Jonah Goldberg Columns category, Page 8
Jonah Goldberg: American reactions to Canada’s trucker protests shows how much our politics have changed
On Monday, Canadian Prime Minster Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act in order to clear out the trucker protests in Ottawa. From the beginning, I’ve remained quietly fascinated by the whole spectacle. Quietly, because I’ve struggled to figure out what I think about them, fascinated because they are a window...
Jonah Goldberg: RNC’s idea of ‘legitimate political discourse’ shows how far gone it is
My first question: What about the feces? I don’t mean figuratively, as in “Wow, the Republican National Committee really stepped in (fill in the blank)” or other colorful idioms. I mean it literally, what about the poop? I should back up. The RNC, the greatest agglomeration of hacks ever seen...
Jonah Goldberg: Ukraine’s president may be our only hope
One can only sympathize with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Vladimir Putin has a dagger aimed at the heart of Ukraine. For months he has mobilized troops along the Ukrainian border. The recent deployment of troops to Ukraine’s almost undefended border with Belarus raises the possibility of a blitzkrieg strike against...
Jonah Goldberg: Joe Biden could learn a lot from Bill Clinton
“You and my husband think so similarly when it comes to politics,” Hillary Clinton once told Joe Biden. “You guys were almost separated at birth.” It’s interesting to think about how Biden’s first year as president would have gone differently if this were in fact true. The easiest way to...
Jonah Goldberg: How an enduring myth about voter turnout distorts our politics
I have long opposed making voting mandatory, an idea that pops up every few years. I still don’t like the idea. But it’s become more attractive, at least as a thought experiment. The arguments against compelling people to vote — as Australia and a handful of other countries do —...
Jonah Goldberg: Just meeting with Putin is a concession — U.S. should be wary of giving more
On Monday, Russian president-for-life Vladimir Putin explained that the “peacekeeper” paratroopers he sent to Kazakhstan to help quash civil unrest were part of his larger policy of preventing “color revolutions” in former Soviet-bloc countries. Putin made his remarks at a meeting of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, which the New...
Jonah Goldberg: As political satire, ‘Don’t Look Up’ fails in more ways than one
“Don’t Look Up,” Adam McKay’s dark comedy released on Netflix just before Christmas, has gotten an enormous amount of attention, despite the fact most film critics tend to agree it doesn’t hold together too well artistically, even as some welcome it for its propagandistic value. As you’d expect from the...
Jonah Goldberg: When ‘Vice President Harris’ became inevitable, trouble was sure to follow
Things have not gone well for Vice President Kamala Harris. Not only is she less popular than her boss, but according to one recent poll, she even broke Dick Cheney’s record for most unpopular sitting vice president. But it’s worse than that. Cheney — fairly or unfairly — was unpopular...
Jonah Goldberg: Tucker Carlson’s ‘Patriot Purge’ was final straw
I quit Fox News after more than a decade as a contributor. So did my business partner and friend Steve Hayes. We explained our reasons on the Dispatch, a media company we founded. The decision was a long time in coming. Like Ernest Hemingway’s description of bankruptcy, it came gradually...
Jonah Goldberg: Inflation and CRT have something in common
How is inflation like critical race theory? A lot of voters have a hard time explaining how either works, but they know they don’t like it when they see it. Obviously, it’s a silly comparison on the merits. For starters, some voters actually like critical race theory while nobody likes...
Jonah Goldberg: What do midterms — and 2024 — hold for GOP?
Republicans are in a triumphalist mood. Last week’s red wave election has many in the GOP counting on a crimson tsunami come next year’s midterms and fueled even more confidence that Joe Biden will be a one-term president. Some skepticism is in order, though a little triumphalism is warranted as...
Jonah Goldberg: ‘Let’s go Brandon’ is what passes for oratory now. Be worried.
The first thing to know about the “Let’s go Brandon” thing is: It’s funny. Or at least, it started out funny. In case you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s how it started. In September, largely or even entirely in response to the Biden administration’s botched handling of our...
