Politics Archives

Tuesday

November 23, 2021

Why I (sort of) stopped using the word ‘woke’

The college campus-born elite ideology that has swept through American institutions in recent years has gone by many names, from “identity politics” and “multiculturalism” to “intersectionality” and “cultural Marxism.” The essayist Wesley Yang coined the phrase “successor ideology,” referring to the doctrine’s replacement of traditional left-liberalism as the hegemonic ideology of the American ruling class. “Critical Race Theory” has become a household name alongside a surge in grassroots resistance to cultural radicalism in public schools across the country. But no term of art has taken hold quite like “wokeness.

defund Protesters hold up signs on June 3, 2020

Amber Duke

The Democratic distraction

Ten months into Joe Biden's presidency, he finds himself sitting at the lowest approval rating of his time in office, most recently due to massive inflation and supply chain issues. The Democrats have a novel solution to their crumbling popularity: avoid tackling any of the actual issues facing American families, continue their political obsession with pinning the January 6 riot at the Capitol on former president Donald Trump. Democrats ignore the fact that the FBI found scant evidence that January 6 was some massive conspiracy and that some bad actors had already made their way to the Capitol building and were pushing down police barriers before Trump concluded his so-called "inciting" speech.

Oliver Wiseman

A bad time for bail reform

A badly timed call for bail reform On Monday, three House Democrats sent a letter to New York’s district attorneys asking for answers on what they describe as the prosecutors’ use of “excessive” bail in the city’s court system as well as ways to deal with unsafe conditions at the infamous jail on Rikers Island. “We have grave concerns that excessive bail amounts are leading to unnecessary pretrial detention,” said Carolyn Maloney, Jamie Raskin and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a joint statement. The timing of the announcement could hardly have been worse.

Christopher Sandford

Fifty years ago, D.B. Cooper changed air travel forever

I flew from Seattle down to Las Vegas the other day to watch the Rolling Stones in action. Great show, Kafkaesque journey. There are times in life when the miseries of the world threaten to engulf us, when the precariousness of the human condition, far from appearing a worthwhile and even noble struggle, seems an infinite rebuke. That’s the way I feel when I pass through a modern-day American airport. Many Spectator readers will be familiar with the ordeal. It was shortly after 6 a.m. when I boarded my outward flight, and my reporting skills perhaps weren’t at their best. Nonetheless, I made a note of some of the many exhortations, appearing in either written or spoken form, that enlivened the morning. Stand here. Look at the camera.

Chadwick Moore

Bill Maher is not your ally

On Friday night’s season finale of his weekly HBO chat show Real Time, Bill Maher encouraged Democrats to recruit a “messaging czar.” They need someone to point their party in the right direction, he insisted. “Vote Democrat because white people suck” isn’t working, Maher said. “I’d say, do the math, but math is a form of white supremacy,” he went on. Why do Democrats seem out of touch? Because “no one likes a snob” and “your microaggression culture doesn’t play well in the Rust Belt.” With each dig at the left — which, for conservative viewers, amounted to little more than tired memes and stale culture war ephemera — Maher’s audience erupted in applause.

Matt Purple

How cable news ruined Thanksgiving

Jim Acosta is an edgy, edgy man. You can tell because he uses the word "bullshit" on live TV, which in this year of our edgelord 2021 still retains a good 1 percent of its taboo. So it was that Acosta on CNN last week honored Tucker Carlson with his "Bullshit Factory Employee of the Year" award, which sounds like a throwaway joke Jon Stewart scribbled on a steno pad while off on an Ambien sleepwalk. The entire Acosta segment was unspeakably sad — and not just because he's supposed to be one of the more respected reporters at The Most Trusted Name in News™®©. It's because CNN's relationship to Fox has become one of clinically committable obsession. Its personalities are forever playing Fox clips and trashing them. And they're not the only ones.

Cockburn

Kyle Rittenhouse takes on his QAnon lawyers

Much of Tucker Carlson’s exclusive interview with Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager found not guilty in a high-profile homicide trial last week, went as Cockburn expected. Tucker largely let Rittenhouse tell his side of the story, running through the events of the bloody night last summer when Rittenhouse shot and killed two men and wounded a third. Tucker’s questions on the political dimensions of the case, something about which Rittenhouse has said very little until now, prompted the most interesting responses. “This case has nothing to do with race, it never had anything to do with race,” said Rittenhouse. “It had to do with the right to self-defense.” Rittenhouse also said: “I support the BLM movement. I support peacefully demonstrating.

