Roger Kimball

Roger Kimball

Roger Kimball is a US columnist for The Spectator, the publisher of Encounter Books and the editor and publisher of the New Criterion.

Tuesday

Roger Kimball

Trump’s big Iowa win spells the end for Ron DeSantis

From our UK edition

Until now, the person who won the Iowa caucus by the largest margin was Bob Dole back in 1988 - by 12 points. A ray of hope that the Nikki Haley contingent and the Ron DeSantis faction harboured was that even though Trump was likely to win, perhaps he wouldn’t win convincingly. An achievement they understood — history and Bob Dole be damned — to be 50 per cent of the vote. If he won less than that — by 40 per cent, say — they could claim that he won by a 'disappointing' result.

Monday

Roger Kimball

Trump trounces everyone in Iowa

Numbers are mysterious things. According to orthodox Roman Catholicism, there are instances in which 3 = 1. You might get by with that formula in your theology seminar. Don’t try it in your arithmetic class. Unraveling the reason why both might be right would take me far afield. But since numbers are in the air tonight — the night of the Big Deal Iowa Caucus Race — I thought I would remind you that numbers, and the reality behind them, can be mysterious. In the run up to the Caucus, lots of pundits put on their best owlish eyeglasses and explained that even though Iowa had only forty delegates to send to the Republican National Convention, it was nevertheless important because it was the first contest in the primary season.

iowa

Wednesday

Roger Kimball

Claudine Gay was bad for Harvard, but Harvard is bad for the country

I advise you to have a bottle of Dramamine on hand before reading Claudine Gay’s nauseating missive announcing her resignation as president of Harvard University. “It has been distressing,” she (or perhaps it was someone else) wrote, “to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor — two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am — and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.” “Confronting hate”? “Upholding scholarly rigor”? “Racial animus”? Puh-leeze!  Gay had a chance to “confront hate” when the pampered panty-waist radicals at Harvard demonstrated in favor of Hamas. She didn’t.

Friday

Roger Kimball

When will Harvard give Claudine Gay the boot?

You are probably almost as sick of hearing about Claudine Gay — as of this writing, still the president of Harvard University — as I am of writing about her. As I pointed out a year ago in this space, Harvard’s appointment of Gay, a black woman, was simply the next chapter in the university’s long-running pursuit of its racial spoils system. Gay’s entire academic career has been a testimony to the power of that enterprise. What a prize Harvard had in Claudine Gay: a black female who was an avid proponent of the whole “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” racket. Could there be any doubt that she was being groomed for the top slot?

claudine gay

Wednesday

Roger Kimball

The looming Lenin comeback

The year 2024 marks the centenary of Vladimir Lenin’s death. In April of that year, the consummate communist, having blighted as many lives as he could, finally shuffled off his mortal coil, aged fifty-three.“That was young,” you may say. But I reply, “Not nearly young enough.” As we embark on what is sure to be an eventful year, it is worth pausing to remember the hideous legacy of that ice-cold totalitarian. What I have in mind is not so much Lenin’s butcher’s bill as his more general modus operandi. Estimates of the number of people Lenin had tortured, maimed and murdered vary, but are always well into the millions. But what is somehow even creepier is his model of government.

lenin
madeira
Roger Kimball

Madeira, our onetime national drink

Does America have a national drink? It once did — not officially, quite, but in fact. And what was that national potation? Madeira. The wine, John Hailman writes in Thomas Jefferson on Wine, “symbolized to Americans a common patriotism and spirit of independence.” It was, he continues, the “mother’s milk of the American Revolution,” the “virtual national beverage after the Revolution.” Madeira was used to toast the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson dispensed it at his inauguration. Washington, Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin all loved the stuff. John Adams remarked that a few glasses of Madeira made anyone feel capable of being president.

