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May 17, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Our contributor Lloyd Billingsley wrote a book back in 1990 about the leftwing politics of the National Council of Churches, From Mainline to Sideline: The Social Witness of the National Council of Churches, detailing how the mainline Protestant churches that compose the NCC had swung far left. Maybe time for an update, as recent surveys find that the long-term decline of mainline Protestant denominations in America has reduced the number
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May 13, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
Everybody’s still talking about Gov. Kristi Noem shooting down that dog but it wasn’t the first time an animal fell victim to an owner’s gunfire. As Mammy (Hattie McDaniel) explained in Gone With the Wind, when Bonny fell and broke her neck, “Mr. Rhett grabbed his gun and run out and shoot that poor pony. And for a minute, I think he gonna shoot himself.” Movies also abound with scenes
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May 12, 2024 — Steven Hayward
The Babylon Bee—”America’s newspaper of record,” as Glenn Reynolds likes to put it—has established itself as a premier humor and political satire site of our time. They’ve pretty much put The Onion out of business, though one reason for this is The Onion slowly succumbed to wokery, and hence has trouble in the humor department. (Check it out if you want; it’s pretty weak these days.) The Babylon Bee’s proprietors
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May 7, 2024 — Steven Hayward
That’s not a headline I ever expected to write, even in satire. But the current experiment in Argentina, under the presidency of Javier Milei, is perhaps grounds for hope that at some point when things get so bad, voters return to their senses. (I’m looking at you, California and Minnesota.) He may not succeed, but the attempt is certainly inspiring. Milei gave a speech a few days ago at the
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May 6, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
“The song of the sixties is over,” noted Peter Collier back in 2018, “but the melody lingers on.” Consider, for example, Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” from 1965. The “Eastern world” was exploding, and if “the button is pushed” there would be no one to save, so “take a look around you boy, it’s bound to scare you, boy.” That invites a look around America in 2024. China and Russia
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May 1, 2024 — Steven Hayward
I keep getting ads like these turning up in my social media feeds: I especially like the Yale person saying they read applicant essays “very carefully.” Probably almost as carefully as Stanford: Student gets into Stanford after writing #BlackLivesMatter on application 100 times CNN — If you’re applying to college, you can spend hours crafting the perfect admissions essay. Or you can just write the same word 100 times. It worked for
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April 24, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Normally I expect that Jon Stewart, freshly back hosting The Daily Show on Mondays, will use his show to bash Trump. But this week he surprised by using a 15-minute opening segment to bash the media’s coverage of the Trump trial going on right now in Manhattan. I have to say it is pretty effective at making the media look stupid. It goes off the rails when he brings on
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April 24, 2024 — Steven Hayward
It is tempting to suggest that the best of all worlds is for Trump to be tied down in the courtroom, where he can’t let fly with one of his frequent provocations, while Joe Biden gets out and campaigns more, reminding Americans that he is a doddering fool. The big story last week was that Biden is the comeback kid! The polls have closed, with some putting Biden back in
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April 19, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Listening to Tom Petty’s Buried Treasure channel on Sirius XM yesterday I heard a Motown song I hadn’t heard since I was a teenager — “You Beat Me To the Punch,” a hit single for Mary Wells and a deep track on The Temptations Sing Smokey. The song was written by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles’ Ronnie White. I take it from Nelson George’s Where Did Our Love Go? that
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April 17, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Columbia University is a hotbed of anti-Semitism right now, and has seen more than its share of ugly incidents since October 7. Right now Columbia president Minouche Shafik is testifying before the same House committee where Harvard’s Claudine Gay self-immolated last fall. I’ve watched a few minutes of the proceedings, and it is clear that Shafik is much better prepared than was Gay to give halfway sensible answers to the
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April 17, 2024 — Steven Hayward
In yesterday’s item about the suspension of longtime NPR business editor Uri Berliner for telling the truth about NPR’s deep ideological bias, I meant to conclude by saying that the obvious next step would be his dismissal from NPR. And today the other shoe dropped: Berliner has “resigned” from NPR, but make no mistake, it was quite clear that NPR’s new Stasi management would no longer tolerate his presence. And
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April 14, 2024 — Steven Hayward
• Bill Maher has gone off the reservation once again, debunking lefty talking points about the greatness of our neighbors and Scandinavia while ignoring facts: • The late John Von Kannon, one of the founders of The American Spectator back in the 1960s, persuaded me many years ago that professional wrestling was a conservative sport, because it is a melodramatic morality play, with clear good guys and bad guys. (This
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April 13, 2024 — Steven Hayward
• For the many of you wondering and sending me notes, this week’s 3WHH podcast will post up tomorrow. Complicated schedules have prevented us from finding time this week to record the episode. • This is a sign of civic health: • The Associated Press continues its beclowning process: • You might well think that even with its diminished cognitive capacity, the New York Times would be able to draw
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April 9, 2024 — Steven Hayward
One of the classic articles from 30 years ago that still gets recalled fondly was Glenn Garvin’s “How Do I Hate NPR? Let Me Count the Ways,” which I think first appeared in the late Washington DC City Paper. Even back then I referred to NPR’s two main shows, “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered” as “Morning Sedition” and “All Things Distorted.” The very voice tones of Susan Stamberg and
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March 31, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
“When Front Page Magazine applied to join Google’s AdSense advertising program we were turned down,” notes Daniel Greenfield of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. “Since Google, like other Big Tech monopolies, has censored and deplatformed us in the past, we weren’t too shocked. But this time, Google told us why we had been banned.” The ban was due to this writer’s “Remember the San Bernardino Fourteen,” from December 3, 2021.
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March 31, 2024 — Steven Hayward
I’m currently working on a long paper I’m presenting at an academic conference on the legacy of the late historian John Patrick Diggins (d. 2009) in New York later this week (poster below, in case any New York area readers might like to drop in), and I can’t resist posting a couple of provocative thoughts from my jumble of notes. Like this from Diggins: Louis Hartz was the first to
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March 27, 2024 — John Hinderaker
In the New York Times, an Israeli lawyer named Amit Soussana describes how she was kidnapped by up to ten Gazans, dragged into Gaza, and was tortured and subject to sexual abuse while held as a captive. It is now-familiar, but horrifying story: The kidnappers attempted to restrain her by beating her and wrapping her in a white fabric, the video shows. Unable to subdue her, the attackers tried and
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