Joel Mathis

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

I've heard about this before, but it still astonishes me: Border Patrol officers are working without permission on private property and setting up checkpoints up to 100 miles away from the border under a little-known federal law that is being used more widely in the Trump administration’s aggressive crackdown on illegal immigration.  Trump administration officials defend the government’s decades-old authority to search people and property, even without a warrant, far from the border. They call it a vital part of preventing weapons, terrorists and other people from illegally entering the United States.  An estimated 200 million Americans live within 100 miles of the border, according to the A.C.L.U. At least 11 states — mostly in the Northeast and Florida — are either entirely or almost entirely in the 100-mile radius. Conservatives talk about liberty and rule of law a lot, but what they're doing is giving police virtually unfettered power over much of the country. At th

I've suggested before that Trumpist immigration enforcement might be an act of injustice far worse than the offense of illegal immigration. We have two more examples this week of why it might be so. First, we have the story of Jorge Garcia , a Detroit man being deported after 30 years in the United States. He was brought to the United States when he was 10; his deportation separates him from his wife and two children, all of them U.S. citizens. Please, read his story.  Second, we have this atrocity: US border patrol agents are routinely sabotaging water supplies left for migrants in the Arizona desert, condemning them to death, humanitarian groups have said. Travellers attempting to cross into the US from Mexico regularly die of dehydration, as well as exposure to extreme heat or cold, so aid groups leave water bottles and emergency stocks such as blankets at points throughout the Sonoran desert. A video released by the groups showed border patrol agents kicking over wat

I've made little secret of my disdain for the Trump-loving website American Greatness . Part of this, I guess, is personal: I know a couple of the people who run the site and, until about a year ago, thought that though they were conservative, they'd still avoid Trumpian nonsense. That was wrong. I'm still working that out. But it's also the case that I think 99 percent of what happens at AmGreatness is mean-spirited and unreflective, so sure of itself and its own rightness, yet small in soul and generosity. "Greatness" seems to be defined almost as its inverse. I'm not a conservative, but I don't think that has to define conservatism or my friends. Yet, for the moment, it does. One other problem: The central conceit of American Greatness, to my mind, is that "saving America" means an end to politics. Progressives are always plotting to destroy the country — as are NeverTrump conservatives and Mitch McConnell, apparently. And in a way, this

Jesse Singal at NYMag says the murder rate is going up, for whites and blacks, for different reasons. And the researcher he talks to endorses a "Ferguson effect," but different from how it's usually defined. There's a crisis of police legitimacy that is enabling the bad guys. The Ferguson effect is a thoroughly politicized concept at this point, because it contains an implicit rebuke of the protests that exploded in the wakes of the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, and other young black boys and men who have been unjustly killed by police. The thinking goes that all those angry, loud protesters are making it harder for police to do their jobs.  But there’s another way of looking at this: It could be the case that yes, deteriorating relationships between communities and the police are helping drive the increased homicide rate, but that things go in the other direction. That is, some communities have come to view the police with such p

Yes, this story could be better — for it to have some meaning, we'd get some insight as to why Tony Hovater became a Holocaust-denying Nazi sympathizer. But the critics go further, saying that the story "normalizes" Nazis. I dunno. Not sure how you can read this and think "gosh, that's normal": Or this: It's true, the story doesn't spend a lot of time screaming "this is bad!" But I suspect that's because the NYT editors know their audience probably doesn't include a lot of Nazi sympathizers, or even many folks who are Nazi agnostic.