Thursday

Roger Kimball

The disgraceful, ducking, diving, dodging college presidents

It was a clarifying moment, wasn’t it? The presidents of MIT, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania testifying for the House Education Committee about the wave of rabid antisemitism on their campuses. Representative Elise Stefanik of New York asked the same question of UPenn’s Liz Magill, MIT’s Sally Kornbluth and Harvard’s Claudine Gay. Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your campus’s rule of conduct, yes or no? That was the question.  You might think it was a pretty simple question.

college presidents

Monday

Roger Kimball

Vivek is right: America is devolving into tyranny

Many commentators (including yours truly) have pointed out that America is divided more now than it has been since the late 1850s and the run up to the Civil War. But as usual, I may have understated the case.  That, anyway, is what Vivek Ramaswamy would say. In a remarkable, just-published interview with Tom Klingenstein, Ramaswamy several time insists that we are not in a pre-war situation. It’s worse than that. “We are,” he insists, “absolutely in a war with the fate of the country at stake.” Hyperbolic? I don’t think so. The war, he acknowledges, could and likely will get worse. But we can already see the troops deployed and the battle lines drawn.

vivek ramaswamy

Tuesday

Roger Kimball

Hamas and retaking higher education

Maybe there is something for which we have to thank Hamas after all. That savage terror group epitomizes the latest form of murderous, antisemitic brutality. The world — most of it — has been sickened and appalled by the spectacle of burnt, mutilated and headless corpses. Aiming at maximum shock, the terrorists made no distinction between young and old, male and female, Israeli and foreign national. Among susceptible souls in the academy and other ideological fever swamps, however, a familiar moral perversion instantly came to the fore. The weasel word “but” was conscripted and put to work early and often. Without warning, Hamas attacked and murdered Israelis. Yet somehow the Israelis are to blame, or half to blame, or at least complicit in the slaughter.

education
Sherry
Roger Kimball

A very Sherry Christmas

Early on in his classic Notes on a Cellar Book, the literary scholar George Saintsbury writes that “no reasonable person should quarrel if we begin with Sherry, even as the truly good and wise usually do at dinner.” That was in 1920. Can you imagine anyone writing that today? The answer is no. But that only tells us how fickle are the revolving fashions of taste. For us, Sherry is an antique taste, quaint if not fusty. By and large it’s something that maiden aunts drink between knitting projects and jumble sales. At its best, Sherry has a fading academic aroma. When I was in graduate school, I had a semester-long tutorial on Plato with the eminent Platonist Robert Brumbaugh.

Wednesday

Roger Kimball

Why Trump’s rally mattered more than the GOP debate in Miami

Do you believe in coincidences? I used to. But like Macbeth I have just “supped full with horror.” That is, I have been flipping back and forth between the glitzy but pointless Republican debate in Miami and Donald Trump’s rally in nearby Hialeah, Florida.  And here’s Exhibit One in my brief against coincidences: my office reading group is just now, as I write, reading Dante’s Inferno. Yes, could there be any more apposite reading?  I am going to take a page here from that priest W. H. Auden talked about who advised the people who came to him for confession to “be brief, be blunt, and be gone.” An admirable imperative which I intend to obey.

debate

Friday

Roger Kimball

The changing season brings a change in politics

If you are paying attention, you know that nature is full of inklings and adumbrations. I am writing in New England in mid-September — and it was just about a week ago that a subtle change in the atmosphere proclaimed the advent of autumn. It was not just that the weather listed cooler; it was also that the entire sensory gestalt shifted. The world suddenly bristled with different smells and colors and sounds. Browns and yellows and reds were edging out summer greens in the leaves. The roads were carpeted with acorns. You knew that the world was confronting you with different prospects and expectations. Something similar happens in the world of politics. For a long time, a certain narrative reigns.

signs
nunes
Roger Kimball

New wines from Devin Nunes

What’s the next big thing in California wine? Everyone knows about the great Cabernets and Chardonnays of Napa. Most people would say that Sonoma is a close runner-up, with some excellent Cabs and Chards and Pinot Noirs, especially in the Russian River Valley. There are Zinfandels, the original plus-size wine, which is the sort of thing people like who like that sort of thing. But let’s travel south to the Central Coast, between San Francisco and Los Angeles. There is plenty of good (if not great) Cabernet and Chardonnay there as well. But the region is perhaps best known for Rhone-style, Syrah-favoring wines. Get ready for something new: some luscious red wines built largely around Touriga Nacional and Tinta Cão, two of the grapes used to make Port in the Douro region of Portugal.

Monday

Roger Kimball

Who or what are ‘the Palestinians?’

