Earlier this month, a feminist in Britain&#8217;s GQ magazine <a href="https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/hip-hop-feminism">asked</a> whether it is possible to &#8220;be a feminist&#8221; and still &#8220;listen to hip-hop.&#8221; She&#8217;s right to be skeptical &#8212; some (<a href="https://madamenoire.com/278863/responsible-rappers-with-mostly-clean-lyrics/">though certainly not all</a>) rap songs are cesspits of sexism and vulgarity that glorify <a href="https://www.nme.com/news/music/eminem-criticised-for-rape-rap-lyrics-in-new-anti-trump-verse-1969259">rape</a> and <a href="https://genius.com/Dmx-x-is-coming-lyrics">sexual assault</a>. For a social movement that has become increasingly <a href="https://everydayfeminism.com/2014/05/grammar-snobbery/">creative</a> in the sources of oppression it uses to justify its existence, feminism devotes relatively little time to berating the mainstream artists whose songs include such poetic lyrics as &#8220;<a href="https://genius.com/Kool-g-rap-hey-mister-mister-lyrics">I beat my b**** up in the street</a>&#8221; or &#8220;<a href="https://dailycaller.com/2017/10/11/heres-19-times-eminem-talked-about-beating-and-raping-women/">I even make the b*****s I rape c**</a>.&#8221;
Rap artists, and some of the more profane elements of broader hip-hop culture, have been partially excused from the Victorian standards of feminism&#8217;s third wave. It&#8217;s not that feminists haven&#8217;t decried the sexism in hip-hop &#8212; <a href="http://archive.massappeal.com/misogyny-in-hip-hop/">they have</a>, if only in passing &#8212; but the plain, unadulterated misogyny in some rap music seems to evade the broader radar of a movement that has spent the better part of a decade <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2015/12/20/the-creepiest-classic-of-all-what-should-we-do-about-baby-its-cold-outside/?tid=sm_tw">screaming</a> about a handful of lines in an obscure, <a href="https://www.vox.com/identities/2016/12/19/13885552/baby-its-cold-outside-feminist-date-rape-romantic">chivalrous Christmas song from 1949</a>.
The intersectional commitments of campus feminism have precluded the movement from taking aim at the excesses of hip-hop culture. The double standard is clear: if Garth Brooks released a single that included even one sentence with as much sexism as any line in a <a href="https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/dmx/partyup.html">standard DMX track</a>, he would be forever excised from polite society. Everyone, at base, knows this &#8212; even those who make <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2007/04/28/the-war-on-hip-hop/">inventive excuses</a> for the pathologies in hip-hop music and the excesses of its attendant culture by blaming conservatives for noticing them.
The dictates of their intersectional alliance require feminists to tell a set of paternalistic and bigoted lies &#8212; by commission or, more frequently, omission &#8212; about the graphic and abusive language in rap music. Feminists, and the intersectional theory that undergirds their ideology, assume that such language is a proxy for broader African-American culture. To apply scrutiny to rap music, by the rules of intersectionality, is to commit the cardinal sin of &#8220;<a href="http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Punching_up">punching down</a>,&#8221; rendering the excesses of hip-hop culture beyond the reproach of even the most hardened feminist scolds. It nevertheless seems awfully racist to assume that criticizing the fetishization of rape and assault in some corners of hip-hop culture is simultaneously an indictment of all African-Americans.
There are cultural forces that ensure that this line of criticism remains verboten. A <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-conservative-war-on-hip-hop-white-scapegoating-and-black-respectability">column</a> by Stereo Williams in The Daily Beast earlier this year berated critics of hip-hop, with all of the typical &#8220;woke&#8221; tropes &#8212; claims that the desire for &#8220;respectability&#8221; is racist, the suggestion that blacks who don&#8217;t hold neatly to a set of ideological orthodoxies are traitors to their race, and all of the standard invocations of academic portmanteaus like &#8220;blackness.&#8221;
Mr. Williams adds in the necessary caveats (&#8220;Of course, the music isn&#8217;t above justified criticisms&#8221;), but by the time he adds those qualifiers, it is clear one best not criticize hip-hop for fear of inciting Mr. Williams&#8217; written wrath: &#8220;The criticism levied at hip-hop from the right is a pointed indictment of black culture: Black people lost their way and this crude music was the culprit. It&#8217;s understandably popular because it feeds into the &#8216;pick yourselves up&#8217; rhetoric that downplays the oppression of black people while justifying it.&#8221;
No one is assigning blame to anyone, at least in this article &#8212; is the observation of pervasive sexism in some corners of rap culture a means of downplaying the &#8220;oppression of black people&#8221;? Does the fact of historic discrimination absolve some members of society from answering earnest questions about the content of their art? It&#8217;s little wonder feminists shy away from asking them such questions &#8212; the only thing worse than the patriarchy, for the third-wave feminist, is disrupting the intersectional order.
&#8220;Baby, It&#8217;s Cold Outside,&#8221; however, is a much easier target. Never mind that perhaps the most famous <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ut3jDxmXa2M">rendition</a> of the romantic duet was done by a pair of African-American singers &#8212; Ella Fitzgerald&#8217;s version is decidedly &#8220;respectable,&#8221; so, by the <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-conservative-war-on-hip-hop-white-scapegoating-and-black-respectability?ref=scroll">logic of Stereo Williams</a>, it isn&#8217;t authentically &#8220;black&#8221;! After all, respectability was once &#8220;Bill Cosby&#8217;s raison d&#8217;être,&#8221; in Williams&#8217; words, so respectability as a value must necessarily go the way of Cosby&#8217;s reputation.
The song has been embraced as a classic by Americans of all colors, making it a far easier whipping post for the killjoys in the modern feminist movement than the blatantly misogynistic rhetoric in some rap songs. Apparently, the Christmas classic&#8217;s presumption that the sexes are complimentary, its glorification of chivalry, and inclusion of a now-dated <a href="https://dailycaller.com/2016/12/05/here-is-why-baby-its-cold-outside-is-not-a-song-about-rape/">cultural reference</a> to alcohol are far more heretical to the sacred dogmas of third wave feminism than lyrics explicitly condoning rape or assault.
Prepare for another winter of trite and tired lectures about the evils of a Christmas classic from campus radicals &#8212; but don&#8217;t hold your breath waiting for them to disavow Eminem or Jay-Z with such force and conviction.

