The Left

Chronicles of the Crazy Time (7)

Featured image I’m actually pretty busy at the moment, even though school is over for the summer, so I’m having trouble keeping up with the tsunami of craziness washing over the land. But I’ll try to continue this chronicle of the most egregious and significant events. • Who would have thought that sense and resolve against statue-toppling repudiation would come from the president of France, Emmanuel Macron. The Daily Wire reports: “We »

Imagine there’s no MPD

Featured image The Minneapolis City Council has 13 members. Of the 13, 12 are leftist DFL loons. The 13th is a leftist Green Party loon. They are missing only a local member of the Legal Marijuana Now Party for the trifecta. Minneapolis sits within the congressional district represented by Ilhan Omar in Congress. Perhaps she makes the trifecta. The Minneapolis City Council made big news when 9 of its 13 members pledged »

Is there a silver lining in the Virginia debacle?

Featured image As Steve noted in his post on yesterday’s election, the results in Virginia did not go the Republicans’ way. Not at all. Outspent significantly by Democrats, Republicans lost control over both houses of the Virginia General Assembly. The Democrats picked up at least two seats in the state Senate and at least five in the House of Delegates. These aren’t massive gains, but they give control of the legislature to »

Which Dem presidential candidate should conservatives be rooting for?

Featured image During last night’s Power Line VIP show, we received plenty of good questions from the audience. We answered a number of them. Apologies to those whose questions we didn’t get to. One of the best questions of the evening came from Scott. He asked, in effect, whether conservatives who favor President Trump’s reelection should be rooting for the Dems to nominate one of their more extreme candidates, on the theory »

Rate the Hate

Featured image On our Power Line VIP show last night, I raised the question of how the left’s hatred (including that of the mainstream media) of President Trump compares to its hatred of previous Republican presidents, especially Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush. John, Scott, and I followed politics closely during all of these administrations. Steve is a historian and biographer of Reagan. Setting the left’s hate rating of Donald »

CRB: The chosen and the woke

Featured image We continue our preview of the new (Summer) issue of the Claremont Review of Books hot off the press. It went into the mail on Monday and is accessible online to subscribers now. Buy an annual subscription including immediate online access here for the modest price of $19.95. If you love trustworthy essays on, and reviews of books about, politics, history, literature and culture, the CRB may be for you. »

Democracy dies in global governance

Featured image Anne Marie Slaughter was an official in the Obama State Department. Now, she’s a professor at Princeton and head of New America (formerly the New America Foundation), a liberal think tank. Slaughter supports “global governance.” By this, she says she means that nations would cede sovereign authority to supranational institutions in cases requiring global solutions to global problems. But who would decide whether a given problem requires a global solution? »

Roger Kimball: Restoring the lost consensus

Featured image Roger Kimball is a man of many parts. He is the author of more than a dozen outstanding books on art, politics, and intellectual history. He is the editor and publisher of The New Criterion. He is the publisher of Encounter Books. He is an eloquent columnist and regular commentator on current events in the Notes & Comments section of the New Criterion as well as other outlets including PJ »

Norman Podhoretz on the left

Featured image The Spring issue of the Claremont Review of Books has not yet gone to press, but it will feature an interview with the incomparable Norman Podhoretz that has been posted online here for subscribers and circulated by the editors in samizdat. The interview is great. Rush Limbaugh flagged it in a segment posted here. Mr. Ace plucked some juicy morsels in a post here at Ace of Spades. The CRB’s »

Tucker returns fire

Featured image The totalitarian left in the form of Media Matters for Communists has undertaken a campaign against Tucker Carlson. Bubba Clem provides the background to the MMC campaign in the Wall Street Journal column “The speech police come for Tucker Carlson.” Last night Tucker undertook to return fire (video below). Tom Lifson takes note at American Thinker in “Media Matters has been throwing stones at Tucker Carlson from its own glass »

Defending our history

Featured image In Minneapolis, what was once Lake Calhoun — the city’s biggest lake — has recently been renamed Bde Maka Ska, for all the painfully familiar reasons. Roger Kimball addresses the issues embedded in those reasons in his Imprimis essay “Shall we defend our common history?” This is a smart and biting essay that sheds light on dark corners of the left’s will to power. I asked Roger if there was »

When they tunnel under your house

Featured image I want to take the liberty of highlighting four paragraphs from Bret Stephens’s New York Times column of December 13: “When anti-Zionism tunnels under your house” (accessible via Outline here). Stephens’s column silently responds to his colleague Michelle Goldberg’s December 7 column “Anti-Zionism isn’t anti-Semitism,” a column that gives cover to the likes of Minnesota Fifth District Rep.-elect Ilhan Omar: Anti-Zionists are not advocating the reform of a state, as »

A Johnsonian smackdown

Featured image I awakened to the greatness of Samuel Johnson — eighteenth century England’s supreme man of letters — under the tutelage of Professor Jeffrey Hart, who required us to absorb Johnson’s magnificent essay on Soame Jenyns’s Free Enquiry Into the Nature and Origin of Evil. Memory of Jenyns’s otherwise forgettable book lives on thanks to the explosion it triggered in Johnson. Johnson’s essay is available online in a form edited by »

Caravan update

Featured image Last night Tucker Carlson invited gonzo filmmaker Ami Horowitz on his show for a short segment on the caravan heading our way from Central America (video below). FOX News reporter Bill La Jeunesse was on the scene for a while, seemingly to serve as the public relations spokesman for the horde. La Jeunesse (and others) to the contary notwithstanding, Horowitz demonstrates that it represents the organized efforts of unknown benefactors »

Our Present Discontents, Then and Now

Featured image I’m deep into the weeds of Edmund Burke these days, in part for a recent lecture at Yale (video to come) and a series of seminars I’ll be doing soon on Burke (podcasts to come, I think), but even reading this great judicious man from more than 200 years ago can’t draw me away from our current catastrophic political scene. One of Burke’s famous essays was “Thoughts on Our Present »

CRB: Radical prophet

Featured image In the third of the three review/essays I chose to preview for Power Line readers from the new (Summer) issue of the Claremont Review of Books (subscribe here), Mark Bauerlein surveys the works of David Horowitz after his turn from the radical left. Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University; he has not previously written for the CRB, but he was an inspired choice to review my friend David’s »

The left’s incoherence on Trump-Putin exposed

Featured image I agree with John’s analysis of the approach President Trump is taking at the NATO summit. In this post, I want to highlight the inconsistency, noted by John, between the left’s criticism of Trump’s approach and its claim that he is soft on, and maybe an instrument of, Putin. Trump has made two main points in Europe. First, key NATO members aren’t doing enough in the area of defense. Second, »