Any rational person’s list of the most intelligent and pungent columnists now writing will perforce include the name Kevin Williamson, late of National Review and, as of Thursday, late of The Atlantic as well. And anyone with a working internet connection knows that Williamson, hired to a chorus of drooling leftoid obloquy by
What took them so long? That was our first question when we heard the latest news about the distinguished University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax. Last summer, Professor Wax created a minor disturbance in the force of politically correct groupthink when she co-authored an op-ed for the Philadelphia Inquirer titled “Paying the price
Thinking about the $1.3 trillion—that’s “trillion” with a “t” for “terrifying”—omnibus spending bill that President Trump signed on Friday, I wonder who is most unhappy about that incontinent, 2,232-page monument to congressional irresponsibility. (A small token of its irresponsibility—and its contempt for the public—was that the bill had to be signed a mere
Some portion of the reading public is eagerly awaiting A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership, the aptly titled exercise in self-serving historical revisionism by James Comey, the disgraced former FBI director who was fired last May by President Trump. The reading material in which I am most interested at the moment is
The Harvard Crimson last week announced that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would receive the Radcliffe Medal on May 25 at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Past recipients of the honor, given annually to individuals (usually women) who have had “a transformative impact on society,” include U.S. Supreme Court justices Ruth
In a dystopian fantasy in The New York Times at the end of the year, the columnist Bret Stephens reminded us of the horror that might have been: Tax cuts. Deregulation. More for the military; less for the United Nations. The Islamic State crushed in its heartland. Assad hit with cruise missiles. Troops
Readers of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit will recall the philosopher’s withering comments about “the dogmatism of mere assertion” which yields naught but an empty and deceptive feeling: self-certitude. I thought about Hegel’s comments this morning when looking through the Democrats’ attempted rebuttal of the memo released earlier this month by Republicans on the
Item 1: “People now marvel how it came to pass that he should have been selected as the representative man of any party. His . . . efforts, imbecile in matter, disgusting in manner, have made us the laughing stock of the whole world.” Item 2: “A tragedy for the American republic, a
In The Meaning of Conservatism and several other books, the English philosopher Roger Scruton argues for the importance of the first-person plural—the “We” that binds us together as a community, a people, a nation. Tuesday night, in his magnificent State of the Union Address, Donald Trump did something similar. Trump’s speech was full
In 1929, Benito Mussolini boasted, “We were the first to assert that the more complicated the forms assumed by civilization, the more restricted the freedom of the individual must become.”This is the first in a series of essays on the life and thought of Friedrich A. Hayek. Of course, Mussolini was wrong about
