Policy wonk: Jeff Sessions Was Right About NY
US Attorney General Jeff Sessions last week provoked a predictable uproar when, in a warning to “sanctuary cities,” he spoke of New York City’s rise in gang-related murders, calling it “the predictable consequence of the city’s ‘soft on crime’ stance.” Local pols denounced him, citing the city’s historically low crime rates. But Seth Barron at City Journal says the AG wasn’t wrong: “Sessions didn’t claim that crime is rising in New York City, as it is in Chicago and other major cities. He said that New York is plagued by gang-related homicide, and that the city has gone ‘soft’ on enforcement.” The numbers, he says, seem to confirm that. Barron also criticizes the growing political policy of lowering crime figures “largely by defining crime out of existence.”
From the right: ESPN Pays Price for Politicizing Sports
This week’s big media news is ESPN’s stunning decision to fire 100 people, many of them on-air talent and sportswriters. Dan McLaughlin at National Review notes “both a business lesson and a political lesson here.” Yes, ESPN overpaid for broadcast rights and has a flawed business model. But as others have noted, ESPN’s business is collapsing because of its absurd decision to turn itself into an overtly left-wing sports network. “This is why ‘stick to sports’ is not just good manners for sports journalism, it’s good business advice.” Because “the more you import politics into the spaces people reserve to crack open a beer at the end of the day and enjoy a ballgame, the more apt they are to look for something else to watch.”
Libertarian: Threatening Political Violence in Portland
Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic warns, “A violent fringe” of protesters against President Trump is using his rise “as a justification for political violence, as if his authoritarian impulses justify authoritarianism from his opponents.” Now leftist activists in Portland, Ore., have caused the cancellation of that city’s 82nd annual Avenue of Roses Parade “by threatening to forcibly drag ‘fascists’ off the parade route if they weren’t excluded.” The ”fascists” are the local Republican Party, a longtime parade participant, whose participation would supposedly “normalize support” for Trump. As the GOP group noted: “The road to fascism begins with armed gangs of thugs using violence to shut down opposing points of view.” When “threats of violence succeed in causing events to get shut down by their risk-averse organizers,” warns Friedersdorf, “more threats will be made.”
Conservative take: Bill Nye’s Repulsive View of Humanity
Bill Nye, best known as “The Science Guy,” has “some detestable ideas about humanity,” showing “totalitarian impulses” and a “soft spot for eugenics,” says David Harsanyi at The Federalist. And they’re all on display in his new Netflix series, “Bill Nye Saves the World,” in which he tries to “adorn his ideological positions with the sheen of science.” Hearkening back to Paul Ehrlich’s “population bomb” theory of the 1970s, Nye and his guests discuss how to limit people from having children. Says Harsanyi: “Talking about humans as if they were a malady that needs to be cured is, at its core, immoral. And listening to a man who has three residences lecture potential parents about their responsibilities to Mother Earth is particularly galling.”
Ex-senator: We Could Use Another Richard Nixon
Former senator and GOP presidential nominee Bob Dole, a longtime favorite of President Richard Nixon, says today’s political leaders “need a dose of Nixonian pragmatism in their decision-making.” The 21st century, he notes in Politico, “is still the Age of Nixon” because “the basic domestic policies and international order that he brought to fruition remain in place.” Today’s leaders need to learn “what a cohesive, well-thought-out and well-executed, America-centered foreign policy looks like.” They “can also learn to think in terms of national interest, versus becoming a prisoner to ideology,” because Nixon, though partisan, was “above all” a pragmatist.
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann