Joel Mathis

Ned Ryun, my fellow Kansan, can't just make an argument. He has to call Brian Stetler a flouncing cuck: This does make me wonder about the sincerity of his Christian faith, which his family parades pretty proudly before the world. Who would Jesus try to publicly emasculate? But Ryun is more Conservative than Christian, and conservatives are really, really obsessed with the status of their penises and making sure people know about their status relative to others. (I once wrote: "The GOP? That stands for the Grand Old Phallus.") It's one reason (along with racism) insults like "soy boy" "beta boy" and "cuck" are so prevalent among the online right. Ryun's version -- "simpering' "eunuch" -- is more of the same. This kind of misogyny has real and terrible effects, as Jessica Valenti points out today: Just this week, Roy Den Hollander, a lawyer and well-known misogynist, allegedly killed the son of a feder

Washington Post: Mr. Trump said so many things that were wrong or false that Mr. Bolton in the book regularly includes phrases like “(the opposite of the truth)” following some quote from the president. And Mr. Trump in this telling has no overarching philosophy of governance or foreign policy but rather a series of gut-driven instincts that sometimes mirrored Mr. Bolton’s but other times were, in his view, dangerous and reckless. “His thinking was like an archipelago of dots (like individual real estate deals), leaving the rest of us to discern — or create — policy,” Mr. Bolton writes. “That had its pros and cons.” This has been obvious for some time - Trumpism is Trump - but that hasn't prevented a cottage industry of writers like Henry Olsen and Victor Davis Hanson or pretty much anybody on the roster of the Claremont Institute to offer an intellectual sheen and overarching consistency to the president's lurching from one crisis to the next. Some of this is to give something

There've been debates in recent days about The Atlantic's decision to hire National Review's Kevin Williamson. Conservatives think (not without merit, I think) that every time a mainstream publication hires a conservative, liberals try to get that conservative fired. On the other hand: Williamson is a dick. He's been a little bit racist ,  a little bit snooty , and you'll forgive women for thinking his proposal to execute women who've had an abortion is-a non-starter. He's a talented provocateur, too smart and self-aware to let himself go Full-Blown Milo, but he also delights sticking a thumb in the eye of people who disagree with him. I'm not going to say The Atlantic shouldn't hire Williamson. I will say there's a National Review voice they should've hired instead: David A. French. There would still be complaints. Critics have long eyed his marriage with suspicion . He's r eligiously conservative on sexual matters . He's

A few years ago, I wrote a short column for the Philly Mag website trying to distill what I'd learned from years of close interaction with conservative friends like Ben Boychuk, William Voegeli, and Steve Hayward — three strong ideas of conservatism that, perhaps, liberalism doesn't always get well. Do the lessons hold up in the age of Trumpism? Let's revisit. • They’re often better at recognizing the law of unintended consequences: Simply put, the attempt to fix a problem can sometimes end up creating new, unanticipated problems that also need solving. You can, for example, make the case that the federal government’s decision to seriously start fighting wildfires in the last century actually ended up making wildfires … worse. In Boulder, Colo., attempts to rein in that city’s runaway growth have driven housing prices skyward —ruining some of the grassroots charm activists there were trying to preserve. Conservatives aren’t perfect at applying this principle—see the in

It’s been nearly nine years now that I’ve had the privilege of being an opinion journalist, at least on a part-time basis. I’ve won a couple of awards for my work, and the column I co-write is distributed to papers across the nation. It’s the kind of gig a lot of people dream of and never attain, and I know that I’m lucky as hell to have had this privilege. During the nine years, two big personal goals that have motivated me: • To prove I belonged: I know I wasn’t the person John Temple had in mind when he hired me, along with Ben Boychuk, for RedBlueAmerica. He told me as much — he was expecting somebody who had done a stint at the New Republic, and I’m guessing an Ivy League degree was probably part of that package. I worked hard to prove that while I was green in opinion journalism and had an unusual background for the job, I was well-read enough, smart enough, and thoughtful enough — curious enough — to express opinions at something deeper than a family-argument-at-Thanksgi

Over at City Journal, Mac Donald starts out: One of the most revealing contradictions of left-wing ideology is the determination of liberals to bring as many Third World “immigrants of color” as possible into the U.S., where, if those same liberals are to be believed, they will face bigotry of appalling proportions. And she keeps going from there. It's a strawman piece of epic proportions. Why? Because it's possible for a reasonably intelligent person to hold these two thoughts in their head at the same time: • America offers more freedom and opportunity than many countries, including the countries where immigrants come from. • America nonetheless is not yet perfect, and has improvements to make in offering freedom and opportunity to all who seek it — particularly people of color. All it takes is just a touch of nuanced thinking and the desire not to mischaracterize your opponent. Mac Donald apparently lacks the desire or ability to do so. She seems smart, so I'm

Dennis Prager's approach to column-writing is pretty simple: A) Something is bad in the world. B) Democrats are at fault. So goes his explanation for the rise of Donald Trump . It's tendentious and dumb — as per usual with Prager — but reading it made me consider a possibility: The old right vs. left construct of our debates might be a bad template going forward. It depends on how much Trumpism survives 2016. If this is more than a one-off, then "telling both sides of the story" won't work anymore, nor will point-counterpoint presentations. (I say that as somebody who co-authors a nationally syndicated point-counterpoint column.)  Trumpism has an array of causes, and grafting an explanation for him onto our old debates seems to not quite hit the point. We're going to need new arguments.