HIRSCHAUER: Why Feminists Hate ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ More Than Flagrantly Sexist Rap Music

Feminism

Racism

With characteristic grace and restraint, Senator Mazie Hirono (D-HI) <a href="http://theweek.com/speedreads/796694/sen-mazie-hirono-suggests-men-shut-step-wake-kavanaugh-allegation">responded</a> Monday to the accusations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh by claiming that &#8220;men in this country&#8221; are &#8220;perpetuating all of these kinds of actions [sexual assault]&#8221; and urged all men to &#8220;just shut up and step up. Do the right thing for a change.&#8221;
The &#8220;right thing&#8221; to which the senator so lucidly refers is allowing Senate Democrats to derail the confirmation of an eminently qualified judge to the Supreme Court based upon unsubstantiated, eleventh-hour allegations from an accuser who is uncertain of whether she&#8217;ll testify under oath. Her measured advice for good-faith male critics is to &#8220;just shut up&#8221; and obey &#8212; she&#8217;s on the right side of History, after all, and you&#8217;re just another one of the &#8220;men in this country&#8221; busy committing &#8220;all of&#8221; America&#8217;s sex crimes.
Since when are we allowed to demand out loud that entire groups of citizens &#8220;shut up&#8221;? Likewise, when did the Left grant that &#8220;men&#8221; exist as a category at all? Aren&#8217;t the differences between male and female illusory fictions fabricated by the patriarchy, and &#8220;men&#8221; and &#8220;women&#8221; are thus so indistinguishable that a man can become a woman just by saying so? I&#8217;m confused, and, as a man, perhaps it&#8217;s best I &#8220;shut up&#8221; and defer to the superior moral judgment of a senator from Hawaii.
The logic (a word used generously) of the senator&#8217;s statement seems to be as follows: because the preponderance (or in her words, &#8220;all&#8221;) of the sex crimes in this country are committed by men, all men have a moral obligation to &#8220;shut up&#8221; and agree with Senator Hirono.
Are we now allowed to impose collective moral responsibilities upon all individuals in groups who make up a disproportionate share of various crime statistics? The obvious answer is and should be no &#8212; imagine using this logic for homicide numbers by race or incidence of terrorism by religion, for instance. Senator Hirono is nevertheless a better person than you, and as such is exempted from the typical mores of polite public discourse.
I&#8217;ll gladly oblige the senator&#8217;s demand to &#8220;shut up,&#8221; provided she&#8217;ll take her own advice. Until then, it&#8217;s worth highlighting how people on her side of the aisle can say nearly anything without being held to account by the powers that be in the media.
John Hirschauer is an award-winning essayist with work at National Review Online, The New York Times, and The Federalist. He is on Twitter @<a href="http://twitter.com/johnhirschauer">JohnHirschauer</a>.

