Woke, or “Wide Awake?”
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” Mark Twain
For a few cynical wags and critics, Ben Domenech is best known as former “The View” co-host Meghan McCain’s husband. But that is unfair. The soft-spoken, cerebral, and calm Domenech is a celebrated writer and editor in his own right, and as of late, an occasional weekly host on Fox News “Primetime,” including this past week.
Domenech’s day job is serving as publisher of a popular and highly-respected libertarian-conservative website, TheFederalist.com, which features a stable of outstanding fellow journalists, including the estimable Mollie Hemingway. He also authors his own daily newsletter, The Transom, to which I subscribe for the bargain price of $30 annually. He publishes almost every day; it is part of my morning routine.
Lots of interesting things are being written and said about our quadrennial tradition of presidential inaugurations yesterday. Most are, at best, shallow and banal utterances from the usual chattering classes, including the usual lofty but largely forgettable and hollow inaugural address (most are, frankly – do you remember anything that was said in any of […]
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On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, author and film director Chris Fenton joined Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky to discuss the damaged relationship between the Chinese Communist Party and the United States based off his experience distributing major Hollywood films in China. Fenton’s newest book, “Feeding The Dragon,” was released on Tuesday.
Fenton explained the false impression he and so many others in Hollywood and in American companies broadly believed that globalism was an intrinsically good thing. Due to the hope of increased revenue and the American influence pervading Chinese culture, Fenton said so many Americans overlooked the theft and other crime that would be developed.
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Some have doubted, so I think its best to drag the evidence into the open and settle the question. Let’s start with this January 2016 article from Accuracy in Media by James Simpson, which says: Exploiting blacks to promote Marxist revolution is an old tactic. The late Larry Grathwohl, former FBI informant in the Weather […]
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Orphe Divounguy joined host Ben Domenech to discuss the economic effects that have resulted from the government lockdown. Divounguy is a chief economist at the Illinois Policy institute in Chicago and his work appears in countless publications.
Through his work at the Institute, he discovered trends among jobs lost in recent months. Divounguy argues that because of governors deeming certain jobs essential and others non-essential, job losses were unequal among groups. Among others, he shared that minority groups and non-government were among those hit the hardest.
I came upon this story at Ann Althouse’s blog the other day. I couldn’t quite make sense of what the story was about so I looked into it a bit and found a wee bit of tyranny enabled by our extensive and bloated administrative/regulatory state. It turns out that Ben Domenech, the publisher of […]
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Media Musings: Mark This
How hard is this reporting stuff? Is it too much to ask people who are paid to publish to get basic reporting right? Could they perhaps take a moment to think through the logic of documents, on their face, before and after drafting a news or analysis piece? Not that I have any strong opinions on the subject, but pardon me while I rant a bit about a Federalist article … and poor Senate Republican staff work.
The context is an excellent post by Scott Johnson at PowerLine “Dear AG Barr: Declassify This.” In that post, you will see a cover letter from Republican Senators to Attorney General Barr. This embedded copy is properly marked for it to be on an unclassified network. You may safely download a copy without imposing a serious burden on yourself and any network administrator. This is in marked contrast to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. And, briefly, The Federalist.
The Federalist crew originally cut and pasted or embedded the Senate document, compounding the error by Senate staffers. Now the Federalist has cleaned up its site, removing the embedded document. Good on them. Shame on the Senate staff, who have not corrected the error. What error? The cover letter is, by itself, unclassified and publicly releasable. However, it was the cover letter to a highly classified enclosure, made so by the level of classification asserted by the DOJ IG for four footnotes. Therefore, default classification for the cover letter is the same as the enclosure, same as the footnotes. Those classication markings go at the top and bottom of every page. The “unclassified” markings go inside, nearer to the body of the page.
Co-host Bob Bowdon talks with Joy Pullmann, executive editor of The Federalist, about the mediocre NAEP and PISA results, after a decade of the Common Core national education standards and the failed experiment with federal involvement in standards, curricula, and tests. They also discuss social emotional learning, parental involvement, and the media’s coverage of K-12 education policy issues.
Stories of the Week: The Denver Public School system is expanding its transportation options to enable more students to attend schools in different neighborhoods. Will this innovation improve student outcomes? In Election 2020, presidential candidate and South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg released a new $1 trillion education proposal for expanded access to childcare and early learning, teacher salary increases, Title I funding, workforce development, and more – can America afford this plan, and where’s the accountability?
Maybe, Baby
If you knew you only had a 1% chance of surviving tomorrow, would you consider that a death sentence? What about 2%, 5%, 10%… at what point would your odds of survival be good enough you wouldn’t feel doomed? And what if you had to purchase your fairly slim chance at survival by risking the life of another? When would you do it? What balance of risk would just barely escape counting as doom?
What if you were the other whose life was risked on the slim hope of avoiding someone else’s death sentence? When would that hope be worth it, and when would it be a forlorn one? How effective must our efforts to lift another’s doom be in order to merit the price?
