A previous version of this article erroneously claimed that Twitter suspended New York Times columnist Brett Stephens after he denounced equity as racism. Stephens voluntarily <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/aug/27/bret-stephens-new-york-times-columinst-bed-bug-twitter">deactivated</a> his Twitter account in 2019. The original claim has been removed; the article and its headline have been revised. 
The New York Times posted Bret Stephens’ latest column, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/28/opinion/racism-antiracism-discrimination.html">titled</a> “The New Racism Won&#8217;t Solve the Old Racism,” on its website on June 28 and published it in the print issue dated June 29.
In the piece, Stephens wrote that the drive to bring about intersectional “equity” — often designated by the term “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) — “is insulting to everyone who still believes we should be judged by the content of our character.”
The idea that the government should redistribute wealth along racial lines has taken on new life since Ibram X. Kendi made it the central pillar of his bestseller, &#8220;How to be an Antiracist.&#8221; Kendi <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/msnbc-host-accuses-josh-hawley-of-misquoting-ibram-x-kendi-it-was-a-real-quote">wrote</a>:
<blockquote>[R]acial discrimination is not inherently racist. … The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.</blockquote>
Stephens argued that DEI violates the morality of most Americans in both sly and blunt ways.
“Sly is the redefinition of the word ‘equity,’ which in common English means the quality of being fair and impartial, to mean something closer to the opposite: the quality of being anything but impartial to achieve a desired, supposedly fairer result,” wrote Stephens. “And blunt is the racial preference, the explicit segregation, the insulting assumption-making and the overall intellectual sophistry that is antiracist ideology in action.”
Stephens noted, for instance, that requiring Jewish employees to join “whiteness accountability” is ludicrous, given the ways white supremacists have victimized Jews at home and abroad.
“It shouldn’t be hard to see that trying to solve the old racism with the new racism will produce only more racism,” Stephens concluded. “Justice is never achieved by turning tables.”
On June 30, a Twitter reader erroneously claimed that Twitter had suspended Bret Stephens’ Twitter account, <a href="https://twitter.com/bretstephensnyt">@BretStephensNYT</a>.
“Just read a piece by Bret Stephens in the int version of @nytimes/@nytopinion, thinking ‘that’s gonna be controversial’. Turns out his Twitter is already suspended. Wow that’s fast!” the <a href="https://twitter.com/EliseKatona/status/1410260915124117511">tweet</a> claimed.
<a href="https://twitter.com/EliseKatona/status/1410260915124117511">https://twitter.com/EliseKatona/status/1410260915124117511</a>
Stephens’ Twitter account now says merely, “Account suspended. Twitter suspends accounts which violate the <a href="https://support.twitter.com/articles/18311">Twitter Rules</a>.”
Stephens previously wrote a devastating critique of the New York Times’ 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones’ Pulitzer Prize-winning undertaking to date America’s founding from the importation of the first African slaves. Stephens <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/09/opinion/nyt-1619-project-criticisms.html">noted</a> the comprehensive scholarly rejection of Hannah-Jones’ assertions before <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/bret-stephens-dismantles-1619-project-thesis-in-search-of-evidence">calling</a> the undertaking a “thesis in search of evidence.”
In February, Stephens penned a column objecting to the way longtime New York Times science reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. “resigned” after public backlash that he had said the n-word while chaperoning his daughter&#8217;s field trip — to ask about the context in which it was used. The New York Times ultimately refused to print Stephens’ column, which was <a href="https://nypost.com/2021/02/11/read-the-column-the-new-york-times-didnt-want-you-read/">published</a> by the New York Post.

7B5F2544-0615-423C-8FFD-E7704BF6B01D_1_201_a

NY Times Columnist Denounces Equity as ‘Racism’ [CORRECTED]

Bret Stephens

New York Times

Twitter

New York Times opinion columnist Bret Stephens criticized the 1619 Project lauded by his employer and progressives across the country by calling it a “thesis in search of evidence.”
He spent the first few paragraphs of his latest <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/09/opinion/nyt-1619-project-criticisms.html">op-ed</a> lauding the “ambition” of the project, which sought to reframe how Americans saw the country’s origins.
“But ambition can be double-edged. Journalists are, most often, in the business of writing the first rough draft of history, not trying to have the last word on it. We are best when we try to tell truths with a lowercase t, following evidence in directions unseen, not the capital-T truth of a pre-established narrative in which inconvenient facts get discarded. And we’re supposed to report and comment on the political and cultural issues of the day, not become the issue itself,” Stephens wrote. “As fresh concerns make clear, on these points — and for all of its virtues, buzz, spinoffs and a Pulitzer Prize — the 1619 Project has failed.”
Those concerns, Stephens wrote, were reported by Phillip W. Magness, a scholar and critic of the 1619 Project, who <a href="https://quillette.com/2020/09/19/down-the-1619-projects-memory-hole/">wrote</a> in Quillette that The New York Times has now replaced a passage that originally claimed the project “aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding” with a new one that omits this claim.
Here’s the old passage:
<blockquote>The 1619 project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.</blockquote>
And here’s the new one:
<blockquote>The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.</blockquote>
Stephens reached out to Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the 1619 Project, after she claimed in a tweet response to Magness that the claim 1619 was America’s “true” birth year was “always a metaphoric argument.” Stephens asked Hannah-Jones “if she could point to any instances before this controversy in which she had acknowledged that her claims about 1619 as ‘our true founding’ had been merely metaphorical.”
“Her answer was that the idea of treating the 1619 date metaphorically should have been so obvious that it went without saying,” Stephens wrote. “She then challenged me to find any instance in which the project stated that ‘using 1776 as our country’s birth date is wrong,’ that it ‘should not be taught to schoolchildren,’ and that the only one ‘that should be taught’ was 1619. ‘Good luck unearthing any of us arguing that,’ she added.”
So Stephens went about finding exactly what Hannah-Jones claimed did not exist – an excerpt from New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein’s introductory essay for the project (emphasis added by Stephens):
<blockquote>1619. It is not a year that most Americans know as a notable date in our country’s history. Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nation’s birth. What if, however, we were to tell you that this fact, which is taught in our schools and unanimously celebrated every Fourth of July, is wrong, and that the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619?</blockquote>
As Stephens noted, Silverstein’s passage, which appeared in print, has been altered online to read:
<blockquote>1619 is not a year that most Americans know as a notable date in our country’s history. Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nation’s birth. What if, however, we were to tell you that the moment that the country’s defining contradictions first came into the world was in late August of 1619?</blockquote>
Silverstein told Stephens the changes were irrelevant.
Stephens criticism comes just days after a group of scholars <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/profoundly-flawed-group-of-scholars-call-for-pulitzer-prize-to-be-revoked-from-1619-project-author">called</a> for Hannah-Jones to lose her Pulitzer Prize for the 1619 project.

