September 5, 2021 — Steven Hayward

Barren Indeed

Featured image I’m a regular reader of Barron’s Magazine, because it’s one of the better financial publications around, though they have been going a bit wobbly lately on climate change and other corporate wokery. But then there’s Barren Magazine, a tiny literary magazine I never heard of that specializes in what it calls “introspective lit.” Their “About” page reassures is that they are on the side of the true and the good: »
September 5, 2021 — Steven Hayward

The Cluelessness of Our Ruling Class, in 43 Seconds

Featured imageWe commented last week on how our “nation builders” thought it was important for Kabul University to have a master’s program in gender studies, but it turns out someone had the bright idea that modern art was also a necessity for Afghan women, starting with Duchamps’ “contextual art” urinal (from a 2015 British documentary—just 43 seconds long, but take in the looks on the faces of the Afghan women subjected »
September 5, 2021 — John Hinderaker

Does Woke Advertising Work?

Featured imageCorporate America has largely aligned itself with the Left, a choice that is often reflected in advertising. “Get woke, go broke” is a nice sentiment, but unfortunately it isn’t always–or, perhaps, usually–true. Nike, to name just one example, has profited greatly by being anti-American. Some of this probably has to do with catering to a non-American customer base, but sadly there is also no shortage of Americans who respond to »
September 5, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff

Joe Biden displays his wisdom

Featured imagePeggy Noonan writes of Joe Biden and his disastrous Afghanistan decisions: A longtime friend of his once told me Mr. Biden’s weakness is that he always thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room. I asked if the rooms are usually small, and the friend didn’t bristle, he laughed. I suspect Mr. Biden was thinking he was going to be the guy who finally cut through, who stopped the nonsense, »
September 5, 2021 — Steven Hayward

Rolling Stone Gathers Moss Again [Updated]

Featured imageIt was seven years ago that Rolling Stone magazine ran the 9,000-word cover story on an alleged rape at the University of Virginia that turned out to be a complete hoax. (File it next to Dan Rather’s Texas Air National Guard story.) Well, it looks like Rolling Stone has done it again. I don’t know what’s up with the controversy over the use of ivermectin, normally a drug treatment for »
September 5, 2021 — Scott Johnson

The return of Andrew Luger

Featured imageOn Friday afternoon the Star Tribune’s Stephen Montemayor reported that “Andrew Luger in final step of U.S. attorney nomination in Minnesota.” Luger served as United States Attorney for Minnesota from February 2014 to March 2017 under President Obama and into the early days of the Trump administration. Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar did what she could to engineer Luger’s continued service under Trump. Her support wasn’t enough then under President Trump, »
September 4, 2021 — John Hinderaker

What Was Fauci’s Role In the Pandemic?

Featured imageAustralian journalist Sharri Markson has written a book titled What Really Happened in Wuhan: the Cover-Ups, the Conspiracies and the Classified Research. The book was excerpted in today’s London Times, from which these paragraphs come: Fauci defended the scientists who had undertaken the highly controversial gain-of-function research that had prompted the global debate, saying they had “conducted their research properly and under the safest and most secure conditions”. The same »
September 4, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff

The horror: Conservative experts criticize Biden on liberal cable outlets

Featured imageThe Washington Post is upset that cable news channels invited former high-level defense and national security officials to discuss the Afghanistan debacle. Among those whom the Post questions whether we should have heard from are two former National Security Advisors (H.R. McMaster and John Bolton), a former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and architect of the successful surge in Iraq, (David Petraeus), a former Secretary of Defense (Leon Panetta), »
September 4, 2021 — Steven Hayward

Podcast: The 3WHH on ‘The Soul of Politics,’ with Glenn Ellmers

Featured imageNext Tuesday, Encounter Books will publish Glenn Ellmers’ magisterial intellectual biography The Soul of Politics: Harry Jaffa and the Fight for America, and Glenn joins us this week to walk through some of the highlights in the book in what is turning out to be a month-long “Jaffapalooza.” Naturally, we draw Glenn into our running argument about the problems of communicating the proper understanding of the principle of equality in an »
September 4, 2021 — Scott Johnson

What we left behind: VDH edition

Featured imageI noted the American materiel we left behind in our hasty departure from Afghanistan in “What we left behind.” I included the mind-blowing graphic below from the Times (UK). A mind-blowing graphic in today's Times on what $85bn worth of lost equipment means in practice for the Taliban: pic.twitter.com/GDcuNQbb6P — Will Brown (@_Will_Brown) August 29, 2021 Our friend Victor Davis Hanson is a renowned classicist and military historian. Last night »
September 3, 2021 — John Hinderaker

The Squad Descends On Minnesota [Updated]

Featured imageIt isn’t easy to assemble the entire Squad in one place, but reportedly it happened today in Minneapolis. The Squad held a press conference to demand that President Biden revoke the permit to construct Enbridge Energy’s Line 3 replacement pipeline. As usual, the activists’ claims are hysterical: The press conference came days after a letter from the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination requested that the federal »
September 4, 2021 — John Hinderaker

Axe the Honor Roll!

Featured imageI went through a stage in my life when I was a less than diligent student. It isn’t that I wasn’t working, I just wasn’t working on the things my teachers had assigned as homework. The result was that there were a couple of 9-weeks periods in junior high school when I didn’t make the honor roll. I have never personally encountered the wrath of God, but the wrath of »
September 4, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff

Covid deaths in the U.S. are higher than last year at same time

Featured imageAt this time last year, the Wuhan coronavirus was claiming around 1,000 American lives per day. It seemed to me that, absent a sudden and sharp decline in that number, Joe Biden would be our next president. It must have seemed that way to Biden and his top advisers, as well. During presidential debates that occurred a little less than a year ago, Biden ripped Trump for his handling of »
September 4, 2021 — John Hinderaker

Where Is the Outrage?

Featured imageIf the Biden administration were deliberately trying to weaken America, what, exactly, would it do differently? David Horowitz asks that question, and also: why aren’t Republicans demanding an end to the outrage? David and Daniel Greenfield wrote this column for Power Line: Impeach the President, Court Martial the Joint Chiefs of Staff Only one man lost his job over Afghanistan. Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller challenged Biden’s incompetent and spineless Joint »
September 4, 2021 — Scott Johnson

Who we brought out

Featured imageWe have been advised by the Biden administration that our surrender and evacuation of Afghanistan is a world-historic success. We know that’s not true, but we have yet to assess the the catastrophe in its multifarious dimensions. For example, we have yet to get a handle on the 120,000 Afghans included with some 6,000 American citizens in the airlift out of Kabul. AP diplomatic correspondent Matt Lee gives us a »
September 4, 2021 — Steven Hayward

The Week in Pictures: Interwar Years Edition

Featured imageSupposedly the American war in Afghanistan is over, but I keep going back to the Bertolt Brecht line, “What if they gave a war and nobody came?” The anti-war left used to emblazon this on t-shirts and bumper stickers, ignoring the immediate sequel: “Then, war will come to you.” More likely some decades from now we are going to look back on this new period that began this week as »
September 3, 2021 — Steven Hayward

Et Tu, Princeton? [with comment by Paul]

Featured imageI’ve been arguing for a while that private liberal arts colleges often exhibit much more extreme wokism that public universities, so we shouldn’t be surprised that Princeton is giving Mount Royal University a run for its money. On Wednesday, the New York Post ran an article from two Princeton faculty, John Londregan of the politics and international affairs department, and Sergiu Klainerman of mathematics, on the insidious racial slurs of »