HIRSCHAUER: Maybe Senator Hirono Should Take Her Own Advice

Brett Kavanaugh

Democratic Party

Sexism

Sexual Assault

Supreme Court

All Catholics sin (some, like myself, are intimately familiar with the experience), and are taught as a matter of doctrine that anyone, Catholic or non-Catholic, who dies conscious of unrepentant <a href="http://www.saintaquinas.com/mortal_sin.html">mortal sin</a> will be eternally lost in the age to come.
The Catholic Church (at least prior to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Vatican_Council">1965</a>) has been acutely aware of perdition, damnation, and moral recompense. Can a Church that today has constituent congregations filled <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/inebriateme/2014/04/stop-comparing-the-communion-line-with-the-confession-line/">unapologetically</a> with <a href="https://www.americamagazine.org/issue/james-martin-and-ross-douthat-pope-francis-synod-and-demands-law-and-mercy">long communion and short confession lines</a> adequately deal with a sex abuse crisis that challenges the moral foundations of Church authority?
The Catholic Church isn’t broken, insofar as it has yet to renege on its <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+16%3A17-19&amp;version=DRA">guarantee of perpetual existence</a>, but it is wounded. And there are certainly those who delight in a wounded Church — there are those harbingers of atavistic grudges about the First Council of Ephesus’ censure of Nestorious (a censure he well deserved) and those whose lives are but a perpetual rebellion against the preferences of their middle-class parents.
It nevertheless demoralizes religions everywhere when the world’s largest Church fails so spectacularly to <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pope-francis-no-comment-catholic-church-sexual-abuse-cover-up-vigano-letter/">speak plainly</a> about the behavior of its leaders. On matters of abuse and accountability, some in the modern Church have suffered from an utter impotence — their larger theological project of remaking Christ in the image of an amalgamated Elizabeth Warren and Mahatma Gandhi doesn’t include a chapter on moral rot. When a matter of grave evil like the abuse scandal hits, such clergy are left without an adequate theological vocabulary to speak about it.
The Jesus of the Bible, who <a href="https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/the-uncomfortable-subject-jesus-addressed-more-than-anyone-else/">spoke more often of Hell than Heaven</a>, would scantly recognize the milquetoast sermons on “self-help,” religious pluralism and “peace” that dominate the modern homilist’s lexicon. In many parishes around the country, “<a href="http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P67.HTM#$211">fear of the Lord</a>” is but a quaint relic of our unenlightened ancestors. It is little wonder, then, that some parishioners are dejectedly considering leaving the Church over the sex scandal — if, as Cardinal Blase Cupich <a href="https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/cardinal-cupich-some-of-greatest-christians-have-no-faith-system/">said</a>, “some of the greatest Christians I know are people who don’t actually have a kind of faith system that they believe in,” why not stick a “Coexist” sticker on the back of your car, berate national immigration policy, and forget the tedium of Sunday Mass and the Sacraments altogether?
Comments like those, and the Cardinal’s <a href="https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/cardinal-cupich-interview-questions-cardinal-mccarrick-allegations-491926591.html">ones</a> in which he defended the Pope’s decision to not answer questions about abuse by mentioning Francis’ commitment to a “bigger agenda” on “the environment … and protecting migrants,” force many Catholics to wrestle with the perception that there is a fundamental lack of seriousness among some of their leaders in the clergy.
My Church, that I treat with the reverence one owes a divine institution, has shifted its locus of teaching away from the salvation of individual souls and onto amorphously defined conceptions of “social justice” and tolerance — both ostensibly noble goals that concurrently alleviate man of his <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/33888/walsh-no-jesus-not-even-close-socialist-matt-walsh">personal</a> duties to aid the poor and save his brother’s soul. This Church, whose parish priests often preach Hell as more of an embarrassing doctrine of antiquity than a possible destination for themselves or their parishioners, is poorly equipped to deal with allegations of the gravity of the ones they currently face.
Any saccharine vision of reform that includes more acoustic guitars and theological imprecision, in lieu of returning to a message of capital-T Truth and things eternal, will fail of its own accord
John Hirschauer is an award-winning essayist with work at National Review Online, The New York Times, and The Federalist. He is on Twitter<a href="http://twitter.com/johnhirschauer"> @JohnHirschauer</a>.

HIRSCHAUER: A Church That Won’t Talk About Hell Stares Evil in the Face

Catholicism

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the hero millennials deserve. Her cocksure ignorance befits a generation that despises its elders, shouts down its superiors and scoffs at its history, all because they&#8217;re confident &#8212; no, certain &#8212; that they are more virtuous than you.
When she decried the Israeli &#8220;occupation&#8221; of Palestine &#8212; whatever that means &#8212; and was subsequently pressed on the subject in a now-infamous PBS interview, she ceded that she&#8217;s &#8220;not an expert on geopolitics on this issue.&#8221; She has given completely incoherent answers when asked how she is going to pay for the multi-trillion dollar entitlement programs she&#8217;s proposing, offering little beyond emotive adjectives and the assurance that she has spoken with a &#8220;Nobel Prize economist.&#8221;
That&#8217;s cold comfort; to modify Bill Buckley&#8217;s formula slightly, someone has to win a Nobel Prize in economics. And if Mark Steyn is right when he says that being a multiculturalist absolves you of knowing anything about other cultures, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez&#8217;s candidacy seems to suggest that being a socialist absolves you of knowing anything at all.
She&#8217;s high on the socialist fever dream that working class white areas in Appalachia are only Republican because they&#8217;re being duped by some combination of the Koch brothers, Fox News, and their own racism; if they would rub the sand out of their eyes and realize they were part of the global proletariat, they could viva la revolucion with her and Bernie Sanders.
No matter; she&#8217;s definitely charming, and there&#8217;s something undeniably endearing about her sincerity. But she is more a millennial than she is socialist &#8212; though she&#8217;s certainly that, too &#8212; she is filled with righteous indignation at all of the people at whom it is fashionable to be righteously indignant. She knows that the rich aren&#8217;t &#8220;paying their fair share,&#8221; that the president should be impeached, and that federal immigration enforcement should be immediately disbanded. It has apparently never occurred to her that, as Michael Knowles has pointed out, she needs to know anything more than bumper stickers.
This is more by design than by fault &#8212; modern higher education teaches millennials that history and politics are Manichean exercises, where the virtuous fight to expunge the hateful and the cruel. As long as you know that your opponents are mean, you can be confident that you&#8217;re on the right side of History &#8212; and History, or at least its heralds in the academy, are rarely kind to non-moderns and those whom it deems retrograde.
Much more effort, therefore, is spent on spotting who is next to be thrown into History&#8217;s ash heap and avoiding that ignominious fate than is spent examining the nuances of public policy and its various tradeoffs. It&#8217;s more important to know that your opponents are bad people than it is to explicate the validity of your own views.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez might soon join the U.S. Congress, which might be getting not only a doctrinaire socialist but its first red-blooded millennial.
God save it if it does.
* John Hirschauer is an award-winning essayist with work at National Review Online, The New York Times, and The Federalist. He is on Twitter @JohnHirschauer.