Jonah Goldberg: To fight climate change seriously, nuclear power must be on the table
World leaders are heading to Glasgow to come up with yet another plan to tackle climate change. Joe Biden had hoped to have a stack of climate-related legislative accomplishments to brag about. But they’re being held up and threatened in the fight over the price tag of the Build Back...
Jonah Goldberg: A third party could impose some pain on the Trumpified GOP
In 2020, many on the right had modest hopes for President Biden. The hope hinged on the not implausible theory that he would govern as a centrist because that’s how he campaigned. Biden did markedly better than Hillary Clinton’s 2016 performance with Republican-friendly constituencies. Indeed, 7% of 2016 Republican Trump...
Jonah Goldberg: The problem isn’t raising taxes, it’s spending, spending, spending
Confession time: I’m open to raising taxes. As a lifelong conservative, making this case comes as easily as arguing for a weak national defense, or more United Nations funding. So please bear with me as I walk through why I’m open to the idea. One of the most important lessons...
Goldberg: Biden’s foreign policy: Too leftist or too Trumpist?
It’s one of the strange ironies of American politics. Few things are as politically polarizing as foreign policy, and yet it’s on foreign policy where the differences between the parties are often narrowest. Indeed, viewed from abroad, our allies and adversaries often think that the biggest problem with any new...
Jonah Goldberg: Partisan squabbling after 9/11 was a preview of the present
I got back to the U.S. from my honeymoon on Sept. 10, 2001. My wife went straight home to Washington, D.C, to start her new job at the Justice Department. I went to Washington state, where we’d gotten married, to retrieve our dog Cosmo, whom we’d left with family. I...
Jonah Goldberg: Blame Congress, not Supreme Court, for eviction ruling
In a major victory for constitutional norms, the Supreme Court overturned a lawless and essentially authoritarian policy of the Trump administration, and progressives are furious. You read that right. Let’s catch up. On March 27, 2020, Congress passed the CARES Act, and Donald Trump signed it into law. One provision...
Jonah Goldberg: Will GOP go back to heeding its voters on foreign policy?
President Biden’s inept execution of his — and his predecessor’s — policy of withdrawal from Afghanistan was a political gift to the GOP. It has made foreign policy, at least temporarily, a unifying issue on the right. For conservatives, whether you supported or opposed withdrawal, Biden’s shambolic implementation has something...
Jonah Goldberg: Afghanistan withdrawal shows allies that U.S. isn’t a reliable partner
When Joe Biden came into office, we were told that the “adults are back in charge” because he immediately set to work undoing as much of Donald Trump’s legacy as he could. “The new president in his first week issued more than three dozen executive actions on a wide range...
Jonah Goldberg: New mask requirement would be a bridge too far
The CDC wants us to go back to wearing masks indoors, even if you’ve been vaccinated. This is where I get off. If you’ll forgive a little testifying, I’ve tried hard to be reasonable throughout the pandemic. I’ve bent over backward to give public officials the benefit of the doubt...
Jonah Goldberg: Accepting defeat in Afghanistan is a terrible choice
Talking to reporters on July 2, President Biden was pressed about the sudden, embarrassing evacuation of our air base in Afghanistan and widespread predictions the Afghan government would fall quickly to the Taliban. The president testily replied: “I want to talk about happy things, man.” His retort seems to have...
Jonah Goldberg: Biden administration has made Facebook a pandemic scapegoat
Let’s say you’re Joe Biden. For entirely valid and legitimate reasons, you staked much of your presidency on getting the country vaccinated. You had a very good start, but then things started to stall right as a new, more contagious delta variant of the coronavirus was spreading. This is a...
Jonah Goldberg: Republican stance on voting rules doesn’t amount to a war with democracy
What a mess. Democrats (and their allies in the media) have convinced themselves that the Republican Party is at war with democracy. Republicans (and their allies in the media) have convinced themselves that the Democratic Party is at war with democracy. They’re both wrong, although in very different ways. Let’s...
Jonah Goldberg: Anti-vax hysteria is anything but pro-life
On a recent flight from Texas to North Carolina, a woman came so unglued that she tried to open the plane’s door. The flight crew had to bind and gag her with duct tape. This was an extreme example of a disturbing trend in air travel: People are becoming unruly...