Nikole Hannah-Jones

Bret Stephens Dismantles 1619 Project: ‘Thesis In Search Of Evidence’

1619 Project

After admitting the horrific confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh made him rethink Trump&#8217;s presidency, the New York Times&#8217; token &#8220;conservative&#8221; Bret Stephens is now back to the same &#8220;Never Trump&#8221; antics he displayed throughout the 2016 election.
Speaking with Chuck Todd on NBC&#8217;s &#8220;Meet the Press&#8221; on Sunday, Stephens declared that President Donald Trump &#8220;is either mentally unwell or morally unfit, maybe both.&#8221; The columnist even said in so many words that Trump may be the worst president in history.
&#8220;You have behavior that is unprecedented in any kind of presidential history in the United States or, frankly, elsewhere,” Stephens said, according to <a href="https://www.mediaite.com/tv/nyts-bret-stephens-the-last-weeks-shown-trumps-either-mentally-unwell-or-morally-unfit-maybe-both/">Mediaite</a>. &#8220;So when I hear guys like Erick [Erickson] saying, ‘Wow, you know, at the end of the day, this is a choice,’ you know, I’d actually rather have a candidate, on the Democratic side, who at least doesn’t scare me every single morning.&#8221;
Stephens said that Trump scares him &#8220;every single morning&#8221; as 2020 Democratic Party presidential candidates make some of the most radical proposals in history, from unfettered taxpayer-funded abortions to medicare for all to gun confiscation to rotating conservative justices off the Supreme Court to the hollowing out of religious liberty.
Stephens later directed his ire toward Trump&#8217;s defenders, who claim that &#8220;you have to separate the signal from the noise&#8221; in order to appreciate his tenure.
&#8220;The reality of the Trump presidency is the noise is the signal, and it’s dangerous,&#8221; said Stephens. &#8220;We are blundering our way into a contest with the Chinese that’s not about national security. It’s a contest of face between two leaders who see themselves as, essentially, you know, supreme leaders, and from which neither of them is easily going to back down. We ended up in a war, in World War II, in part because we were trying to impose an economic embargo on Japan. These things have a precedent. And they’re worrisome. We should be worried about China. But trying to wage a trade war with it, with no outcome in sight, is going to have consequences.&#8221;
Ironically enough, reports 24 hours later indicated that China&#8217;s economy <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/51032/breaking-trump-tariffs-tank-asian-equities-chinese-ryan-saavedra">was already suffering the effects</a> of Trump&#8217;s trade war and wanted to negotiate a deal. From The Daily Wire&#8217;s Ryan Saavedra:
<blockquote>President Donald Trump&#8217;s latest trade war escalation against China appears to have had an immediate effect on Asian markets and the Chinese Yuan, sending both tumbling early on Monday morning.
&#8220;China&#8217;s yuan currency fell to 7.1487 to the dollar, its weakest level since early 2008 at the height of the global financial crisis,&#8221; AFP <a href="https://news.yahoo.com/equities-yuan-plunge-trump-escalates-trade-war-china-031103927--finance.html">reported</a>. &#8220;On equity markets, Hong Kong led losses, slumping more than three percent, with investors also spooked by fresh violent protests in the city that saw police use water cannon for the first time. Shanghai lost 1.3 percent and Tokyo ended the morning more than two percent off.&#8221;
Chinese Vice Premier Liu He indicated early on Monday that the communist nation was willing to negotiate with the U.S. to prevent the trade war from escalating.
<a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-china-vice-premier/china-willing-to-resolve-trade-dispute-with-us-via-dialogue-newspaper-idUSKCN1VG059">Reuters </a>reported that &#8220;Liu, China’s top trade negotiator, was speaking at a tech conference in Chongqing in southwest China&#8221; when he made the remarks.</blockquote>
Bret Stephens going all-in on his &#8220;Never Trump&#8221; stance on the eve of the 2020 election radically departs <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/36708/never-trump-bret-stephens-praises-trump-nyt-column-kassy-dillon">from his praise of the president </a>in the fall of 2018 when the Democratic Party unilaterally tried to destroy the life of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh with severely flawed allegations of sexual assault from over 35 years ago.
&#8220;I’m grateful because he’s a big fat hammer fending off a razor-sharp dagger,&#8221; Stephens said of the president.

