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Articles by Ron Radosh
Diana West's "American Betrayal" is McCarthy on Steroids
Originally published on FrontPageMag. Many Americans at both ends of the political spectrum view history in conspiratorial terms. The late Senator Joseph McCarthy set the bar very high when he claimed to have uncovered “a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.
The mendacity of Walter Duranty
The announcement of the prize proclaimed, “Mr. Duranty’s dispatches show profound and intimate comprehension of conditions in Russia and of the causes of those conditions. They are marked by scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment, and exceptional clarity, and are... A Message from the Editors Your donation sustains our efforts to inspire joyous rediscoveries. Show your support Popular Right Now
Steve Bannon and MAGA Martyrdom
On Monday, Stephen K. Bannon surrendered to federal authorities and was released on his own recognizance after a court appearance in the afternoon. He was not reticent. To the contrary: He brought along his own people to livestream and record an impromptu street-side appearance as he left the court building. Those who saw it on the TV news channels noted his excitement, his ability to seize the moment to gain more support from the MAGA movement, and to extol his goals.
Today’s Democratic Socialists: Not So Big on Democracy
Recent comments about Cuba and Venezuela from individuals associated with the Democratic Socialists of America make clear that today’s democratic socialist movement bears little resemblance to its forebears.
Shaping Reasonable People
Let’s Be Reasonable A Conservative Case for Liberal Education by Jonathan Marks Princeton, 221 pp., $27.95 In his new book, Let’s Be Reasonable, Ursinus College political scientist Jonathan Marks aims to convince his fellow educators of the need to commit themselves and their universities a bit more forcefully, a bit more singlemindedly, to the fundamental goal of liberal arts education: the “shaping of reasonable people”—a better goal, he says, than merely “shaping people who deal well with...
Why Women Hate Trump
One of the many striking results from 2016 was that Donald Trump carried white women 47-45 over Hillary Clinton. So much for identity politics! The first female major party nominee couldn’t even win her own demographic niche. And this result was even more striking because Trump wasn’t just “not a feminist.” He wasn’t your garden-variety, patriarchy-lite conservative, like a John Cornyn or Mike Pence.
Getting Past Partisan Blinders
“Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal.” —Robert Heinlein Among many lessons learned over the last excruciating four years is this: Partisanship is a more potent drug than heroin. I consider myself to be in recovery, but by no means cured. The urge to curate information to suit your own prejudices is nearly impossible to conquer—even when you’ve switched sides.
Trump as a Champion of ‘Bourgeois Values’? Not So Fast.
On the weekend of October 17, the Wall Street Journal ran a lengthy interview with political writer and historian Fred Siegel, conducted by a Journal contributor, Tunku Varadarajan.
A Tale of Three Possible Outcomes
In the last century, three presidents have lost re-election bids for a second term: Herbert Hoover in 1932, Jimmy Carter in 1980, and George H.W. Bush in 1992. Each of these losses was different from the others, and each brought its own distinctive after-effects. Since it now seems likely that Donald Trump will follow in these three one-term presidents’ footsteps, let’s take a quick look at their defeats.
President Trump’s Unpatriotic ‘Patriotic Education’
Anti-American propaganda in schools, such as the blatantly inaccurate but widely lauded 1619 Project, is a real problem. So it is certainly welcome to hear someone prominent complain that it “rewrites American history to teach our children that we were founded on the principle of oppression, not freedom.” The problem is that this was said by President Trump in a Constitution Day speech announcing a new initiative to promote “patriotic education,” whatever that means.
Donald Trump’s Bizarre History Conference
For good reason, President Donald J. Trump is not a man whom one thinks of as having a deep interest in or knowledge of American history. “History and culture—so important,” Trump said, inanely, in a Reno speech in 2017. Yet when the president gives examples, his complete ignorance of history comes forth at once. For example, as conservative journalist Sol Stern pointed out during the 2016 campaign, Trump has constantly repeated a false historical story: He told rallies that General John J.
Why Sweden Should Join NATO
As American foreign policy observers begin cautiously to look beyond the Trump era, what they see is not pretty: The United States’s reputation lies in shatters. Whereas George W. Bush (justly or not) earned the U.S. a reputation of aggression and carelessness in leading the free world, Donald Trump has earned the U.S. a reputation of uninterest in leading at all.
