Tag: Middle America

3,199 words

The 2020 film Irresistible, written and directed by the well-known former Daily Show host Jon Stewart, is a much-underrated political comedy in which a small-town mayoral campaign becomes a partisan battleground. At first I thought it might cover the same ground as The Candidate. (As I remember from when I watched it around 1979, a young greenhorn campaigns for a Senate seat, has to tone down his far-Left politics for optics purposes, and is furious because he wins after compromising himself.) Instead, it went in some surprising directions. (more…)

President Lyndon Johnson signing the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Act into law, surrounded by his supporters.

3,031 words

Part 6 of 9 (Chapter 1 here, Chapter 4 Part 2 here, Chapter 5 Part 2 here)

When a term has become so universally sanctified as “democracy” is now, I begin to wonder whether it means anything, in meaning too many things. — T. S. Eliot (more…)

Jason Köhne

1,390 words

I recently watched an interesting debate centered on the Jewish Question between Mark Collett of Patriotic Alternative and Jason Köhne of No White Guilt. If you’ve been around this scene for a while, the debate wasn’t earthshattering. Lines have been drawn. Sides chosen. Listeners knew the arguments that both sides were going to make before they made them. And yet, what was truly great about the debate was that both sides made them, clearly and succinctly. (more…)

Rylee McCollum

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On September 10, 2021, my wanderings carried me to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where I had the privilege of witnessing the homecoming of Lance Corporal Rylee McCollum, one of thirteen American Marines killed during the evacuation of Kabul. Rylee was 20 years old, a husband, and an expectant father. (more…)

8,232 words

As an American, I find European theories about this country and its character intriguing (or amusing) — particularly those formed from intimate experience. Of course, such theories presuppose that there is and has been such a thing as “the American people,” or “ethny” from which to draw an assessment. I submit two, not quite antithetical, but competing European judgments about the United States. (more…)

Anne Case and Angus Deaton.

3,201 words

Part I

When Purdue Pharmaceutical introduced OxyContin, their marketing for the drug was aggressive, efficient, unscrupulous, and amoral. Resources were poured into advertising; the company spent $200 million on marketing in 2001. Sales grew from $48 million in 1996 to $1.1 billion in 2000, (more…)

1,717 words

Like many in Hollywood, actor/director Rob Reiner has dedicated much of his Twitter feed to bashing President Trump. Lately, however, he’s been taking it further by condemning Trump’s supporters as being just as bad as the President. There really is no end to the scorn he heaps on Trump and the sixty-three million people who put him in office:

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1,883 words

The Tillman Story (2010)
Directed by Amir Bar-Lev

Pat Tillman of the 75th Ranger Regiment was killed in action on April 22, 2004 in Afghanistan. In the grand scheme of things, Tillman’s death was not all that remarkable. America was engaged in two wars at the time, and soldiers, especially those in especially dangerous jobs like the Combat Engineers or the Rangers, were being killed every day. (more…)

Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, and Ross Perot at a 1992 presidential debate

2,310 words

Perhaps the greatest irony of the periodic political revolutions that occur in American democracy is that most of the voters who make them possible have not the foggiest notion of what they are doing. In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt won the White House by running on a platform that promised to balance the budget and reduce the scale and power of the federal government, and there is no doubt that most of the Americans who sent him to Washington supported him simply because of the desperate economic straits in which they found themselves and their country, not because of any passion they shared with him for the socialist and internationalist experiments that he and his brood immediately imposed. (more…)