January 8, 2024 — Scott Johnson

Shady Grove

Featured image The Star Tribune represents the mainstream media at work in Minnesota. It is the dominant voice of conventional wisdom that relentlessly peddles the left-wing line on its news pages and its editorial positions. It is, moreover, a profitable business owned by a billionaire. Glen Taylor bought it in 2014 for $100 million. He may have assumed some of the paper’s debt in the process. It reportedly makes a substantial amount »
January 8, 2024 — Scott Johnson

Austin anomalies

Featured imageSecretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was admitted to intensive care at Walter Reed on January 1. He was suffering complications from an undisclosed surgical procedure. For some reason he held his hospitalization as a secret to be kept inside the Pentagon. No one in President Biden’s world was notified — not Biden, not National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, not communications spokesmen inside the White House. No one mentioned Austin’s disappearance »
January 7, 2024 — John Hinderaker

Systemically Neutral Law Enforcement

Featured imageThe dogma that American law enforcement is “systemically” racist is one of the chief pillars of what passes for liberal thought. In truth, that theory has been perhaps the most damaging of all leftist shibboleths. A recent meta-study concludes that there is no empirical evidence that our criminal justice system discriminates against blacks, but that academics nevertheless continue to assert that claim–even in studies whose data actually refute it: An »
January 7, 2024 — John Hinderaker

Harvard Is Still Anti-Semitic

Featured imageWriting in the Wall Street Journal, Harvard freshman Charlie Covit explains why it is still hard to be a Jew at Harvard, notwithstanding Claudine Gay’s demise: [T]he crisis facing Harvard’s Jewish community hasn’t gone away. A zealous hatred of Israel has swept our campus, thinly veiling an epidemic of antisemitism. Ms. Gay’s testimony in Congress, in which she said calls for the genocide of Jews were context-dependent, was representative of »
January 7, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley

Gavin Escuela

Featured imageCalifornia Gov. Gavin Newsom attended Santa Clara University on a “partial baseball scholarship,” and as he told Liz Mullen of Sports Business Journal in 2019, “the only reason I am governor of California, the only reason you are talking to me right now, is because of baseball.” That same year, veteran California commentator Dan Walters advanced other reasons Gavin Newsom might be governor of California: Newsom is succeeding someone who »
January 7, 2024 — Scott Johnson

Democracy, Biden style

Featured imageJonathan Turley reviews President Biden’s reelection campaign kickoff somewhere near Valley Forge in his Hill column “Joe Biden is no George Washington…” I linked to the text and posted video of Biden’s speech in “It’s always January 6 somewhere.” Professor Turley expands on the patent contradictions between Biden’s speech and reality, or between Biden’s defense of our democracy™ and Biden’s record. Here is one representative passage: Biden spoke of how »
January 7, 2024 — Scott Johnson

The Shambhalic Henry Wallace

Featured imageHenry Wallace! I have long thought that Roosevelt’s replacement of Wallace with Truman on the Democratic ticket in 1944 provided irrefutable proof that God looks out for the United States. Wallace was a fool who would have altered the course of history very much for the worse if he had succeeded Roosevelt to the presidency in 1945 instead of Truman. Among other evidence of Wallace’s foolishness, one thinks of Wallace’s »
January 6, 2024 — John Hinderaker

Has Harvard Always Been Anti-Semitic?

Featured imageHamas’s October 7 massacre has focused attention on anti-Semitism in American universities. The Claudine Gay episode brought such attention to Harvard, specifically. The Times of Israel notes that anti-Semitism has a long history at that institution: In a 1934 editorial, Harvard Crimson student journalists spoke out in favor of hosting top Nazi and former Harvard man, Ernst F.S. Hanfstaengl. Nicknamed “Putzi,” Hanfstaengl was Hitler’s foreign press chief and graduated from »
January 6, 2024 — Steven Hayward

Podcast: The 3WHH, Happy Insurrection Day!

Featured imageRonald Reagan used to joke that for Republicans, every day is the 4th of July, while for Democrats every day is April 15. Today we need to update that contrast by noting that the favorite new holiday for Democrats is January 6—”Insurrection Day.” We’ll get to Joe Biden in due course, but the real insurrection this week took place at Harvard, where, as John Yoo predicted last week (we have »
January 6, 2024 — Scott Johnson

It’s always January 6 somewhere

Featured imageThe Biden administration has exerted itself to elevate President Trump in the eyes of Republican voters. Donald Trump is in any event President Biden’s opponent of choice in the 2024 election. Is that really debatable? Biden seems to have tired of promoting Bidenomics as his ticket to reelection. He kicked off his 2024 campaign in earnest yesterday near Valley Forge with a speech whose heading tells you everything you need »
January 6, 2024 — Steven Hayward

The Week in Pictures: Gay Times Edition

Featured imageWell, this new year is starting off much better than expected. It’s not often that a schadenfreudey moment like the self-immolation of Harvard’s Claudine Gay lasts an entire month, so by all means let’s revel in it for another week. Let it roll over us like hot chocolate syrup on a vanilla ice-cream sundae. (I’m sure some ninny somewhere will think this imagery racist, unless they stop and think about »
January 7, 2024 — Scott Johnson

The Austin auscultation

Featured imageThe Austin Auscultation might be the title Robert Ludlum would have given to a suspense novel if he were inspired by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s secret hospitalization. It doesn’t have quite the ring of The Bourne Ultimatum and other of his Bourne series thrillers, but it could do. Secretary Austin’s hospitalization was so secret that it was kept strictly within the Pentagon’s five sides. Politico reports: “The Pentagon did »
January 7, 2024 — Scott Johnson

Sunday morning coming down

Featured imageWe went to see the The New Standards perform one of their annual pre-New Year’s shows at the Dakota on December 30 — the first of two shows they played that night following two shows the night before. We’ve gone for at least the past 10 years and have loved the band since we first saw them at one of their pre-New Year’s shows (they call them “preeners”). The band »
January 6, 2024 — John Hinderaker

The Race That No One Can Win

Featured imageA year ago I was confidently predicting that neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump would be on the 2024 presidential election ballot. The Democrats would be crazy to nominate Biden, and the Republicans would be crazy to nominate Trump. And yet, with the caucus and primary season about to start, here we are. With no sign that the Democrats have a way to get Biden off the ballot, and with »
January 6, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley

Mitrokhin Phone Home

Featured image“Ex-CIA analyst says intel agencies to be politically active again in 2024 election: ‘Significant problem,’” proclaimed the January 2 Fox News headline. The former CIA analyst is Georgetown professor John Gentry, who cites “ideology driven analytic errors” such as diversity, equity and inclusion policies. According to Gentry, Bill Clinton launched the DEI policy, formally established by an Obama executive order in 2011. Gentry flags former CIA boss John Brennan and »
January 6, 2024 — Scott Johnson

Alejandro Mayorkas: It ain’t me, babe

Featured imageDHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas appeared for an interview on FOX News Special Report with Bret Baier this past Thursday. FOX News has posted video of the whole thing here. At the Fox News site Charles Creitz reported on the interview here. Running for office President Biden invited illegal aliens of the world to come on in under his prospective presidency. On his first day in office he made good on »
January 5, 2024 — John Hinderaker

Don’t F*** With Bill Ackman’s Wife

Featured imageBill Ackman is a lifelong liberal whose political donations have been to Democrats. But, as a Harvard alumnus and a Jew, he was appalled by Claudine Gay’s incompetent and borderline anti-Semitic Congressional testimony, as well as her lack of any body of original scholarship. So for the first time, he stepped into the cultural and political fray. The Left responded predictably, by attacking his wife, Neri Osman, who is brilliant »