Get Ready for a Week of Unhinged Attacks on Biden and Harris
While the left is showing signs of dissatisfaction with the Democratic party’s candidate for president and arguing that the party’s program is not progressive enough, the right has become positively unhinged, warning that the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris ticket will lead to full-blown Soviet-style socialism, or even the collapse and destruction of the United States. For his part, Biden’s policy proposals are solidly within the center-left mainstream.
Presidential Pardons and the Spirit of Clemency
Donald Trump’s commutation of Roger Stone’s prison sentence brings to mind another occasion, nearly a century ago, when a conservative Republican president commuted a convict’s sentence—not out of self-interest, as in Trump’s pardon of Stone, but out of concern for what he thought was right for the country. The prisoner in this case had been serving time for violation of the Espionage and Sedition Acts passed during the administration of Democratic president Woodrow Wilson.
The Conspiracy Theorist Trump Wants to Install in the Pentagon
The news that the Trump administration has directed the Defense Department to appoint the once-dismissed conspiracy theorist, Rich Higgins, to a major Pentagon job has so far received little coverage in the major press.
No, We Should Not Admire Communists for Their Passion
The Romance of American Communism (paperback re-release) by Vivian Gornick Verso, 265 pp., $19.95 Vivian Gornick, now 84, is experiencing a literary renaissance. Not since her bestselling memoir Fierce Attachments was published in 1987 has she received so much attention. The New York Times Book Review recently placed that book at the very top of a list of the best memoirs of the past 50 years.
Nikki Haley Turns Trumpist
Over the last week, Nikki Haley—once viewed as a potential Republican presidential nominee who might save the GOP in a post-Trump era—has embarrassed herself by going out of her way to prove her fealty to Donald Trump. What has attracted the most media attention in her new book With All Due Respect is her revelation that she defended the president against former secretary of state Rex Tillerson and former White House chief of staff John F.
The Real Angela Davis
The National Museum of African-American History and Culture in our nation’s capital fills a void, providing us with an in depth look at the unique African-American experience in America since the days of slavery. It is disheartening, therefore, to hear that this coming September the museum is featuring an old documentary on Angela Davis titled, Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners.
Truth Hurts - The Bulwark
The Soviet Union treated history as a tool to be used to gather support for whatever the Communist party line happened to be at the moment.
What Are We Supposed to Think of Martin Luther King Jr. Now?
The British newsmagazine Standpoint hit newsstands in England today featuring an article titled “The Troubling Legacy of Martin Luther King” with the subtitle “Newly revealed documents portray the great civil rights leader as a sexual libertine who ‘laughed’ as a forcible rape took place.” The article is written by historian David J. Garrow, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his 1986 biography, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Better Dead Than "Red Joan"
When the film industry—in this case the British one—makes a movie about a Westerner who spied for the Soviet Union, you can predict that its message will be that they did it for the sake of humanity, and for permanent peace in the world. This is indeed what the new film Red Joan—directed by Trevor Nunn, starring Judi Dench—has done.
Socialist? Yes. Democratic? Ehhhhhh.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has become the Democratic Party’s gift to the GOP. It seems that each time she issues a statement, she is ensuring that the Democrats in 2020 will lose many of the seats they gained in the recent midterm election. Donald Trump certainly thinks so and has encouraged her and other progressives to keep it up. As Thomas Edsall points out, it was moderate Democrats, not leftists, who played the crucial role in the Democratic takeover of the House in 2018.
Romancing I. F. Stone
y the time he died in 1989, the once outcast and radical journalist I. F. Stone, fondly called “Izzy” by all who knew him, had become an icon. The blurbs on the back of Myra MacPherson’s new look at Stone’s life are from the likes of journalistic establishment dons like Craig Unger, Helen Thomas, Richard Reeves, and others—all of whom try to tell us that, were he alive, Stone could wake up today’s “lapdog” reporters.
Booted from the Right
Max Boot, The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right, Liveright Publishing Co., 260 pp., $24.95 Max Boot is angry. Actually, he is furious at the turn American conservatism and the GOP have taken since they embraced Donald Trump and the politics of Trumpism. In his new political memoir and page-turner, he gives us a straightforward account of why he finally broke with the Right.
On the unraveling of Greek civil society
It was one of those natural confusions, the sort that occur when the taxi driver doesn’t speak much of your language and you speak less of his. When I got into his cab at Venizelos Airport, I had asked for the Hotel Herodion, a tourist hotel at the southern foot of the Acropolis. My intention was to observe the intermingling effect of sunlight and smog on the Parthenon from either or both of the Herodion’s rooftop jacuzzis.
Ragtime pixies
rom the moment Fred and Ginger first took the screen, to dance the Carioca, they fizzed and sparkled, joshed and romanced each other. Fabulous, sometimes transcendently so, they are nonetheless not quite sui generis—they fit in the category of the romantic dancing leads.
Getting away from it all
\Hudson, New York viaI look’d now upon the world as a thing remote, which I had nothing to do with, no expectation from, and indeed no desires about: In a word, I had nothing indeed to do with it, nor was ever like to have; so I thought it look’d as we may perhaps look upon it hereafter, viz. as a place I had lived in, but was come out of it; and well might I say, as Father...
Tintern Abbey by Anthony Daniels - The New Criterion
t is two hundred and seventeen years since Wordsworth visited Tintern Abbey for the second time, five years after his first visit, and then composed his celebrated Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey; there have been some changes at the Abbey since. The vegetation that in Wordsworth’s time grew in and on the ancient walls has been cleared away, for it would eventually have ruined the ruins. But that, as you might have guessed, is not the greatest change.
The pleasures of Greece
irst and foremost, Honey, Olives, Octopus presents itself as a well-informed, sustained paean to the joys not only of the Greek table but also of the landscape of the country from Thasos to Thessaloniki to Serifos to Crete. Bakken investigates and describes some of the foodstuffs this variegated country yields, from honey, olives, and octopus to chickpeas, bread, and red mullet. And let’s not forget wine, ouzo, and tsipouro,all washed down in heroic quantities.
It’s a sign!
ypographers, printers, and designers like to imagine themselves experts in their fields, and anyone who writes about typography may be assailed for slights and inaccuracies—real or imagined. Ask us which side of the Helvetica ja! vs. bah! divide we occupy, and you’ll hear a discourse as impassioned as any author’s thoughts on the demise of “whom” or the validity of the serial comma.
Glamour’s false charm
ne of the best descriptions of glamour isn’t a description of glamour at all.
The master off duty
Reading a literary biography or a collection of some great writer’s correspondence, one tends to slog impatiently through the early pages—the childhood stuff—out of a sense of duty, often more than a bit numbed by the obligatory details about parents, siblings, schooling, and such, and itching to get to the good bits; later, much later, as the subject, now (most likely) jaded, world-weary, and in artistic decline, approaches the final curtain, one follows the post-climactic personal and...
Lepidoptery & gush
wo things bother me about Letters to Véra, Vladimir Nabokov’s letters to his wife, Véra Slonim. One is lepidoptery, the other is gush. They strike me as self- or wife-indulgent, these missives headed and peppered with declarations of adoration, yearning in separation, brimming with anticipation, glorying in fulfillment, amounting often to verbal slobber. A fifty-two-year loving marriage may well stand out laudably among literati, but need it be swooningly verbalized in letter after letter?
The dawn of life
emoirist, novelist, editor extraordinaire, Diana Athill has been a mainstay of literary London for something like seven decades. Now, at ninety-eight years of age, she has become one of those people whose notoriety derives simply from not being dead—from still being, according to the title of her most recent memoir, Alive, Alive Oh! Ms. Athill is possibly the very last English author who can remember the 1920s clearly and write about that lost era with grace.
New York chronicle (April 2018) by Jay Nordlinger
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra was known for its brass—not its administrators but its trumpeters, trombonists, and so on. “The Chicago brass” was a byword in music. Is it still? My impression is, no. There is an essential parity between orchestras, or a sameness, if you like. Regardless, the Chicago brass is still impressive—and some of them got to show off. That was in a new concerto by Jennifer Higdon, an American born in 1962.
The Dems' Only Hope: Give Up Leftism for Lambism
The Dems' Only Hope: Give Up Leftism for Lambism
Alexander Cockburn: The Last Stalinist, an Enemy of Freedom, and a low-level Anti-Semite. May He Not Rest in Peace
You know that when hosannas of praise rise up for a journalist who died, simply described in the New York Times obituary as a “left-wing writer,” that a great deal remains unsaid.
Why the Left hates tolerance
A large portion of this issue is devoted to essays that conjure with the problem of free speech in the academy. The “problem,” it may almost go without saying, is that the academy is increasingly inimical to free speech, free inquiry, free action, and free minds. The dissemination of political correctness, subordinating the pursuit of truth to the imposition of political dogma, sacrifices freedom on the altar of virtue, or supposed virtue.
The GOP Prepares to Die, as the Alabama Republicans Stick by Judge Roy Moore
By any rational measure, Judge Roy Moore should never have been nominated as a senatorial candidate. His statements over the years have proved that he does not understand the constitutional separation of church and state; he believes his role is “to obey God’s law,” not that of the state or nation in which he presides.
DSA'S DRIFT FROM DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM TO STALINIST TOTALITARIANISM
Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is on a roll - going from 8000 nation-wide members in 2016 to over 25,000 today, which makes it the largest organized socialist group in the United States. Its members play a large role within the Democratic Party, where they work with others from Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, to push the party more to the left.
American TV Covers the White Nationalists and the Leftist Antifa: Were Their Special Reports Fair?
Two TV programs, covering both the white nationalists/neo-Nazis and their “Unite the Right” rally and the violent left-wing group Antifa, aired last week. The shows focused on what both groups stand for, and how both groups operate.
America's 'Fascist Moment'
For decades, the left has used the term "fascist" to attack just about anyone they disagree with. That behavior continues: The feminist author Naomi Wolf has recently come out with a book condemning what she calls the "fascist shift" in America, in which she describes the 10 steps she thinks America is taking that lead to fascism. (Of course, to Ms. Wolf the no.
Finally, Conservative Writers Accept the Truth About the Trump Campaign's Folly
The time has passed for Republicans and conservatives to drop the charge that Russian meddling in the U.S. electoral system is part of a witch-hunt, instituted by Democrats to challenge the legitimacy of Trump’s Electoral College victory. While some of them argued, as one congressman did, that the charges were a “nothingburger,” they now have shifted their narrative. As Charles Krauthammer put it: And that is no defense.
The New Cuba Regulations Hurt Cubans and Help the Castro Regime
My wife and I recently returned from a trip to Cuba -- which we wrote about in the new issue of The Weekly Standard -- just in time to hear Donald Trump announce his new Cuba policy in Miami. His speech to the most ardent anti-Castro Cuba-Americans was strong and enthusiastically received. He promised to reverse Obama’s 2014 opening, which had not led to reforms in human rights, to political freedom, or to the lessening of repression. In truth, Trump’s Cuba policy is not a reversal.
The Walter Duranty Prize for Journalistic Mendacity
featuring Roger Kimball & Ron Radosh On May 5, 2014, The New Criterion and PJ Media presented the second Walter Duranty Prize for Journalistic Mendacity. May 20, 2014 On May 5, 2014, The New Criterion and PJ Media presented the second Walter Duranty Prize for Journalistic Mendacity. The award is given to highlight egregious examples of dishonest reporting. Also awarded this year was the Rather, a new award for lifetime achievement in mendacious journalism.
Robert S. Leiken: March 19, 1939-June 7, 2017. R.I.P.
Early in the morning on June 7th, my friend Bob Leiken passed away. Numerous and serious health problems took their toll, and in the hospital, he died of pneumonia. Few today recognize his name, but he played a major role in the 1980s in the fight against communism in Central America. He was an early supporter of the Reagan administration’s policy of strong opposition to the Marxist regime that had taken power in Nicaragua.
NYC's Mayor Bill De Blasio Joins in NYC's Honor to a Marxist-Leninist Puerto Rican Terrorist
A few days ago, a New York Times headline informed readers that the annual Puerto Rican Day Parade held in New York City would honor Oscar Lopez Rivera, a person they described as a “long-jailed militant” and a “nationalist” -- certainly a misleading description of the self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist and terrorist.
Victor Navasky Fittingly Receives Soviet Propagandist Award
Victor Navasky, the former editor-in-chief and publisher of The Nation, is having a good year. Nearing his 85th birthday this coming July, and still very active in journalism, he is racking up awards.
The Left Attacks Elliott Abrams. Why Would Trump Supporters Do the Same?
A few days ago, Andrea Mitchell broke the news that Rex Tillerson intends to choose Elliott Abrams to be deputy secretary of State. Politico now reports that Abrams is meeting President Trump and Rex Tillerson to discuss the pending appointment. Almost immediately, the left decided to wage a no-holds-barred campaign against his appointment. First was Eric Alterman, in the pages of The Nation.
Dems' Answer Is Always the Same: Move More Left | RealClearPolitics
Dems' Answer Is Always the Same: Move More Left Nearly every time the Democrats face a crisis, their answer is the sameâ??move left. This time, theyâ??re about to fall off the edge.Read Full Article »
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