Free Republic

I'm old enough to remember the hubbub over JournoList, a listserv of leftist reporters from different news outlets who convened regularly in a chatroom to strategize how to spin stories and set narratives, such as how to torpedo Gov.Sarah Palin to get Barack Obama elected president. From 2007 to 2010, JournoList was its own echo chamber, as Politico put it at the time. Now the same thing's happening again, with TV lawyers acting as rhetorical wetwork teams covering the trials of their political nemesis, Donald Trump. JournoList was started by Ezra Klein, who now works for the New York Times,...

Showing once again why he didn’t fit in with the progressive orthodoxy at Vox, Matt Yglesias has a piece up on his Substack today arguing that diversity training might be doing more harm than good. The whole piece covers a lot of territory but he starts by arguing that there’s not a lot of certainty about what works in terms of anti-racist training, but there is some evidence about what doesn’t work. …as best I can tell, none of the literature seems to support the idea that in-your-face calling-out tactics are effective. What seems to work best are fairly gentle...

Yglesias will become part of The New Contras, a band of center-left journalists whose willingness to critique the excesses of leftism have pushed them from major publications to ascendant self-publishing platforms.The state of the media is neatly explained by the recent separation of inseparable bloggers Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias. Six years after co-founding Vox in 2014, and nearly two decades after hitting the blogosphere, the pair is splitting up. Klein is headed to The New York Times. Yglesias is going to Substack. At the Times, Klein will become part of The Consolidation, another starry-eyed pioneer of new media settling...

There’s a well-worn saying on the right: Scratch a progressive, find a fascist. Usually, that’s a bit of hyperbole to point toward the tendency of progressives to embrace top-down, big government solutions to every problem. But in this case, it’s almost literally true, though the real progressive is embracing a fictional fascist from the show Game of Thrones. Vox’s Matt Yglesias published a piece yesterday at Vox arguing that Daenerys was right to burn people alive in the city of King’s Landing because she needed to convince the entire kingdom not to question the dictates of a powerful central government.

‘There’s Nothing Random About the Threats Against Jewish Targets:’ US Jewish Leader Chides Obama Over Paris Terror Comments President Barack Obama’s description of the January 9 Islamist terrorist attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris as a “random” assault on “a bunch of folks in a deli” has sparked widespread outrage, with a top American Jewish leader telling The Algemeiner, “President Obama absolutely misspoke…there’s nothing ‘random’ about the threats against Jewish targets.” In wide-ranging interview on foreign policy with Vox magazine editors Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias – “Again and again, they serve him softball—no, make that Nerf ball—questions and...

Last week, conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt interviewed Zach Carter...The Huffington Post‘s senior political economy reporter. The interview’s purpose was to discuss Carter’s negative response to Hewitt’s previous interview of former Vice President Dick Cheney. The interview was lively and interesting but it did not go well for Carter, who was forced to admit his ignorance of the historical context of the situation in Iraq....Carter said he hadn’t read...Bernard Lewis’ Crisis of Islam, Robin Wright’s Dreams and Shadows, or Thomas P. M. Barnett’s The Pentagon’s New Map. He said he hadn’t read Dexter Filkins’ The Forever War but that he’d...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Speaking on Fox News recently, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer proposed what, to many, might have sounded like a rather novel compromise on the minimum wage. His idea? We should have two of them, a higher minimum for "breadwinners," and a lower minimum for everybody else. Here was Krauthammer's thinking, paraphrased. It might be hard to feed a whole household on $7.25 an hour. But raising the minimum is most likely to hurt teenagers and minorities who rely on low-paid, entry-level jobs to get a foothold in the working world. So how do you lend a hand to hard-pressed families without...

Poor Matt Yglesias. The liberal economics blogger for Slate thinks he knows more than you. So when people began predicting that the Obamacare exchanges might not get off to such a great start, he was there to correct them. “I wanted to once again take the opportunity to lay down a marker and say once again that Obamacare implementation is going to be a huge political success,” he wrote in July on his blog. But so far, the implementation of Obamacare’s online exchanges have gone anything but swell

Liberals resort to conspiracy theories to explain Obama's problems Following two years of poor economic performance and electoral repudiation, liberalism is casting around for narratives to explain its failure - narratives that don't involve the admission of inadequacies in liberalism itself. For some, the solution is to lay the blame on President Obama. He hasn't been liberal enough. He can't communicate. "I cannot recall a president," Robert Kuttner says in the Huffington Post, "who generated so much excitement as a candidate but who turned out to be such a political dud as a chief executive." Obama is "fast becoming more...

Abstract In this essay, I argue that neither non-economist bloggers, nor economists who portray economics —especially macroeconomic policy— as a simple enterprise with clear conclusions, are likely to contibute any insight to discussion of economics and, as a result, should be ignored by an open-minded lay public. The following is a letter to open-minded consumers of the economics blogosphere. In the wake of the recent financial crisis, bloggers seem unable to resist commentating routinely about economic events. It may always have been thus, but in recent times, the manifold dimensions of the financial crisis and associated recession have given fillip...