Liberals
October 9, 2017 — John Hinderaker
I wrote here about left-wing indoctrination in the Edina, Minnesota public schools. As a local story, it has been explosive. As a national story, it is a warning to normal parents and students everywhere. Leftism in the Edina schools is the subject of the cover story in the current issue of Thinking Minnesota. I highly recommend the article, written by veteran Twin Cities columnist Kathy Kersten. The Edina controversy actually
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October 9, 2017 — John Hinderaker
Jemele Hill is an on-air ESPN personality. In the last few years, ESPN has become notorious for emphasizing politics over sports; Ms. Hill is part of the problem. Last month, she denounced President Trump as a “white supremacist” after he criticized NFL players who kneel during the National Anthem. After that incident, she apologized for “letting her colleagues and company down” with the white supremacist tweet. She did not, however,
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October 9, 2017 — Steven Hayward
Harvey Weinstein’s pledge to attack the NRA and champion women’s rights in the aftermath of his scandal is such a transparent appeal to ideological partisanship that even liberal ideological partisans are embarrassed (and not buying it). Weinstein might be better off doing a remake of the old Phil Ochs tune, “Love Me, I’m a Liberal.” Here are my suggested lyrics for Harvey: I cried when they shot Pretty Woman Tears
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October 6, 2017 — Scott Johnson
Ammo Grrrll is not herself a vicim of GENDER DYSPHORIA or “GIRLS” GONE STUPID. She writes: I will not be commenting – except indirectly further on – on the monstrous evil in Las Vegas until more facts are known. I am writing this on Tuesday, must submit it for editing on Wednesday, so by the time you are reading this, anything I have to say about Vegas will either be
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September 15, 2017 — John Hinderaker
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, one must have a heart of stone to view the cover that the New Yorker intended to run to commemorate Hillary Clinton’s election as president without laughing: The painting, by Malika Favre, is called “The First.” The Washington Post’s report will bring a smile to your face: It’s the “what if” cover — the image that the New Yorker planned to run if Hillary Clinton had
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September 7, 2017 — Steven Hayward
Amazon: “Separate but Equal” Headquarters? No sooner does the Seattle City Council propose a city income tax than Amazon, headquartered in Seattle, announces this morning that it intends to set up a “separate” (but equal!) headquarters somewhere outside of Seattle, and is in the process of soliciting bribes “incentive packages” from interested states and municipalities. Where to start with the hilarity of this? This is my favorite paragraph in the
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September 6, 2017 — Steven Hayward
One of the things I learned taking in the APSA last weekend is how fully today’s radical left rejects the liberal democratic tradition in toto. The rule of law, democratic institutions, and majority rule itself are all tools of oppression that need to be replaced. And then there’s New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who was interviewed a few days back by New York magazine. He was asked, “In
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September 2, 2017 — Scott Johnson
Earlier this week I quoted Minnesota Senator Al Franken on his obstruction of the Senate consideration of the nomination of Justice David Stras to the Eighth Circuit: “I think we’re going to have a decision very soon.” That is a somewhat cryptic statement. What is he waiting for? If we had a free press operating in Minnesota, the obvious follow-up question would have been asked. Coverage of the blocking of
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August 23, 2017 — John Hinderaker
It is no secret to anyone who has been paying attention that the Left’s commitment to free speech–perhaps never strong in the first place–has been eroding rapidly. Now even the American Civil Liberties Union is beginning to backtrack on the First Amendment. The Associated Press reports: Faced with an angry backlash for defending white supremacists’ right to march in Charlottesville, the American Civil Liberties Union is confronting a feeling among
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August 23, 2017 — John Hinderaker
One of my daughters asks, are Robert Lees across the country scrambling to change their names, lest they be discriminated against by their employers? Is Robert the new Adolf? I say, Yes! And it’s only right. But why stop there? Think how many Thomas Jacksons and James Stuarts there are in the U.S. Why shouldn’t they be discriminated against, too? This whole thing with statues and names could be a
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August 19, 2017 — John Hinderaker
I know, the competition is stiff. But I think we have a winner. At the University of Southern California, activists have pointed out that the horse that the school’s Trojan mascot rides around the football stadium on has almost the same name as Robert E. Lee’s horse! The Los Angeles Times reports: When Richard Saukko galloped his chalk-white Arabian horse named Traveler around the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum almost 56
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August 16, 2017 — John Hinderaker
Fanny Hill was the first pornographic novel written in English. It was authored by John Cleland (who, as far as I know, never wrote anything else) and published in 1748. Among other things, Fanny Hill is famous for the fact that it doesn’t contain any bad words. Pornographers were a lot more inventive in those days. Nevertheless, it was, in former centuries, one of the most frequently banned books. I
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August 12, 2017 — Steven Hayward
The Wall Street Journal ran an excerpt from Mark Lilla’s new book, The Once and Future Liberal, coming out on Tuesday that we mentioned here yesterday. Here’s a link to the whole piece if you are a WSJ subscriber, but if not here are two of the better paragraphs in it: As a teacher, I am increasingly struck by a difference between my conservative and progressive students. Contrary to the stereotype,
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August 11, 2017 — Steven Hayward
When I see things like the meltdown at Google or any of the various campus disgraces that can be mentioned, I like to ask: “When are liberals going to defend liberalism?” One liberal who is standing up for liberalism is Mark Lilla of Columbia University. As noted here back in November, Lilla wrote an op-ed for the New York Times criticizing the Democratic Party’s reliance on identity politics. For this,
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August 9, 2017 — Steven Hayward
You know what they say about a stopped clock being right twice a day? Tom Friedman, the New York Times‘s second most predictably dismal columnist, had one such moment in yesterday’s column. You knew something was up from the lede, which began with “I was talking the other day to. . .” Already you’re groaning: will it be a taxi driver, a celebrity intellectual, or the Swiss store clerk with
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August 3, 2017 — Steven Hayward
One thing that is reliable about liberal policy ideas is that they will generate unintended consequences and perverse results, 95 out of 100 times. So of course one might have predicted that the move to “ban the box” asking about criminal convictions on employment application forms would result in increased racial discrimination. And now we have the social science to back up this common sense perception. From the Quarterly Journal
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July 29, 2017 — John Hinderaker
There have long been similarities between politics in the United States and politics in the United Kingdom. For example, one could argue that Ronald Reagan = Margaret Thatcher, George H.W. Bush = John Major, and Bernie Sanders = Jeremy Corbyn. Recently, though, the parallels have been rather uncanny. Here in the U.S., Democrats have refused to accept the results of the November 2016 election. They view President Trump as illegitimate
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