It’s so cute when politicians like AOC and Rashida Tlaib, to say nothing of hysteric undergraduates and ill-informed lefties across the country, complain that Israel is an “apartheid state” that is illegitimately “occupying” the land West of the Jordan River from the Golan Heights down to the border of the Sinai Peninsula.  Responding to the murderous attacks on Israeli civilians by Hamas on October 7, AOC decried “the occupation of Palestine” while Tlaib urged “ending the occupation, and dismantling the apartheid system” that can “lead to resistance.” Hermeneuts of the world, unite! What does Tlaib mean by “resistance” here? Slaughtering innocent partygoers? Incinerating and beheading babies?

palestinians

Friday

Roger Kimball

What does a ‘proportionate’ response to Hamas look like?

As the world stumbles through the fog of war following the savage attacks on Israel by Hamas last week, I thought it might be worth pondering two things.  First, since the news is full of headlines warning against Israel’s conducting a “disproportionate” response, I wonder what a “proportionate” response to the wholesale murder and mayhem perpetrated by Hamas would look like?  Second, I know that I am not alone in sensing that the attack, though brutal, was but the opening gambit of a plan whose origin and course is, as of this writing, still unknown to the public. As to the first, this was the strophe: on October 7, hundreds of Hamas terrorists suddenly and without warning swarmed across the border separating the Gaza Strip and Israel.

gaza proportionate hamas

Friday

Roger Kimball

What’s going on in the Republican party?

From our UK edition

23 min listen

Freddy speaks to Roger Kimball, editor of the New Criterion and columnist for The Spectator's US edition. After Kevin McCarthy was ousted as speaker of the House this week, they discuss why the Republican party is such a mess.

Wednesday

Roger Kimball

What hath Matt Gaetz wrought by tipping over the House apple cart?

What’s worse than chaos? How about a power vacuum? All the beautiful people are bewailing the ouster of Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House yesterday because it is supposedly “thrusting the House into chaos.”  Right on cue we have the New York Times skirling that “Far-Right GOP Faction Throws House Into Chaos.” Cant watchers: notice the deployment of the term “far-right” as an intensifier. Not only chaos but chaos from a source the Times can get away with castigating as far right. (Extra credit: would the Times describe a dramatic action by the Squad as “far left”? If not, why not?) On November 2, 1963, a CIA-instigated coup sparked the assassination of Vietnam president Ngô Đình Diệm. The trouble was, they had no one with whom to replace Diem.

matt gaetz

Friday

Roger Kimball

In Representative Victoria Spartz, a star is born

Merrick Garland’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday was a spectacular, if depressing, confirmation of something any sentient observer had noticed long ago: that the Department of Justice, and its head, Attorney General Garland, are horribly, egregiously compromised.  The outcome or upshot? That Garland should be impeached and removed from office and the DOJ itself should be put into the political equivalent of Chapter 11 so that its management can be replaced and its activities reorganized. As I say, this has long been obvious to any sentient observer. But Wednesday’s testimony put meat on the bones of this impending repudiation. Several Republicans put hard questions to the attorney general.

Tuesday

Roger Kimball

The Biden crime family is our own reality-TV mafia show

I have been meaning to weigh in on [cue scary music] Special Counsel David Weiss’s sham indictment of Hunter Biden on felony gun charges for a few days. I am glad I waited.  It’s not that I have changed my mind about the indictments, or company man Weiss. Everyone knows he is on the job as an interior decorator, whose primary task is to produce window dressing for the Department of Injustice so that its two-tier deployment of police power is not too obvious to the casual onlooker. Weiss has supposedly been investigating Hunter Biden for the last five years. Wouldn’t you know it, the statute of limitation on many of the tax charges is passing by like that herd of cows outside your train window even as I write.

Wednesday

Roger Kimball

Why dry Sauternes are the next big thing

It is my sense that the popularity of sweet wines like Sauternes, Port, Tokaji and all the German Auslese wines is on the upswing. I am here to tell you about the Next Big Thing: dry Sauternes. Yes, that’s right: dry Sauternes. The supersnazzy, superexpensive Château d’Yquem is the only Sauternes to boast the designation “Premier Cru Supérieur” from the 1855 classification of Bordeaux wines. That exclusive label — along with the probably apocryphal but oft-repeated story that Michel de Montaigne, born Michel Eyquem, had something to do with the property — helps account for its astronomical price. But Yquem has been making a blanc sec since 1959.