Story Hour with Bridget Phetasy is a segment where Bridget reminisces with cousin Maggie and tells stories explaining who she is and how she got here. Full transcript available here: WiW47-AccidentalPundit-Transcript
This week Bridget covers how she went from being the Playboy Advisor to an accidental pundit on Ben Shapiro’s Election Special. She can trace every opportunity she’s had since leaving waitressing behind to one thing – Twitter. The realization that Twitter is just like high school, with its cool kids and its cliques helped her understand it and how to use it to her advantage. She discusses using it to hone her writing and her wit, being blocked by Demi Moore, the wrath of Dane Cook and her first mobbing (you can read the essay here), and how Twitter helped her get sober. Hear about her first taste of virality with her essay Bill Cosby Raped Me… Kind Of, how she built her following and created her own community of people who offer support in some of her darkest moments. Her journey from Playboy to the Federalist was a direct result of the paradigm shift that occurred after Trump won the election. She honestly had no idea what she was getting into when it came to political commentary and being caught in the crossfire of the culture war. She wonders as much as anyone “How did I get here?”
Liz Wolfe, managing editor for The Federalist and part-time editor for Reason, has an in-depth discussion with Bridget about why she thought college was a huge waste of money and wanted to drop out, how she managed to get her degree in two years, and the fact that most people have no understanding of the debt they are taking on when they take out student loans. They bond over being self-starters and hustlers and how it’s a skill that helps them find ways around the “gatekeepers” in life, how being from big families teaches you that life isn’t fair at an early age, and discuss why sometimes having low expectations about an experience is the best way to approach it. They coin the phrase “weaponized fragility,” lament over how being patriotic has somehow become a bad thing, and note that you’ll never change someone’s mind by calling them names. Liz offers fascinating insight into being raised in a home where her parents fostered children, and the hidden costs of that experience, and Bridget shares the name of the self-help book she wants to write, Laziness Motivates Me.
ACF#24: Groundhog Day
Today’s podcast is Groundhog Day, because this is the 25th anniversary of the movie. The Federalist’s Robert Tracinski joins me for a discussion of the best Bill Murray movie bar none–and one of the few contenders for comedy of the ’90s. We talk about the inescapability of character; about Harold Ramis’s Tocquevillian insight into American restlessness; about the big city and the small town; about liberal individualism and the divinity of all action no consequences; about relational being, love, and civic friendship; about French poetry and ice-sculpture; about Sonny, Cher and Rachmaninoff!
Food Allergies Are Not “Food Fetishes”
Because an Epi-Pen won’t stop the hives that break out on my body when I eat foods I’m allergic to, that’s selfish of me to pretend I have allergies? Uh, no.
Joy Pullmann of The Federalist (who I really like, by the way, despite my firm disagreement with her latest article) attacks people with food sensitivities and food allergies and people who make dietary choices that restrict their willingness to consume certain foods that hurt them (but don’t result in instant anaphylaxis) as “selfish.”
Referring to any non-EpiPen-allergy as “food fetishes,” Pullmann harangues people she believes are not “actually allergic to gluten” and says “picky diets” and “food choices are a way of virtue signaling.”
Recently, The Federalist published an article in which the author sincerely argued that two popular social movements – Black Lives Matter (BLM) and anti-abortion/pro-life activists – pursue a common goal: the respect and preservation life. Christina Marie Bennett- a writer and pro-lifer who works with pregnant women in crisis environments for the benefit of both […]
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Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist and Mark Hemingway of The Weekly Standard give us a weekly update on the November elections. Among other issues, the Hemingways discuss President Obama and Donald Trump’s respective reactions to the terrorist attack in Orlando, and Mollie defends Hillary Clinton, but maybe not in the way you’d imagine.
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A young lady asked me today what I’ve been doing on Ricochet with these posts about stand up comedy. She wanted to know who is this Mr. Anthony Jeselnik, praise of whom I have been damning & damning & am about to thrice damn. This was in public, so I had to be careful. I retold the […]
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Did anyone every tell you about who knows what classic that’s supposed to be all that & a bag of chips but they can give you no sense as to why? At least when Mr. Clinton gives you Leaves of grass you know exactly what he’s smoking & where the fire is… But these other people […]
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I ask you, fellow Ricochetti, is The Federalist a den of philistines or only a hotel of philistines? How silly can conservatives get about vulgarity? Here’s the shot–get your own chaser. Mr. Jeselnik is not known to you decent, not to say lucky folks. He is known to me by his work. He pretends that his […]
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Mollie Hemingway Hits a Home Run
I readily admit it, folks. I miss Mollie. But she has not disappeared, and she has a piece on The Federalist website that you should all read.
To begin with she has discovered the woman in charge of the Ebola crisis. Her name is Dr. Nicole Lurie; and, some time ago, she was appointed Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services for — drumroll, please — Preparedness and Response; and her job is to “lead the nation in preventing, responding to and recovering from the adverse health effects of public health emergencies and disasters, ranging from hurricanes to bioterrorism.” Here is what Mollie reports:
