Liberals

Monday

Roger Kimball

What the left calls ‘chaos,’ the rest of us call ‘winning’

They never learn, the libs. Back in 2016, they provided hours of entertainment assuring themselves that Donald Trump would “never be president” (“take it to the bank,” said Nancy Pelosi, who in another galaxy, long, long ago was speaker of the House). Patriotic citizens, eager to instruct the public about the dialectic of hubris and nemesis, stitched together many joyful compilations of Hollywood celebrities, ditto-head news readers and Democratic politicians intoning that party line.  Then, after the impossible mutated into the inevitable and Trump was elected, the narrative shifted to “the walls are closing in on Donald Trump.” If it wasn’t Russia, Russia, Russia it was Stormy Daniels, putatively shady business deals or putative efforts at insurrection.

Monday

Amber Duke

The rise of BlueAnon

Someone call the disinformation police! Left-wing conspiracy theories and attempts to manipulate the media are spiraling out of control ahead of the 2024 election. From tall tales about former president Donald Trump staging his own assassination attempt to the lower-stakes speculation that Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance is wearing guyliner, “BlueAnon” has reemerged in a big way. BlueAnon is a blanket term coined by some conservatives to describe liberal and left-wing conspiracy theories. It intentionally rhymes with QAnon, the arguably better-known right-wing conspiracy, and mostly arose in response to what many regard as the Russian collusion hoax, the idea that Trump colluded with the Russian government to win the 2016 presidential election.

BlueAnon
climate
H.W. Crocker III

Why conservatives are happier than liberals

Ross Pomeroy, editor of RealClearScience, calls it “one of the most surefire findings in all of social psychology, repeatedly replicated over almost five decades of study: American conservatives say they are much happier than American liberals. They also report greater meaning and purpose in their lives, and higher overall life satisfaction.” Given their recent embrace of lockdowns and masking as a societal ideal, drag queens as role models, abortion as a good career move, and sanctions against “misgendering,” it might not surprise you that American liberals are much more prone to neurosis, depression, and anxiety, and, as one recent study cited by Pomeroy pointed out, “have become less happy over the last several decades.

Wednesday

Tristan Justice

Conservatives who complain about Bill Maher are missing the point

Every time Bill Maher goes viral for being a "non-woke" liberal, the conservative pundit class is eager to remind readers that Maher is not one of them. It’s a pedantic and pointless exercise, because Maher has never claimed to be.  Case in point, earlier this month, National Review published another piece in a long trilogy of tired conservative columns bitching about Maher acting as some sort of “leftist agent” because he “has always made his bed with the mainstream.” “As entertainment,” wrote culture critic Armond White, “Real Time has a limited audience of HBO subscribers, yet its clips serve as a crutch for conservative TV programs — those outlets too feckless to generate their own talking points but that are always following the lead of left-wing media.

bill maher

Tuesday

Stephen L. Miller

Nicholas Kristof tries to figure out who destroyed the West Coast

Like alcoholics, whenever a journalist has a moment, however brief, of political clarity to consider that perhaps they are the “baddies,” it should be commended. Such is the case with columnist and former candidate for governor of Oregon, Nicholas Kristof. Earlier this week, Kristof penned a piece in the New York Times titled, “What Have We Liberals Done to the West Coast?” and strained to defend his own political philosophy.

Wednesday

Matthew Walther

Why the new right is like the old left

F.H. Bradley, perhaps the most self-aware philosopher who ever lived, once dismissed metaphysics as “the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct.” Bradley (whose favorite pastime was using pictures of Gladstone for target practice with his revolver in his rooms at Merton College, Oxford) qualified his negative assessment of the intellectual life by pointing out that philosophy was itself one of those irrepressible instincts — a nicely circular way of putting it. This is more or less how I feel about journalism. I don’t expect anything from readers except the occasional quiet chuckle and a general sense of not having wasted their time. I am certainly not in the business of changing hearts and minds.

right

Monday

Daniel McCarthy

What conservatives lack

A famous passage in the preface to Lionel Trilling’s book The Liberal Imagination is widely quoted and just as widely misunderstood. Trilling, a Columbia University professor and literary critic, wrote that at the time — this was 1950 — that there was no articulate conservative or reactionary thought in America, only conservative or reactionary “impulses” expressed “in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” Trilling’s point was not to criticize conservatism but to set up an argument for his work as a literary critic. Liberals, Trilling argued, needed to be challenged; they had grown complacent in the absence of a vigorous conservatism to spotlight liberalism’s deficiencies.

Saturday

Teresa Mull

Is losing God making America miserable?

The number of Americans who believe in God has reached an all-time low, according to a Gallup survey that’s been tracking our nation’s “values and beliefs” since 1944. For a God fearin’ woman such as myself, it’s a disheartening statistic. But we are told never to abandon hope, and recent events — the Supreme Court rulings against abortion and in favor of prayer, a million swing voters switching their registrations to Republican, Keeping Up with the Kardashians finally airing its last season — betoken a more God-centered future. Gallup reports: The vast majority of US adults believe in God, but the 81 percent who do so is down six percentage points from 2017 and is the lowest in Gallup’s trend.

god

Thursday

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Conservatives and culture

"The liberal conception of society,” the political philosopher Kenneth L. Minogue wrote in The Liberal Mind, “is... determined by the moral and political policies of modern liberalism. It has only a tenuous connection with sociological description.” As well as, we must add, the political realities of the nation state in the twenty-first century. (Minogue’s book was first published in 1963.) Today, liberal policies are the emotional expression, translated into political terms, of liberals’ utopian aspirations toward the complete “inclusion” of every one of society’s “communities” on precisely equal terms. Liberals will not recognize that this goal can never be achieved, and that a multicultural nation is a plain contradiction in terms.

culture

Wednesday

Bill Zeiser

The left’s great Twitter evacuation

The smell of Musk is in the air, and it’s causing Twitter’s left-wing users to clear the room — or so they say. Their threats to vacate cyberspace started a few weeks ago as free speech absolutist Elon Musk, in short order, became the largest shareholder of the social media firm, was offered a seat on its board, declined that seat, and made an offer to buy the firm outright. They rose to a fever pitch yesterday, as Musk’s $44 billion offer to take the company private was accepted. Twitter’s liberal users buckled under the fear of unmoderated political discussion and even, perhaps, the return of the famously suspended Donald Trump.

Thursday

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.

liberal

Thursday

Rod Liddle

It’s not just the moon landings. Everywhere, the PC brigade is rewriting history

I remember the moon landing very well. I was nine years old. I can remember too my sense of outrage and disillusion. ‘This is a blatant violation of the moon’s dignity and sovereignty,’ I told my parents, as the astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong attempted to secure the US flag to the lunar surface. ‘An act of imperialistic, Zionist barbarism and a statement of intent from the American government that it intends to export its white supremacy throughout the known galaxy. You will note that no people of colour were chosen as astronauts, nor women, nor people with fibromyalgia.

moon landing