Enjoying the view from Limbo
“Biden embarrassing US on world stage,” announces a headline from Fox News, specifically concerning an episode of Laura Ingraham’s show in which she interviews Victor Davis Hanson to arrive at the startling investigative conclusion referenced in that headline. But Ingraham and Hanson, both highly educated and presumably fairly intelligent, along with the entire Fox News corporate entity from whose audience approval they profit...
Bernie Sanders has had a heart attack. If this is anything more than the sort of blip on a heart scan that doctors notice two months later, there is little question that his presidential campaign is done. In fact, under these circumstances, I think it would say a lot about his immoderate lust for power if he even considered staying in the race...
Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published March 24, 2019
American progressives, ever keen to exploit a crisis, even one on the opposite side of the globe, are in breathless outrage mode over gun ownership again in the wake of the “New Zealand massacre.” Meanwhile, just below radar range, anti-republican activists are roving the country looking for soft underbellies to stab with “red flag” laws at the state level, thereby perplexing many conservatives...
Hillary Clinton, like all progressives, is projecting her own hatred and radicalism onto her opponents, claiming that communists (whom she still quaintly insists on calling “Democrats”) would certainly be civil if they could, but that civility simply is not possible as long as Republicans remain in power. “You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for,...
As reported at the Daily Beast, a new book written by journalist Amy Chozick, who traveled with Hillary Clinton’s campaign, revisits an important, conveniently-forgotten theme of the 2016 U.S. presidential election: during the primaries, the Clintons and their media allies were all in for Trump. From early on, the Clinton camp saw Trump as an enemy to encourage, Chozick writes. During the campaign…...
Among the weirder conceits of the once charming, now aggressively meaningless TV drama Twin Peaks, is the deus ex machina of the Black Lodge, a place of mock native legend, where people confront their own darkest fears, or meet doppelgängers who will live out alternative versions of their lives. The New Yorker has just sent America to the Black Lodge. For some reason,...
[Note: If you have not read Part I of this post, I strongly recommend that you read it before reading Part II. Click here to read Part I.] It’s time at last to defy the norms of time and space, and, in the name of full disclosure, reveal what Meryl Streep’s Golden Globes acceptance speech sounded like in a universe parallel to ours, a world which differs from...
Ideas and Reflections / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published December 31, 2016 · Last modified January 1, 2017
For a few weeks, I have had very little to say about the world’s latest political news from my perch here in the dark wood. Perhaps this is healthy. I have been urging others for years to realize that the era of direct political action, which is to say of politics in the narrow sense, is over, at least for those who care about...
The American mainstream (aka Democrat) media is in a state of apoplexy over Donald Trump’s election. Many on the so-called right are reveling in the scene of helmet-haired talking heads tranforming into tin-foil-hat-wearing exploding heads before our eyes. “How could this have happened?” “How can America survive?” “What’s to become of us?” “Is it time to move abroad while we still can?” My problem...
On November 8th, the United States of America is staging (I choose that word carefully) a presidential election that will go down (and I also choose that word carefully) in history as the most terrifying, banal, hideous, and irrational exercise in the entire spotty narrative of Western democracy. The nation on whose fate largely rests that of the whole Earth at this moment–the nation with the most money,...
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