Politics Archives

Saturday

September 18, 2021

The ‘Justice for J6’ rally was a total dud

There used to be an old joke that there were more members of the FBI who were members of the American Communist party than there were actual believers in rule from Moscow. Something like that seems to have occurred with the much ballyhooed 'Justice for J6' rally in Washington DC. Justice, schmustice. Much as I had expected, almost no one rallied to the rally. A grand total of two people were arrested. Seldom has Washington seemed more peaceful. The notion that DC was about to be stormed may have given a lascivious pleasure to those liberals convinced that the enemy is not just at the gates but within them already. But that was never in the cards. Having been caught napping on January 6, there was no way a repetition of those sanguinary events would recur.

Friday

September 17, 2021

Phillip Nieto

J.D. Vance: Biden is unwilling to secure the southern border

All eyes are on the flyover state of Ohio as the fight for the future of Trumpism unfolds. In January, Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman announced he was bowing out of politics for good. His vacancy has set up a rare primary between two candidates offering two different versions of Donald Trump's amorphous ideology. One believes the former president's rhetoric should assimilate with bygone Tea Party-era politics and contemporary culture war talking points. The other is running on the populist rollercoaster that slung Trump into the White House. Rust Belt boy wonder Josh Mandel, who served in the statehouse and was state treasurer for almost a decade, touts a pro-Trump campaign 'to protect the Judeo-Christian bedrock of America.

Teresa Mull

David Frum is wrong: guns save lives and sustain communities

The debate over guns in the United States could, until recently, be divided into two extreme camps: the liberal elites (invariably protected by armed guards) who call for ever-more restrictive control of firearms, the basic functionality of which they cannot even begin to explain, and the uber-conservative right, for whom guns are a way of life and are ofttimes life-sustaining. David Frum is evidently of the first faction, writing in the Atlantic this month about how 'Responsible Gun Ownership Is a Lie.' Gun sales — especially among first-time gun buyers — surged between 2019 and 2020, and continue to smash records. This trend has Frum worried.

Thursday

September 16, 2021

Bridget Phetasy

Worse than porn

I never wanted any of this. I came to Los Angeles like any broken, lost 19-year-old searching for fame and fortune, running from myself, my past and my family. As I made a beeline for the West Coast a mere six months after getting out of rehab for heroin addiction, I daydreamed about what my life would look like. I envisioned myself sitting on the deck of my Malibu beach home, idly flipping through scripts after my morning yoga session. Against the backdrop of the mighty Pacific, I would eat mango, listen to the waves, watch dolphins and smoke that sweet California weed. A superstar must always flip through scripts idly. I wanted to be a superstar.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

A Cheney imperiled

Kemmerer, Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney has the political brain of a sucked egg, as her egregiously self-destructive decision to join her Democratic colleagues in voting to impeach President Trump following the events at the US Capitol on January 6 showed. In terms of personability and charm, Cheney is the Republican equivalent of Hillary Clinton. And in a state with a population of 581,024 people spread across 97,914 square miles where politics has always been something like a family affair, she is very much an outsider, even a stranger. Born in Madison, Wisconsin, she lived in the Cowboy State for only a year or so when she was a sixth- and seventh-grade student in the 1970s.

Addison Del Mastro

The patriotism of CNN’s ‘magic wall’

It’s becoming spooky season, by which I mean not Halloween but elections — at least in Virginia and New Jersey, which have gubernatorial races. They are, incidentally, two of the three states I’ve lived in (I’m in Virginia now; the other one was Maryland). National elections have ceased to be fun for some time now, and I’m not sure my own state’s gubernatorial race is going to be much better. I’m supposed to choose between a washed-up former governor and a businessman-turned-political-neophyte who enthusiastically hawks his endorsement by the businessman-turned-political-neophyte who last occupied the White House.

Rupert Darwall

Afghanistan and climate change: the West’s twin failures

The West’s humiliation in Afghanistan has an older brother: climate change. As siblings, the two share characteristics, most obviously an inability to confront unwelcome facts. In Afghanistan, there was a large constituency led by the Pentagon invested in the mantra of proclaiming progress in the fight against the Taliban. Climate has its own industrial complex of NGOs, climate scientists, renewable energy lobbyists profiting from the energy transition, eager helpers in the media, and politicians posing as world saviors. Energy experts tell us renewable energy is cheaper than building new fossil fuel power stations. If they’re right, why did China build the equivalent of more than one large coal plant a week last year?

