April 29, 2024

Peter Beinart vs. Israel and the Jews

The effect of the October 7 atrocity and its aftermath upon Jews in the United States is the ostensible topic of Peter Beinart’s recent op-ed in the New York Times, “The Great Rupture in American Jewish Life.” Actually, Mr. Beinart ...

February 17, 2024

The Silent Radio: A Third Year Without Rush

A third year has passed since the death of Rush Limbaugh. The day of the sad news, millions of people were sensible of a loss. Something they depended on for reassurance, reinforcement, confidence, strength, amusement, and interest was now gone and n...

February 14, 2024

What Does an Insurrection Look Like?

As the 2024 election approaches, the Democrats are much concerned with what they call “insurrection.” They, of course, refer to the events at the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, a day that will live in political opportunism for the p...

November 6, 2023

About those Obama 'thoughts on Israel and Gaza'...

Among the many public declarations spawned by the October 7 Hamas attack upon Israel, none surely is of greater interest than President Barack Obama’s written statement of October 23.   Among many possible spokesmen for the contemporary...

September 5, 2023

Galston's Law: Misconstruing the 'Stop the Woke' Act

In a recent Wall Street Journal column, William Galston accuses Governor Ron DeSantis of perpetrating “indoctrination” in Florida’s state universities through the “Stop the Woke Act.” The part of the ...

September 27, 2022

Orban the Terrible and American Conservatism

Would it be an exaggeration to say that Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary is more often the object of censure by Democrats and NeverTrumpers than Communist China’s Chairman Xi? If that is the case, it is not because they particularly care ...

August 31, 2022

What Jonah Goldberg gets wrong on the Mar-a-Lago raid

It once again has become necessary that Mr. Jonah Goldberg, scholar, humorist, rationalist, and exemplar of moral consistency, bring to heel a rabidly partisan right-winger (Yearning for a Banana Republic).  The burden is thrust upon him by...

February 21, 2022

What Liz Cheney doesn't get about the Constitution

In her Wall Street Journal article titled "The Jan. 6 Committee Won't Be Intimidated," Congresswoman Liz Cheney advises us that the January 6 Select Committee upon which she sits is all about defending the Constitution. ...

September 29, 2021

Afghanistan: What Comes of Limited War

The recent disaster in Afghanistan, however spectacular, was part of a pattern, the pattern of failed American interventions since the Second World War. Previous misadventures might not have entailed needless bungling of the kind just displayed ov...

May 12, 2021

When Pundits Express Joy at Derek Chauvin's Conviction

Among the dalliances of the season, none so enraptured a certain kind of political commentator as the conviction on all counts of Officer Derek Chauvin.  To such authorities, it was not so much a trial as a ritual sacrifice to the god of ra...

February 5, 2021

The True 'Citadel of Democracy' Is Not the Capitol. It's You.

It would have been unremarkable had the events of January 6 been called simply a lawless and disturbing spectacle — an intrusion into the chambers of Congress by a mob with violent loss of life.  That, however, would not have served t...

July 4, 2020

Trump's Choice, and the Conflicting Voices from the Right

The cataract of disasters roiling the land in 2020 now has placed President Trump’s reelection in doubt. Present polling, at any rate, suggests that it is in doubt, although optimists remind us that similarly dire figures were broadcast and ult...

February 21, 2020

Dershowitz's Critics on the Right

The avalanche of denunciation that fell upon the head of Professor Alan Dershowitz after his address before the Senate’s impeachment proceeding was unsurprising.  In lending his stature and knowledge to the President’s defense, he, o...

December 28, 2019

Patriotism and 'Impartiality'

Is there a political virtue of ‘impartiality”?  If so, then with regard to what should we be impartial?  Could impartiality as to our country’s fate ever be right? Distinguished author and scholar Joseph Epstein says th...

September 16, 2019

An Atlantic Magazine Liberal's Jaw-Dropping Attempt to Redefine 'Conservative'

Andrew Sullivan is a "conservative," which represents a virtuous mean between the extremes of "liberal" and "reactionary."  He does not ever actually define "liberal," but a "conservative" i...

May 30, 2019

Donald Trump Is Fighting for Free Speech. Professors Who Hate Him, Take Note.

Hostility to conservatives and conservative speech is the rule today in American universities.  We therefore can take no solace in the fact that the school recently guilty of disgraceful behavior toward Harvard government professor Harvey M...

March 5, 2019

Why Does the NY Times Despise Moderates?

New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie finds "something odd about the self-described [Democrat] moderates and centrists considering a run for president."  Initially, Mr. Bouie suggests that "'moderatio...

February 11, 2019

The Devil and Ross Douthat

A recent piece by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, “The Covington Scissor," presents a dialogue between him and a mysterious Voice, which he finds “devilish,” though it claims to be his conscience, and which culminates in...

