History
July 11, 2021 — Scott Johnson
This weekend comes news that the city of Charlottesville has officially removed the statue of Robert E. Lee from Emancipation Park. Fox News story on the removal of the statue is posted reports: “Viewing areas for the removal of the statues were erected so that bystanders could watch cranes lift the statues from their plinth blocks; the process was nearly complete just before 9 a.m.” Politico reports: “Spectators by the
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July 7, 2021 — Scott Johnson
The case of Nikole Hannah-Jones stands at the crossroads of racial mania, journalistic degradation, historical fabrication, and educational descent. She appears to have walked out of an unwritten essay or novel by the late Tom Wolfe. Would that Wolfe were alive to do justice to her today. Spectator deputy editor Dominic Green puts me in mind of Wolfe in his column “The rights and wrongs of Nikole Hannah-Jones.” Here is
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July 4, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
The University of North Carolina has decided to grant tenure to Nicole Hannah-Jones, author of the discredited 1619 Project, after all. It made the decision at a closed-door meeting of the Board of Trustees. The University initially denied tenure to Hannah-Jones, and with good reason. Her attempt at scholarship included demonstrably false claims, including the view that the American Revolution was waged to preserve slavery and that Blacks were largely
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July 4, 2021 — 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, 2021 — 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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June 20, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Scott’s Father’s Day tribute to his dad includes a picture of his father and Hubert Humphrey. Scott noted that the picture was taken not long after Humphrey had led the charge to retake the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party from the Communists between 1946 and 1948. Around the same time as that picture was taken, my father, a socialist, was a leader in the movement to wrest control of certain union locals in
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June 20, 2021 — Scott Johnson
I wrote this on Father’s Day several years ago. It is a post that struck a chord with at least a few readers. I amplified it last year and am taking the liberty of reposting these reflections in honor of the day. My father was a thoughtful man in his own way. In the last years of his life he recited for me the things for which he was most
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June 19, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Steve Silbiger, a longtime observer of Joe Biden, sent me the following message: Biden is living proof of how much progress the United States has made on racial discrimination. The man who ran for President on a Southern strategy in which he claimed that “Delewareans were on the side of the South in the Civil War” has signed a bill that creates a Federal law commemorating the effective end of
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June 8, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
I have a new hero. He’s Walter E. Hussman Jr., an Arkansas newspaper publisher. Hussman, a major donor to the University of North Carolina, raised objections to UNC awarding tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones. Hannah-Jones is the author of the 1619 project, a radical reinterpretation of American history that has been rejected by leading historians, including liberal ones and even socialists. Hussman says he didn’t threaten to stop donating to the
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June 6, 2021 — Scott Johnson
My Dartmouth classmate John Floberg recently retired after a distinguished career in neurology. We took Professor Peter Bien’s freshman seminar on Politics and the Novel together during our first term at the college. John is originally from Chicago but we reconnected in the Twin Cities through Power Line 40 years after our studies with Professor Bien. Following in a family tradition, John served as a commissioned Navy officer after our
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June 2, 2021 — Scott Johnson
President Biden traveled to Tulsa to deliver a speech on the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre. I can’t find an official White House version of the speech President Biden delivered in Tulsa yesterday. Rev has posted an unofficial transcript here. I have embedded the Guardian News video at the bottom. The speech mixed its memorial purpose with low Democratic politics while giving no hint of remarkable progress made
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May 31, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Last week Tablet published Professor Patrick Henry’s remembrance of Roddie Edmonds, the former Army master sergeant who saved the Jews in his ranks from plans the Nazis had in store for them as prisoners of war. Professor Henry takes the title of his column from Edmonds’s memorable assertion to the unhappy Nazi commandant of the prison camp: “We are all Jews here.” It is a moving and inspirational story. In
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May 31, 2021 — Scott Johnson
In observance of Memorial Day 2007 the Wall Street Journal published a brilliant column by the late Peter Collier to mark the occasion. The column remains timely and is accessible online here. I don’t think we’ll read or hear anything more thoughtful or appropriate to the occasion today. With the kind permission of Peter himself, here it is: Once we knew who and what to honor on Memorial Day: those
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May 26, 2021 — Scott Johnson
We continue our preview of the new (Spring) issue of the Claremont Review of Books with Andrew Roberts’s review of a clutch of new books on, or bearing on, Winston Churchill. Roberts’s review is titled “Winston is back!” Subhead: “Churchill was filled to the brim with a love of life.” The heading of Roberts’s review is the message signalled to the fleet upon Churchill’s return to the Admiralty in 1939.
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May 25, 2021 — John Hinderaker
These days, statues are coming down and buildings and monuments are being re-named as leftists scour the historical record for evidence of nonconformity with today’s conventional wisdom. Generally, I have little sympathy for this project, in part because I scoff at the idea that our forebears were less moral than we are. I do make exceptions, however: there is a statue of former Governor Floyd B. Olson on the grounds
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May 24, 2021 — Steven Hayward
The current scene keeps bringing back to mind the old saying attributed (incorrectly) to Mark Twain: history doesn’t repeat itself—but it rhymes. Right now the country seems to be repeating the cycle of the 1960s, when liberals in power gave us reckless spending that stoked inflation, social engineering like “model cities” and busing, degraded law enforcement with soft-on-crime policies contributing to a massive crime wave, and race riots that elicited
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May 12, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Yesterday, Steve wrote about how the left has turned on John Kennedy. To me, the wonder is that it didn’t turn on him years ago. Kennedy’s presidency might have been liberal as that term was understood at the time, but it wasn’t “progressive.” In fact, today it might reasonably be considered conservative. Kennedy gave Americans a big tax cut on the theory that this would stimulate the economy. It did.
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