NYT’s Token ‘Conservative’ Bret Stephens: Trump ‘Mentally Unwell Or Morally Unfit’

2020 Election

In a new column for The New York Times, Bret Stephens, a self-proclaimed conservative &#8220;Never-Trumper&#8221; praised President Donald Trump for the way he handled the controversy surrounding the confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh.
The column is titled &#8216;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/04/opinion/trump-kavanaugh-ford-allegations.html">For Once, I&#8217;m Grateful for Trump</a>&#8217; and focuses on Trump standing up to what Stephens calls &#8220;sly moral bullying.&#8221;
Despite Trump mocking Kavanaugh&#8217;s accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, &#8220;in his ugly gratuitous way at a rally,&#8221; Stephens wrote, he is &#8220;grateful because Trump has not backed down in the face of slipperiness, hypocrisy and dangerous standard-setting deployed by opponents of Brett Kavanaugh&#8217;s nomination to the Supreme Court.&#8221;
&#8220;I&#8217;m grateful because he&#8217;s a big fat hammer fending off a razor-sharp dagger,&#8221; Stephens added.
Stephens claimed he started feeling this way about Trump&#8217;s response after a friend told him he&#8217;d rather be accused of murder than sexual assault, to which Stephens said, &#8220;I feel the same way.&#8221; He added, &#8220;One can think of excuses for killing a man; none for assaulting a woman.&#8221;
&#8220;Falsely accusing a person of sexual assault is nearly as despicable as sexual assault itself,&#8221; he wrote. &#8220;It inflicts physical, familial, reputational and professional harms that can last a lifetime. This is nothing to sneer at.&#8221;
Stephens even took aim at his own publication for publishing a 1983 handwritten letter by Kavanaugh where he wrote, &#8220;We&#8217;re loud, obnoxious drunks with prolific pukers among us.&#8221;
&#8220;Adolescent boasting now being treated as if it is a crucial piece of incriminating evidence,&#8221; Stephens said of the letter.
The rest of the piece focuses on different moments that led him to his opinion on the confirmation. &#8220;I&#8217;ll admit to feeling grateful that, in Trump, at least one big bully was willing to stand up to others,&#8221; he concludes.
Stephens joined The New York Times in April of 2017, and has written several pieces critical of Trump. In December of 2017, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/29/opinion/why-im-still-a-nevertrumper.html">he penned a piece</a> titled &#8220;Why I&#8217;m Still a NeverTrumper,&#8221; and in August he wrote a piece criticizing Trump&#8217;s rhetoric about the media, titled &#8220;Trump Will Have Blood on His Hands.&#8221;
Also in December of 2017,<a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/media/363350-nyts-bret-stephens-says-he-can-never-vote-republican-again"> Stephens told</a> MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle that &#8220;until last year, I voted Republican in every single election,&#8221; but added &#8220;I think I speak not only for myself but for many other people that I could never vote ever again for a party that is making an open endorsement of a man against whom there are credible accusation of pedophilia,&#8221; in reference to former Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore.
Stephens&#8217; position resembles others from prominent &#8220;Never-Trump&#8221; conservatives, including Erick Erickson, <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/never-trumpers-unite-to-back-trumps-battle-for-kavanaugh">who wrote on Friday</a>: &#8220;I find myself in an odd position where, for the first time, I see myself, one of the original so-called &#8216;Never Trump&#8217; conservatives, voting for President Trump in 2020,&#8221; adding &#8220;The political press has behaved as co-conspirators with the Democrats in the Kavanaugh matter. They have clearly been fully co-conspirators with the Democrats in the Kavanaugh matter.&#8221; The Wall Street Journal <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-never-conservatives-1538608630">editorial page also wrote</a>: &#8220;Republicans across America can see, and certainly their senators voting on Judge Kavanaugh should realize, that the left hates them as much or more than they loathe Mr. Trump. Conservatives understand that, for the American left, they are all deplorables now.&#8221;
Trump also mentioned the unification of the Right on Twitter:
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The harsh and unfair treatment of Judge Brett Kavanaugh is having an incredible upward impact on voters. The PEOPLE get it far better than the politicians. Most importantly, this great life cannot be ruined by mean &amp; despicable Democrats and totally uncorroborated allegations!
&#8212; Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1047822816580722690?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 4, 2018</a></blockquote>
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Never-Trump Bret Stephens Praises Trump in NYT Column

