Yesterday, on the nation’s 242nd birthday, I asked if we could set strife aside for a day, and just be grateful to live in such a remarkable nation. It occurred to me immediately after writing that line, though, that simple gratitude for the nation we have is itself a deeply conservative disposition. Joseph Sobran described […]
Here’s a peppery little post by one Anne Carter on the state of public discourse: Shrieking Monkeys. Ms. Carter is a Southerner, and so, not having been farm-raised in the Yankee waters that our ruling classes have swum in all their lives, she is in a position to notice the moralizing and missionary zeal that […]
Bernie Sanders Is Not the Left
I’ve just read a good item, by Joel Kotkin at City Journal, about a conference in Normandy on the future of Western democracy. It is appropriately gloomy, and savvy readers will catch a whiff of the Iron Law of Oligarchy in the extent to which democratic rule in Europe is anything but representative, and proceeds […]
Bill Vallicella weighs in on the natural-rights question we’ve been discussing, here. We read: The problem is that the notion of a natural right is less than perspicuous. Part of what it means to say that a right is natural is that it is not conventional. We don’t have rights to life, liberty, and property […]
The title, of course, is a reference to the oft-heard quip that there are three branches of government in the contemporary United States: the Executive Branch, The Legislative Branch, and Anthony Kennedy. Justice Kennedy has announced that he is retiring. This is huge news, and a wonderful opportunity. May RBG be next, and soon. Update: […]
Two posts ago we read Michael Anton’s emailed reply to a collection of questions I’d posted in Part 1 of this series. I mailed back a response, and received another reply in return. (There the correspondence stands, for the moment, as I’ve been traveling and working the past couple of days. I’d also like to […]
Our commenter Jacques has replied, in an email to me, to Michael Anton’s response (published in our previous post). I am posting it below. Michael Anton (on the question of “natural rulers”): “One can raise all sorts of objections to this. For instance, if Trump is such a natural ruler, why did he lose the […]
My last two posts (here and here) were in response to an extensive review, by Michael Anton, of Thomas West’s new book on the American Founding, and to a comment by our reader Jacques. In Saturday’s post I laid out some questions that I thought the review, and Jacques’ comment, had raised. I did not […]
In my previous post I linked to a review, by Michael Anton, of a new book on the American Founding by Thomas G. West of Hillsdale College. I have a keen interest in the Founding, and in particular I am, like nearly everyone in the “neoreactionary” community, dogged by the question of just where things […]
I’ve just read a remarkable review, by Michael Anton, of a new book by Thomas G. West, who is a professor at Hillsdale College. (You may know Michael Anton as ‘Publius Decius Mus’, the author of the celebrated essay “The Flight 93 Election” that argued for the necessity of electing Donald Trump in 2016.) Professor […]
Well, the long-awaited Inspector General’s report on the FBI’s handling of the Clinton email investigation came out on Thursday. I’m interested enough to read it, but haven’t had the time. Mollie Hemingway has, however, and she gives us a helpful summary of it over at The Federalist. Key points: The philandering Peter Strzok, who was […]
It’s a busy stretch for me, with little time for writing (sorry about the lack of substantial posts here lately), but I’ll get back to logorrheic bloviation as soon as I can. Meanwhile, I have to post a picture I just ran across: Donald Trump at the G7 meeting, resolutely staring down a hectoring Angela […]
It’s fifty years since Robert Kennedy was shot dead, and the press is gushing in fond remembrance. Not so Boston’s own Howie Carr, though.
According to a new report by the Senate Homeland Security Committee, the Obama administration, having repeatedly assured Congress that under the JCPOA Iran would have no access to U.S. financial markets for asset conversion, nevertheless clandestinely issued a license permitting Iran to do exactly that. Apparently the effort failed because the banks themselves, showing more […]
In a recent interview, Bill Clinton expressed sympathy for the #MeToo movement (which, as various wags have pointed out, can be read off as “Pound Me Too”), and said it was “overdue”. I try not to write much about the Clintons anymore — they are perhaps the vilest and most contemptible public officials to have […]
With yet another hat-tip to Bill Keezer, here’s a tart little item, by Don Surber, about the nation’s gradual recovery from Barack Obama’s years of control. Perhaps one day it will all seem like it was just a bad dream.