Monday

November 22, 2021

Ben Sixsmith

Kid Rock conservatism

Kid Rock feels like he emerged from a time capsule left for us in the Nineties, perhaps along with Dunkaroos and the decaying corpses of the Simpsons, who were replaced with inferior clones around the dawn of the millennium. In those heady days of nu-metal, Jackass and the Attitude Era, bored suburbanites and neglected “rednecks” unleashed their frustrations into jubilantly crass and confrontational entertainment that turned the raising of a middle finger into a kind of sacred ritual. Mr. Rock's breakout hit “Bawitdaba” hailed “the topless dancers” and “the...heroes at the methadone clinic,” and scorned “the crooked cops” and “all you bastards at the IRS.” Both he invited to, well, “Bawitdaba da bang da bang diggy diggy diggy.

Oliver Wiseman

Biden picks Powell

Biden picks Powell After months of umm-ing and ahh-ing, Joe Biden this morning announced that he will nominate Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell to a second term at the helm of the central bank. The move is designed to reassure. At a time when prices, and economic anxiety, are on the rise, Biden has opted for a known quantity: the Trump appointee who has helped steer the US economy through an uncertain few years. Progressives had been pushing Biden to replace Powell with Lael Brainard, a Fed board member who had criticized some of Powell’s moves as governor. Among her most vocal supporters was Elizabeth Warren, who has called Powell a “dangerous man.

Sunday

November 21, 2021

Gilbert T. Sewall

John McWhorter versus the progressive elect

In his timely new book Woke Racism, Columbia linguistics professor John McWhorter examines the force of an ascendant political religion that to his mind “has betrayed black America.” “White privilege becomes the original sin that requires perpetual atonement,” McWhorter observes. Woke rebukes white America for its passive, unpardonable complicity within a fundamentally racist system. One is cleansed only through self-mortification. According to McWhorter, a multi-racial Elect thinks of itself as a bearer of exclusive wisdom and empathy. Woke positions itself against the white race, men, Christianity, capitalism and private property, heterosexuality — in other words, against people, institutions, belief systems and worldly activities at the nation’s core.

Saturday

November 20, 2021

Bethany Mandel

Saving children’s books from wokeness

There is something deeply sinister happening in the world of children’s literature. Whereas the children’s section at your local library or bookstore was once filled with fables and fairy tales, it's now filled with titles like The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish and Race Cars: A Children’s Book About White Privilege and How Mommas Love Their Babies featuring wholesome lines like “Some mommas dance all night long in special shoes. It’s hard work!” The illustrations accompanying that page are an outdoor shot of a strip club at night, with glowing neon lights and a woman protesting for fair wages for strippers. This is a recent tweet from the author: https://twitter.com/juniperfitz/status/1458215711805956101?

Dominic Green

Kyle Rittenhouse is still no hero

Kyle Rittenhouse did nothing wrong in law, but this does not mean he did the right thing in going armed to Kenosha. Much of the right is celebrating him as a patriot for taking arms against a sea of troubles, and as a poster child for the Second Amendment. He is neither. He is a liability for both of those causes. The right to bear arms is just that: a legal right. Choosing to bear them publicly is another matter: an ethical choice. Rittenhouse’s defense was that he was legally innocent because he was ethically innocent. Despite growing up with guns, he seems to have been unaware of the adult commonplace about bearing them: if you produce a weapon, you should be prepared to use it.

Taylor Millard

Yes, Build Back Better will raise the deficit

The fate of the Build Back Better plan is now in the hands of the Senate. The House approved the gargantuan $1.85 trillion bill on Friday despite efforts from Republicans to delay the vote. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy played the role of Rand Paul or Ted Cruz, railing against the legislation in an over eight-hour-long speech. The Associated Press suggests that McCarthy viewed his talk-a-thon as an opportunity to show his conservative bona fides should Republicans take control of the House in 2022 and he decide to push for the speakership. “This is a tipping point,” McCarthy said on Friday morning as he wrapped up the speech. “This is a point of not coming back. The American people have spoken, but unfortunately, the Democrats have not listened.” Which Americans?

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Does Liz Cheney want to be a Republican?

