Enjoying the view from Limbo
From Raymond Aron’s Peace and War (1966): In 1938 France tried to deter Hitler from attacking Czechoslovakia: Hitler was not impressed, and Frenchmen and Englishmen preferred Czech capitulation to the risk of having to carry out their commitments, i.e., their threat. In 1939 Great Britian took the initiative of signing a mutual assistance treaty with Poland in the hope of deterring Hitler by...
Very early in 2016, when I stepped into the midst of the rapidly evolving Trump cult at American Thinker (where I had been a successful and popular contributor for several years) to deliver my first few missives on the folly and danger of supporting an ignorant vainglorious self-promoting sociopath in the Republican presidential primaries — I know, when you state it directly this...
The problem with Donald Trump’s political rise, as I have said many times, is not so much Trump himself, but rather the tens of millions of Americans who are sanguine — nay, enthusiastic — about this buffoonish Putin agent and anti-American demagogue running roughshod over their country’s traditions, decimating its alliances, disrespecting its constitution and its institutions, befouling its public discourse, turning her...
America Descending / Liberty's Labors Lost / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published February 17, 2025
Canada, my home country, disappoints me no end. It has, over the course of my life — the correspondence is so clear that I sometimes believe I may be responsible for it — turned decisively toward the soft despotism of democratic socialism, the relativistic nihilism of multiculturalism, the personality cult normalization of the multi-generational Trudeau dynasty, the most laughable excesses of progressive identity...
America Descending / Liberty's Labors Lost / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published February 13, 2025
The government of Ukraine is entering an inevitable phase of resignation and surrender. Her leaders are beginning to admit to themselves, it appears, that in today’s world, if your sovereignty and your freedom depend on the friendship of the United States of America, you will soon lose both. America, for the better part of the past seventy-five years, has consistently been both the...
This past weekend, Donald Trump made what our minute-by-minute age calls “history” by becoming the first U.S. president to attend a Super Bowl game. In other words, true to form, Trump was the first president in American history crass enough to think it appropriate to turn even his country’s most popular annual apolitical entertainment event into a divisive and hyper-political photo opportunity for...
The Wall Street Journal is making itself into headline news (the ultimate goal of all modern news media) with a headline labelling Donald Trump’s imposition of tariffs on Canada and Mexico as “The Dumbest Trade War in History,” followed by the teaser, “Trump will impose 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico for no good reason.” I call disinfomation on that “no good reason”...
The most cowardly president in U.S. history, in one of his new administration’s ceremonial first lies, ordered one of his most prominent and tongue-weary bootlickers, Marco “Yes Master” Rubio (aka Marco the Martian-Hunter), to “pause” all foreign aid, excluding military aid to Israel and Egypt, which is to say including military aid to Ukraine. Meanwhile, the Insult-in-Chief himself, in part of his feverish...
In 2022, comedian Dave Chappelle hosted Saturday Night Live and caused quite a stir with an opening monologue that was both highly entertaining and, at moments, politically on point in the way intelligent stand-up comedy can occasionally be. On that night, the controversies he stirred up, primarily with his comments on “the Jews,” but secondarily with his refusal to do the simplistic “Trump...
The Village People are performing at the U.S. president’s inauguration celebrations. Very appropriate. The Village People are a group of campy, unmasculine performers who have built a popular entertainment career that has extended long past its sell-by date by donning the costumes of various “real man” types — the hard hat, the police officer, and so on — and dancing around while laughably...
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