History
August 18, 2017 — Steven Hayward
Further to my comments the other day about the issues emerging from Charlottesville, a few more observations and interrogatories: It is understandable that Democrats would be agitating to remove Confederate-honoring statues. After all, it is their history that they need to make go away. You know, things like this: I won’t vouch for the accuracy of the histogram below (after all, it was produced by a hate group, the Southern
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August 17, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
Today, President Trump tweeted: Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments. I disagree that taking down statues of and monuments to Confederate generals and soldiers rips apart the history and culture of our country. Our history doesn’t change when a monument is removed. And how we view history inevitably changes from generation to generation,
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August 17, 2017 — Scott Johnson
Written and directed by Christopher Nolan, Dunkirk is the blockbuster film depicting the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from France over four days in late May 1940. British, French and Canadian troops had been cut off by the German Army. In his history of the war, Gerhard Weinberg writes that “it looked as if Great Britain would lose nearly its whole army including the professional officers who would be
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August 16, 2017 — Steven Hayward
So we seem to be on our way to tearing down every statue related to the Democratic Party’s largest achievement in American history—the Confederate States of America. Funny how the Confederate battle flag, and now statues, didn’t start to come down until Republicans became ascendant in southern states. Democrats who had a monopoly grip on the South for decades had lots of time to take these steps, but didn’t. You’d
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August 15, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
The crazed left has an uncontrollable urge not just to vent, but to destroy. The latest manifestation is the destruction in Durham, North Carolina of a monument to Confederate soldiers (“the boys who wore gray”). I have no problem with removing monuments to Confederate generals and soldiers if that’s what the public wants. The monuments were erected because those in control of the political process at the time considered them
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August 14, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
Charlottesville, scene of a hate rally and of awful violence this weekend, was the home town of Thomas Jefferson. Virginia’s liberal governor Terry McAuliffe was among those who invoked Jefferson when condemning the alt-right. McAuliffe said: Go home. You are not wanted in this great commonwealth. Shame on you. You pretend that you are patriots, but you are anything but a patriot. You want to talk about patriots, talk about
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August 14, 2017 — Scott Johnson
Wherever craven liberal authorities hold sway, the quest to bring our past into conformity with the wave of our totalitarian leftist future continues with token resistance, it any at all. Yale University presents a useful case in point. At NRO Kyle Smith notes that “Yale’s determination to take a giant jar of Wite-Out to history has reached a new level of fatuousness.” Smith points to the Yale Alumni Magazine report
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August 5, 2017 — John Hinderaker
Burnt Toast is a podcast about food. I normally wouldn’t hear it, but my wife urged me to listen to this episode. Burnt Toast had done a podcast on the Roto-Broil 400, one of the premier kitchen devices of the early 1960s. The Roto-Broil remains a cult item that is still in use in some homes. After that podcast, the producer received a message that led to a follow-up, which
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August 4, 2017 — Scott Johnson
Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin made a big impact on me. The subject of Larson’s book is the American ambassador to Germany, William Dodd, and his daughter, Martha, from the time Dodd was offered the ambassador’s job by President Roosevelt in 1933 to the Night of the Long Knives in May 1934. Dodd was something like Roosevelt’s fourth choice
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July 31, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
That’s the title of this New York Times op-ed by Matthew Continetti. He cites the firing of Sean Spicer and Reince Priebus, and says it sends the following message: After six months of trying to behave like a conventional Republican president, he’s done. His opponents now include not only the Democrats, but the elites of both political parties. This is a reasonable interpretation of where Trump is. The question is
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July 19, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
Andrew Stuttaford at NRO informs us that a statue of Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx’s writing partner and and benefactor, has been erected in Manchester, England. The Manchester Evening News gushes: Iconic socialist thinker, Friedrich Engels has returned to Manchester[,] 150 years after he left. As part of the Manchester International Festival, a statue will be officially unveiled of the German writer, in Tony Wilson Place, this Sunday. Tony Wilson, by
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July 17, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
French President Emmanuel Macron hosted yet another prominent leader when Benjamin Netanyahu came to Paris this weekend. Netanyahu’s visit struck a more serous note than President Trump’s. The Israeli Prime Minister wasn’t in Paris for a parade. Instead, the occasion was the 75th anniversary of a Holocaust roundup in Paris in which thousands of Jews were arrested and deported to Nazi concentration camps in Eastern Europe. The occasion was also
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July 16, 2017 — Steven Hayward
Some years ago the evangelical scholar Mark Noll wrote an influential book titled The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. It was a critique of the lack of intellectual seriousness and depth among his fellow evangelicals, and a clarion call to for evangelical thinkers to step up their game. Christianity Today named it the “Book of the Year” in 1994, and it provoked far-reaching and long-lasting discussion among evangelicals. I wonder
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July 15, 2017 — John Hinderaker
My friend Jon Lauck is a man of many parts: a lawyer, a historian, and a long-time adviser to Senator John Thune. Jon is a native South Dakotan and a Midwesterner through-and-through. As such, he has long pondered the fact that the Midwest is in many ways the most successful part of the United States. In the 19th century, the Midwest developed a superior civic culture that has produced a
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July 7, 2017 — Steven Hayward
Carson Holloway, who for some inexplicable reason I don’t know and have never met, has a very nice long review of my book Patriotism Is Not Enough over at Public Discourse. I’m stunned that someone I have not bribed captures the action and intent of the book so fully: Hayward, however, writes here for a more popular audience of thoughtful citizens, offering them an accessible account of the questions that
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July 4, 2017 — 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, 2017 — 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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