Tommy Robinson, the patriotic English gadfly who has had the audacity to advocate, over the past several years, the preservation of the British Isles as an ethnic homeland for the British people, has been arrested for standing outside an English courthouse to live-stream the trial of a Pakistani child-grooming operation. The government, not content with […]
National Review is essentially the official organ of what is often called “Conservatism Inc.” these days, but there are still worthwhile things to read over there. Here are two. First, Charles Cooke, who has been consistently excellent on gun-control topics, rebuts an Op-Ed in the New York Times that tries to tie the Second Amendment […]
From Spandrell: here, here, and here are three posts outlining an idea — “Bioleninism” — that seeks to explain the steady movement leftward of political systems, and the shift, beginning in the 1960s or so, from economic to cultural Marxism as the vehicle for that movement. The model seems coherent and plausible. It also has […]
I’m driving all day, but for now here’s a brief item on the political consequences of shifting American demographics. Rising diversity at national scale increases tribalism, destroys cohesion, diminishes liberty, and fosters divisive competition that throughout history always tends toward fission and violence. What fools we are.
President Trump yesterday announced that the U.S. would no longer consider itself bound by the deal his predecessor had made with Iran. His critics, both here and abroad, are writhing and hissing like Gollum with the Elven-rope around his neck: To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, only someone with a heart of stone could witness their pain […]
My friend Bill Vallicella, having read our recent post and comment-thread on Rod Dreher’s essay on Marx (see Bill’s recent post on the same article, here), noted my formulation of the consistent principle of our opponents in the current culture war: Defend your people, always. Attack the enemy with whatever comes to hand, always. (The […]
There’s been an interesting discussion over at Bill Vallicella’s Maverick Philosopher website about the Constitution’s prohibition, in Article VI, of a “religious test” for public office. The discussion, with an anonymous Canadian philosopher (although, as was said once of Newton, “we recognize the lion by his claw”), spans several posts. In the first post in […]
April 27, 2018 – 11:15 am
I’ll be driving all day today, but before I go I want to pass along this long report by Representative Louis Gohmert on the character and professional history of Robert Mueller. (A hat-tip to our e-pal Bill Keezer for this.) Caveat lector: I haven’t had time to read it all myself yet, or to vet […]
Here are three takes on the Michael Cohen raid, and the Mueller probe generally: by DiploMad, Alan Dershowitz, and Dymphna.
According to this report, the Obama administration suspended the mechanism whereby employers are notified that the Social Security numbers used by their employees don’t match the employees’ names. This sensible cross-checking had been used to catch both fraud and clerical errors, and had prevented millions of citizens from losing Social Security benefits they were entitled […]
Here’s a response, by Stephen Moore and Arthur Laffer [cue ad-hominem attack in comment thread in 3…2…1…], to Hillary Clinton’s insulting remarks the other day about winning the “dynamic” states, and losing the backward ones. I will confess that I hesitated before mentioning That Woman’s name in print. As Richard Wagner is said to have […]
I’ve been unable to turn on the news over the past 24 hours without immediately hearing about yesterday’s protests against “gun violence”. The news agencies have clearly learned a trick or two from their show-biz colleagues who call themselves “illusionists”: if these protests were about “violence”, the marchers would surely have something to say about […]
We’ve been hearing a lot about the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook data-mining story, in which personal information about Facebook users was scooped up by a firm working for the Trump campaign. The media have been all over it. It’s been terrible PR for Facebook, and the company’s stock has dropped sharply. The media response was not, however, […]
March 20, 2018 – 12:00 pm
An addendum to yesterday’s “reactionary roundup“: In the Radio Derb podcast linked to in the post, Mr. Derbyshire reported on the detention and deportation of several identitarian dissidents who had come to England to express their views at Hyde Park’s famous Speakers Corner. One was a young Austrian by the name of Martin Sellner. Mr. […]
Nobody has brought more clarity to reporting on the tempest of scandals and investigations flooding the political landscape than National Review‘s Andrew McCarthy. As the federal prosecutor who handled the case against the “Blind Sheik” Omar Adbel Rahman for the 1993 Word Trade center bombing, he brings expertise and authority to a topic that would […]
Writing at the Federalist, Molly Hemingway gives us the latest on the DOJ’s skulduggery in the Trump investigation: a personal relationship between FBI agent Peter Strzok and the FISA-court judge Rudy Contreras, who mysteriously recused himself was recused after taking Mike Flynn’s guilty plea. Ms. Hemingway’s story, which is based on newly obtained text messages […]
In the comment-thread to our previous post, we see in microcosm the tremendous fissure in American culture and politics. It goes far deeper than mere disagreements about policy; it has reached the point in which the two sides have entirely different conceptions of moral, political, cultural, social, historical, and even human reality — views that […]
March 15, 2018 – 10:10 pm
We’ve been treated in recent days to the spectacle of schoolchildren marching in the streets to demand legislative restrictions on gun acquisition and ownership. This sort of thing is nothing new; I remember my own adolescence, in the late 60’s and early 70’s, and the student protests of that era. When you’re that age, it’s […]
Here’s an interesting item: politics and geology. It’s a reminder also of how much warmer the Earth once was, long before your SUV ruined everything.
