Though we both worked for the (British) Spectator in the 1990s, my friendship with Anne Applebaum dates only from her arrival in Washington, D.C. in the early 2000s. Therefore, I was not invited to the now-famous party she and her husband, Radek Sikorski, gave at their country house in Poland on December 31st, 1999. Now…
The late, great historian Bernard Bailyn may have been, as his New York Times obituary says he said he was, “not very political,” but I think he must have inadvertently done much political mischief with the title of his most famous book, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Though I fully accept that, as…
The corruption of our language by the woke left continues apace. Having changed the meaning of the word “science” from a system of inquiry and verification to whatever knowledge or pseudo-knowledge, verified or not, supports their political agenda, they have now turned their attention to “traitors.” We had a foretaste of this when John Brennan…
On the nature and the uses of “Science” as the media understand it — From The New Criterion of June, 2020
Apart from the name of the publication, its volume number, date and price, the only words on the front cover of the current number of the London Review of Books are these: “Adam Shatz: America Explodes.” You would think that, if true, this would be pretty big news around the world, and yet this little…
According to the (London) Daily Telegraph, the latest target of the rampaging iconoclasts in Britain is the statue of Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris outside the RAF Church of St Clement Danes in London. Sir Arthur, as his soubriquet indicates, managed the Allied bombing campaign over Germany during the Second World War. Thus it seems rather…
A quarter of a century ago a man named Tom Engelhardt wrote a book called The End of Victory Culture — a book that celebrated, only a bit prematurely as it now seems, the demise of America as we had known it up until the end of the Cold War a few years earlier. In…
Experts can never be wrong for, if they were wrong, they wouldn’t be experts. They would be Donald Trump. — From The New Criterion of May, 2020
A couple of weeks ago The New York Times ran a curious little think-piece by David Segal headed “Why Are There Almost No Memorials to the Flu of 1918?” That’s easy, I thought to myself when I read it. Because in 1918 they hadn’t yet learned the lesson of our post-honor culture of a century…
In this morning’s Times of London there’s a very reasonable sounding editorial (or “Leading Article” as it’s called in Britain) headed “Honest Mistakes" which purports to instruct Boris Johnson, the prime minister, that admitting the mistakes made by himself and his colleagues in government could only win back some of the trust of the people…
Though he may take small comfort in the fact, the government prosecution that all but ruined General Michael Flynn should be a good lesson to the half of the country that still pays any attention to what the media have to say. If the ever holier-than-thou press corps are incapable of admitting to error in…
The talk-radio host Chris Plante of WMAL in Washington, D.C. is fond of saying that “were it not for double standards, the left would have no standards at all.” But I wonder if all those who appreciate the joke quite “get” its real point — which is that double standards are “no standards at all.”…
