Author Archive: Glenn Reynolds

LEFTIST LIES HAVE CONSEQUENCES:

HMM: Forget the Consumer Surveys, Businesses Say We’re in a Boom. “Gloom and doom is everywhere these days — except in the economic data or in business planning meetings.”

I remember Mark Penn bragging about how the ’92 Clinton campaign convinced people the Bush economy was awful when it was actually rebounding sharply. It helps to have the press in your pocket, of course.

“MOST EVIL” IN TRANSLATION: “SOMEONE WHO STANDS IN THE WAY OF CURRENT DEMOCRAT GOALS.”

MERCY TO THE GUILTY IS CRUELTY TO THE INNOCENT:

IT’S GOOD TO BE THE NOMENKLATURA:

HOW THINGS WORK:

INSURRECTION: “Over the past two weeks, there have been nightly and escalating riots at the Delaney ICE Detention Center. Massive resources have been poured in by outside NGOs funded by leftist billionaires, foundations, Neville Singham, and the Chinese Communist Party. Protesters from around the country have assembled there, expensive riot gear provided to the activists, and even scripts given to selected spokespeople to push out a carefully constructed message. As in Minnesota, local politicians have been backing the rioters, insisting that they are only using their First Amendment right to protest, even if that means assaulting officers, lighting fires, stealing from local businesses, dismantling public property to turn the rubble into weapons, and demanding that officers kill themselves, or threatening to kill them and their families.”

I’M A FAN OF WALTER MCDOUGALL: A Return to Proper History. REVIEW: ‘The Mighty Continent: A Candid History of Modern Europe’ by Walter A. McDougall.

“Too often academic treatises these days are insufferably ‘woke’ or even unreadable, thanks to their postmodern jargon,” explains the author of this refreshingly countercultural work. “This book, by contrast, consists of old-fashioned, meat-and-potatoes history.” After lecturing on European history at UC Berkeley and Penn, Professor Walter McDougall is clearly exasperated at the way his craft has been wrecked by what he lists as “postmodernism, deconstructionism, critical race theory, radical feminism, and ‘wokeness’ in general.”

Instead of merely ranting against those ideologies, however, he has shown what can be achieved if historians simply ignore them. Drawing on his half-century of lectures, he has written a history of Europe from the Renaissance to 1945 that is erudite, thought-provoking, and engaging, proving that sweeping surveys of the past can still be written in the grand old style. This book is a triumphant return to proper history, the way it was written before the commanding heights of the Academy were captured by the Left. It’s so old-fashioned that there are no endnotes or bibliography, but is none the worse for that.

I’ve been a fan of his ever since his The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age.

CHANGE:

I may retire to Argentina. Or Cuba, which I expect will be hospitable by then.

OPEN THREAD: Ring out the weekend.