Wednesday

September 15, 2021

Matthew Continetti

Joe Biden’s Swamp

President Biden told Americans to expect an era of unity and normality after four years of disruption. What they got was a chief executive unable to cope with the overlapping crises of the coronavirus pandemic, consumer price inflation, illegal immigration, crime and a botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. Yet there is one thing that Biden has restored to good working order: the DC gravy train. In Biden’s Washington, well-connected liberal Democrats in the influence industry have no problem enriching themselves. The world is a mess but the Swamp is as fetid as ever. Not long after taking office, Biden issued an executive order restoring and strengthening the government ethics provisions that had been in force under President Obama. He banned gifts from lobbyists.

Roger Kimball

The great unraveling

The smart money says that Donald Trump will not run in 2024. The smarter money says that he might, but that he shouldn’t because he’s too old and too divisive. I have no accounts at either of those depositories, so am not going to participate in that panel discussion. Instead, I propose to make a few obvious points. If they’re obvious, why make them? Because the obvious is not always so obvious. René Descartes is widely detested by all the clever people, for whom ‘Cartesian’ is term of snobbish contempt. I think Descartes was a great genius but one who was wrong about a couple of important things. No, I do not mean what he says about ‘extended substance’, the ‘Cogito’ or any of his other epistemological and metaphysical flights.

Matt Purple

Jeopardy! is in trouble

THIS...iiiiiis Jeopardy! And it’s time now for today’s final answer. This pack of gibbering monsters is witlessly tearing down everything that’s good and decent about our society. What is us? All of us. The vicious and grievance-obsessed people we’ve become. Jeopardy! is that rarest of American traditions, one that really hasn’t changed. The quiz show has remained a granite bulwark against the pop-cultural tides: same sober presentation and aesthetic, same challenging questions and unforgiving pace. There are no blazing graphics, no CGI car chases through downtown Montpelier during the ‘State Capitals’ category. There hasn’t even been a crossover with the Real Housewives — ‘Bitch, the largest fossil-fuels producer in Central Asia isn’t Uzbekistan!

Stephen L. Miller

No one elected Mark Milley

A coup by any other name and maybe even a little light treason. Those are the accusations flying over revelations in a new Bob Woodward book about what Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley did after the January 6 Capitol riots. Milley reportedly held several phone calls shortly after January 6, with both Speaker Nancy Pelosi and with his counterpart in China. According to Woodward, the general gave assurances to Gen. Li Zuocheng that he would alert the Chinese to any possible coming attack, nuclear or otherwise. There is no evidence President Trump was planning any kind of strike against China, or Iran, or Florida. No battle plans were being drawn. Miller supposedly took these actions after Trump signed an executive order removing US forces from Afghanistan.

John Fund

Democrats reluctantly backed Newsom: ‘It was more like taking out the trash’

In August, polls showed that Gavin Newsom’s chances of surviving a recall were slipping away. Many Democrats were so apathetic and Republicans so fired up that in a low-turnout election, the nation’s largest Blue State might indeed oust its liberal governor. Democrats went to work. Leading Democrats from President Joe Biden to Vice President Kamala Harris to Sen. Bernie Sanders all painted the recall as a 'life or death’ battle to preserve liberal values and fight 'Trumpism’ and extremism. Larry Elder, the leading Republican in the simultaneous election to pick a successor to Newsom should the recall succeed, was turned into a boogeyman with a Los Angeles Times columnist actually calling him 'the black face of white supremacy’. The strategy worked.

Phillip Nieto

Gavin Newsom won in California, but so did Trumpism

The California dream turned into a nightmare for Republicans on Tuesday night after a blowout victory saved the formerly embattled Gov. Gavin Newsom. Instead of licking their wounds in silence, however, Republicans are eating their own. From the day he took office in 2018, conservatives were seeking to oust Newsom. The former mayor of San Francisco's lockdown orders gave life to their efforts. Out of all the scandals in which elected officials broke their own quarantine mandates, Newsom's power meal at the French Laundry restaurant with state lobbyists in Napa Valley was by far the most infamous. It gave Republicans enough ammo to push the recall over the 1.5 million signature requirement, thanks also in part to a four-month extension to the deadline.

