Conservative Conversation and Community
Bret Stephens, op-ed columnist for The New York Times, sits down with Bridget to discuss Trump’s effect on the Republican Party, feeling out of place in your own country, the dangers of a culture that’s so sure of its convictions, mob politics, and how Trump’s behavior is both a symptom and a cause of a […]
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Shelby Steele’s September 24 Op-ed in the Wall Street Journal is worthy of being quoted in its entirety, because every sentence is quotable. But I chose a couple of the choicest parts. Steele opines that the left’s descent into hatred started in the 1960s, when:
MoreAmerica finally accepted that slavery and segregation were profound moral failings. That acceptance changed America forever. It imposed a new moral imperative: America would have to show itself redeemed of these immoralities in order to stand as a legitimate democracy. The genius of the left in the ’60s was simply to perceive the new moral imperative, and then to identify itself with it. Thus the labor of redeeming the nation from its immoral past would fall on the left. The left … would set the terms of this legitimacy and deliver America from shame to decency.
Once a year, The Wall Street Journal publishes an extended report ranking US Colleges, and this that newspaper did this morning, ranking some 500 institutions. Missing from the list, however — this year, last year, and every other year in which WSJ has printed its report — is Hillsdale College.
The reason is simple. Hillsdale does not take federal money because that money comes with strings attached. Schools that do take that money are highly regulated by the federal government, and we value our independence. The Wall Street Journal and its partner in producing the report they publish annually, the Times Higher Education Supplement, do not bother to do much reporting. They get their data from the US Department of Education, which collects the pertinent information from the schools that receive federal funds, and they do not go to the trouble of securing comparable data from the handful of schools that do not take federal money. And thought this omission has been drawn to the attention of the editors of The Wall Street Journal, they have neither corrected their error nor included in their report an acknowledgement that their rankings are for this reason incomplete.
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For this week’s Big Ideas with Ben Weingarten podcast, I had nationally syndicated radio host, columnist, author of numerous books, teacher, film producer and co-founder of PragerU, Dennis Prager, on the podcast to discuss among other things:
You can find the episode on iTunes, everywhere else podcasts are found, download the episode directly here or read the transcript here.
MoreThere is a post describing an article in the Wall Street Journal that is “behind a paywall”. Lots of great writing in the Journal is of interest to Ricochet members. Why couldn’t the members fund a subscription to the digital Journal that any member could access? A full year costs $222 (or $18.50 per month). […]
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Last weekend, in the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan asked a rhetorical question: Why do Americans have so many guns? Here is how she answered her own question:
MoreAmericans have so many guns because drug gangs roam the streets, because they have less trust in their neighbors, because they read Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” Because all of their personal and financial information got hacked in the latest breach, because our country’s real overlords are in Silicon Valley and appear to be moral Martians who operate on some weird new postmodern ethical wavelength. And they’ll be the ones programming the robots that’ll soon take all the jobs! Maybe the robots will look like Mark Zuckerberg, like those eyeless busts of Roman Emperors. Our leaders don’t even think about this technological revolution. They’re too busy with transgender rights.
James Taranto is leaving his Best of the Web column — must reading over a decade and a half — to be editorial features editor of the Wall Street Journal. It sounds like some kind of promotion, but I think readers may be worse off. Here’s his last BoTW column: By the spring of 2001 we had […]
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Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal has a dynamite piece entitled, “Hillary’s Other Server Scandal.” Strassel hints that, while the revelation of state secrets, etc. is a very serious matter, it is the intersection of her duties at State and the funding of The Clinton Foundation that is the most interesting – and potentially damaging…I am […]
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I’ve heard frequently from the Wall Street Journal editors that National Review is reaping what it sowed with the candidacy of Donald Trump. In the latest Journal Editorial podcast, Kim Strassel said the NR editors “have been militant” over immigration. “They they inflamed that issue out in the public…now they sort of opened up the pathway […]
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Jeb Bush is back in the Wall Street Journal’s opinion pages this morning, explaining “How I’ll Slash the Regulation Tax.” Similar to his tax plan, there’s both rhetoric here to warm a conservative’s heart — whatever that means — and details that demonstrate how Bush simply doesn’t get the the expectations of the right wing of what should be his base (disclosure: I am a card-carrying member of the far right wing of what should be his base).
Bush starts by quoting important statistics from various think tanks and agencies: the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s 2015 finding that the federal regulation imposes a $1.88T silent tax on the economy each year ($15,000 for each American family) and the World Bank’s ranking of the United States’ 46th in terms of ease starting a business. He then does a very nice job characterizing the crony capitalist nature of the regulatory state:
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It’s hard to keep track of all the various and sundry Clinton scandals, sure. But add another to your list – Hillary as predatory lender. The WSJ’s Best of the Web Today columnist James Taranto explains:
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We’re well on our way to a conservative civil war on taxes. On one side, we’ve got my heroes at the Wall Street Journal editorial page and most recently Amity Schlaes. On the other, we’ve got my heroes Ramesh Ponnuru, Marco Rubio, and Mike Lee. Cut it out, guys! More
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Late on Friday, University of California—Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks sent around a message claiming to honor the 50th anniversary of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, but not only was the message poorly written, it also entirely missed major concepts about freedom of speech.
As I write today in The Wall Street Journal:
MoreWhat do last week’s elections in India mean for the future of the U.S. relationship with New Delhi? And what are the broader implications for Asia? I talked to former Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton earlier today to get answers to those questions:
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In an extended episode of Opinion Journal, I talked today with Texas Governor Rick Perry about a wide array of issues: Vladimir Putin, Syria, the Obama Administration’s Asia policy, immigration, Obamacare, and what he learned from the 2012 election, just to name a few:
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Interviewing him for Uncommon Knowledge, I served up several questions in a row that all but begged Robert Thomson, chief executive officer of News Corp —which owns the Wall Street Journal, the Times of London, and more than 150 other newspapers — to weep and moan about the way technology has squeezed the profits out of journalism.
Thomson wouldn’t bite.
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The News Corp owns more than 150 newspapers, some of which date far, far back—the Times of London, to name one, first appeared in 1785, the Wall Street Journal in 1889. Chief executive officer of News Corp for a year now, Robert Thomson explains how he intends to infuse the organization with the mentality of a startup–including a willingness to make mistakes.
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Since becoming a copyboy back home in Australia at 18, journalism is the only life Robert Thomson has ever known—and he has made a brilliant career of it as a foreign correspondent for the Financial Times, editor of the Financial Times, editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal, and now chief executive officer of News Corp, the newspaper company, built by Rupert Murdoch, that owns more than 150 titles.
When I interviewed him for Uncommon Knowledge, I tried to get Robert going on journalism-as-a-noble profession.
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One of the most basic observations of comparative religion is that the difference between Judeo-Christian religion and Asian religious systems, such as Buddhism, resembles the difference between a line and a circle.
In Judaism and Christianity, reality has a beginning and an end. It’s linear. It’s going somewhere. Both beginning and end are mysterious, the former rendered, mythically, in the creation story, the latter represented, at least in Christianity, in the thrilling if baffling formulation that “time shall be no more.” The beginning is believed really to have happened and the end is believed to really be coming.
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Yesterday morning, the lead article in The Wall Street Journal started with the following paragraph:
MoreMore than 95% of Crimeans voted to break way from Ukraine and rejoin Russia, according to preliminary results, in a referendum that raises the stakes in the most acute East-West confrontations since the Cold War.
