Jonah Goldberg stories, Page 14

What offends me most about the whistleblower-Ukraine-Biden story isn’t the obvious corruption of it all. It’s the way members of Team Trump assume we’re all idiots who won’t notice they’ve abruptly shifted their narrative. At first, it seemed like a familiar scenario of allegations met with denials. The Washington Post...

It’s exhausting being both a conservative and a critic of President Trump. When I aim my pen at the White House, many of my comrades on the right go nuts. And readers who love it when I go after Trump turn into a cage full of poo- flinging monkeys when I...

“No Democrat is going to win the nomination for president of the United States without African-American support. Nor should they,” Kate Bedingfield, Joe Biden’s deputy campaign manager, told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. Bedingfield was pushing back on a single bad poll for Biden (from Monmouth University) that had the media and...

Early one recent morning, Donald Trump tweeted: “94% Approval Rating in the Republican Party, a record. Thank you!” Where the president got this specific number remains a mystery. Recent polls by YouGov put his GOP approval roughly 10 points lower, and Gallup, which has tracked Trump’s popularity since he took...

Here’s an idea: Joe Biden should run a front-porch campaign. Front-porch campaigns were once a common feature of American presidential politics, though the term wasn’t always applied to the practice. The most famous front-porch campaigns were in the 1880s and 1890s, culminating in William McKinley’s successful bid in 1896. While...

Here’s a crazy idea: Maybe the forces of liberty will win. Sadly, few people are rooting for liberty these days, and even among those who are, there’s a dismaying amount of pessimism about its prospects. Consider China. There’s a new bipartisan consensus these days: The “elites” made a “bad bet”...

Anyone who’s watched a courtroom TV drama has heard the phrase “Hard cases make bad law.” It’s a legal maxim that says really extreme — i.e., rare or weird — cases are not only hard to generalize from, they’re also a bad foundation for new legislation or policy. This also...

America is sick. Just about everybody recognizes it, and we didn’t need two more mass shootings to convince anybody of anything. Most Americans think the country is on the wrong track, despite a roaring economy. You can blame Donald Trump, but Americans have been unsatisfied with the country’s direction for...

I want to put in a good word for partisanship. This might sound strange to some readers. I’ve written a lot about our problem with tribalism, including hyper-partisanship and political polarization. It was a major theme of my cheerily titled book “Suicide of the West.” So I’m happy to concede...

Paul Ryan is getting the hate treatment — again. The former GOP House speaker and 2012 vice presidential candidate is a unifying figure these days. Liberals have long despised him — unfairly in my mind. Anti-Trump conservatives are infuriated by his “surrender to Trumpism,” in the words of Charlie Sykes,...

Increasingly, the intellectual consensus seems to be that our political leanings are hardwired in our genes. There is some excellent research behind this thinking, and I’ve come around to believing that DNA plays a bigger role in our political worldviews than many on the right or left are willing to...

Nike is doing it wrong. I don’t mean the shoemaking, though that thing with Zion Williamson was pretty bad, I have to say. No, Nike is doing it wrong because it managed to do something that all the neo-Nazis, Klansmen, alt-righters and other denizens of the lowest coprophagic phylum of...

The idea holding together the conservative movement since the 1960s was called “fusionism.” The concept, which always worked better as an organizing principle than a philosophical one, was that freedom and virtue were inextricably linked. Virtue not freely chosen wasn’t virtuous. Or as Frank Meyer, the foremost architect of fusionism,...

The intellectual right is in the middle of a huge brouhaha, as some prominent right-wing commentators celebrate what they believe is the end of the “conservative consensus” around classical liberalism — free markets, limited government, the sovereignty of the individual and even in some cases free expression. Fox News’ Tucker...

“Without the ILLEGAL Witch Hunt, my poll numbers, especially because of our historically ‘great’ economy, would be at 65%,” President Trump tweeted last month. In all likelihood, the president believes what he wrote. It’s a strongly held sentiment among many of Trump’s ardent supporters that if he hadn’t been stabbed...

“Democrats are aggressively pushing late-term abortion, allowing children to be ripped from their mother’s womb right up until the moment of birth,” President Trump said at a Florida rally earlier this month. “The baby is born and you wrap the baby beautifully and you talk to the mother about the...

In the 1920 presidential election, Warren Harding won in a landslide by promising a “Return to Normalcy.” Today’s Democrats would be wise to make that same pledge for 2020. They probably won’t, however, which is why President Trump might get re-elected. Harding’s concept of normalcy has been ridiculed and reviled...

The National Rifle Association has big troubles. It’s wildly in debt. The attorney general of New York — where the NRA was founded in 1871 and where it remains incorporated — is investigating the tax-exempt status of what she has called a “terrorist organization.” The NRA’s longtime chief executive, Wayne...

“Do you think this is impeachable?” Chuck Todd, host of “Meet the Press,” asked Rep. Jerrold Nadler about the findings in the report by special counsel Robert Mueller. The congressman from New York replied, “Yeah, I do. I do think this, if proven, if proven … some of this would...

Maybe you haven’t noticed, but we live in a time when everything is supposed to be black and white. The weird, incestuous relationship between the media and the political parties incentivizes combatants to take positions on the 1-yard lines, if not in the end zones. But what if — and...