Tuesday

September 14, 2021

Cockburn

A sober evening at the 2021 Bradley Prizes

Cockburn’s invite to the Met Gala must have gotten lost in the mail — so instead he spent Monday night in Washington at the 2021 Bradley Prizes. Well-heeled guests sauntered into the National Building Museum, a rare building in downtown DC that has yet to be ceded to the homeless, or worse, the federal government. The night’s honorees were Federalist senior editor and Fox News mainstay Mollie Ziegler Hemingway, Roger R. Ream, chairman of The Fund for American Studies, and the author Amity Schales. The Bradley Foundation is a Milwaukee-based conservative foundation that, according to its website, 'envisions a nation invigorated by the principles and institutions that uphold our unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'.

Alexander Larman

The smug self-satisfaction of the Met Gala

Oscar Wilde said, of the death of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop, that ‘you would have to have a heart of stone to read...without laughing.’ It was hard not to feel the same way today, as pictures of last night’s Met Gala were released to a curious international public. The point of the event, where tickets sell for a suitably jaw-dropping $30,000, is nominally to raise money for selected good causes, and to mark the opening of the museum’s major costume exhibition. Yet every year, the invited celebrities become more absurd, and their outfits more demonstrative and performative.

Dominic Green

In defense of AOC’s Met Gala dress

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez looked radiant on the red carpet at the Met Gala. She looked elegant too, at least until she turned around. But this is show business. And that, after the last 18 months, is reassuring: this is still America. Also still American is the message that she delivered at the Met through the medium of a decorated wedding dress. It’s an important one, about class and the future of this country. And no one in politics since Donald Trump is better placed to deliver it. Ocasio-Cortez is proof that the prosperity gospel lives. Like an old-time starlet equipped only with moxie and a major in Theater Studies, she has risen to the top. It is only right that she shares her success with her public, just as the stars of the Depression years shared theirs.

John Fund

California’s Wild West versus Canada’s security

Some conservatives did themselves no favors by exaggerating the threat of election irregularities in California’s Tuesday recall election. Tomi Lahren of Fox Nation claimed on air that: 'The only thing that will save Gavin Newsom is voter fraud.’ A New York Times news story promptly labeled concerns about the election as 'baseless allegations’. But regardless of the recall outcome — which Gov. Newsom is favored to survive — we shouldn’t dismiss concerns about the shift California and other states have made to all mail-in elections at the expense of the traditional secret ballot. Two electorates in places with some 40 million people each — California and Canada — will vote this month.

Monday

September 13, 2021

Stephen L. Miller

A tale of two media standards for governors

Almost no topic shows our media's complete disconnect from reality than the national coverage of governors over the past year with regard to the COVID-19 pandemic. While flooding their viewers with stories of coronavirus failures about Ron #DeathSantis in Florida and Kristi Noem in South Dakota and Greg Abbott in Texas, the press consistently praised the work of Andrew Cuomo of New York and Gavin Newsom in California. The reality on the ground could not be more different. The two most prominent faces of the Democratic response to COVID (with Gretchen Whitmer being the third) have found themselves humiliated and disgraced. Both may end up out of power thanks to their personal and professional behavior of the past year.

James Panero

Hunter Biden, artist of modern life

Why do we keep hearing about Hunter Biden? Why is this disgraced political son and aspiring amateur pornographer now making art? Why must we even contemplate his creations? The reason is that much of our culture — at least its sanctioned, outward-facing elements — now operates ‘against nature’. I refer to that 1884 novel by the Symbolist author Joris-Karl Huysmans. À Rebours, known in English as Against Nature, is the book in which French literature dispensed with naturalism and its common-man struggles, and instead gave voice to the rot of the elite. Before we dwell on Biden fils, let us briefly revisit Jean des Esseintes, the main character of Against Nature. He is the withered end of a once noble family.

John Meroney

Life in LA is murder

It was a punch in the face, followed by a thick spray of blood. Then another punch, another victim. More blood. I was witnessing a random assault on two elderly tourists in broad daylight. A man walked up to a couple, hit the woman so hard she fell to the ground bleeding and when the husband stepped forward to protect her, he too was pummeled. ‘I saw what you did!’ I yelled as the assailant fled. I called 911 and followed him through a parking garage and onto a side street. In a few minutes, police arrived and apprehended the man. As rescue workers attended to the victims, an officer asked if I would testify in court. I agreed and watched as the attacker was handcuffed and removed.