Brett Kavanaugh

Christine Blasey Ford

Conservatism

Donald Trump

On Friday, the internet began passing around a column from last year by <a href="https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/opinion/guns-second-amendment-nra.html?referer=https://www.google.com/">The New York Times</a><a href="https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/opinion/guns-second-amendment-nra.html?referer=https://www.google.com/">&#8217;</a> in-house conservative columnist, Bret Stephens. That op-ed called for the repeal of the Second Amendment. It&#8217;s an exercise in futility, shot-through with misplaced indignation and a shocking amount of willingness to overlook the plainly factual.
Stephens begins by deriding the &#8220;conservative fetish for the Second Amendment.&#8221; Why, he asks, do conservatives support a private right to own weapons for the protection of life and liberty?
After all, Stephens says, &#8220;From a law-and-order standpoint, more guns means more murder.&#8221; Now, this is plainly untrue. More guns in certain places means more murder. Stephens cites a study in the American Journal of Public Health, for example, to show that &#8220;States with higher rates of gun ownership had disproportionately large numbers of deaths from firearm-related homicides.&#8221; There&#8217;s just one problem with the study: it examines the statistics on a state level, which makes no sense. Virtually all murder happens in major cities, not in the surburbs or the boonies, so we&#8217;d have to actually examine gun laws and their efficacy in cities themselves to see how effective they&#8217;ve been. And that supposedly bulletproof study <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3828709/table/tbl3/">actually comes to a rather uncomfortable conclusion</a> that both the study authors and Stephens would prefer to ignore: &#8220;For each 1-standard deviation increase in proportion of household gun ownership, firearm homicide rate increased by 12.9%. For each 1-standard deviation increase in proportion of black population, firearm homicide rate increased by 82.8%.&#8221; (The study write-up attempts to hide this fact by not showing the data in the text.) The correlation between gun laws and gun death is <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/10/06/zero-correlation-between-state-homicide-rate-and-state-gun-laws/?utm_term=.8cf44b62452c">actually non-existent</a>, according to Eugene Volokh of The Washington Post.
Stephens continues by stating, &#8220;From a personal-safety standpoint, more guns means less safety.&#8221; He then cites the fact that more people are killed in accidental firearms deaths than in self-defense shooting situations. But that&#8217;s not the point of owning a weapon. The point of owning a weapon is not to fire it. While the CDC points out that there were 268 justifiable homicides by firearms in 2015, according to the National Self-Defense Survey extrapolations, people use firearms in self-defense millions of times per year. <a href="http://reason.com/blog/2015/03/09/how-to-count-the-defensive-use-of-guns">Brian Doherty</a> at Reason has an exhaustive analysis of just which one is closer to the truth &#8212; but it&#8217;s certainly not true that only justifiable homicides act as a measure of the value of guns in self-defense.
Stephens next moves on to deriding the founding-era viewpoint that guns could protect liberty. He says that such a suggestion is &#8220;quaint&#8221; in terms of foreign policy, laughing at the suggestion that guns could deter &#8220;Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un.&#8221; Except, of course, that small firearms utilized in guerilla warfare have thwarted major states time and again, from Vietnam to Afghanistan. He also mocks the notion that &#8220;an armed citizenry is the ultimate check on the ambitions and encroachments of government power,&#8221; citing the Whiskey Rebellions and the New York draft riots. Except, of course, that the Whiskey Rebellion likely resulted, politically, in the ouster of President John Adams and the end of the internal federal taxes on whiskey. Most armed insurrections are terrible mistakes, of course, but to say that their threat doesn&#8217;t act as a deterrent is historically illiterate (it&#8217;s one major reason, for example, that the feds haven&#8217;t tried a major gun grab &#8212; try telling Texans that the ATF is coming to confiscate weaponry).
Then Stephens turns to the &#8220;active shooter&#8221; phenomenon, stating that such situations are &#8220;extremely rare&#8221; in the rest of the world. That&#8217;s true. It&#8217;s also true that they&#8217;re <a href="https://crimeresearch.org/2015/06/comparing-death-rates-from-mass-public-shootings-in-the-us-and-europe/">extremely rare in the United States</a>. And citing Stephen Paddock as an example of a person who had no record of mental health problems is intellectually dishonest &#8212; he&#8217;s about the only example of an active shooter without a history of red flags. That&#8217;s some serious cherry picking of data.
After that, Stephens starts parroting the talking points of full-blown idiots like Piers Morgan. He says, &#8220;I&#8217;m not the <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-if-stephen-paddock-were-al-qaeda-1507071366" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">first pundit</a> to point out that if a &#8216;Mohammad Paddock&#8217; had purchased dozens of firearms and thousands of rounds of ammunition and then checked himself into a suite at the Mandalay Bay with direct views to a nearby music festival, somebody at the local F.B.I. field office would have noticed.&#8221; Really? How good a job did the FBI do of watching Omar Mateen in Orlando or Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik in San Bernardino?
Stephens suggests that Leftists are losing the gun control debate because they lie about the facts (correct) and talk about &#8220;common sense gun control&#8221; when they really mean full-scale repeal of the Second Amendment. His solution: repeal the Second Amendment.
He then says that this should become a &#8220;great cause.&#8221; He says gun ownership shouldn&#8217;t be outlawed, but it &#8220;doesn&#8217;t need a blanket Constitutional protection, either,&#8221; again mocking those who think &#8220;Red Dawn&#8221; is imminent. It apparently never occurs to Stephens that a state powerful enough to confiscate weapons or ban the sale of them is made more powerful by the lack of weapons in private hands.
What about the founding philosophy? Stephens says that today, James Madison would be on his side &#8212; without any evidence.
&#8220;The true foundation of American exceptionalism should be our capacity for moral and constitutional renewal, not our instinct for self-destruction,&#8221; Stephens concludes.
This is about as non-conservative a philosophy as can be found. Human nature doesn&#8217;t change. The founders knew that. It&#8217;s why they thought the right to self-defense and defense of liberty was the foundation of all other rights. If Madison would be shocked by our level of murder, his recommendation would be to inculcate virtue in our communities, not to restrict our rights. Down the alternative path lies tyranny.
NOTE: This column originally stated that Stephen&#8217;s column was released in response to the Florida shooting. That was incorrect. The column is actually from October 2017, and went viral again on Friday.

NYT Conservative Columnist: ‘Repeal The Second Amendment’

