Politics Archives

Thursday

June 25, 2020

Bright lights, abandoned city

Joan Didion wrote that New York is a city only for the very rich, the very poor and the very young. That was in her cult classic 1967 essay ‘Goodbye To All That’, in which she created the farewell-to-New York genre. It’s a quote I carried with me through my twenties, from one grim apartment to the next, each smaller, farther out and more expensive than the last. This is simply the nature of the place, I told myself. If you don’t like it, move somewhere else. Many of us emerged from Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s luxury dictatorship in the aughts with a sense of battle fatigue.

Michael Tracey

Black Lives Matter is a state-backed religion

'Protest' often feels inadequate as a characterization for the public exhibitions that have erupted nationwide over the past several weeks. The term 'protest' carries a connotation of actions carried out in opposition to existing structures of power; hence, you 'protest' against forces that are arrayed against you (even if some municipal bureaucrat might have reluctantly granted you a permit). However, at least in many jurisdictions, events which were presented as 'protests' should more rightly be labeled as something along the lines of 'state-backed demonstrations.' For instance, in my otherwise sleepy hometown of Caldwell/West Caldwell, New Jersey, high-school students organized what turned out to be an astonishingly large protest march.

Peter Wood

The Great Self Hate

A group of children recently gathered one morning near the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument in Riverside Park. The adults in charge handed out brightly colored pieces of chalk and soon the sidewalk and plaza were cheerfully adorned with mottos such as Black Lives Matter, Black Trans Lives Matter, Tell Me Why the Police Need Tanks, Let Justice Roll Down, and — my favorite — Burn It Down. Burn down the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument? No need. New York City has had it roped off for years as it crumbles away. The 96-foot monument was in its time a tribute to the New York soldiers and sailors who fought for the Union during the Civil War. The cornerstone was laid in 1899 by Gov.

Wednesday

June 24, 2020

Ben Zeisloft

After BHAZ

Protesters tried to establish an autonomous zone between the White House and St John’s Episcopal Church on Monday. Law enforcement pushed the demonstrators out of Lafayette Park using pepper spray, quickly shutting down the ‘Black House Autonomous Zone’ and establishing a perimeter much farther away from the White House. The protesters also attempted to topple a statue of Andrew Jackson.By the next morning, law enforcement had set up a perimeter such that it was impossible to venture within a quarter mile of the White House from any direction. https://twitter.com/BenZeisloft/status/1275458551985483776?s=20 The police line in the middle of the newly dubbed Black Lives Matter Plaza was rather calm.

Matt Mayer

The right’s cannibalism problem

The right has a cannibalism problem. It gleefully attacks and eats its own. The left silently watches Republican after Republican do their dirty work for them. John Bolton is just the latest example of this problem. Sitting astride their high moral horses, establishment Republicans talk wistfully about the integrity of the presidency and the perceived damage Donald Trump’s personality and style are doing to it — as if Bill Clinton had not already defined the presidency downward.The left never attacks its own leaders in this way, which is why they’ve managed to enact far more of their policies over the last 30 years. The left knew that a morally repugnant Clinton allowed for the placement of thousands of political appointees who got their wish list done.

Will Lloyd

You say you want a revolution?

In the early hours of May 30, after a night of violent protests in New York, two lawyers were arrested by the NYPD. Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman, Princeton and Fordham graduates respectively, were charged with attempting to firebomb a police vehicle with a Molotov cocktail. Mattis and Rahman are now indicted on seven felony charges for which they could face life in prison. What drove two promising young professionals with top-flight educational credentials to risk everything like this? Gary Saul Morson, an expert on Russian literature at Northwestern University, offered an answer.

Andrew C. McCarthy

The rule of law is collapsing

It is the law that makes us 'the best of animals.' So saying, Aristotle had a very specific conception of justice in mind: 'The law is reason free from passion.' Committed to live under it, mankind is 'perfected.' There is, however, a flip side. 'When separated from law and justice,' as happens when passion overwhelms reason, mankind 'is the worst of all.' Which would make this the worst of times. The streets of America’s greatest cities are aflame. Some of it is anarchic. Most of it is methodical mayhem. Cultural Marxists are not merely desecrating statuary, they are erasing history. Naturally, this is done under the guise of ideals such as ‘anti-racism’, ‘anti-fascism’, and ‘equality’.

