Liberals
October 7, 2020 — Steven Hayward
When asked to name the single greatest defect of the left, I usually answer quite narrowly: an inability to think in terms of tradeoffs. This is why liberals, owing to a Kantian-inspired disposition that favors intentions above consequences, tend always to utopianism, to the view that we if we just have good will and another tax increase, we can have the best yearbook ever! As Thomas Sowell likes to say, “There
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October 1, 2020 — Steven Hayward
A few days ago a liberal columnist for the Seattle Times wrote a good column about the collapse of small business in the downtown core of the Emerald City: “Self-inflicted wounds make Seattle’s business losses worse.” Someone in Seattle’s media is finally getting it: Shops were looted, in some cases repeatedly, this past summer. It sullies the cause of social justice protests to link the two together. The looting was
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September 23, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Incendiary and violent language is used constantly by liberals, including the most important Democratic politicians. Thus, no one should have been surprised when Bernie Sanders volunteer James Hodgkinson tried to assassinate a group of Republican House members in 2017, and would have succeeded in killing Steve Scalise but for the miracles of modern medicine. Since Hodgkinson’s assassination attempt, things have only gotten worse. Implied or explicit death threats from liberals,
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September 22, 2020 — John Hinderaker
This is a fun entry in the annals of liberal hypocrisy: Alyssa Milano, who I take it is an actress, is a lefty with a big Twitter following. She has advocated defunding the police. Of course, when she says “the police,” she means your police, not hers. She and her husband thought an armed man was loose on their property, and they summoned the 101st Airborne Division. Well, not quite,
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September 13, 2020 — John Hinderaker
I generally avoid writing about events or people merely because they are dumb. We are so awash in stupidity that doing so would be more than a full-time job, and you and I both have better things to do with our time. However: sometimes stupidity is entertaining, as in the video below. I don’t know what the event was, except that, per Mike Nayna’s tweet, it is a group of
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September 6, 2020 — John Hinderaker
It may well be, if inflicted on a company’s or government agency’s employees. In July, the City of Seattle required employees to attend training on “Internalized Racial Superiority for White People.” Last week, U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner Peter Kirsanow wrote a letter to Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan, which is embedded below. Kirsanow questioned the legality of the City’s “training” program under federal civil rights law: This training likely violated Title
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August 24, 2020 — Scott Johnson
Now we are engaged in a great civil war of ideas, or should be. Our constitutional order is under attack by the neo-Marxist scoundrels of the Black Lives Matter crowd and the woke mob along with their allies inside the Democratic Party, the party’s media adjunct, and big business. And now along comes Yoram Hazony to explain what it’s all about in his Quillette essay “The challenge of Marxism.” In
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August 18, 2020 — John Hinderaker
This is one of those days when I am not actually writing anything, just posting other people’s videos. Here is one more, by a guy named Ryan Long. A friend forwarded me the link. It illustrates, in the form of a pickup basketball game, how normal people see the cancel culture and other aspects of contemporary political life. The conservative guy may have flaws, but the liberal is completely nuts.
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August 6, 2020 — John Hinderaker
I wrote here and here about the program that Heather Mac Donald did for Center of the American Experiment a week ago today, and our battle with YouTube to keep the video of her presentation alive. If you haven’t seen the video of her speech, you should. She definitively rebuts the Black Lives Matter narrative of “systemic racism” in policing. You can watch the event here. If you follow that
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August 2, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Some months ago, I saw a shocking video: someone rode a bicycle down a sidewalk in Los Angeles, filming as he went, for something like a half hour. The entire time, he passed tent encampments or cities on both sides of the sidewalk. They seemed to go on forever and had an appearance of permanence. Yesterday a friend sent me a similar video, on a smaller scale, which was filmed
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August 2, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Watching the literally insane behavior on display in places like Portland and Seattle has prompted a lot of observers to suggest that many of the Antifa mobs suffer from mental illness. This is a thesis we talked about here back in April in “Does Liberalism Cause Mental Illness?“, in which I passed along some of the survey data Zach Goldberg at Georgia State had turned up and analyzed. One of
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July 25, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Polls suggest that most Americans have high regard for the Centers for Disease Control. I don’t. CDC has performed rather poorly with regard to the coronavirus, and at best, it is a federal bureaucracy not much different from the others. Among other things, I don’t trust CDC to be free of politics. In May, a reader texted me: Longtime reader of PL here. I saw your article on the CDC.
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July 22, 2020 — John Hinderaker
This is a sign of the times: a rather famous historian named Jill Lepore, who teaches at Harvard, wrote an article for the absurdly left-wing New Yorker magazine in which she made a claim that no sane person could believe. And yet, many did believe it, and the New Yorker, to my knowledge, has yet to correct it. (To be fair, the New Yorker gave up on fact checking long
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July 22, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Current liberal orthodoxy holds that a person is defined, more than anything else, by his or her skin color. People are mostly members of groups, not individuals; in fact, individualism is explicitly frowned upon. Members of the same racial group are pretty much all alike, and can be generalized about freely. Those views used to be the very definition of racism. In my opinion, they still are. Hans Bader expands
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July 21, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Tom Cotton made liberal heads explode when he analogized Portland’s criminal Antifa to Confederates of the 1860s: The federal government cannot allow anarchists and insurrectionists to destroy federal courthouses, federal buildings, or other federal property. These insurrectionists in the streets of Portland are little different from the insurrectionists who seceded from the Union in 1861 in South Carolina and tried to take over Fort Sumter. And just like President Lincoln
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July 20, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Yesterday a group of Coloradans sponsored the Sixth Annual Law Enforcement Appreciation Day in Denver: I doubt that the first five were controversial, but this year the forces of Marxist anarchy–that is, anarchy followed by socialism–showed up in force. Antifa Brownshirts charged the stage, assaulted the patriots assembled there, and prevented the event from going forward. Shockingly, Denver’s Chief of Police made common cause with the criminals. America is in
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July 18, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Last night Communist and Anarchist rioters attacked the statue of Christopher Columbus in Grant Park, Chicago. Police tried to guard the statue, and a pitched battle ensued, with 18 police officers injured and a dozen rioters–nowhere near enough–arrested. The rioters gained temporary ascendancy over the police, got control over the statue and attempted to pull it down, but without success–unlike the vandals who tore down the statue of Columbus on
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