Lamenting the astonishing success of the activist Left’s century-long Gramscian march through America’s major institutions is, at this juncture, old hat. Still, there have been a few recent powerful examples, coming in quick succession, illustrating the extent to which leading liberal institutions of civil society have been captured by far-left […]
Joshua Hammer
41 posts
The story of Elon Musk’s acquisition, transformation and public rehabilitation of Twitter is nothing short of remarkable. Here is that rarest of confluences: A right-leaning (or at least right-sympathetic) mega-billionaire privately acquires a disproportionately influential public company out of genuine public-spiritedness, perhaps even a hint of noblesse oblige, and an […]
Last month at the Sixth Annual Kentucky Chapters Conference of the Federalist Society, Judge James C. Ho of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit (disclosure: my former boss) issued a call to arms. Ho, who earlier this year ruffled feathers at Georgetown University Law Center by using […]
Last week, this column focused on the eye-opening recent revelations from Missouri and Louisiana’s lawsuit, still ongoing, that exposes the depth and breadth of the collusion between the Biden regime and the oligarchs of Big Tech. Those lightly redacted documents, made public via a Twitter thread from Missouri Attorney General […]
On Thursday, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, who is also the Show Me State’s candidate for U.S. Senate this November, unveiled some very interesting documents that his office, along with the office of Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, have received since the two states jointly filed a potentially pathbreaking lawsuit […]
President Joe Biden’s new plan to “cancel” up to $10,000 in student loan debt for those making less than $125,000 annually is at once a dereliction of constitutional duty, a crass political gambit in the lead-up to a contested midterm election and a morally perverse value judgment that lavishes The […]
Community organizer and left-wing social activist Saul Alinsky wrote, in his 1971 book “Rules for Radicals,” that “he who controls the language controls the masses.” Alinsky, whose work profoundly influenced at least one notable fellow Chicagoan, Barack Obama, was in that quip channeling George Orwell’s famous dystopian novel, “1984.” “Newspeak,” […]
The president of the United States, equal parts senescent and feckless, garners record-shattering low approval ratings seemingly each week. This week, a new Quinnipiac University survey found that a paltry 31% of Americans approve of the way Joe Biden is handling his job. Among political independents, that number is, somehow, […]
It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to describe just how bad President Joe Biden is at his job. Comparisons to Jimmy Carter are pervasive, but trite — and too flattering to Carter. Perhaps a more apt (and dark) analogy, given how civic strife has reached a fever pitch, is to James […]
President Joe Biden, who faces four-decade-high inflation and record-high gasoline prices, is set to depart for the Middle East next week. As part of his trip, he will visit the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He may not explicitly beseech the kingdom’s precocious crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), for an […]
This past week and a half has been truly remarkable. From a conservative perspective, and a legal conservative perspective more specifically, there has not been a condensed period of such consistent, meaningful winning in my entire adult lifetime. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Biden v. Texas, the “remain in Mexico” […]
On Thursday, the single greatest living American used the occasion of his 74th birthday to remind of his greatness. He did so by issuing the single piece of writing that, at least thus far, best encapsulates and defines his career as one of the most towering constitutionalists in the history […]
To listen to House Democrats’ — and Liz Cheney’s and Adam Kinzinger’s, but I repeat myself — shrieks of hysteria from the opening nights of the Jan. 6 House Select Committee dais is to hearken back to the Soviet-era show trials of yesteryear. Vladimir Lenin, as the veteran conservative commentator […]
Chesa Boudin is, by any reasonable measure, a nut job. Conservatives could not grow a more picture-perfect political villain in a petri dish, even if they tried; Boudin really is that caricaturable. Boudin’s parents were Weather Underground domestic terrorists and, following the 1981 Brink’s Robbery in New York state, convicted […]
President Joe Biden recently signed into law a massive $40 billion “emergency” measure allocating additional U.S. aid to Ukraine. That $40 billion sum, which includes $20 billion in direct military assistance, $8 billion in general economic support, $5 billion directed toward food shortages and $1 billion toward the Ukrainian refugee […]
I find myself more shaken and stricken after this week’s latest mass shooting, the elementary school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, that saw 19 children and two teachers slain in cold blood, than I did after other mass shootings in recent years. Part of that is biographical: As an ex-Texan, the […]
In his 1838 Lyceum Address in Springfield, Illinois, a 28-year-old Abraham Lincoln spoke on “the perpetuation of our political institutions.” The speech was eerily prescient, coming 23 years as it did before then-President Lincoln presided over a nation tragically brought into a grisly Civil War — the ultimate test of […]
Last June, the Biden administration unveiled its “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism.” Despite its anodyne-sounding name, the “National Strategy” was anything but anodyne. The pamphlet represented the logical culmination of the Left’s cynical use of the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot as a means of ginning up large-scale, […]
The scandalous leak of a full draft of Justice Samuel Alito’s five-justice-strong majority opinion in this term’s marquee Supreme Court case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, is an event without precedent in the Court’s history. If Alito’s coalition holds, the leaked majority opinion, a February-dated first draft whose authenticity […]
The impending acquisition of Twitter by the world’s wealthiest person, Elon Musk, is one of the most improbable developments out of the business world — and, indeed, the political world — in decades. Though a fairly modest percentage of adult Americans use Twitter, at least when compared with more popular […]
I was in New Haven this past week for a couple of events at Yale, one of which was a William F. Buckley, Jr. Program debate for a primarily college-age audience on “common good conservatism.” During the debate, I argued on behalf of the more “muscular,” more forceful and less […]
The long and disturbing rap sheet of Frank James, the black nationalist New York City subway shooter arrested on Wednesday and charged by federal prosecutors with one count of committing a terrorist act against a mass transportation system, ought to serve as a national wake-up call. The 24 hour-plus nerve-racking […]
The great debates of our time are not exclusively those hard-hitting ones affecting human anthropology and political community — how many genders exist, what criteria we should look for in prospective immigrants, and so forth. Certainly, many of our most notable debates do implicate those most foundational rifts. But some […]
On the precipice of the regime-defining 2020 presidential election, Facebook and Twitter committed their “Pearl Harbor attack” against the incumbent president, Donald Trump, and in dutiful favor of the regnant regime’s favored candidate, Joe Biden. In an October move that would presage the collapse of the “public”-“private” distinction during the […]
The issue with Ketanji Brown Jackson, the 51-year-old federal appellate judge who is our senile president’s Supreme Court nominee, is not necessarily her on-paper qualifications. By most traditional metrics, she is “qualified”: She has served as both a district court and appellate court judge, served as vice chair of the […]
For conservatives and Republicans, the present flare-up in Ukraine has shone a spotlight on the extent to which there is profound foreign policy disagreement within the broader ranks. From the ultra-hawkish calls for a U.S.-imposed no-fly zone or even the assassination of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin from the likes of […]
The defeat of Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan in World War II ushered in the Cold War era. For the four and a half decades between the defeat of fascism and the collapse of communism, global affairs unfolded within a bipolar backdrop of “mutually assured” destruction between the […]
More so than perhaps any story in my adult lifetime, there is now an astonishing amount of disinformation pertaining to Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression in Ukraine. Russian disinformation and Russian propaganda, by now infamous for any American with even a cursory knowledge of the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, […]
In February 2014, Russian kingpin Vladimir Putin invaded and subsequently annexed the Crimean Peninsula, which had been under Ukrainian jurisdiction. The timing was no accident, coming as it did only a handful of months after then-President Barack Obama reneged upon his own chemical weapons “red line” for Syrian dictator Bashar […]
I’m writing from Budapest, the beautiful, Danube-bestriding Hungarian capital. Hungary, though a faraway land and modest in both size and population, has played an outsize role in the American conservative conscience for the past half-decade or so. After just a few days, it is not difficult to understand why. Hungary, […]
As we race toward this fall’s midterm elections, it is obvious to even cursory observers of our political landscape that Democrats are in for a shellacking. As of this writing, both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have job approval ratings that are underwater by double-digit margins. Even […]
The metastasis of the woke ideology, which seeps through our moribund body politic like a cancer, has shocked the conscience of many who still cling to the idea of America as a liberal bastion. One of the woke ideology’s more prevalent symptoms, the phenomenon known as “cancel culture,” has perhaps […]
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court finally granted a writ of certiorari in two now-consolidated affirmative action cases, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina. The cases will be jointly argued during the next Supreme Court term, and they place […]
There are many lessons to be drawn from last Saturday’s hostage crisis at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas. First, reports that Malik Faisal Akram’s antisemitic hostage-taking had disrupted Beth Israel’s livestreamed Shabbat services proved more prescient than those reporters perhaps realized. Orthodox Judaism does not permit electronic streaming on […]
The recent arrival of the omicron variant of COVID-19 has, for far too many, reset the clock of our timeline for a return to societal normalcy. Public health authorities in many countries reimposed loosened travel restrictions that had lapsed. Washington, D.C., under the mayorship of Muriel Bowser, passed a draconian […]
To observe that the left and its cheerleading media have treated the one-year anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot as a solemn occasion would be to understate the point. For the left, the (actually) mostly peaceful demonstrations of that day, which for a small percentage of demonstrators […]
In March 2020, when COVID-19 first exploded onto the scene, sports fans waited with bated breath to see which teams, and which leagues, would bow out on precautionary grounds. The answer quickly became clear: all of them. But actions that were more justifiable at that particular juncture, when we knew […]
Are there are any other issues confronting our fractious republic that matter if Americans themselves are too scared to walk outside, lest they be mugged by a “bail reform”-freed perp or shot by a gangbanger in a drive-by shooting? As we get ready to close the chapter on this bloody […]
In the 2016 Republican Party presidential primary, decades of dissonance between the party’s aggrieved grassroots and its blinkered elite spilled out into the open. For years, the chasm widened between the GOP’s heartland base, the river valley-dwelling “Somewheres” from David Goodhart’s 2017 book, “The Road to Somewhere,” and the party’s […]
At last month’s National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Florida, I used my speech to criticize “Fusionism,” the postwar conservative movement’s default political alliance built upon an attendant “Fusionist” political philosophy, and instead argue on behalf of an alternative path forward. Fusionism, as formulated and popularized by the midcentury theorist Frank […]
Bowing to intense political pressure, Oklahoma’s Kevin Stitt, the Republican governor of one of the nation’s reddest states, commuted on Thursday the death sentence of convicted murderer Julius Jones. Stitt’s commutation of Jones, who was convicted for a first-degree carjacking murder in one of the most reliably pro-death penalty states, […]