Tuesday

June 23, 2020

Michael Lind

The rioters and the rentiers

It was inevitable that the wave of destructive rioting and looting that has swept through cities that are almost all governed by progressive Democrats, triggered initially by outrage over the sickening death in police custody of George Floyd, would be compared to the American urban riots of earlier generations. But the parallels miss profound differences in the underlying economic and social dynamics. The Detroit and Newark riots of 1967 and the Los Angeles riot of 1992, for example, took place in cities suffering from the effects of deindustrialization. Los Angeles is not often thought of as a major manufacturing center, but Southern California had a flourishing aerospace industry that went into decline following the Cold War.

Monday

June 22, 2020

Amber Duke

Trump unveils sweeping immigration changes

President Trump will be signing an executive order and implementing a series of new regulations that will temporarily halt specific types of guest worker visas and make permanent changes to the H-1B visa program. In April, Trump signed an executive order preventing the issuance of new green cards for 60 days. The new order extends that guidance through December 31, 2020 and also temporarily suspends the issuance of new visas through the H-1B and H-2B programs, as well as some visas through the J-1 and L-1 programs. The order intends to lower foreign competition for the tens of millions of newly unemployed Americans during the economic shutdown resulting from the COVID-19 outbreak. The May unemployment rate dropped slightly to 13.3 percent from 14.

Roger Kimball

Teddy Roosevelt saw this mob coming

So now they have come for Teddy Roosevelt. The large bronze statue of TR on horseback, flanked by a black man and an American Indian, will be removed from the spot it has graced since 1940 in front of New York’s Museum of Natural History. Why? According to Warren Wilhelm Jr — known to some as Bill de Blasio — the statue is being moved (to where no one yet knows) ‘because it explicitly depicts Black and Indigenous people as subjugated and racially inferior.’ Does it? I don’t think so. I think both flanking figures exude strength and dignity. I also think they stand in solidarity with the jovially commanding figure of Roosevelt.

Douglas Murray

The new inequality

It is a strange habit, the American one of making talk-show hosts into preachers. There is no good reason, after all, why a comedian should be any kind of arbiter of morality or anything much else. Yet in America the court of public opinion accepts the right of the jester to preach the homily too. So it was that, in a period not short on ‘personal takes’ and celebrity messaging, one night in early June on his Late Late Show, James Corden delivered a teary monologue about race relations in America. Lots of people thought he did well, and praised Corden’s talk of ‘white guilt’ and all manner of other sins. But one phrase stood out for being especially bogus. It was a phrase that was widely quoted.

Sunday

June 21, 2020

Daniel McCarthy

Self-righteous vandals

Violent left-wing activists have taken to styling themselves as antifa, short for ‘anti-fascists’, though their street-fighting tactics resemble nothing so much as the Brownshirt thuggery practiced by fascists themselves. This did not stop NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson from likening these hooligans to the heroes of World War Two. On the anniversary of D-Day, June 6, while America’s cities still smoldered after days of riots and looting, Liasson took to Twitter to call the Normandy invasion the ‘biggest antifa rally in history’. Dumb jokes are nothing new on Twitter. For many liberals today, however, it’s no laughing matter.

John Zmirak

The conservative legal movement is dead

Imagine if Sonia Sotomayor, once she got on the Supreme Court, started ruling like Clarence Thomas. I know, I know, that’s like something out of The Twilight Zone or the Babylon Bee. But try to picture it. There’d be riots on the campus of every school she’d attended, and likely in DC, too. Democrats would drawing up articles of impeachment, and speaking of packing the court. And whatever social justice thinktank vets SCOTUS appointees for the Democratic National Committee would start chopping off heads. Scapegoats would be piling up on the unemployment line like pork chops at a slaughterhouse. But that’s precisely what just happened with Neil Gorsuch (and less, surprisingly, John Roberts) in the Bostock decision.

