June 9, 2025

June 8, 2025

DON’T TRUST YOUR LYING EYES:

Posted at 9:56 pm by Glenn Reynolds 214

OPEN THREAD: Ring out the weekend.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds 1247

PLAYING WITH FIRE:

If Beijing wanted to keep us distracted…

Posted at 8:49 pm by Stephen Green 163

LET’S MAKE THAT TAX 35 PERCENT:

Posted at 8:48 pm by Glenn Reynolds 140

WAIT UNTL 2025-ERA GAVIN NEWSOM DISCOVERS WHAT GAVIN NEWSOM DID IN 2020!

UPDATE: From April of 2020:

As Jack Dunphy wrote in April of 2020: Crackdowns on Lone Surfers and Paddleboarders Threaten to Erode Respect for Law Enforcement Even Further.

UPDATE: Question asked:

Posted at 6:55 pm by Ed Driscoll 304

WELL, I HOPE THIS TURNS OUT TO BE TRUE:

Interesting thread.

Posted at 6:42 pm by Glenn Reynolds 123

OH, THAT VIOLENT LEFT:

Meanwhile, at CNN:

Posted at 5:45 pm by Ed Driscoll 100

JAMES PIERESON on WFB: Buckley’s Life on the Firing Line. Review: Buckley: The Life and Revolution that Changed America by Sam Tanenhaus.

Buckley entered Yale in 1946, eager to make up for lost time (he had spent the previous two years in the Army) and to catch up with his brother, Jim, who had already graduated. He landed a spot on the debate team, alongside fellow student Brent Bozell, and by his third year was appointed editor of the Yale Daily News, where he published critical articles on the left-wing tilt of the faculty that got him into hot water with the administration. He would soon turn those articles, along with copious notes, into a best-selling book, God and Man at Yale, published in 1951 (after his graduation). The book claimed that Yale professors, in the name of academic freedom, were undermining Christianity and promoting collectivism by teaching Keynes and other liberal thinkers. He called upon alumni to withhold donations unless and until the university changed course.

The book was a sensation, as Tanenhaus writes, especially so for a young man with no other books to his credit. It was widely reviewed—McGeorge Bundy, a Yale graduate, wrote in the Atlantic that he found the book “dishonest in its use of facts, false in its theory, and a discredit to its author.” Others weighed in along the same lines. Buckley was unfazed and enjoyed the furor surrounding the book. He saw, as did others, that the critics missed the main point: The popularity of the book was due to its attack on the professional elites at Yale and elsewhere who pretended to be neutral and open in outlook but were in fact selling a point of view—namely, liberalism.

Buckley followed up with a new book, McCarthy and His Enemies, written jointly with Bozell, and published in 1954 just as McCarthy’s career was about to collapse in censure by the Senate. The book was not so much a defense of McCarthy as it was an attack on the security system in the State Department (and elsewhere) that allowed communists and fellow-travelers to penetrate the U.S. government. Critics panned the book because they disliked McCarthy, but that was partly the authors’ point: The communist issue was much larger than McCarthy.

With two controversial books under his belt, Buckley was by this time the acknowledged leader of a loose band of conservative writers that included Russell Kirk, James Burnham, Frank Meyer, Willmoore Kendall, and Whittaker Chambers. There was no political home for writers who were at once anti-communist and anti-statist. They were not welcome in the universities, certainly, nor in the Republican Party: Eisenhower had pushed aside their favorite (Robert Taft) for the presidential nomination, and once in office declared his support for the main themes of the New Deal and the containment doctrine favored by his Democratic predecessor.

In this circumstance, his friends prevailed upon Buckley to launch a new magazine that would at once articulate these two themes—anti-communism and anti-statism—and also unite the disparate band of conservatives around a single publication. They looked to Buckley as their leader for obvious reasons: He could debate; he had a name by virtue of his books; and, importantly, he had access to money through his father and his father’s friends. Buckley agreed to be editor of the weekly publication. The inaugural issue of National Review appeared in November 1955 with a bold statement of purpose from its editor: “[National Review] stands athwart history yelling Stop, at a time when no other is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”

Buckley would serve as editor of National Review for the next 35 years, writing weekly columns, supervising the editorial pages, serving as referee for disputes among his writers, and, as Tanenhaus writes, trying to wall off unsavory elements (bigotry and anti-Semitism) from the magazine. Buckley denounced the John Birch Society, erstwhile allies in the anti-communist cause, for extremist claims—for example, that President Eisenhower was a communist.

As Russell Kirk famously quipped at the time, “Ike’s not a communist. He’s a golfer.”

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 74

YES:

Posted at 5:18 pm by Stephen Green 147

THE WAY WE STILL ARE: Remember that 1973 classic flick starring Robert Redford and Barbara Streisand? They were total opposites, but somehow managed to find love, get married, ignore their irreconcilable differences for a stretch of years, but it all ended when her Marxist “principles” were more important than love, companionship, loyalty, etc.

There is a vitally important lesson in that movie, one that the conventional wisdom of the Left will never acknowledge, as I explain in my latest Substack column.

Posted at 4:27 pm by Mark Tapscott 65

SERIOUSLY?

Update: An LA friend just pointed out one of these is LAPD, and the other is LA County Sheriff, which is responsible for Paramount.

Posted at 3:45 pm by Charlie Martin 80

GREAT MOMENTS IN DEMOCRAT OPTICS:

Posted at 2:45 pm by Ed Driscoll 138