Paul Ryan used to give copies of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged as Christmas gifts. The novel, a long ode to what Rand called the “virtue of selfishness,” sums up the departing House Speaker’s own obsessions.Owning a copy is more a status signal than anything. “I make all my interns read it,” he told The
It seems every time European elites get a good laugh out of a presidential tweet, sooner rather than later, the joke is on them. In June, President Trump, though without the caps-lock and employing just one exclamation mark, tweeted that “the people of Germany are turning against their leadership,” as Merkel’s open-borders policy
The demise of British Prime Minister Theresa May has been put off. At least until next week. Last weekend, the Sunday Times assured readers that the Maybot had finally rusted into obsolescence, heading for a Chinese junkyard presumably, to be pecked at by enterprising children and sold for parts. But she clings on.
Few events would seem to be more excruciating than an evening with Hillary and Bill Clinton. Remarkably, many Americans truant of their synapses seem happy to stump up hundreds of dollars for such cultural root canal treatment. On Monday, Hillary announced a 13-stop speaking tour in which purgatorial souls might douse themselves in
In what now seems like a distant memory from a parallel universe—one in which things were relatively normal and milk wasn’t a symbol of patriarchal oppression—Jeb Bush was supposed to fight Hillary Clinton for the presidency, and maybe even win. He had it all, apparently. Name recognition. A decent background as governor of
The final victory of feelings over facts was almost confirmed this week, at least until the pre-condemned Brett Kavanaugh was afforded the old-fangled notion of defending himself against the most lurid of claims. With measure and conviction, Judge Kavanaugh perhaps saved his Supreme Court appointment in the face of a rabid hysteria unqualified
Hillary Clinton employs just 30 words before ladling a characteristic untruth across the page of The Atlantic this week. It shouldn’t surprise anyone inured to her austere relationship with the truth. The essay, an excerpted afterword of the soon-to-be published paperback edition of What Happened, is sparse in the details of what actually
Perhaps the populist wave breaking across Europe had calmed into a dampened squib by the time it reached liberal Sweden last week, but the ripples have already made it onto dry land. After a tumultuous election uncharacteristic of Swedish kumbaya and its usual progressive Olympics, the populist Sweden Democrats landed with 18 percent
Angela Merkel’s dastardly decision to throw open Germany’s borders to more than 1 million mainly Syrian migrants in 2015 didn’t quite go as planned. The German Chancellor’s grandiloquent gesture meant to exorcise German history once and for all instead cleaved through the middle of a once-reliably measured and “open” nation. Even in Germany,
American progressives are often beside themselves when extolling the apparent and deceptive wonders of the Scandinavian model. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) doesn’t stop yapping about Denmark. Indeed, whenever “democratic socialists” are asked to enumerate a country in which their creed has actually worked and not ended in the repression and slaughter of countless
