The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Is Ace of Spades ‘Cruel’?

Who was it that first described Ace of Spades as an ewok? I don’t know, but it stuck, because he was bearded and bespectacled and cuddly. Maybe since he’s started working out — GAINZZ! — Ace is less ewok-like than he used to be, but was it fair for Victor Davis Hanson to call him […]

Policy Goal: Avoid World War III

Ever since Russia invaded Ukraine, I keep thinking of Barbara Tuchman’s Pulitzer-winning history The Guns of August, which chronicled the miscalculations that led to World War I. Probably few of the people blabbing about the need for NATO to defend Ukraine have read Tuchman’s book, and certainly they seem heedless of its lessons. While I’m […]

What ‘Intellectuals’ Believe

Elie Mystal Jr. is the son of a Haitian immigrant. His father became a politician in Suffolk County, N.Y., whose “tenure as a county lawmaker ended in 2008 after he faced charges that he lied about living in the district in 2007 and 2008, a period during which he was splitting his time between Huntington […]

Is the Irony Obvious Enough?

To extend this quote from Henry Rogers, a/k/a Ibram X. Kendi: “The conjoined twins are two sides of the same destructive body. The idea that capitalism is merely free markets, competition, free trade, supplying and demanding, and private ownership of the means of production operating for a profit is a whimsical and ahistorical as the […]

‘Liberal Creationism,’ Revisited

William Saletan marks his 25-year anniversary at Slate-dot-com with a column discussing what he’s learned, about himself and the online audience, during his quarter-century at the original Internet magazine. Among other things, he laments the rise of Twitter warfare and the way centrifugal forces seem to be driving both Left and Right toward tribalism, with […]

MBD’s Trump Problem, and Mine

Let me start by saying that I like Michael Brendan Dougherty, and I’ve always liked him. He is a serious thinker and his paleoconservative leanings are so obvious that it’s a miracle he hasn’t already been purged from National Review, like John Derbyshire, Peter Brimelow, et al. His 2007 article “The Castaway,” about the late, […]

‘Smart Takes’ = Too Clever By Half

The first thing to understand about Jonathan Chait is that he has never been anything but a pundit. He hired on at The New Republic fresh out of the University of Michigan, and has never done the kind of journalism that involves any actual reporting. He’s never worked at a newspaper, covering city council meetings […]

‘The Negro Problem,’ Then and Now

For about four decades, Nathaniel Southgate Shaler (1841-1906) was among the leading professors of science at Harvard University. In 1884, Professor Shaler published in The Atlantic Monthly a lengthy article entitled “The Negro Problem,” which begins with this paragraph: When the civil war determined by its result the political position of the black people in […]

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