Liberals
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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July 15, 2020 — John Hinderaker
I wrote here that Minneapolis may have taken over, from Portland, the title of America’s worst-governed city. Scott furnished more evidence for that proposition this morning, pointing out that Minneapolis’s parks have been turned into homeless encampments. A friend adds to Scott’s dire depiction of the panic in Powderhorn Park with this letter, which he sent to the Minneapolis Park Board. Once again, the villain of the story is Minnesota’s
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July 12, 2020 — John Hinderaker
I know, we reached absolute zero in TDS a long time ago. How can things possibly get worse? I don’t know, but USA Today is trying, via, perhaps, the dumbest “fact check” in history: Clarification: The claim that Trump 2020 has put out a T-shirt with a symbol similar to a Nazi eagle and is being criticized for it is true. Worth noting, the eagle is a longtime US symbol,
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July 6, 2020 — John Hinderaker
The current rage for tearing down statues and renaming things has reached a sort of reductio ad absurdum: the city of Columbus, Ohio has removed the statue of Christopher Columbus from in front of its City Hall. The Wall Street Journal reports: The city of Columbus, Ohio, this week unceremoniously evicted a 16-foot bronze statue . . . of Christopher Columbus. “For many people in our community, the statue represents
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June 28, 2020 — John Hinderaker
This is a tough one for Marxists to understand, but the political reality has been apparent for quite a while: small business remains generally conservative, but big business is mostly on the Left. How can that be? The answer is partly economic. Conservatism favors open competition and innovation. Big business is, for the most part, on the other side of those concepts. The easiest path for the largest companies is
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June 27, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Did you know that Tim Scott is the only black Republican Senator? You probably do know that, because this is how everything he does is minimized and scoffed at by the Democratic Party press. Here are just a few of the thousands of examples we could offer: Scott himself complained in an email this morning about being anonymized by the Democratic Party press: Lost in the shuffle is the fact
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June 22, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Minneapolis got away with being a liberal city for quite a while, but the rot was deep and the decline was inevitable. Now the city vies with Seattle, Chicago and Baltimore as a haven for crime. When the crime was limited to minority neighborhoods, Minneapolis’s city fathers–to the extent any are left–were willing to put up with it. But that is no longer true. Murder now reaches into the heart
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June 20, 2020 — John Hinderaker
When I moved to Minneapolis in 1974, it was considered a model city. Prosperous, clean, progressive, low-crime. It has been declining ever since. After four decades of monopoly Democratic Party rule, Minneapolis has deteriorated beyond recognition. The George Floyd incident and nearly a week of rioting, looting and arson, which did around $500 million in damages–no one has any plan to rebuild the destruction–has brought Minneapolis’s decline to public attention.
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June 20, 2020 — Scott Johnson
On the colonial frontier Congregational minister Eleazar Wheelock established Dartmouth College as an institution to educate Native Americans. The college had its origins in the Indian missionary movement and in the mid-eighteenth-century evangelical revival. The college’s charter reflected its origins in Indian education even though it also provided for the education of “English Youth and any others.” (I borrow this account of the college’s history from Encylopedia.com.) The education of
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