HIRSCHAUER: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is A Millennial’s Millennial

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Conservatives are fond of accusing progressives of using the ends to justify backhanded means &#8212; heaven forbid I absolve them of that noble and necessary charge &#8212; but the means such ideologues pursue are frequently indistinguishable from the ends desired.
For instance, the administrative agency ostensibly meant to &#8220;solve&#8221; a niche problem in society is far more likely to make itself a fixture on the expansive list of permanent government bureaucracies that give salaried jobs to sociology majors at taxpayer expense than it is to put a significant dent in the problem it was initiated to solve.
The central planning, kangaroo justice, and clerical bloat caused by the growth of the administrative state all do more to subvert America&#8217;s constitutional norms in pursuit of European collectivism than &#8220;solving&#8221; the problem ever could.
All of which amounts to a cheap caricature of progressive motives &#8212; I lack the requisite piety to feel deeply ashamed of that &#8212; but it nevertheless captures something in the leftist ethos that seeks Progress&#8482; before progress.
President Trump, the once-liberal reality show personality who now despises bureaucracy with a Goldwater-ian tenacity, has been the avatar of a decades-old conservative infatuation with reversing the subversive creep of the administrative state. By all accounts, it has been markedly successful: analysts <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/17/bank-of-america-ceo-gdp-may-be-4percent-in-q2-with-deregulation-tax-reform.html">project</a> 4% GDP growth this quarter, citing Trump&#8217;s tax and regulatory policy as catalysts in the economic boom.
What&#8217;s more, Americans are freer; vast administrative bureaucracy had, before this administration. sidled further into the lives of ordinary citizens than at any time in our nation&#8217;s history, and the utter unaccountability of regulatory agencies before Congress had allowed the state to intrude into the most basic modalities of private citizens&#8217; lives without consulting first their elected representatives.
The proliferation of &#8220;experts&#8221; and the culture of &#8220;scientific governance&#8221; predated the Obama administration (in Mark Levin&#8217;s telling, it began in the Wilson administration or even earlier), but the economic success and liberties now experienced speak to how onerous and burdensome Obama-era regulatory measures were.
The president might be on the precipice of presiding over a quarter of 4% economic growth, and his deregulatory agenda is no small contributor to that success.

HIRSCHAUER: The President Deserves Praise For His Deregulatory Agenda

Conservatism

Donald Trump

Christ insisted that &#8220;no one knows the day or hour&#8221; when the Son of Man shall return to call history to a close. Easy for Him to say; He could have never foreseen the nomination of an Originalist to the Supreme Court.
Much has been <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/33065/erickson-when-does-shooting-begin-erick-erickson">written</a> about the cataclysmic fantasies of the American Left, and Mitch McConnell <a href="https://twitter.com/foxnews/status/1016411445536395265">spoke of such fatalism</a> on the floor of the Senate last Monday, noting how &#8220;the apocalypse&#8221; Democrats inevitably warn about &#8220;never comes.&#8221; Judge Brett Kavanaugh&#8217;s nomination to the Supreme Court by a duly elected President was automatically branded a threat to thousands of lives and even the republic itself; Yale law students and alumni proclaimed in an <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScUrOBy5sPzw1VGusbYr2VqVqPiNmO5adNdo8mIcsryvgOfrw/viewform">open letter</a> that &#8220;Judge Kavanaugh&#8217;s nomination presents an emergency &#8212; for democratic life, for our safety and freedom, for the future of our country.&#8221;
It is the apocalypse, forerun by the possible reversal of an <a href="https://nypost.com/2018/07/06/why-roe-v-wade-is-a-travesty-of-constitutional-law/">erroneous</a> Supreme Court decision &#8212; a First World cataclysm if there ever was one. And if Armageddon&#8217;s harbinger is the removal of a judicially constructed &#8220;right&#8221; to kill an unborn child, count me among the horsemen.
To a political movement that asserts that <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/14/opinion/sunday/when-is-speech-violence.html">free speech is violence</a>, the reversal of Progress&#8482; is an act of war. Mere opposition to the Left&#8217;s promised utopia is, in its eyes, indistinguishable from actual, physical violence. Jimmy Kimmel Live writer Bess Kalb made this quite clear when she <a href="https://twitter.com/bessbell/status/1016525573827383296">stated</a> that the &#8220;Federalist Society is currently a bigger threat to the basic safety of Americans than MS-13.&#8221;
MS-13 is, of course, a criminal gang of mostly illegal aliens whose numerous homicides throughout the country routinely involve unspeakable acts of <a href="http://abc7ny.com/news/victims-found-violently-murdered-in-li-park-identified/1873347/">sadism</a> and <a href="https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/MS-13-gang-members-charged-with-satanic-10971238.php">torture</a>. But in Kalb&#8217;s calculation, a non-profit group committed to upholding the Constitution as written is a bigger threat to the lives of Americans than an organized gang of criminal aliens willing rip a man&#8217;s heart from his decapitated body and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/police-ms-13-members-in-maryland-stab-man-more-than-100-times-and-decapitate-him/2017/11/22/0cba9760-cf7e-11e7-a1a3-0d1e45a6de3d_story.html?noredirect=on&amp;utm_term=.7ca1374035f7">toss it into his open grave</a>.
The presumed &#8220;threat&#8221; posed by a judicial Originalist is, among other things, to the fate of a hypothetical woman seeking to kill her unborn child in a red state following the reversal of the legally indefensible decision made in Roe. Will it be difficult or dangerous for such a woman to kill her child in this hypothetically post-apocalyptic North Dakota? Perhaps. But I&#8217;m hardly willing to proclaim the imminence of Judgment Day on that basis, and indeed suggest we bring ourselves closer to it should we continue to allow the state-sanctioned slaughter of unborn children.
This iteration of doomsday-mongering from progressive prophets is no different than the last &#8220;apocalypse&#8221; when taxes on working families were reduced, or decades ago when the now-beloved Anthony Kennedy was nominated. &#8220;No one knows the day or the hour, not even the angels in heaven or the Son himself,&#8221; or even Chuck Schumer.
&#8220;Only the Father knows.&#8221;

