From the Right
/Politics
Elections Have Consequences
Republicans have never met a government program outside the Defense Department that they wanted to save. Democrats, outside the Defense Department, have never met a government program they wanted to close. With Donald Trump's election, the discrete niceties of Washington, D.C., have been pushed aside in favor of a Republican effort to shutter ...Read more
A Dunning-Kruger Plane Crash
The Dunning-Kruger Effect is in full force these days. It posits that those with less knowledge of a subject have more certainty about the subject. For example, a layman is far more certain about the big bang than the astrophysicist. The armchair aviation expert is far more certain of the plane crash cause than the aviator.
Tragedy struck on ...Read more
Press Victims
The American press corps covers Republican presidential administrations very differently from Democratic presidential administrations and covers Donald Trump's administration differently from everything. To the press, Donald Trump is a bad man -- a would-be authoritarian tyrant. Therefore, any policy is presumed to be bad, and it will be ...Read more
Entropy on the Right
The Cathedral of St. John the Divine is a cathedral of the Episcopal Church, the fourth largest cathedral in the world, and unfinished. Begun in 1892, it is more exhibition hall than gathering for Christians. Given the rate of decline of the Episcopal Church, once called the Republican Party at prayer, it can safely be written that the last ...Read more
A Progressive Hellscape
"February was the wettest month in downtown Los Angeles since 1998. With over 12 inches of rain drenching the city, it was the fourth-wettest February -- and the seventh-wettest month overall -- in the city's nearly 150-year recorded history," said Judson Jones' report on Los Angeles' weather on March 2, 2024, in The New York Times. Just under...Read more
New Year, Same as the Old Year
The Romans set January as the first month of the year. Originally, March had been the start of the new year. But the early Roman kings, before the republic, moved it to coincide with Janus, a two-faced god who looked backward with an old face and forward with a young face. Julius Caesar realigned Roman governance around January being the start...Read more
A Light in the Darkness
The week before Christmas in 2006, on the same day I lost my job, doctors gave my wife six months to live. I had to be the one to break the news to her. I sat in her recovery room following a lung biopsy surgery, waited for her to be awake and aware, and told her the doctors discovered she had an aggressive form of cancer that had spread to ...Read more
The Democrats' Buts
Democrats are slowly, but surely, building a permission structure for progressive activists to kill those they determine are bad. From the rise of antisemitism to, now, the murder of an insurance CEO, few Democrats seem capable of condemning violence without adding a "but."
To their credit, Gov. Josh Shapiro and Sen. John Fetterman of ...Read more
The Problemed Nominee
President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Fox News host Pete Hegseth to be Secretary of Defense. Hegseth left a well-paid Wall Street job to deploy with the Army National Guard to Guantanamo Bay in 2004, and then to Iraq shortly afterward. He then worked for military nonprofits before joining Fox in 2014.
There are some real problems with ...Read more
Worldview Matters
It is a truism that does not get talked about enough, but is innately part of being a conservative, or really a person of any ideological conviction -- worldview matters.
Those of us on the right have long understood this.
If, for example, a person is an atheist who believes there is no eternal judgment, Heaven or Hell, their convictions ...Read more