The former spokesman for the U.S. National Security Council under former President Barack Obama lashed out over a recent report from a Kuwaiti newspaper about how the Obama administration prevented Israel from assassinating a man with strong ties to terrorism by warning Iran about their plans.
The New York Times&#8217; Bret Stephens tweeted out an article from Haaretz quoting the newspaper saying that three years prior to its report, the U.S. thwarted an Israeli attempt to kill Iranian general Qassem Soleimani who is the commander of the Quds Force, a <a href="https://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/hp644.aspx">US-designated sponsor of terrorism</a>.
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The story here, Kuwaiti-sourced, is that Obama team tipped Tehran to an Israeli attempt to assassinate Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian general who has the blood of hundreds of American troops in his hand. What says <a href="https://twitter.com/brhodes?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@brhodes</a>? <a href="https://t.co/sf5PYp4mq5">https://t.co/sf5PYp4mq5</a>
&#8212; Bret Stephens (@BretStephensNYT) <a href="https://twitter.com/BretStephensNYT/status/948653540439928837?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 3, 2018</a></blockquote>
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Former Obama NSC spokesman Tommy Vietor jumped in at that point, writing: &#8220;Yeah WTF Ben? Immediately confirm or deny this totally unsubstantiated claim and then tell us why you don&#8217;t support assassinations.&#8221;
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Yeah WTF Ben? Immediately confirm or deny this totally unsubstantiated claim and then tell us why you don&#8217;t support assassinations.
&#8212; Tommy Vietor (@TVietor08) <a href="https://twitter.com/TVietor08/status/951150829700075526?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 10, 2018</a></blockquote>
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Stephens responded by writing: &#8220;Funny, I remember how Iran-Contra scandal began Tommy Vietor. Little story in obscure Lebanese magazine. Also glad to know Obama administration doesn&#8217;t support assassinations&#8212;except by SEAL team or drone strike. Because that&#8217;s totally different.&#8221;
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Funny, I remember how Iran-Contra scandal began <a href="https://twitter.com/TVietor08?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@TVietor08</a>. Little story in obscure Lebanese magazine. Also glad to know Obama administration doesn&#8217;t support assassinations&#8212;except by SEAL team or drone strike. Because that&#8217;s totally different. <a href="https://t.co/xfaHbKoUmO">https://t.co/xfaHbKoUmO</a>
&#8212; Bret Stephens (@BretStephensNYT) <a href="https://twitter.com/BretStephensNYT/status/951216401301299202?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 10, 2018</a></blockquote>
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It was at this point that the back-and-forth between Stephens and Vietor got really interesting. Vietor replied: &#8220;Yeah Bret Stephens taking out Osama bin Laden is the same as assassinating an Iranian political leader.&#8221;
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Yeah <a href="https://twitter.com/BretStephensNYT?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@BretStephensNYT</a> taking out Osama bin Laden is the same as assassinating an Iranian political leader. <a href="https://t.co/PKRWFjgZPW">https://t.co/PKRWFjgZPW</a>
&#8212; Tommy Vietor (@TVietor08) <a href="https://twitter.com/TVietor08/status/951219021332074496?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 10, 2018</a></blockquote>
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It is worth noting that the Obama administration was <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/24826/shock-obama-helped-hezbollah-secure-bogus-iran-ryan-saavedra">credibly accused</a> in December of enabling the Iranian backed terrorist organization Hezbollah by ending a massive federal investigation into the group.
Stephens responded: &#8220;Seriously, Tommy Vietor? Suleimani is an &#8216;Iranian political leader&#8217;? Actually he&#8217;s head of the Quds Force, which is a US designated sponsor of terrorism. Suleimani is sanctioned by name. Here, read about it,&#8221; he wrote, linking to a Treasury Department summary of the <a href="https://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/hp644.aspx">Quds Force&#8217;s support of terrorism</a>.
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Seriously, <a href="https://twitter.com/TVietor08?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@TVietor08</a>? Suleimani is an &#8220;Iranian political leader&#8221;? Actually he&#8217;s head of the Quds Force, which is a US designated sponsor of terrorism. Suleimani is sanctioned by name. Here, read about it: <a href="https://t.co/vUd02MB53p">https://t.co/vUd02MB53p</a> <a href="https://t.co/XtHtK1jDZK">https://t.co/XtHtK1jDZK</a>
&#8212; Bret Stephens (@BretStephensNYT) <a href="https://twitter.com/BretStephensNYT/status/951237360934621185?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 10, 2018</a></blockquote>
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Vietor then seemed to almost confirm the story written by Haaretz, writing: &#8220;We were well aware of the dangers posed by QS and the IRGC. Obama sanctioned them repeatedly, among other deterrents. But an assassination of QS by Israel would be destabilizing to put it mildly.&#8221;
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-conversation="none" data-lang="en">
We were well aware of the dangers posed by QS and the IRGC. Obama sanctioned them repeatedly, among other deterrents. But an assassination of QS by Israel would be destabilizing to put it mildly.
&#8212; Tommy Vietor (@TVietor08) <a href="https://twitter.com/TVietor08/status/951239821065965568?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 10, 2018</a></blockquote>
</div>
Stephens immediately picked up on Vietor&#8217;s statement, responding: &#8220;So did you alert Iran to the Israeli surveillance and potential attempt, Tommy Vietor? It sounds like you are confirming the story.&#8221;
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
So did you alert Iran to the Israeli surveillance and potential attempt, <a href="https://twitter.com/TVietor08?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@TVietor08</a>? It sounds like you are confirming the story. <a href="https://t.co/JwhLFNoaXF">https://t.co/JwhLFNoaXF</a>
&#8212; Bret Stephens (@BretStephensNYT) <a href="https://twitter.com/BretStephensNYT/status/951241640861143041?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 10, 2018</a></blockquote>
</div>
UPDATE: Vietor responded to Stephens, writing, &#8220;I didn&#8217;t work in the White House three years ago, but Ben did and he already denied it. Regardless, you could&#8217;ve tried to confirm this without spreading the lie via Twitter. Good to see you&#8217;re bringing the same intellectual rigor you apply to climate change to national security.&#8221;
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-conversation="none" data-lang="en">
I didn&#8217;t work in the White House three years ago, but Ben did and he already denied it. Regardless, you could&#8217;ve tried to confirm this without spreading the lie via Twitter. Good to see you&#8217;re bringing the same intellectual rigor you apply to climate change to national security.
&#8212; Tommy Vietor (@TVietor08) <a href="https://twitter.com/TVietor08/status/951483770695307272?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 11, 2018</a></blockquote>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-conversation="none" data-lang="en">
Keep up the great work spreading fake news and embarrassing the <a href="https://twitter.com/nytimes?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@nytimes</a>. You&#8217;re off to a great start!
&#8212; Tommy Vietor (@TVietor08) <a href="https://twitter.com/TVietor08/status/951516434567397376?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 11, 2018</a></blockquote>
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SHOCK: Former Obama Official Hints Admin Warned Terrorist That Israel Was Going To Assassinate Him

