New Republic

Many years ago, Rush Limbaugh started calling the MSM “state-run media.” Sarah Jones indicated on Wednesday that Rush’s description might better fit righty outlets whose agendas dovetail with President Trump’s. Jones also suggested that conservatives are taking the mainstream media for a ride: “It has become an article of faith on the right that non-right media is malicious propaganda, even as…

Just how desperate are the writers at the New Republic? All of a sudden, they’ve moved from saying that Donald Trump is a neo-Nazi president to saying “Donald Trump is Killing Us: Notes From the End of the World As We Know It.”  

Conservatives who’ve rallied behind former Google engineer James Damore traditionally have undermined workers like him, contended The New Republic’s Josephine Livingstone on Wednesday. Livingstone has no use for Damore’s now-famous, if little-read, memo, which allegedly “contained a bunch of ‘red-pill’ nonsense about biological differences between men and women,” but she also claimed that the…

Deliberately polluting the air with high-volume diesel exhaust isn’t just a pastime for nihilists -- it’s an expression of “the key animating ethos in the decision-making process” of the Republican Party, claims Brian Beutler. The activity is known as “rolling coal,” and, as Beutler sees it, three years ago it resembled “many Obama-era protest trends” in that it was “a kind of obnoxious primal…

If Dwight Eisenhower were alive, he might warn the Republican Party about the dangers of its conspiracy-industrial complex, suggested Jeet Heer on Tuesday. As for Democrats, Heer acknowledged that while some of them buy into conspiracy theories, especially juicy ones about President Trump and Russia, they, unlike Republicans, generally deal “responsibly” with “politically convenient, but…

On Friday (appearing in Saturday's print edition), the New York Times published its first column by Bret Stephens, the former Wall Street Journal columnist recently hired as a "conservative" voice. Its theme was that the political "hyperbole" about climate change doesn't match the underlying science — even if one trusts the underlying science. That alone was enough to send journalists into…

Throughout the presidential campaign, especially during primary-and-caucus season, many on the right called Donald Trump a squish, even a liberal. They should be much happier now, contends Jeet Heer, in part because Trump’s position on health care indicates that he’s “succumbing to the central policy of conservative Republicans: cruelty to the needy...To simply wait for the ACA to ‘explode’ would…

According to Leah Finnegan in her Thursday piece for The New Republic, when Steve Bannon cast the mainstream media as full-fledged opponents of the Trump White House, it wasn’t an accurate statement, but it may have been the next best thing: a self-fulfilling prophecy. “What if, rather than reflexively assuming its defensive posture of ‘objectivity,’ the press embraced this opportunity to go full…

In “Me and Bobby McGee,” Kris Kristofferson wrote that “freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.” On Wednesday, Brian Beutler suggested that “freedom” is just another word Republicans use to deprive Americans of health coverage. The GOP, contended Beutler, has “a weird way to define liberty” that involves 14 million people losing coverage “almost immediately.” He added, “Their…

Separatist and secessionist talk has burgeoned in 21st-century America. The day after the 2004 presidential election, sulky liberals began circulating a map that represented pro-Kerry regions of the country as part of the “United States of Canada” and pro-Bush regions as “Jesusland.” Grouchy conservatives weren’t sure they belonged in a nation that elected and re-elected Barack Obama. Now comes…

In a Friday guest post on The New Republic’s website, Steven Beutler surmised that explaining President Donald Trump’s “bizarre, volatile behavior” and concerns “raging among mental health professionals about Trump’s mental state” could be put to rest with his guess that Trump’s been battling a Sexual Transmitted Disease (STD) and specifically syphilis.   

Chuck Schumer is the leader of Senate Democrats and, arguably, the current face of his party. For a narrower role -- congressional Dems’ chief Trump-mocker -- Graham Vyse nominates another senator, Al Franken. Vyse remarked in a Thursday piece that Franken “has largely shunned the spotlight” on Capitol Hill, but now he needs to “harness his talent as a public entertainer and take on Trump as only…

The image of America as “a shining city on a hill” (or a similar phrase) has been a staple of conservative political rhetoric for several decades. In a Tuesday piece for The New Republic, Matthew Pratt Guterl, a professor at Brown University, adapted the metaphor for leftist domestic use: “The nation as a whole seems no longer interested in celebrating any vision of equity, justice, and mutual…

Aaron Hanlon thinks anti-conservative bias at colleges and universities is a molehill that a lot of people try to make into a mountain. To the dismay of Hanlon, a professor of English at Colby College, some of his fellow liberals are among those who, in his opinion, exaggerate the problem and thereby bolster the right’s case. Last Thursday in The New Republic, Hanlon went after New York Times…