HIRSCHAUER: The Apocalypse That Never Comes

Christianity

Leftism

Bill Buckley&#8217;s vision of the conservative movement as a loosely-held coalition of libertarians, traditionalists, and anti-Communists &#8212; three groups who shared certain tangential concerns but held very little else in common &#8212; has endured in some form or another all the way through our current political moment. 
Family farmers, religious fundamentalists, commodities traders and oil rig workers are all represented under the GOP tent, despite the fact that these groups often share little in the way of common values or life experiences. Appealing to factions within a coalitional party often leads to the pursuit of individual policy prerogatives that are relatively unpopular but nevertheless help band together a viable electoral coalition.
Part also of movement politics, which conservatism has been since at least Barry Goldwater&#8217;s 1964 presidential campaign, involves pursuing unpopular doctrinal policies with the goal of winning converts if (and in the ideologue&#8217;s belief, when) the policy outperforms the expectations of skeptics. Better still than either of these justifications for the occasional (or not so occasional) preference for ideology over popular sentiment is that it&#8217;s possible for a policy to be simultaneously popular and wrong-headed. The fact that cutting spending, for example, is relatively unpopular doesn&#8217;t per se render the policy unnecessary or immoral.
This all ought not dissuade Republicans from harnessing the electoral efficacy of populist fervor; populism, broadly defined, has been made significant hay internationally for the political right. But it is at their own peril that conservatives ignore the fact that mainstream elements in the Democrat party <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/27/opinion/republicans-democrats-trump-urban-rural.html">deem illegitimate</a> the very existence of small-r republican institutions like the <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2017/09/13/politics/hillary-clinton-anderson-cooper-electoral-college-cnntv/index.html">Electoral College</a> and the <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/12/abolish-the-senate/">Senate</a> as their base consolidates in urban metropolitan centers.
For Republicans to claim the mantle of populist fervor while having lost the popular vote is of little service to the central argument conservatives have made for generations: federalism and state&#8217;s rights matter greatly to the American experiment, and the United States is, at root, a republican democracy. 
Jay Cost of National Review laid out the fundamental conservative arguments against the abolition of the Senate quite well in his 2017 piece &#8220;<a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/11/senate-democratic-government-federalism-james-madison-thomas-jefferson-small-states/">In Defense of the Senate</a>&#8221;. &#8220;Progressives,&#8221; Cost begins &#8220;wish to restore a balance by nationalizing our institutions, but the better response is to devolve certain powers back to the states and communities.&#8221;
In rightfully enjoying the fruits of a conservative-populist presidency, conservatives should not forget the principles of federalism and localism that have sustained their movement for a generation.