Barack Obama

Iran

Terrorism

Bret Stephens of The New York Times thinks that conservatives should support the NFL athletes disrespecting the flag, arguing that it would be the conservative thing to to do.
Appearing on Hardball with Chris Matthews, the duo discussed a biased <a href="http://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/rngs/FOOTBALL-POLL/010050ZQ28D/2017%20Reuters%20Tracking%20-%20NFL%20Topline%2009%2026%202017.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Reuters/Ipsos </a><a href="http://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/rngs/FOOTBALL-POLL/010050ZQ28D/2017%20Reuters%20Tracking%20-%20NFL%20Topline%2009%2026%202017.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">poll</a> showing that Americans opposed President Trump weighing in on the NFL debate, failing to mention that an even higher number of Americans despise spitting on the flag.
Matthews began: &#8220;Listen to this, 53% of adults, according to a new Reuters poll just out tonight, think it&#8217;s inappropriate for Trump to comment &#8212; even comment on how NFL players observe national anthem. Even comment on it. Unfortunately, we know Trump doesn&#8217;t go gunning for 53%, he likes that smaller percent, in the 30s that&#8217;s loyal to him.&#8221;
Stephens, an avowed Never Trumper, then hit at conservatives for not supporting the kneelers.
&#8220;It&#8217;s amusing to hear conservatives, I think, rightfully complain about excessive campus orthodoxies and then go berserk over Colin Kaepernick and other NFL players trying to break this other taboo and be iconoclast and champions of freedom in their own right,&#8221; said Stephens.
Then Stephens repeated the leftist line that standing for the flag means some kind of worship and that kneeling is equally respectful of the values it represents.
<blockquote>
We don&#8217;t worship the flag as a totem like it&#8217;s the obelisk that descends on planet Earth in 2001: A Space Odyssey. We &#8212; we admire the flag because of what it represents and the chief thing that it represents, is freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom to think unpopular thoughts, despite the booing of crowds or the views of a President intent on rabble rousing.
</blockquote>
Except that&#8217;s not how it works. None of the NFL&#8217;s detractors deny that they have a right to spit on the flag and only assert that they are jerks for doing so, and for incoherent reasons, and deserve the scorn that is coming their way.
Not that anyone should expect a reasonable response from Stephens in the age of Trump, who has repeatedly never given the President an inch. His most egregious criticism of this administration came when news broke that Vice President Mike Pence avoids having dinner alone with women for the sake of his marriage.
Like a Manhattanite elitist, and certainly not like a conservative, Stephens had this to say about Pence faithfully and prudently living out his marriage:
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The calling card of all religious fundamentalism: terror of women. <a href="https://t.co/FTkk47YlBq">https://t.co/FTkk47YlBq</a>
&#8212; Bret Stephens (@BretStephensNYT) <a href="https://twitter.com/BretStephensNYT/status/848242892049190912">April 1, 2017</a></blockquote>
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So, the most charitable word to describe Stephens here is &#8220;hypocrite&#8221; for demanding that conservatives stand with elitist athletes spitting on the flag while blasting the Vice President as some kind of Ayatollah for dedicating himself to his wife.
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Bret Stephens: Conservatives Should Stand With The Kneelers

Free Speech

MSNBC

Bret Stephens devoted his New York Times column last week to admonishing me for my tweet from two weeks ago and critiquing my follow-up column last week explaining the tweet.
The tweet reads, &#8220;The news media in the West pose a far greater danger to Western civilization than Russia does.&#8221;
Since he wrote the column as a &#8220;Dear Dennis&#8221; letter to me, I will respond in kind.
Dear Bret: I&#8217;ll try to respond to the most salient arguments you made. I&#8217;ll begin with one of the most troubling.
You wrote: &#8220;Wiser conservatives &#8212; and I count you among them, Dennis &#8212; also know that when we speak of &#8216;the West,&#8217; what we&#8217;re talking about is a particular strain within it. Marx and Lenin, after all, are also part of the Western tradition, as are Heidegger and Hitler.&#8221;
I was taken aback that such a serious thinker could write that nihilist communists and nihilist Nazis are all &#8220;part of the Western tradition.&#8221;
That&#8217;s what the vast majority of professors in the social sciences teach: There&#8217;s nothing morally superior about Western civilization &#8212; it&#8217;s as much about Hitler and Lenin as it is about Moses and Thomas Jefferson. And, anyway, Moses never existed and Jefferson was a slaveholding rapist. Among those professors&#8217; students are virtually all those who dominate the Western news media.
Am I wrong? Do you think your colleagues at the Times or the Washington Post or Le Monde or BBC believe in the moral superiority of the West?
Of course they don&#8217;t. Most believe in multiculturalism &#8212; the doctrine that all cultures are equal &#8212; and it is therefore nothing more than white racism to hold that Western civilization is superior. Didn&#8217;t nearly all of your (nonconservative) colleagues who commented on President Trump&#8217;s speech in Warsaw call it a dog whistle to white supremacists?
On those grounds alone, my tweet was accurate.
I am surprised that anyone &#8212; especially you &#8212; thinks Vladimir Putin&#8217;s Russia poses a greater threat to the survival of Western civilization than the Western left. No external force can destroy a civilization as effectively as an internal one &#8212; especially one as powerful and wealthy as the West. The Western left (not Western liberals) is such a force. Western liberals always adored the West.
I was also stunned by your saying, &#8220;I&#8217;m not sure that Justin Trudeau declaring there is &#8216;no core identity, no mainstream in Canada&#8217; counts as a Spenglerian moment in the story of Western decline.&#8221;
The prime minister of Canada announces with pride that his country has no core identity and you don&#8217;t think that counts as an example of a declining civilization?
And here&#8217;s another upsetting sentence: &#8220;To suggest that Vladimir Putin is a distant nuisance but Maggie Haberman or David Sanger is an existential threat to our civilization isn&#8217;t seeing things plain, to put it mildly.&#8221;
The reason I found that troubling is I never cited Haberman or Sanger, and you well know that no generalization includes every possible example &#8212; that&#8217;s what makes it a generalization. But I did specifically cite the writers in The Atlantic who equated Western civilization with white supremacy, and your substitution of your New York Times colleagues for The Atlantic commentators allowed you to avoid dealing with The Atlantic writers&#8217; and others media attacks on Western civilization.
Despite the fact that neither my tweet nor my column said a word about Trump, you devoted almost half your column to denouncing the president. Yet, as I wrote in the column, my tweet would have been just as accurate had I sent it out during former President Obama&#8217;s administration or Hillary Clinton&#8217;s, if she were president.
Bret, to your great credit, you are a lonely voice of strong support for Israel at your newspaper (your readers should see the videos on the Middle East you made for Prager University; they have eight million views for good reason). Doesn&#8217;t the almost uniform hostility toward Israel in the media and academia trouble you? Does it trouble you that most Democrats in America hold a negative view of Israel? That Jewish students at many American, not to mention European, universities fear expressing support for Israel or just wearing a yarmulke on campus? That so many young American Jews, influenced by the media and their professors, loathe Israel? I am certain all of that greatly troubles you. Is any of that Putin&#8217;s doing? Or is it all the result of the media and academia?
You mentioned that you will be sending me a birthday gift, a book about Putin&#8217;s Russia, &#8220;Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible&#8221; by Peter Pomerantsev. I promise to read it. And I request a promise in return: Read the book I am sending you, &#8220;The Strange Death of Europe&#8221; by the eminent British thinker Douglas Murray. The book describes Europe&#8217;s suicide at the hands of its progressive elites &#8212; in particular, its multiculturalism-affirming political leaders and mendacious news media. To the best of my recollection, in describing the death of European civilization, Murray doesn&#8217;t mention Putin once. (Regarding the mendacious media, read the report published this week in Germany about the dishonesty in the German media, which routinely substitutes left-wing opinion for facts in reporting the immigrant crisis in Germany.)
Perhaps the most troubling part of your response was your penultimate line: &#8220;Don&#8217;t be a hater, Dennis.&#8221;
Where did that come from? You cite not a single hateful word in my column &#8212; because there are none to cite. And &#8220;hater&#8221; has become the all-purpose left-wing epithet to dismiss all conservatives. Why would my friend Bret Stephens use it?
Dennis Prager&#8217;s latest book, &#8220;The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code,&#8221; was published by Regnery. He is a nationally syndicated radio show host and creator of PragerUniversity.com.
COPYRIGHT 2017 CREATORS.COM