Friday

June 19, 2020

Stephen L. Miller

Gracious China allows athletes to speak out on social issues again

Even after China unleashed a viral pandemic on the planet, crashing the world economy and killing thousands, we all find ourselves in their debt. You see China has been magnanimous enough to let those who matter most in America finally begin to weigh back in on social and political issues: our beloved professional athletes.Remember when China stopped NBA players from speaking about what was happening in Hong Kong? That now seems a long time ago. This past week has seen a flurry of professional athletes finally stand up and speak out against a racist government and police brutality. At an Atlanta rally in the wake of the shooting of Rayshard Brooks, Atlanta Hawks head coach Lloyd Pierce spoke about the protest movements happening across the world. What about China?

Ben Zeisloft

Here’s some left-wing stuff we can cancel, too

‘What do we burn apart from witches?’ ‘More witches!’A pitchfork-and-iPhone-wielding diversity mob is running amok in major metropolitan areas and on social media, calling for the wholesale destruction of statues, monuments and institutions that mark the history of racism in the United States.In their efforts to build a more perfect union, the mob has so far succeeded in canceling Gone with the Wind, Aunt Jemima, police-themed Legos and thousands of average, working-class Americans. Thanks to these ‘stunning’ and ‘brave’ civil rights heroes, little black boys and girls in America will never again feel terrorized, oppressed, or microaggressed during Saturday morning pancakes or afternoon playtime.

Roger Kimball

Thank goodness for Hillsdale College

Did you go to college? If so, then it is overwhelmingly likely that you have been the recipient of a nauseating communication like this one from 'Maud' (that would be Maud S. Mandel, President of Williams College) explaining how Williams will 'confront and fight racial and social injustice.’ I hope that you are impressed by both Maud’s bravery and her virtue. In an earlier communication, just as the wave of violent hooliganism began rolling over the country at the end of May, she let us know that she is 'disgusted, saddened and angered by ongoing racism in all forms and places’ (every last one!). What a paragon she is! Maud then went on to 'state unequivocally’ (unequivocally!

Ben Sixsmith

Conservatives talk about cancel culture too much

If you are on the right I suspect you have heard leftists saying something like this: ‘Thousands of people are dying from coronavirus, the Chinese and Indians are fighting, young black men are being killed on the streets and all conservatives can talk about is “cancel culture”. What is up with that?’Well, in the past few weeks there have been attempts, many successful, to force people out of their jobs for discussing social science studies and genetic research, for saying all lives matter, for questioning whether the killing of George Floyd was racially motivated, for publishing a US senator’s opinion piece, for making edgy jokes, for refusing to ‘walk around with a BLM sign’, for wearing blackface to a Halloween party two years ago et cetera.

Dominic Green

Juneteenth is Trump’s chance to win in November

Of course June 19 should be a federal holiday. It’s not just the right thing to do: it’s also the smart thing to do. If Donald Trump doesn’t establish honoring the freeing of America’s black slaves in the national calendar today, then we’ll know that he’s asleep at the switch: too busy tweeting ‘LAW & ORDER’ in full caps, or nodding out in bed to Tucker, or incapable of leaving a mark on American life and politics any deeper than a divot left by his five-iron.Emancipation Day, which is what it should be called, would be a symbol, but also a statement of fact. It would acknowledge slavery, but also freedom.

Robert Cherry

Don’t defund the police: reform them

‘Nothing works if public space is unsafe,’ says the respected urban sociologist Patrick Sharkey. The ‘Defund the Police’ initiative demands deep structural changes. But are incremental reforms more likely to deliver safe and lawful policing to those who need it most?Reflecting on the prevalence of gun violence in many black communities, Sharkey writes:‘An expanding body of research has shown just how damaging violence is to community life, children’s academic trajectories and healthy child development. We have rigorous, causal evidence that every shooting in a neighborhood affects children’s sleep and their ability to focus and learn.

Thursday

June 18, 2020

Matt Mayer

I will not be silent

After the horrible death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, I started to grow increasingly uncomfortable by what I saw. I saw the legitimate grievances of African Americans who for too long have failed to see their lives improve. I saw virtue-signaling whites lecture the rest of us to do something. My heart grew heavy. I was told again and again that I had 'white privilege’; that America suffered from 'institutional racism’; that the original sin of slavery made the country I love so deeply flawed. I reached my boiling point as I drove my kids to meet up with friends where I shared my discomfort with the narrative being told about America. In the car, we talked about what's been happening.