HIRSCHAUER: Put Not Your Faith In Populism

Republican Party

Taxes

The most obvious illogic embedded in Sarah Huckabee Sanders&#8217; <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/23/us/politics/sarah-huckabee-sanders-restaurant.html">show trial</a> on the premises of a Virginia restaurant is, of course, that the actors cheering this as a heroic act of #Resistance are the exact same ones who delight in the financial ruin of religious bakers and florists who exercise similar discretion in their provision of services.
The Left surely sees no such contradiction &#8212; they are Oskar Schindler and Sarah Sanders is aiding and abetting a Hitlerian regime &#8212; but then again, as Michael Knowles is fond of saying, if progressives had no double standards they would have no standards at all.
Sarah Sanders has been the subject of inordinate fury from hard left elements ever since she began her role as Press Secretary in July of 2017. Critics have resorted to <a href="https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2018/03/06/sam-nunberg-intv-huckabee-sanders-sot-erin.cnn">criticizing her appearance</a> and calling her what amounts to the <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/04/29/sarah_sanders_endures_harsh_roasting_at_wh_correspondents_dinner.html">female equivalent of Uncle Tom</a>, and Sanders seems to be a favorite <a href="https://www.salon.com/2018/06/20/seth-meyers-taunts-sarah-huckabee-sanders-when-are-you-going-to-start-telling-us-the-truth/">punching bag</a> for the monolithic voices of late night television.
Some of this is certainly a result of the nature of her position; it is the unenviable job of a Republican press secretary to justify the policies of the current administration to a crowd of skeptical and probing journalists whose skepticism and probity seem routinely absent under Democrat presidents.
But there is a special scorn reserved for Sanders, of a species afforded few others in the Trump orbit, save perhaps <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2017/09/28/protesters-criticize-devos-and-change-on-campus-sexual-assault-probes/?utm_term=.c471d8630eaf">Betsy DeVos</a>. The contempt directed at Sanders is little different than the disdain held for most Trump voters by media types, who view both as being complicit in what they are convinced is an America teetering on the brink of fascism. Sarah Sanders says what many Trump voters internally believe or outwardly express, but on an elevated platform.
They would gladly throw you out of a restaurant too if you were candid about your beliefs on a sufficiently public basis.
Part of the consternation is almost certainly Sanders&#8217; southern accent, which is evocative of a culture which the media despises as ignorant, backwards, and below their posh metropolitan taste. Part also is Sanders&#8217; conservative Christianity; a belief in traditional sexual ethics is now considered not only outmoded but explicitly bigoted.
But more than anything, the Left and the media hate Sanders because they hate Trump voters. They don&#8217;t particularly want to share a country, let alone a restaurant, with their political opposites &#8212; the Left would as soon expel Sarah Sanders from Red Hen restaurant as they would all Trump voters if it were palatable to do so.
Until the Left is convinced that disagreements about marginal tax rates and immigration policy aren&#8217;t sufficient grounds for calling your opponent a Nazi, it&#8217;s unlikely they&#8217;ll want to share a meal with you anytime soon.

HIRSCHAUER: They Hate Sarah Sanders Because They Hate You

Sarah Huckabee Sanders

Much has been written about the social ills associated with fatherlessness, and for good reason: <a href="https://www.fatherhood.org/father-absence-statistic?hsCtaTracking=6013fa0e-dcde-4ce0-92da-afabf6c53493%7C7168b8ab-aeba-4e14-bb34-c9fc0740b46e">without a father at home</a>, children are four times as likely to grow up in poverty, twice as likely to be obese, are significantly more likely to be incarcerated and, for female children, to become pregnant as a teenager.
The absence of fathers in communities of all kinds has increased dramatically since the advent of the Great Society programs in the 1960s, but the spike has been most dramatic in the African-American community, where almost <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/77-black-births-to-single-moms-49-for-hispanic-immigrants">77%</a> of births occur out of wedlock and <a href="https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/107-children-in-single-parent-families-by#detailed/1/any/false/870,573,869,36,868,867,133,38,35,18/10,11,9,12,1,185,13/432,431">66%</a> of children are raised without fathers. Economists <a href="http://capitalismmagazine.com/2004/08/war-on-poverty-revisited/">Thomas Sowell</a> and <a href="http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/williams060805.asp">Walter Williams</a>, both African-Americans, have written extensively about the decimation of the black family that has occurred partially as a result of incentives created by the Great Society.
The tremendous surge in fatherlessness in families of all backgrounds has sent shock-waves through our political ecosystem. And while the causes of fatherlessness are myriad &#8212; irresponsible men, government programs incentivize broken families, the attempted estrangement of sex from procreation, and political parties that demonize masculinity as inherently &#8220;toxic&#8221; &#8212; the effects are not so varied. Broken homes, shattered families, and a culture bereft of meaning seem the inevitable fruit of widespread fatherlessness. If Daddy is not your father figure, someone or something else less desirable certainly will be.
For the men who stick around, the ones who take seriously the charge of raising their children, they deserve our society&#8217;s acknowledgement, particularly on Father&#8217;s Day. They provide a stayed foundation and role model for children in a way that no federal subsidy, no amount of &#8220;pre-Kindergarten education,&#8221; and no utopian policy could ever replace.
Society is indebted to them, not because their act is especially heroic- remaining present should be the default for those who impregnate a woman- but because so many men in our current moment shirk from this basic duty, and in turn decimate the lives of their children or cause their lovers to kill the unborn child that they helped create.
Those men who are derelict in their paternal duties are aided and abetted by those for whom the dissolution of the nuclear family is a political endgame. The recognition of the importance of fathers &#8212; particularly good fathers &#8212; on Father&#8217;s Day is a welcome antidote to the anti-familial philosophers of our time. In an age that, as Malcolm Muggeridge once said, &#8220;offers sex in terms of sterility&#8230;reality in terms of fantasy, and&#8230;security in terms of destruction,&#8221; there is something wonderfully revolutionary about a man who functions unironically as he ought to &#8212; as a father to his children.
To all of the great fathers, mine included, thank you and happy Father&#8217;s Day.