November 20, 2018

The 14th Amendment and the Constitution

Is anyone born on American soil a citizen, even if his mother entered the country illegally for the specific purpose of giving birth there? There are sufficient voices, including some nominally conservative, answering in the affirmative....

October 21, 2018

Liberals Need to Stop Calling for War

New York Times columnist Charles Blow delivers a genuine polemic, a "warlike speech," in reaction to the confirmation of Justice Kavanaugh.  Apart from the declaration of hostilities in the title of the piece, it concludes with th...

November 13, 2017

George W. Bush Finally Criticizes Another President

Some weeks ago, former President George W. Bush delivered a speech attacking the incumbent president, Donald Trump, and his supporters.  That was the “unmistakable” thrust of Mr. Bush’s remarks, in the apprehension of virtually...

October 12, 2017

On the 'Vulgar Manliness' of Donald Trump

In “The Vulgar Manliness of Donald Trump,” Harvard Professor of Government Harvey Mansfield depicts the President as a demagogue -- precisely the sort of crass figure whose rise to power the Founders wished to forestall.  The theoret...

August 30, 2017

Doctor Krauthammer's Peculiar Guardrails

In general, the only view that liberal and conservative commentators share today is perturbation about the country and its future.  For liberals, the shocking anomaly in our national life has the name of a man: Donald Trump.  For conservati...

August 7, 2017

The 'Independent Thinkers' Who All Oppose Trump

American conservatism was riven by the Trump candidacy, and it remains so in the first year of his administration.  Things indeed were made worse by the "collusion with the Russians" inquisition, which imperils the new presidency nearl...

March 20, 2017

Do liberals really condemn the Middlebury outrage?

The suppression by force of Dr. Charles Murray's planned address at Middlebury College, Vermont was an event so vile, so inimical to academic freedom and the governance of reason, that several prominent liberals have felt compelled to write in co...

December 31, 2016

Trump, the New York Times, and the Constitution: Who Needs an Education?

Freedom of speech is a topic upon which liberal thinking is perhaps a little idiosyncratic.  Leftists – the current attorney general of the United States being only one example – call rioting protest and invoke the First Amendment. ...

November 25, 2016

Our Betters: Trump Must Now Exercise 'Magnanimity' toward Democrats

It is November, and the air reverberates with cries for unity and bipartisanship.  The Republicans must have won an election.  Sentiments such as "I won" and "You ran the bus into the ditch, so now sit in the back seat and be...

October 26, 2016

Another Time for Choosing

Fifty-two years ago this month, Ronald Reagan made a speech in which he said the following: Our natural, inalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation of government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from o...

October 5, 2016

Of Prudence and Principle: Ted Cruz Endorses Donald Trump

How do you tell whether someone in public life acts out of moral principle or cynical pursuit of his own advantage? Is it at all a complicated matter? Does it require thought on what motivates a genuine statesman, and how the intention to do good mus...

June 25, 2016

The Fractured Conservatism of Yuval Levin

The Fractured Republic (2016, Basic Books), by Yuval Levin, presents a view of contemporary American civilization and the historical stages that most recently preceded it.  The book is much acclaimed.  John Podhoretz  pronounces it the...

May 14, 2016

Peggy Noonan's Trump Tears

In her recent column, "That Moment When 2016 Hits You," Peggy Noonan issues something of a lament for the nation.  The current presidential election represents a unique, a seminal episode in our political history, and in no good sense ...

April 13, 2016

In Defense of the Voters...Even if Trump Is Winning

Should the success of Mr. Donald Trump in the Republican nomination contest make us despair of our people's capacity to govern themselves?  That seems to be the implication of certain writings by nominally conservative authors in recent mont...

January 23, 2016

Michael Gerson, Trump-basher, and the soul of the Republican Party

In a recent Washington Post column, Former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson warns that should Republican voters so disregard his counsel as to nominate Donald Trump, it “would rip the heart out of the Republican Party.”  By...

January 3, 2016

So Democrats Love America More than Republicans?

In a column entitled "Which Party Loves the U.S.A.?," the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne, Jr. presents an interesting formulation.  Democrats love their country more than Republicans, because Democrats love it the way it is right no...

October 11, 2015

'Annuit Coeptis': Wondering if God Still Smiles on Us

Since the release of the undercover videos exposing Planned Parenthood, the defenders of that organization and its good works have repeated certain inconsequential arguments.  The films were edited.  The image of a doomed infant kicking its...

July 4, 2015

Of Malice, Charity And The Confederate Battle Flag

We used to think that the 19th Century had seen out the enmity of the Civil War. There had been a “farewell to the bloody shirt” associated with the end of Reconstruction. This, it must be added, entailed the abandonment of the freed slav...

May 27, 2015

The Iraq War Question: A Suggestion to Republican Candidates

The foreign policy position of several Republican candidates took a dramatic turn after Jeb Bush, by common perception, bungled a question on the Iraq War.  Knowing what he knows now (i.e., that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq)...