, he didn’t directly answer his own question. We were to infer, however, that it’s none of our business. It might be best to avert our eyes. “War begets more war,”
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September 3, 2024 — John Hinderaker
That is what many people are calling Chris Rufo. After all, getting Harvard’s president fired is no mean accomplishment. And Rufo has many more successes to his credit, including being appointed by Governor Ron DeSantis to the Board of Trustees of New College, formerly a small, failing liberal arts college, now being remade–as one trustee put it–as the “Hillsdale of the South.” So Rufo is worth keeping your eye on.
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August 25, 2024 — Steven Hayward
The positively Orwellian invocations of “freedom” at the Democratic National Convention by authoritarian “equitycrats” like Kamala Harris and Tim Walz sent me to my library to dust off James Burnham’s classic Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism. Looks like I’m going to end up re-reading the whole thing, because it has lost none of its potency in the 60 years since it was
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