HIRSCHAUER: A Salute To Good Fathers

C.S. Lewis once aptly observed that &#8220;Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.&#8221;
I searched earnestly for a coherent thesis in Professor Stephen Asma&#8217;s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/03/opinion/why-we-need-religion.html?smtyp=cur&amp;smid=tw-nytopinion">column</a> &#8220;What Religion Gives Us (That Science Can&#8217;t)&#8221; that ran in The New York Times last Sunday. It&#8217;s basic premise, as best I can tell, is the following: religion is false, even laughably so, but it makes some people feel good in a way that science cannot. The author seems sincere and without malice, facts that are impressive only because he is an academic. His point is nevertheless condescending, and it is the natural olive branch extended by a philosophy certain of two things, namely, that they&#8217;re right and you&#8217;re a rube. But at least you&#8217;re a happy one, satisfied in your pitiable delusion.
First, Asma claims that &#8220;it&#8217;s a tough time to defend religion.&#8221; Perhaps it&#8217;s difficult for an avowed atheist to defend something he doesn&#8217;t believe, but religious believers were never asked for comment.
He cites &#8220;continued revelations of abuse by priests and clerics, jihad campaigns against &#8216;infidels&#8217; and homegrown Christian hostility toward diversity and secular culture&#8221; as evidence of his assertion that religion is beyond defense. Molestation and suicide bombings are put in the same moral category as opposition to lax immigration laws (which is precisely what he means by &#8216;hostility toward diversity&#8217;) and abortion. Resist&#8482; at all times, and if necessary impugn the motives of your theological and political opposites. Or something.
Next, he details an epiphany he had after a typical day&#8217;s work of &#8220;lecturing a class of undergraduates about the incoherence of monotheism.&#8221; A student came up to him after class and explained that after his brother&#8217;s tragic murder, his mother &#8220;would have been institutionalized if not for the fact that she expected to see her slain son again&#8221; in the sweet hereafter. His road-to-Damascus realization was not that religious people are not unilaterally irrational- &#8220;religion fails miserably at the bar of rational validity,&#8221; to use his words- but that faith&#8217;s &#8220;irrationality may even be the source of its power&#8221; to help those experiencing despair. In other words, the schizophrenic is satisfied in his psychosis, so we ought not treat him.
Religion, like any other philosophy or ideology, is only meaningful if it is true. Saint Paul says that if the specific historical claims of the Christian creed &#8211;that a Jesus of Nazareth made radical claims about His personal Divinity, was crucified under the auspices of Pontius Pilate and rose from the dead in vindication of His claims of divination, to borrow the formula from <a href="https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/question-answer/problems-with-the-old-testament">Dr. William Lane Craig</a>&#8211; were untrue, then &#8220;we are of all men most miserable.&#8221; The schizophrenic gains nothing from the furtherance of his delusion, and so too do we who count ourselves as believers receive no recompense if our beliefs are foundationally untrue.
The author avoids entirely the possibility that he is wrong. This, it seems to me, is a malady with a particularly high incidence among atheist intellectuals. Dr. Asma excuses himself from examining the possibility that religion&#8217;s status as, in his words, &#8220;the most powerful cultural response to the universal emotional life,&#8221; is not granted solely because of its anesthetic capacity but instead because it&#8217;s actually true.
I&#8217;m open to the possibility that all religious people (myself included) are irrational rubes, but I simply don&#8217;t have enough faith to believe that. Evidently, Dr. Asma does, and his olive branch that we&#8217;re generally made better off by our irrational, pre-civilizational beliefs is of little solace if we&#8217;re destined to be worm food at the end of our days.

HIRSCHAUER: Religion Is Important Only If It’s True

Atheism

Religion

Science

A spokeswoman for New York Governor Andrew Cuomo <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/new-york-attorney-general-state-law-trump-pardon-2018-4">indicated</a> that the governor &#8220;believes that the federal legal system should not provide a basis for any wrong doers to escape justice.&#8221;
Placing the statement&#8217;s incredulity aside &#8212; the governor is no friend of law enforcement and no serious person believes that he means that statement &#8212; it cuts to the core of the paradoxes buttressing a politics of expedience and self-righteousness. Pitiless imposers of the people&#8217;s retribution upon crimes &#8212; or, more aptly, criminals &#8212; for which and whom they hold contempt, New York&#8217;s simultaneous contention that federal immigration law&#8217;s teeth end where the cosmopolitan tolerance of its state lines begin is too ironic to be the fruits of anything but cynicism.
One of the (many) great ironies of the Trump presidency, as Tucker Carlson notes, is that the people who a mere two years ago labeled an affinity for federalism a species of Faubusite intolerance, now themselves hold high the flag of states&#8217; rights as a means proper of &#8220;resistance.&#8221; An ideology that induces its adherents to selectively mete out the fiat of federal law upon its myriad dissenters approaches a more righteous cause for such resistance, one intuits.
Outraged at the prospective pardoning of a man whose visceral crime was a minor campaign finance violation and actual offense was infidelity to the cult of Obama-worship, the New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood released a statement decrying, among other things, Dinesh D&#8217;Souza&#8217;s pardon and the &#8220;double jeopardy loophole.&#8221; Such a loophole is known, in other parlance, as a clause of the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution, a document that she herself is duty-bound to uphold by her own oath of office.
Underwood&#8217;s ultimate goal is likely <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/04/schneiderman-double-jeopardy/558389/">more nuanced</a> but no less foul; her invocation of a remedy for the &#8220;loophole&#8221; is a call for the ability to try federally pardoned citizens for violations of New York law, even if they have already been previously tried on a federal level.
There is a palpable contempt for the founders&#8217; enshrined protection from retrial; that and other provisions in the Constitution certainly weaken the &#8220;resistance&#8221; effort, and if the sitting president is indeed a fascistic despot waiting to intern visible minorities in internment camps like a <a href="https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/roosevelt-ushers-in-japanese-american-internment">Democratic forebearer</a> then constitutional norms seem of little consequence.
Therein lies the great paradox for American progressives in the civil service: can they swear to &#8220;support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic&#8221; and concurrently serve an ideology that <a href="https://rewire.news/article/2017/08/22/donald-trump-using-founding-fathers-racism-cloak-present-day-white-nationalism/">despises the Founders</a> and their seminal document&#8217;s <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/bernie-sanders-us-founded-on-racist-principles">principles</a> and civic vision?
Progressives have long abhorred the Constitution&#8217;s <a href="https://constitution.hillsdale.edu/document.doc?id=322">penchant</a> for negative liberty, and deified progressive president Woodrow Wilson long sought to <a href="https://digitalcommons.salve.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1066&amp;context=pell_theses">unshackle himself</a> from the bounds of constitutionally delineated power. The Left&#8217;s broader distaste for the very documents they swear to uphold is a paradox that predates the movement&#8217;s current hysteria in the face of a Trump presidency, but the climate of panic that has enveloped the culture has exacerbated progressive hostility for the country&#8217;s founding documents.
Let&#8217;s hope we don&#8217;t lose the Constitution&#8217;s Fifth Amendment to the ill-tempered political preferences of a New York civil servant.