If Facebook really has biased its feed results against conservative outlets, that truly sucks. But I wonder if my conservative friends think that warrants government intrusion into the company's affairs, and if so: On what basis?

One relief about the rise of Donald Trump is that his alienation from the conservative intellectuals in the Republican Party means he can’t — and probably won’t — gussy up his campaign with any pretense that it’s about restoring limited-government Constitutionalism to American governance. We don’t really know if Trump even has a theory of Constitutional interpretation, but his public statements seem skeptical of the idea that his presidency would be one that could be checked or balanced. Why is this a relief? Because for all the talk my smart conservative friends have about the Founders, liberty, fiscal rectitude, and a strict-constructionist view of the Constitution, Republicans don’t actually govern that way all that often . George W. Bush was more or less handpicked by the conservative establishment, and defended vociferously by it, but his administration was defined by both mounting deficits (just like Reagan’s!) and its attempts to innovate theories of expanded executive pow

For most of my life, the 1960s have loomed large in the political life of the country. If you loved the 1960s, you were probably a liberal who loved the Civil Rights movement, feminism, Medicare—all the things that made the era perhaps the last great moments of center-left ascendancy in the United States. And if you hated the 1960s,  you probably missed the simpler times of the 1950s, when "Ozzie and Harriet" and Ward Cleaver ruled the airwaves, and life was orderly and a little more moral. Somewhere in the last few years, though, the script has flipped. Liberals have come to embrace the relative economic egalitarianism of America in the 1950s—blacks and women notably excepted—while conservative Republicans seem to view Dwight Eisenhower as an accomodationist who too easily surrendered to the welfare state designs of his Democratic predecessors. I'm not sure where all this started to change. Paul Krugman's "The Conscience of a Liberal" certainly celebrate

In the newest Weekly Standard , Matthew Continetti makes the case that conservatives don't really have to care about income inequality—whether it's growing or not— because it's not government's job to address such issues.  Inequalities of condition are a fact of life. Some people will always be poorer than others. So too, human altruism will always seek to alleviate the suffering of the destitute. There is a place for reasonable and prudent actions to improve well-being. But that does not mean the entire structure of our polity should be designed to achieve an egalitarian ideal. Such a goal is fantastic, utopian even, and one would think that the trillions of dollars the United States has spent in vain over the last 50 years to promote “equality as a fact and equality as a result” would give the egalitarians pause. That sounds principled, and maybe even a little bit appealing if you're of the right temperament. But it fundamentally ignores one simple fact: By virtu

The Media Research Center seems to think the media is proving its liberal bias by covering the Herman Cain scandal so closely, whereas it strained to ignore the Clinton sex scandals of the 1990s. Which is weird, because my memory of the late 1990s is that political coverage was dominated, for a time, by news of Clinton's sex scandals. There was even an impeachment or something. Nonetheless, MRC concludes: When one contrasts the sexual harassment scandals of Democrat Bill Clinton, which included on the record accusers, with the hazy allegations against Republican Herman Cain, it becomes clear that the networks have enthusiasm for one and ignored the other. That's interesting framing, because the "hazy allegations" against Cain are actually confirmed cases that were settled with monetary payouts a decade ago . That makes them somewhat more tangible than the MRC suggests, it seems to me.

Hey! Look! Ben Shapiro is griping again about how Hollywood is out of touch with mainstream American values, with shows that make light of sex and use the word "vagina." Truth be told, I don't have much use for the new fall season shows he criticizes at National Review, but then he reaches this astounding conclusion. Some of these shows may be good. Who knows? I enjoy how the quality of shows is irrelevant to his critique of them. I enjoy how he implicitly admits that he hasn't seen the shows he's criticizing .  But that's not the juicy part.  Maybe Hollywood will stumble onto something. But note a pattern: the network that continues to appeal to most Americans — and the network that doesn’t appear on this list — remains CBS. That’s because they aim at older audiences, and so have less need to be “edgy.” It’s also why you won’t see them winning too many Emmys in the near future. Well sure. CBS is the most-popular network—and its most popular sitcom, Two

To listen to Republicans in the presidential primary debates, you'd think Barack Obama had thrown open the borders to the United States to every Tom, Dick, and Juan who wants to stream over the southern border. That's not true, of course: Obama's deported nearly as many illegal immigrants in less than three years than George W. Bush did in eight.  But there are still illegal immigrants in the United States, so clearly he's doing something wrong. Right? Maybe you can ship all 11 million illegal immigrants out of the country. But here's the thing, conservatives: You're going to need a much bigger federal bureaucracy to get the job done. According to a Washington Post profile this morning, the U.S. only has the budget to deport 400,000 illegal immigrants a year.   At that rate, it'll only take 27.5 years to ship everybody else—assuming, of course, you can keep everybody else out. If you want tougher enforcement that includes deportation of any immigrant

