Attention to the Unseen

Politico reports: The chairman of an Austrian political party founded by ex-Nazis, the conservative Twitter star behind the anti-trans Bud Light backlash and former President Donald Trump all walked into a bar. Seriously. On Saturday night in Manhattan, amid butler-delivered bellinis, sequined ball gowns and a five-course French service meal, characters from all corners of the Republican Party’s MAGA faction gathered for “a night of dinner, drinking, and love of country.” Trump, the New York Young Republican Club’s 111th Annual…

Read More Read More

Jonathan Martin writes: At a Hoover Institution conference here last week, former Trump Defense Secretary Jim Mattis — who in 2020 denounced the former president as a threat to the Constitution — said retired generals “need to go silent during elections” and argued that the “American people do not need military officers telling them how to vote.” Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) was on the same panel with Mattis and said afterward that the former president is dominating the lead-off Iowa…

Read More Read More

Rolling Stone reports: Of all the strange, conspiratorial, and potentially dangerous theories Donald Trump and his allies came up with in the days after the 2020 election, this was the strangest, the most conspiratorial, the most potentially dangerous. Millions of electronic ballots for Trump had been “deleted,” and hundreds of thousands more had been “switched” to Joe Biden, Trump and his cronies in media, political, and legal circles insisted — thanks to software designed at the behest of Venezuelan dictator…

Read More Read More

Robert Kagan writes: If Nikki Haley is serious about trying to stop Trump […], there is only one way to cut into his mammoth majority, and that is by raising doubts about Trump’s electability. The way to do that is to warn those Republicans still capable of listening that a Trump presidency really does pose a risk to our freedom and democracy and the Constitution. That is what will be required to win over the small percentage of Republicans who…

Read More Read More

Tom Nichols writes: If Donald Trump wins the next election, he will attempt to turn the men and women of the United States armed forces into praetorians loyal not to the Constitution, but only to him. This project will likely be among his administration’s highest priorities. It will not be easy: The overwhelming majority of America’s service people are professionals and patriots. I know this from teaching senior officers for 25 years at the Naval War College. As president, Trump…

Read More Read More

Chris Knight writes: In a world where money talks, we’re often faced with a harsh choice – compromise on a point of principle or find ourselves out of work. One way or another, many of us have been there. To keep body and soul together, one version of ourselves colludes with the prevailing powers while another indignantly resists. In 1955, Chomsky found himself in just such a situation. He had a PhD in linguistics but was unable to get a…

Read More Read More