HIRSCHAUER: New York AG Swears An Oath She Could Never Uphold

Andrew Cuomo

Constitution

Dinesh D’Souza

New York

When the NFL announced it will hereafter force players to stand for the national anthem, it was clear the league was attempting to salvage its damaged public image in the wake of the players&#8217; refusal to show respect to the country. By choosing to make standing for the anthem a matter of coercion rather than a voluntary act of patriotism, it (quite wrongly) suggests that NFL executives and the kneeling movement&#8217;s many malcontents in the country are unable to provide a coherent reason why America is worth honoring in spite of its flaws. Worse, it furthers the very narrative that drives protests like Kaepernick: The established authorities are afraid of the message they bear, and it is the established authorities&#8217; ill-reception of this message that perpetuates the &#8220;systemic racism&#8221; that threatens the lives of black men in America.
The anthem-kneeling protest began, of course, with Colin Kaepernick. A self-styled <a href="https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/11/15/colin-kaepernick-on-malcolm-x-his-parents-speaking-freely-and-if-he-regrets-anything-from-the-last-few-months/">disciple of Malcolm X</a>, he has offered bumbling <a href="http://www.miamiherald.com/sports/spt-columns-blogs/armando-salguero/article117033883.html">praise</a> for the murderous Fidel Castro and <a href="https://www.sbnation.com/lookit/2016/9/1/12751038/colin-kaepernick-wore-some-police-pig-socks-49ers-camp">worn socks</a> depicting police officers as pigs. Kaepernick&#8217;s anthem-kneeling was meant to highlight his perception of American law enforcement as systemically lethal in their handling of black suspects. Putting aside the <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/09/police-violence-against-black-men-rare-heres-what-data-actually-say/">statistical realities</a> for a moment, Kaepernick&#8217;s central contention was that he is &#8220;not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.&#8221; And while there are plenty of well-meaning and sincere players who have taken action on related issues, the radical flavor of the movement&#8217;s claims is unmistakable. It&#8217;s worth acknowledging that modern aggrievement politics are fueled, in large measure, by the appearance of aggrievement. And the NFL just gave the kneelers ammo.
The reaction to this has been largely what one would expect. Overwrought rhetoric abounds for a policy that, as ESPN anchor Mike Greenberg points out, is less stringent than the <a href="https://ftw.usatoday.com/2018/05/nfl-new-anthem-policy-rule-nhl-nba-nascar-mls-ncaa">NBA&#8217;s</a>. The left-wing sports blogosphere, a large contingent of the sports journalism market comprised of overtly political sports sites like <a href="http://www.deadspin.com/">Deadspin</a>, has been apoplectic since the release of this decision.
What has been unfortunately lost is an actual debate about the merits of the protest itself: Are American police systemically murdering black people at a disproportionate rate? <a href="http://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/test-9">If not</a>, should that matter in whether one chooses to abstain from honoring the flag? Does the statistical <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evidence-shows-bias-in-police-use-of-force-but-not-in-shootings.html">fact</a> that black and Hispanic Americans are more likely to be the victims of low-level force by police provide a prima facie justification for this protest? At root, is America a country falling so systemically short of its founding ideals that it isn&#8217;t worth standing for its anthem? Or, as some on the left would contend, are the principles of individual liberty and personal freedom so anathema to the implementation of a socialist utopia that the principles themselves aren&#8217;t worth standing for?
There are legitimate debates to be had about disparate outcomes in the criminal justice system, but those debates cannot lose sight of the statistical reality that the narrative upon which this entire kneeling movement rests &#8212; that blacks are disproportionately slain by a racist police force &#8212; has been thoroughly contradicted by a comprehensive <a href="https://scholar.harvard.edu/fryer/publications/empirical-analysis-racial-differences-police-use-force">study</a> from Harvard University. The fact remains that protest, even what some on the right would see as misguided protest, is a legitimate expression of the sentiment of free speech in our founding documents. But by allowing for the appearance of top-down silencing, Goodell and the owners have given the outrage industry its primary currency: something to be outraged about.

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John Hirschauer