Liberals
February 3, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Everyone knows that when a liberal is out of ammo, his first recourse is to accuse those who disagree with him of being racists. This dodge is so familiar, and so ineffective, that I usually don’t bother to comment on it. But today we saw an extreme instance, and one that involves the organization that I run, Minnesota’s think tank, Center of the American Experiment. So here goes. By way
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January 28, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Glenn Reynolds has an excellent column in USA Today on the re-segregation of American universities that is being forced by the Democratic Party and the Left: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever!” Those words were thundered by Alabama Gov. George Wallace in his 1963 inauguration speech. But, in fact, the very next year, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which brought an end to segregation. Or did it? Wallace
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January 20, 2020 — John Hinderaker
On one side, we have virtue-signaling Manhattan leftists. On the other, we have working-class people trying to survive through honest labor. On whose side will the New York Times come down? If you guessed virtue-signaling leftists, it means you have occasionally read that rag. But this story about the New York City Council’s ban on serving foie gras in the city’s restaurants is surprisingly balanced: Last October, when the New
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January 20, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Today an estimated (by police) 22,000 people demonstrated at the Virginia capitol in Richmond in favor of Second Amendment rights, which are being threatened by the newly-elected Democratic majority in that state’s legislature. Liberal news outlets were hoping the rally would turn violent, and their disappointment when it didn’t was palpable. Thus, the Washington Post: And CBS: And CNN: The Babylon Bee headlines: “Media Offers Thoughts And Prayers That Someone
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January 16, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Kelly Holstine is a left-wing Minnesota teacher who was honored as the state’s Teacher of the Year for 2018-19, and made headlines locally by refusing to attend the White House ceremony at which the states’ honorees were recognized last spring. Shockingly, she doesn’t like President Trump, and didn’t want to be anywhere near him. This is how she describes herself on Twitter (after telling us that her pronouns are “she/her”):
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January 13, 2020 — John Hinderaker
For many years, people have commented on the seemingly-incongruous alliance between radical Muslims and Communists. In fact, however, there is no mystery: both are hostile to the values of advanced Western civilization and yearn for tyrannies that are not, in practice, particularly different from one another. Thus, while millions of Iranians are celebrating the demise of terrorist leader Qasem Soleimani, we shouldn’t be surprised that Venezuela’s Maduro regime is officially
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January 10, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Peter Brimelow has sued the New York Times for defamation, as reported by PJ Media. Brimelow is not a nobody. Among other things, he was the senior editor of Forbes magazine from 1986 to 2002. Brimelow is now the proprietor of Vdare, a site that can fairly be described, I think, as anti-immigration, a perspective that it shares with millions of Americans. (My own often-expressed opinion is that we should
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December 30, 2019 — John Hinderaker
Bret Stephens is a columnist at the New York Times. On Friday he wrote an op-ed titled The Secrets of Jewish Genius. In that column, he speculated about why Jews have made such signal contributions to modern intellectual life, far out of proportion to their numbers. Stephens attributed the phenomenon to Jewish teachings and experience: There is a religious tradition that, unlike some others, asks the believer not only to
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December 28, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Kevin Drum is a left-of-center writer who is worth reading at Mother Jones. He often departs from liberal orthodoxy, as we’ve noted here in the past. To end this year, Drum offers “A Few Things Liberals Believe That They Shouldn’t.” Six, to be precise. They are: Head Start (and similar pre-K programs) raise student achievement. American health care is expensive because of private insurance. We have a retirement crisis. The
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December 26, 2019 — Scott Johnson
The Aspen Times deposited the metaphorical lump of coal in conservative columnist Glenn Beaton’s Christmas stocking this year. After a seven-year run as the paper’s one and only conservative columnist as well as its most widely read columnist, period, the editors terminated him. The reason given for Glenn’s abrupt firing was that his “values” conflict with those of the newspaper. Glenn is a Trump supporter and has been critical of
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December 23, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
The Washington Post reports that some Democrats are mad as hell at Pete Buttigieg for abandoning some of his previous positions — e.g., Medicare for all and decriminalizing illegal border crossings. I think Buttigieg can live with their wrath, given that his move out of the hard left lane has corresponded with a surge in the polls, both nationally and especially in Iowa. However, the Post’s article, by Chelsea Janes,
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December 19, 2019 — John Hinderaker
In western Massachusetts, a group of a dozen or so climate activists tried to stop a trainload of coal heading for a power plant in New Hampshire…by standing on the railroad tracks in front of the train. Evidently they thought the train could, and would, screech to a halt. This short video is dark and doesn’t show much, but it conveys some sense of why this was a poor idea:
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December 18, 2019 — John Hinderaker
At St. Olaf College in Minnesota, a set of dorm rooms occupied by a group of mostly-conservative students was raided on Sunday by Public Safety officers in search of firearms. The College Fix reports: Several conservative students at St. Olaf College had their lives turned upside down Sunday after a false report that alleged that they had guns and ammunition in their dorm prompted campus public safety officers to enter
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December 13, 2019 — John Hinderaker
YouGov did an interesting poll in connection with the U.K. election. It is a couple of simple questions with a striking disparity of responses between Conservatives and Labourites, and between Leavers and Remainers: Labour voters (41%) and Remain voters (40%) are much more likely to judge someone else negatively for voting differently to them than Conservative voters (19%) and Leave voters (13%)https://t.co/vYue4Qi3lk pic.twitter.com/WtdsFrlCIG — YouGov (@YouGov) December 9, 2019 We
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November 29, 2019 — John Hinderaker
Liberals are trying to rewrite American history, teaching our children that the only thing that ever happened here–until they came along a year or two ago!–was slavery. The New York Times’s 1619 Project, which is being enthusiastically adopted by the nation’s public schools, is the culmination of years of left-wing propaganda. The liberals’ task is made easier by the fact that world history is mostly terra incognita to America’s young
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November 20, 2019 — John Hinderaker
The City Council of Charlottesville, Virginia has voted to remove a statue of Meriwether Lewis, William Clark and Sacagawea, their Shoshone interpreter, from a street in the city: The city council voted to direct city staff to create a plan for the removal of the West Main Street statue commemorating the Lewis and Clark expedition during a work session Friday. *** At the work session, councilors discussed the statue with
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October 30, 2019 — John Hinderaker
This piece in Commentary by Bruce Bawer (“The ‘Global Citizen’ Fraud”) deserves wide attention. Citizenship is out; patriotism is in disgrace; borders are passe. One Worldism and Global Citizenship are the order of the day. There are few greater threats to our freedom. Bawer writes: On September 24, Donald Trump told the United Nations General Assembly that “the future does not belong to the globalists. The future belongs to the
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