Leftism
January 31, 2023 — John Hinderaker
I won’t say that vegans are the most annoying people in our society, but I will say this: they rank ahead of cross-fit enthusiasts. So this video should bring a smile to your face. It is several years old, but just popped up on Twitter on a large scale this week. A group of vegan terrorists–perhaps not a fair characterization, since they couldn’t scare anyone–tries to stop a truckload of
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January 31, 2023 — John Hinderaker
…all the time. But you can fool most of them some of the time, e.g. last November. Still, if Gallup has it right, quite a few people have caught on. Americans now say that our biggest problem is our government, up six points from last November and December: That our government is indeed our biggest problem is reinforced by the fact that most of our other major problems are caused
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January 28, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Several years ago, I saw a cartoon that went something like this: a liberal college administrator tells a conservative speaker that his event is being canceled because there have been threats of violence. The conservative asks, who are the threats coming from? and the liberal administrator answers, “Us.” This is, in fact, one of the Left’s favorite ploys to shut down conservative speech. It happened at Florida’s New College last
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January 25, 2023 — John Hinderaker
I have been writing lately about the war on agriculture–the Left’s attack on modern, scientific farming. The Left’s two main targets, so far, are fertilizers and animal husbandry. What is the end game? Leftists want us to eat a largely vegetarian diet, with insects as a protein source instead of cows, pigs and poultry. This is no secret if you follow leftist writing, but many people find it hard to
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January 21, 2023 — John Hinderaker
The Davos elite-fest is valuable for the same reason it has been useful to see journalists on Twitter: among friends, leftists say what they really think. Thus, Siemens Chairman Jim Hagemann Snabe tells one billion of us to stop eating meat: One billion people should stop eating meat in order to save the climate, the chairman of the largest industrial manufacturing company in Europe told a panel at the World
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January 19, 2023 — John Hinderaker
But some people think they actually do. Check out John Kerry, a man of limited intelligence but infinite self-regard, on his status as a master of the universe, along with the others at Davos: John Kerry to the elites gathered at the World Economic Forum in Davos: "It's pretty extraordinary that we, a select group of human beings…are able to sit in a room and come together and actually talk
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January 18, 2023 — John Hinderaker
That the Left has taken over public education (and most private education) in America is common knowledge. But the extent to which it has solidified its grip, and is in the process of driving out all non-conforming thought, may not be. An instance of this, in Minnesota, is the currently pending revisions to teacher licensure rules. The rules are being amended so that no one can be licensed as a
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January 17, 2023 — John Hinderaker
The World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos kicked off yesterday. For a long time I didn’t take the Davos elite-fest seriously, but it has gained steam: This WEF summit features a record turnout from many of the most powerful government and corporate officials. There will be 379 public officials attending, including 30 heads of state, 56 finance ministers, 19 central bank governors, 39 heads of global organizations, including the
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January 15, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Leftists, perhaps thinking their war on reliable energy is well in hand, are now making war on scientific agriculture. The war has two main elements: opposition to fertilizers, without which billions of people could not be fed, and hostility toward animal husbandry. Leftists don’t want you to eat meat. When you tell people that liberals’ end game is for them to eat bugs, they sometimes think you can’t be serious.
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January 14, 2023 — John Hinderaker
One of the saddest aspects of the Left’s takeover of our institutions is what it has done to the scientific establishment. This is a big topic, but for now let’s stick to the Lancet, which once was one of the world’s most respected medical journals. Now, it is largely a joke, pushing hack politics–race, gender, climate change–instead of seriously advancing medical science. This degeneration long predates covid. In 2016, I
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January 4, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Hennepin County, Minnesota, includes the City of Minneapolis and generally two tiers of suburbs. In recent years it has swung radically to the left–it is, after all, Ilhan Omar territory. An indication of how far out of whack politics are in this area is the election in November of Mary Moriarty as Hennepin County Attornety. Alpha News covers Moriarty’s swearing in ceremony, which was yesterday. Did Moriarty place her had
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December 27, 2022 — John Hinderaker
I spent a little time in Oxford during my recent vacation, and a day or two later Mark Steyn told me that the City of Oxford had adopted an ordinance that penalizes driving more than 15 minutes from your home. This seemed hard to believe, but in fact, it is true. First of all, the “15-Minute City” is a movement of sorts, promoted by the usual suspects, the United Nations
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December 21, 2022 — John Hinderaker
A political reality in today’s world is that the Left has vastly more money than the Right. That is certainly a problem, but the more important question is how each side deploys its resources. We have just emerged from an election cycle in which vast amounts of money were spent on both sides, in most cases inefficiently if not entirely fruitlessly. Some years ago, Glenn Reynolds proposed that the Koch
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December 16, 2022 — Steven Hayward
I’ve got a few updates for our periodic lexicon of current political discourse, inspired by Michael Walsh in the most recent podcast. The new terms defined here are “stakeholder,” “tolerance,” and “reform.” Scroll down to the bottom for these new entries: Populism: When the wrong person or cause wins a free election, like Brexit or Trump. [Alternative: John Gray’s definition—“Populism is a term used by centrist liberals to describe political
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October 29, 2022 — John Hinderaker
By universal consent, the most powerful force in Minnesota politics is the teachers’ union, Education Minnesota. In my opinion, Education Minnesota is the state’s number one source of evil. My organization, Center of the American Experiment, has been fighting for years to counter the teachers’ union’s malign influence. We are the only effective challenge to their power. Among other things, we have exposed the fact that the union spends much
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October 25, 2022 — John Hinderaker
Whenever I get depressed over the steep decline suffered by the city of Minneapolis, I console myself with the thought that it could be worse: we could be Portland. Portland, home of Antifa; site of a skyrocketing violent crime rate; abandoned by one business after another; beset with homelessness. But now, maybe Portlanders–those who are left–have had enough. The city’s far-left Mayor Ted Wheeler has announced plans to deal with
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October 17, 2022 — John Hinderaker
BlackRock Inc. is the world’s largest investment company. It has also been the leader in ESG (environmental, social, governance) investing–i.e., prioritizing a left-wing agenda over shareholder returns. It seems, finally, that BlackRock’s political agenda is dragging the company down: Brennan Hawken, an analyst at [UBS], downgraded the stock of BlackRock (NYSE: BLK) to Neutral from Buy and slashed the stock price target to $585 from $700 over growing pushback to
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