PRAGER: My Response To Bret Stephens

Anti-Semitism

Media

Media Bias

Bret Stephens of The New York Times analogized Donald Trump&#8217;s assumption of the White House to the hijacking of Flight 93 by Islamic terrorists during the 9/11 attacks.

Mocking an article from September of 2016 by Michael Anton entitled, &#8220;<a href="http://www.claremont.org/crb/basicpage/the-flight-93-election/">The Flight 93 Election</a>,&#8221; Stephens initially dismisses fears of America as a nation in crisis via the spread of leftism:

<blockquote>
To imply, as Anton did, that Barack Obama, for all his shortcomings, was Ziad Jarrah, Flight 93&#8217;s lead hijacker, is vile. To suppose that we&#8217;d all be dead if Hillary Clinton, for all her flaws, had been elected is hallucinatory. To argue that the United States, for all its problems, was the equivalent of a doomed aircraft is absurd. To suggest that Donald Trump, a man who has sacrificed nothing in his life for anyone or anything, is the worthy moral heir to the Flight 93 passengers is a travesty.
</blockquote>
Stephens concludes that perhaps it is Trump who represents the political manifestation of 9/11&#8217;s Islamic terrorists, painting Hillary Clinton&#8217;s failed presidential campaign as analogous to the failed attempt by Flight 93&#8217;s passengers to secure the cockpit:

<blockquote>
Maybe 2016 was the Flight 93 election, or something like it. Maybe the pilots are dead. Maybe the passengers failed to storm the cockpit. Maybe the hijackers reached their target by landing on the White House after all.
</blockquote>
Stephens describes himself as &#8220;proudly conservative,&#8221; and is often presented as a conservative when participating in television news media discussion panels on outlets such as CNN. 

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<a href="http://www.dailywire.com/news/10233/bret-stephens-im-gonna-vote-hillary-clinton-robert-kraychik">Last October</a>, Stephens announced that he would be vote for Hillary Clinton, repeatedly describing Donald Trump as a &#8220;threat to the Republic.&#8221; In doing, he joined other self-described conservatives such as David Frum and David Brooks.

Follow Robert Kraychik on <a href="https://twitter.com/">Twitter</a>.