They're wearing red. That can't be a coincidence. I confess I don't get this reaction to the June story in Fortune about how Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are trying to persuade other billionaires to leave half their estates to charity : As it turns out, however, the writer, senior editor-at-large Carol Loomis, struck a raw nerve with Fortune readers. Most were outraged – regarding the philanthropy plan as grandstanding that would do nothing to create jobs or to address horrific problems, including runaway government spending, the spiraling deficit, and the near-comatose state of the economy. As Fortune notes in its July 26 issue, “When Carol Loomis reported on Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates’ plan to pledge half of their wealth away, the comments – nearly 500 of them – came in fast and, literally, furious.” According to Fortune’s own tally, the comments ran 2-to-1 against Buffett and Gates. The included 36 percent of who readers described the philanth

Andrew Breitbart came to Philadelphia on Saturday; I missed the event, unfortunately, but this Philadelphia Inquirer article crystallized what about Breitbart, exactly, troubles me so. It's not his willingness to peddle misleadingly edited videos, or his well-documented arrogance (some would call it flair) or the fact that he gives shelter, on his Big Government site , to conspiracy peddlers like Frank Gaffney. (No, I'm not going to link to that.) These things bug me, but they're not the thing that bugs me about Andrew Breitbart. This is the thing that bugs me: Andrew Breitbart has made himself famous and influential by raging against (he says) a liberal establishment colossus. But he's used his power, essentially, to try to crush ants. He's done that loudly, sure, but that doesn't change the essential dynamic. Let me elaborate, by referring to the Inky article. Here's Breitbart describing his mission, echoing statements he's made elsewhere: An

National Review's Dennis Prager departs from dispensing invaluable marriage advice  to offer similarly valuable insight into human nature. Liberals, he says, hate conservatives. Granting the exceptions that all generalizations allow for, conservatives believe that those on the left are wrong, while those on the left believe that those on the right are bad. I'll grant that there are lots and lots of liberals who feel this way. But Prager's blithe dismissal of similar phenomena on the right suggests he's not dealing with the issue honestly. Because there's lots of conservatives who think that liberals are evil. For example: I was attending a conservative evangelical Mennonite college in 1992 when Bill Clinton was elected president. I was one of the few students to openly support Clinton for president that year; many of my fellow students and faculty warned of literally Biblical, literally Apocalyptic consequences if he attained office. (The night of the election, a

Because he's Matt Labash, the new Weekly Standard cover story in which he attempts "living liberally" -- as defined by Justin Krebs' new book, "538 Ways to Live Work and Play Like a Liberal" -- is at least moderately entertaining until it stretches into tedium. In a bit of stunt journalism, Labash attempts to "live liberally" for 10 days, exploring the ways that Krebs' book contains contradictions and/or reaches into the furthest corners of your life. Get it? It's comically tiresome to live every single aspect of your life through the prism of politics. Which, no kidding. If you haven't given up somewhere by page 12 or so, though, it seems to me the real story comes when Labash puts down the book and goes to a "Drinking Liberally" meetup to hang out with some real liberals . The group arrives one by one—about a dozen in all. I haven’t told them in advance I was coming, so when I break the news that I’m a reporter for a c

If you read this Weekly Standard article , you might think it a shocking expose -- shocking, because it's in the Weekly Standard -- of BP's longstanding laxness with regards to safety issues. But what develops is something else entirely: An exercise in schadenfreude that a company that tried so hard to brand itself as "green" has enmeshed itself in one of history's more notorious environmental disasters. The game is given away when describing Oberon Houston, an engineer who left the company a few years back after narrowly avoiding death on a BP rig. Andrew Wilson's article presents a litany of safety-related reasons for Houston's departure, but tacks this on: And finally, he told me over the course of several interviews, he was distressed by an abundance of rhetoric—coming from the CEO—about BP going “beyond petroleum” and joining the environmental activists in campaigning for reduced carbon emissions. “To me and everyone I knew, it didn’t make any sens

Some of my more thoughtful conservative friends have criticized President Obama's bigger initiatives -- like the health reform law -- from a "first principles" argument that economic liberty is the foundation of, well, liberty liberty. Any governmental act that interferes with the rights of individuals to their property or profit is a reduction of liberty and thus potentially a step down the slippery slope to tyranny. I think it's an insightful argument, but I also think it's got limits. And I think those limits might be demonstrated by the Heritage Foundation's 2010 Index of Economic Freedom . What's notable is that the two "countries" ranked highest on the index -- Hong Kong and Singapore -- might be great places to make cash, but they're not what most Americans would think of as substantially "free." (The United States ranks ninth.) Hong Kong might be listed as a separate "country" for the purposes of the index, but i