If you’re familiar with Patrick Buchanan, you won’t be surprised to know that his latest column is a ringing defense of tariffs. An excerpt: “Trade wars are not won, only lost,’ warns Sen. Jeff Flake. But this is ahistorical nonsense. The U.S. relied on tariffs to convert from an agricultural economy in 1800 to the […]
In a recent post I declined to comment on the proposed imposition of new tariffs, pleading ignorance of the subject. The uncommonly astute blogger calling himself “ZMan”, however, has a definite opinion. An excerpt: The fact is, the current trade regime ushered in after the Cold War, has proven to be the boondoggle critics like […]
A foreground item in the news in these last days has been President Trump’s announcement of tariffs on various goods. As with everything else he says or does, (or, for that matter, anything that any prominent person says or does these days), there has been pugnacious disagreement. I’m not going to comment on this one. […]
February 27, 2018 – 3:29 pm
Our reader, the indefatigable JK, has sent along a column by David French about “gun-violence restraining orders”, or GVROs. Mr. French argues that they are a plausible compromise between the community’s collective interest and the individual right guaranteed (not “granted”, mind you!) by the Second Amendment. Mr. French outlines some limitations that would, in his […]
February 22, 2018 – 1:03 pm
Last night CNN put on a televised “Town Hall” meeting on guns. I didn’t watch it, but from what I’ve heard my impression was that it was neither civil nor productive. (Astonishing, I know.) Charles Cooke comments on it, here. He calls it a “disaster for our discourse”. All comity and presumption of goodwill is […]
February 20, 2018 – 11:39 am
Here’s a article that asks the question: if Russian trolls are indictable for election-meddling as unregistered foreign agents, why not Christopher Steele? Why not, as criminal co-conspirators, Fusion GPS, Perkins Coie, the DNC, and the Clinton campaign?
February 19, 2018 – 8:20 pm
For those who would ban all guns in private hands — and I know many of you personally — some Q & A: What are arms for? They are power multipliers. Who has arms has power over those who do not. What does it mean to be sovereign? What is it that distinguishes the sovereign […]
February 18, 2018 – 7:42 pm
Nobody has written with more clarity on the web of intrigue surrounding Russia, the FISA court, the Mueller probe, election-tampering, possible abuses of power by the Obama-era FBI, DOJ, and IRS, and alleged “collusion” than the former Federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy. His latest column explores, with lucidity and detail, the difference between a criminal investigation […]
February 8, 2018 – 7:14 pm
Back in late November of 2016, the New York Times lamented, in its smugly named “Interpreter” column, that democracy was suddenly in danger around the world. (What might have happened around then that would have put them is such a frame of mind? I feel as if I’m forgetting something…) They called upon two boyish […]
February 7, 2018 – 2:09 pm
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has just released an interim report on its investigation into the skulduggery surrounding the Clinton email server. For your convenience, I’ve saved a copy here.
February 6, 2018 – 1:15 pm
Yesterday’s post was a look at the tension and strife afflicting present-day America. In a comment, reader ‘Magus’ said: Obligatory libertarian quote: if the Constitution/US political framework set up by founders was unable to prevent the current state of affairs it was either complicit in it or failed to stop it. Either way, it was […]
February 5, 2018 – 3:56 pm
It is hardly possible to be a sentient being in the United States without observing that we are engaged an a great struggle for power. Politics always involves such wrangling, and of course our system of government was designed with that in mind, but in these last decades several trends, moving in one direction only, […]
February 2, 2018 – 10:39 pm
So, the Memo’s been published. “The mountain has labored, and brought forth a mouse.” Sure, there are damning things in it — notably that the FISA petitioners at the FBI and DOJ knew the Steele dossier to have been a highly questionable political hack-job, paid for by the DNC and the Clinton campaign (pardon the […]