Thought for the Day
September 5, 2024 — Steven Hayward
In re: the growing scandal of Tucker Carlson’s promotion of (among other things) anti-Churchill “rightists,” let us recall afresh the judgment of British historian Geoffrey Elton: “When I meet a historian who cannot think that there have been great men, great men moreover in politics, I feel myself in the presence of a bad historian. And there are times when I incline to judge all historians by their opinion of Winston
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September 4, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Everyone has their hair on fire over Tucker Carlson’s promotion of Darryl Cooper, whom I’ve never heard of before despite Tucker’s claim that Cooper is one of the most popular historians in America, following the revisionist line about Churchill, Hitler, and World War II that is by now quite long in the tooth, having been advanced with much more vigor, if not rigor, by Pat Buchanan and the anti-Semitic British
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September 3, 2024 — Steven Hayward
The great theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer offers a useful observation: Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leave behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests
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September 2, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Back in 1957, Leo Strauss, taking note of what he thought was a surprising amount of hostility toward Israel in the pages of National Review (a magazine he otherwise liked and admired) wrote a letter to the editor, portions of which ought to be sent along to the Democratic Party today: The first thing which strikes one in Israel is that the country is a Western country, which educates its
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August 30, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Just keep pouring Tom Sowell straight into my veins (from Social Justice Fallacies): No sane person believes that there is zero racism in American society, or in any other society. . . Even if, by some miracle, we could get to zero racism, we already know, from the history of American hillbillies—who are physically indistinguishable from other white people, and therefore face zero racism—that even this is not enough to
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August 29, 2024 — Steven Hayward
After the week of progressive blather from the Democrats, you need to dust off your James Burnham, Kenneth Minogue (The Liberal Mind), and above all Thomas Sowell as an emetic. Social Justice Fallacies is a good place to start: Many assumptions and phrases in the social justice literature are repeated endlessly, without any empirical test. When women are statistically “under-represented” in Silicon Valley, for example, some people automatically assume that
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August 28, 2024 — Steven Hayward
One of the odder and least credible phrases of Kamala Harris’s convention speech last week was her pledge to maintain “the most lethal military force in the world.” Imagine the reaction if a Republican nominee used the phrase “lethal” this way. In any case, very few are noting this phrase because everyone knows Harris doesn’t mean it. The Biden-Harris Administration has been reducing real spending for defense, and as John
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August 27, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Hit tip to Jim Garaghty of National Review for reminding us today of the warning Clinton Treasury Secretary and former Harvard president Larry Summers gave us back in May, 2021: Larry Summers warned the Biden administration, “We’re taking very substantial risks on the inflation side. . . . We are printing money, we are creating government bonds, we are borrowing on unprecedented scales. Those are things that surely create more
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August 26, 2024 — Steven Hayward
A number of Trump and RFK Jr. critics are attacking them for being believers and purveyors of conspiracy theories. Let us stipulate that most elaborate conspiracies that require large numbers of people to be complicit (like faking the moon landing) are implausible. I have my own thumbnail equation, which is that the probability of a conspiracy actually happening is the inverse of the number of people that would be required
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August 25, 2024 — Steven Hayward
The positively Orwellian invocations of “freedom” at the Democratic National Convention by authoritarian “equitycrats” like Kamala Harris and Tim Walz sent me to my library to dust off James Burnham’s classic Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism. Looks like I’m going to end up re-reading the whole thing, because it has lost none of its potency in the 60 years since it was
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April 8, 2024 — Steven Hayward
You know things are bad when Bill Clinton is the voice of moral clarity in the Democratic Party. Here’s what he said in 2016: “I killed myself to give the Palestinians a state. I had a deal they turned down that would have given them all of Gaza… between 96%-97% of the West Bank, compensating land in Israel, you name it.” “Hamas is really smart. When they decide to rocket
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April 7, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Richard Weaver (author of the canonical 1949 text, Ideas Have Consequences) writing about social science in 1956: Those Congressmen who are reported to have confused social science with socialism may not have been so dumb after all. They had the right intuitive perception, even if they got the academic distinctions a little confused. A thing is defined partly by its tendency, and the tendency of scientistic social science, from Comte
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January 11, 2024 — Steven Hayward
One of the constitutional reform ideas that the “goo-goos” (my shorthand for the so-called and self-appointed “good government” types who resent constitutional limits on their will) is that we should abandon the “native born” requirement for eligibility for the presidency so that talented foreign-born people could be our president. I used to harsh their mellow by saying, “Yes, I think I can warm up to the sound of ‘President Kissinger.'”
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January 10, 2024 — Steven Hayward
From “Eldest Statesmen,” by Fintan O’Toole in the current issue of the New York Review of Books: It is quite a thought that if Joe Biden were a Catholic bishop, he would have been required to submit his resignation to the pope five years ago. If he were a cardinal, he would, when he turned eighty in November 2022, have lost his right to vote in the conclave that will
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November 22, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Short answer: No. The idea of free speech is that it is a means toward the main end of securing all of our natural rights by promoting political deliberation, and promoting the search for truth. I argued in the latest podcast that it is perfectly reasonable to shut down Students for Justice in Palestine chapters on college campuses purely on the grounds that they abuse the principle of free speech
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November 20, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Michael Oren is the prominent historian and Israeli ambassador to the United States. His 2015 memoir Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide remains timely and illuminating. He writes in his Free column “A war against the Jews” (November 20): This war is not simply between Hamas terrorists and Israelis. It is a war against the Jews. The insight began with the international media’s coverage of the conflict. Again, it
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November 19, 2023 — Steven Hayward
From Angelo Codevilla and Paul Seabury’s 1989 classic, War: Ends and Means: Discrimination means that armed forces should fight armed forces and not ravage the enemy’s countryside, cities, or economy. While it is permitted to “starve out” an army, blockades of whole countries, such as the ones that kept food from Germany in World Wars I and II, have traditionally been considered unjust means of warfare because they do not
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