bret_stephens_tweet

NYT Conservative Columnist Compares Trump To Flight 93 Hijacker

David Brooks

David Frum

Hillary Clinton

Republican Party

Wall Street Journal

On Saturday, brand new <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/28/opinion/climate-of-complete-certainty.html">New York Times</a> conservative columnist Bret Stephens penned a moderate column about climate change. In that column, he says that global warming due to man-made activity is a certainty:
<blockquote>
Anyone who has read the <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/syr/AR5_SYR_FINAL_SPM.pdf">2014 report</a> of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change knows that, while the modest (0.85 degrees Celsius, or about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) warming of the Northern Hemisphere since 1880 is indisputable, as is the human influence on that warming, much else that passes as accepted fact is really a matter of probabilities. That&#8217;s especially true of the sophisticated but fallible models and simulations by which scientists attempt to peer into the climate future. To say this isn&#8217;t to deny science. It&#8217;s to acknowledge it honestly.
</blockquote>
Stephens cautions against false certainty &#8212; failing to report uncertainty in data. &#8220;We live in a world in which data convey authority,&#8221; Stephens says. &#8220;But authority has a way of descending to certitude, and certitude begets hubris.&#8221; Stephens&#8217; language about certainty is actually designed to help climate change enthusiasts &#8212; if they keep making claims that keep being proved wrong, without any doubts baked into the cake, people will simply discount what they&#8217;re saying.
This moderate take has led a mass revolt by leftists who insist they will now cancel The New York Times. They call Stephens&#8217; column denialism, even though Stephens acknowledges global warming has taken place. They say that it&#8217;s just wrong on a factual level. Susan Matthews of Slate called the piece &#8220;classic climate change denialism,&#8221; explaining that reasonable people could not be &#8220;skeptical about the dangers of climate change.&#8221; Erik Wemple of The Washington Post actually wrote an <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2017/04/30/new-york-times-editor-pens-weak-vague-response-to-critics-of-bret-stephenss-op-ed-on-climate-change/?utm_term=.e2b2e5cad43b">email to the paper</a> complaining about the op-ed and asking for answers on Stephens&#8217; piece &#8212; something he hasn&#8217;t done on any other New York Times op-ed he&#8217;s ever reported.
Here was Stephens&#8217; eminently correct response:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
&gt;&gt; <a href="https://twitter.com/BretStephensNYT">@BretStephensNYT</a> emails&#8230; <a href="https://t.co/SEa3lgO8WS">pic.twitter.com/SEa3lgO8WS</a>
&#8212; Dylan Byers (@DylanByers) <a href="https://twitter.com/DylanByers/status/858757172167135232">April 30, 2017</a></blockquote>
Nonetheless, Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight complained:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
There&#8217;s nothing conservative (or liberal) about the Stephens column. The issue is about evidence vs. bullshit. He doesn&#8217;t know his subject. <a href="https://t.co/r4OuPDlVcI">https://t.co/r4OuPDlVcI</a>
&#8212; Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) <a href="https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/858741398694187012">April 30, 2017</a></blockquote>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
I wrote a book chapter on uncertainty in climate models. That Stephens/NYT column is sophistry passing itself off as reasoned skepticism. <a href="https://t.co/WBKMkA4Tzn">https://t.co/WBKMkA4Tzn</a>
&#8212; Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) <a href="https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/858078783110361094">April 28, 2017</a></blockquote>
I&#8217;ve read Silver&#8217;s book, The Signal and The Noise. It&#8217;s an excellent primer on data analysis. He has an entire chapter on climate change. In that chapter, he states, &#8220;In climate science, this healthy skepticism is generally directed as the reliability of computer models used to forecast the climate&#8217;s course&#8221; &#8212; in other words, precisely the sort of data Stephens seems to be questioning in this piece. Silver continues, &#8220;A survey of climate scientists conducted in 2008 found that almost all (94 percent) were agreed that climate change is occurring now, and 84 percent were persuaded that it was the result of human activity. But there was much less agreement about the accuracy of climate computer models.&#8221; In fact, here is Silver&#8217;s conclusion: &#8220;When we advance more confident claims and they fail to come to fruition, this constitutes much more powerful evidence against our hypothesis. &#8230; [Science] is a work in progress, always subject to further refinement and testing. This is what scientific skepticism is all about.&#8221;
Which is exactly Stephens&#8217; point.
But because Stephens is a conservative, when he says that he wants climate change advocates to be more exact in their phraseology without overstating levels of certainty, that&#8217;s a cause for outrage. You can only express scientific skepticism if you express no scientific skepticism, apparently.

NYT Columnist Stephens Says There Are Still Questions About Global Warming Predictions. The Left Loses Its Mind. Here’s Why They’re Full Of It.

Global Warming

Nate Silver

Bret Stephens will be leaving The Wall Street Journal and joining The New York Times in May, continuing his writing of opinion editorials.

The New York Times&#8217; James Risen <a href="http://www.nytco.com/bret-stephens-joins-nyt-opinion/">described</a> Stephens as possessing &#8220;intellectual depth, honesty and bravery.&#8221;

On Thursday, Stephens <a href="https://twitter.com/BretStephensNYT/status/852554589849227264">described himself</a> as &#8220;proudly conservative:&#8221;

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In October of last year, Stephens <a href="http://www.dailywire.com/news/10233/bret-stephens-im-gonna-vote-hillary-clinton-robert-kraychik">announced</a> that he would be voting for Hillary Clinton in the presidential election.

Stephens belongs to a cadre of ostensibly Republican and conservative news media figures employed by left-wing and and Democrat-aligned news media outlets. Political and news media observers will group him with such personalities as Joe Scarborough, Nicolle Wallace, Matt Lewis, Steve Schmidt, Rick Wilson, Amanda Carpenter, Ana Navarro, Jennifer Rubin, David Brooks, and David Frum.

 
Stephens&#8217; new Twitter handle adds his forthcoming employer&#8217;s acronym, reading <a href="https://twitter.com/BretStephensNYT">@BretStephensNYT</a>.

Outside of its opinion page, The New York Times presents its news coverage as politically objective and non-partisan.

Follow Robert Kraychik on <a href="https://twitter.com/kr3ch3k">Twitter</a>.

Bret Stephens Joins New York Times

Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal told Fox News Channel&#8217;s Jenna Lee on Wednesday that he will be voting for Hillary Clinton. Invited to discuss a recent column he wrote entitled <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/my-former-republican-party-1477353852">My Former Republican Party</a>, he repeatedly described Donald Trump as &#8220;a threat to the Republic.&#8221;
<div> </div>
&#8220;I&#8217;m gonna vote for Hillary Clinton,&#8221; said Stephens, adding that he &#8220;would vote for Republicans down ballot.&#8221;
<div> </div>
&#8220;I&#8217;m a registered Republican and I&#8217;d like to see my old party back,&#8221; continued Stephens. He added that he wants the GOP to be &#8220;the party that stands for free trade,&#8221; &#8220;the party that understands the value of [legal immigration] for the United States,&#8221; and &#8220;the party that understands the importance of a strong defense.&#8221;
<div> </div>
Stephens described his top priority for the GOP as being an insistence that its leaders subscribe to &#8220;civility and culture.&#8221; He lamented, &#8220;that&#8217;s not what we have now.&#8221;
<div> </div>
Stephens said a landslide victory for Hillary Clinton would help the GOP rediscover what he said were the party&#8217;s core principles.
<div> </div>
&#8220;The only way the Republican party finds its center, finds its soul, finds its Reagan once again is if it takes such a drubbing that it says to itself, &#8216;We&#8217;re never gonna repeat that mistake of nominating someone with the ideas or the temperament of Donald Trump,'&#8221; said Stephens.
<div> </div>
Victor Davis Hanson recently wrote an article entitled <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/440198/never-nevertrump-not-voting-trump-republican-suicide">Never NeverTrump</a> chastising the Never Trump crowd, published at National Review.
<div> </div>
<div>Follow Robert Kraychik on <a href="https://twitter.com/kr3ch3k">Twitter</a>.</div>
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