…the U.S. has been too slow in arming its ally, too restrictive in setting conditions on the use of weapons, and generally too fearful of Vladimir Putin’s threats. The result is that Ukraine, for all its unfathomable courage and boundless ingenuity, has been permitted to fight, but not win, the war. If this keeps up, Ukraine could actually lose.
When I step back a bit, I can see that Zuckerberg isn’t just haplessly begging our forgiveness. He’s trying to save his business. Meta Platforms, the company he controls, contains some of the world’s most widely used and profitable digital brands, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Meta appears to be thriving, with its stock price more than quadrupling since a rocky 2022. But Zuckerberg knows that his company’s brands are built on foundations of sand. Just as a sandbar will move with tides, the user base of any social platform can drift away in a surprisingly short time.
This is Harris’s challenge: She’s the incumbent vice president running for higher office in a change election. She’s an undefined candidate whose positions and job performance are vulnerable to attack. She wants to be seen as a disruptor while remaining loyal to President Biden. And she wants to move away from the far-left views she held as a senator while she continues to proclaim that her values have stayed the same.
Being middle class in America used to mean something—something socially transformative, something even revolutionary. The American middle class represented a form of national social order never before seen on this earth—cultural domination not by the very rich and very educated, or the political domination either by tyrants or the mob, but by a mass of people, relatively well-to-do, who felt themselves fortunate in their circumstances. That was what made the American middle class different from the French or English bourgeoisie. Its members believed, and the country believed, that they were the nation’s backbone, its true governing class, and its moral compass.
President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump squared off four years ago and are on track for the first major-party rematch since 1892. Biden and Trump are the oldest presidential candidates in history, and each man has an established political brand. Biden first won federal office in 1972, and it’s been over a decade since the GOP nominated someone other than Donald Trump. The 2024 election is like all the SIRIUS XM oldies stations—Classic Vinyl, Classic Rewind, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Radio—rolled into one.
If you had never heard of Candace Owens until recently, you aren’t alone. Less than a decade ago, she was an unknown college dropout working as a marketing professional in New York, writing pieces for her company’s website about the “bat-s—t crazy antics of the Republican Tea Party.” Then, suddenly, she claimed to have experienced a political conversion. She told the libertarian political commentator Dave Rubin in 2017, “I became a conservative overnight. . . . I realized that liberals were actually the racists. Liberals were actually the trolls.”
Commentary Magazine (February 10, 2024) – The latest issue features ‘Power Broke Her’ – The Rise and (Maybe) Fall of Lina Khan; The ‘As A Jew’: A Brief History; What Putin and Xi have in Common; Hostages – What Price is Too High?; On Joan Didion and more…
Lina Khan was pleased with her progress. Appearing before the Economic Club of New York in July 2023, she outlined her vision as the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission under Joe Biden and its success so far. Never mind the fact that, just days earlier, a federal court had delivered her agency yet another high-profile setback.
The magazine Popular Mechanics, where I once worked, used to have a column called “Saturday Mechanic.” It was a guide to basic car repair for the weekend tinkerer, and its author had decades of experience both in fixing cars and writing about them. Nonetheless, for each column, he would perform the task in question, carefully documenting each step with photographs. It was a lot of work, in other words.
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