Jonah Goldberg stories, Page 10
Jonah Goldberg: Battle over critical race theory won’t benefit GOP in the long run
It feels like yesterday that my wife and I were shopping for grade schools for our daughter — the same daughter who just graduated from high school. We visited a bunch of private schools where the children of Washington’s elite get turned into the feedstock of the meritocracy. The most...
Jonah Goldberg: Concept of antiracism leaves no room for dissent
“If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” I’ve long argued that this exhortation is a soft form of totalitarianism. It’s rhetorical bullying. The speaker assumes he or she has authoritative knowledge of not just the problem but the solution. And if you disagree, you’re a...
Jonah Goldberg: Cold War strategies no longer apply with Russia
President Joe Biden and Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin are scheduled to meet today for the first time since Biden was elected president. For many in the foreign policy establishment and diplomatic press corps, this is an exciting opportunity to conjure some Cold War drama. Historically, such summits were major happenings....
Jonah Goldberg: Outrage over billionaires’ tax returns ignores basic facts
ProPublica obtained the tax returns of the richest Americans and discovered what every informed person already knew: They don’t pay as much in income taxes as some people would like them to. This is being called a great scandal by many Democrats and liberal journalists. Meanwhile, that these returns were...
Jonah Goldberg: Manchin taking heat for what should be political normalcy
It’s official: In the great existential battle between a return to normalcy and a new progressive era, normalcy is winning. Recall that Joe Biden ran as a moderate in 2020, not just in the general election but also in the Democratic primaries. Biden triangulated off the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth...
Jonah Goldberg: The people we owe in Afghanistan
I think Joe Biden’s decision to fully withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan is a mistake. It’s mistaken on strategic and moral grounds. I hope I’m wrong. But when even administration officials, and experts who favor the decision, concede that our pullout — of a very small contingent of troops —...
Jonah Goldberg: Populism at root of right wing’s conspiracy-mongering paranoia
Over Memorial Day weekend, Michael Flynn, who briefly served as Donald Trump’s first national security adviser, appeared at a QAnon-affiliated conference in Dallas. During a Q&A session, an audience member asked, “I want to know why what happened in Myanmar can’t happen here.” What happened in Myanmar was an old-fashioned...
Jonah Goldberg: Anti-Trump sentiment fueled premature dismissal of Wuhan lab theory
A remarkable consensus has emerged in the last few weeks: It’s no longer crazy to think that the covid-19 pandemic was the result of a “lab leak” in Wuhan, China. Just to set the stage, the lab-leak theory isn’t that China deliberately unleashed the virus as some sort of biological...
Jonah Goldberg: GOP — ‘mostly peaceful’ for me, not for thee
Last summer, after months of protests and riots in response to the murder of George Floyd, the phrase “mostly peaceful,” often used by the media and Democrats to describe the protests, achieved parody status thanks to a CNN clip. It showed a reporter in Kenosha, Wis., standing in front of...
Jonah Goldberg: Supreme Court ruling on abortion case could be game-changer
The Supreme Court recently announced it will take up Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a challenge to a Mississippi law that all but bans abortions after 15 weeks. It’s the first case in years that could result in the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that,...
Jonah Goldberg: Independents are part of the partisan problem
If you’re the kind of person who boasts about being a political independent, this may be hard to hear: You’re part of the problem. This no doubt will come as a shock, in part because independents get such fantastic press. That in itself is odd, given that independents have no...
Jonah Goldberg: Deterrence method for piracy might also discourage cyberattacks
The Colonial Pipeline, which provides roughly 45% of the East Coast’s oil, gas and jet fuel, was hacked last week by a group called DarkSide. The cyberattack forced the pipeline owners to shut down operations, leading to long gas lines in many American cities. The incident has sparked a long-overdue...
Jonah Goldberg: Politicians use competition as marketing tool
In his address to Congress last month, President Biden used some variant of “compete” a dozen times. “We’re in competition with China and other countries to win the 21st century,” Biden said. “We’re at a great inflection point in history.” Chinese President Xi Jinping, Biden said, is “deadly earnest about...
Jonah Goldberg: Is ‘banned on Facebook’ the new ‘banned in Boston’?
“Banned in Boston” is a phrase that probably doesn’t resonate with many people today. But there was a time when “Footloose” might as well have been set in Beantown. Founded by Puritans in the 1630s, Boston held onto its Puritan zeal — if not necessarily the Puritan faith — for...
Jonah Goldberg: Biden’s spending spree isn’t a new New Deal
We don’t know what the Biden years will ultimately look like, but one thing is pretty obvious, at least to me: It won’t be a new New Deal, nor will this be the beginning of a new Progressive Era. First, a bit of history. The New Deal, particularly in the...
Jonah Goldberg: Biden’s overreach doesn’t match campaign rhetoric
Joe Biden didn’t just campaign as a moderate. He signaled again and again that he would be an affable placeholder president who’d clean up the messes created by his opponent, mend some fences with allies and get the pandemic under control. “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as...
Jonah Goldberg: Boring is Biden’s superpower
Joe Biden’s first 100 days as president will be in the books Friday, and one thing is clear: Boring is a superpower. But first, let’s start by noting that the whole “first 100 days” thing is a pseudo-event that’s only a big deal because politicians and journalists agreed to make...
Jonah Goldberg: Inability to make distinctions has led to toxic discourse
Nothing is more vital to serious thinking than the ability to make distinctions between superficially similar things. The gas pedal and the brake pedal look awfully similar, but if you can’t distinguish between them, good luck getting out of the driveway safely. Distinctions don’t just matter among similar-but-different things. They’re...
Jonah Goldberg: Mad queen Marjorie Taylor Greene abdicates her throne
Marjorie Taylor Greene was readying her assault, like that legendary Anglo-Saxon warrior Canute the Great at Assandun. The QAnon-friendly first-term Georgia congresswoman, who was banned from any committee assignments shortly after she was sworn in, was poised to launch her “America First Caucus” with Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., an anti-Semitic...
Jonah Goldberg: Biden citing wrong reasons for Afghanistan withdrawal
President Biden has decided to end the war in Afghanistan. He feels it’s time, and so do a lot of Americans. I feel it too. I’m just not sure feelings should win the day. In his televised address announcing the decision, Biden reiterated that American withdrawal can’t be “tied to...
Jonah Goldberg: Future of the GOP may hinge on Florida
You know all those “Florida Man” stories? “Florida man arrested for throwing alligator through drive-thru window,” “Florida man learns the hard way he stole laxatives, not opioids,” etc.? There are several theories for why Florida men stand out so much, starting with Florida is just weird. The most interesting involves...
Jonah Goldberg: ‘Jim Crow’ criticism of Georgia voting law doesn’t fit
The debate over Georgia’s new voting law has been deeply depressing to watch for a number of reasons. The first is that it hasn’t really been a debate so much as a lot of performative shouting from all directions. The second is that many of the law’s harshest critics don’t...
Jonah Goldberg: Georgia election flap underscores our collective action problem
The Georgia debacle is a perfect example of the rolling collective action problem of our democracy. A collective action problem, simply put, is when there is a goal that would benefit everyone — in this case, confidence in our machinery of democracy — but the incentive structure for the individual...
Jonah Goldberg: Culture wars a convenient distraction from spending
You know what you get for spending trillions of dollars you don’t have? More fights over Dr. Seuss, cancel culture and identity politics. By any measure, the federal government has been on a spending spree for decades. Without getting bogged down in the green eyeshade stuff, suffice it to say...
Jonah Goldberg: Bipartisanship can be a lethal weapon against political foes
American politics is caught in a perverse paradox. The bases of both parties would like nothing more than to destroy the other party. But it is precisely this animus that prevents them from accomplishing their goal. That’s because the best strategy for partisans to wreak havoc in the other party...