Last weekend, the Wyoming GOP Central Committee voted not to recognize Liz Cheney as a member of the Republican Party by a margin of 31-29, a vote that was much closer than those taken in some county committees, a number of which made the unanimous decision to disavow her. The action does nothing to reduce Cheney’s power and position as Wyoming’s sole congressional representative, and in any case it seems increasing likely that the lady no longer cares what her constituency Way out West thinks of her. Last weekend Cheney, together with Representative Jim Clyburn, the House Majority Whip, and Chris Wallace of Fox News, each accepted a Jefferson-Lincoln Award bestowed by the Panetta Institute for Public Policy on Dr. Wallace’s Sunday show.

Friday

November 19, 2021

Amber Duke

Justice for Kyle Rittenhouse

The fundamental right to self-defense won today. A jury in Kenosha acquitted teenager Kyle Rittenhouse on all counts related to allegations that he murdered rioters who attacked him. The prosecution’s case rested on the insane lie that legally carrying a firearm is an incitement to violence. Rittenhouse, they argued, was akin to an active shooter and thus deserved Joseph Rosenbaum, Anthony Huber and Gaige Grosskreutz chasing him, trying to take his rifle, hitting him in the head with a skateboard and pointing a handgun at his head.

Kyle Rittenhouse reacts to "not guilty" verdict (Getty Images)

Oliver Wiseman

Kevin McCarthy’s magic minute

A magic minute and magic maths Why did House minority leader Kevin McCarthy deliver a speech that lasted a whopping eight and a half hours last night? After all, his filibuster will not stop the House from passing the Democrats’ $1.75 trillion social spending bill, which will be voted on shortly after lawmakers reconvene this morning. But in much the same way people don’t run marathons to get from A to B, McCarthy’s demonstration of rhetorical stamina was designed to prove a point. “I am a fighter” was the intended message and the GOP caucus was the intended audience. For McCarthy wants the Republicans to win back control of the House next year, and he wants to be the one handed the speaker’s gavel if they do.

Peter Van Buren

The selfish and cynical ‘resistance’

It's bad enough when someone actually thinks reposting an "I Stand With..." meme is an act of woke resistance. But when the problem is enlarged to a societal scale, it hurts us all. Nothing actually broken ever gets fixed, and a deep sense of cynicism is injected into once-believers when they realize they've been conned. We live inside a con job where the appearance of action is mistaken for action. So we are left to wonder about the point, other than setting the stage for more future cynicism, of the Google "doodle" this past Veteran's Day. The illustration showed various vets, all appropriately racially ratioed, drawn half in uniform and half in civilian garb. One's a painter, one's a baker, and the Marine is shown as trans.

Matt Purple

Congress: worst anime ever

Yes, yes, I know Congress has a lot to worry about these days. But have you seen the anime edit videos? Over now to Crazytown's favorite son, Congressman Paul Gosar, who this week found himself on the butt end of a censure hearing. His crime? He had retweeted an anime video that depicted a likeness of himself killing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with a sword before also attacking Joe Biden. This was, according to the scrupulously nonpartisan Nancy Pelosi, an "emergency," worthy of a criminal probe, and possibly a threat to the republic as we know it. We're 100 words in and already you may be thinking: what in God's name is wrong with the United States Congress? If so, be assured that this is a perfectly healthy rumination and one you should keep repeating on a near-constant basis.

Thursday

November 18, 2021

Matt McDonald

Infrastructure Republicans aren’t ‘traitors’

Are you a Republican — or did you vote for the infrastructure bill? That’s the binary choice offered to House GOP members by the right-wing of the party. The thirteen representatives who voted to pass the landmark legislation find themselves in the sights of not just their fellow members of Congress, like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Cawthorn, but also former president Donald Trump, whose list of primary targets grows longer by the day. In a Saturday email, Trump called for “good and SMART America First Republican Patriots to run primary campaigns” against both the members who’d voted for the infrastructure bill and the members who had voted to impeach him for causing the January 6 storming of the Capitol. “You will have my backing!” he asserted.

Alexander Larman

How Meghan Markle wins the White House

In October, Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, made her most significant political intervention to date. She marked her fortieth birthday by writing an open letter “as a mom” to Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, and asked Congress to legislate for paid family leave for new parents. Markle may have thought she was pushing at an open door: the Democrats were striving to include paid family leave in the Build Back Better Act. But this may not be the only open door Meghan is pushing at. Seasoned observers will notice the Markle trademarks in the letter. There is the folksy appeal to her humble heritage: “I grew up on the $4.99 salad bar at Sizzler... I knew how hard my parents worked to afford this because even at five bucks, eating out was something special, and I felt lucky.