The Weekend Notebook

Vance gets the memo; the Post didn't cut enough

• Count me among the multitudes enjoying extra whipped cream and sprinkle toppings on their heaping mounds of schadenfreude over the implosion of the Washington Post. Full disclosure: I occasionally contributed feature pieces in their Sunday ‘Outlook” section about 15 years back (the ‘Outlook’ section was dumped several years ago), and also wrote a few books reviews for the Post at their invitation. (Book reviews were axed completely last week.)

But my invitations to write book reviews always came with a surprising condition: did I know, or have any acquaintance with, the author of the book they were asking me to review? Now, I have met a lot of people, and in more than half the cases when the Post contacted me, even the fact of having met the person disqualified me from the review.

On the surface this is a reasonable question. If you are good friends with an author, editors may rightly suspect you won’t be objective or critical, but will be a shill for your pal. But I’ve never had an editor at any other publication overworry about this. In fact most knowledgeable editors have a decent feel for when people who know each other will be the best-suited reviewer, because small differences can make for a more incisive reviews, and often a savage or lively review, because nobody can blow up seemingly small disagreements more than intellectuals, otherwise known as “the narcissism of small differences.”

It is also strange when you contemplate the wider scene at the Post or other elite legacy media, where the reporters and editors often socialize with the people they cover (the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner is a walking advertisement for media corruption). And people are hired by the legacy media precisely for their conformist (meaning left) opinions and connections with other elites. Which makes all the more odd that in this one domain WaPo editors were suddenly fastidious. (Or maybe they just applied this standard to me, as a known conservative. I wonder if this standard was applied to, say, Walter Isaacson reviewing Bob Woodward’s latest fantasy narrative with his imaginary sources.)

In any case, here’s a measure of how badly askew the Post had become: climate reporting. The headlines the last few days make it seems like an apocalypse has occurred among those “journalists” (really just environmental advocates with bylines) who make their living off of the apocalypse:

How many fewer? This many fewer:

Surveys consistently show Americans are bored by climate change and don’t care about it very much. Post management ignored this. I once looked up some of their climate change journalists. Virtually none had a science or economics background. Most were graduates of Brown with degrees in gender justice or environmental studies or something.

But wait! There’s more! The Post axed their sports section. But they didn’t go far enough. Today:

And how will we ever get by without reporting like this:

It’s like the reporters and editors wanted to kill off the paper. Cue the classic Iowahawk tweet that never ages:

• Looks like J.D. Vance has wised up. Following some equivocal (at best) remarks about Israel and Jews over the last several months, Vice President Vance seems to have figured it out. From the Jerusalem Post:

Pressed on whether Republicans should accept the supporters of far-right activist Nick Fuentes, Vance told the Daily Mail he did not understand the label used for them [‘Groypers’], then pivoted to a broader rejection of hatred based on race or religion.

“I think that there are certain things that we should have the moral clarity to condemn,” he said, before adding, “I think Jew hatred is disgusting.”

Vance’s latest comments also followed earlier remarks he made in a separate interview with UnHerd, where he said antisemitism and other forms of ethnic hatred had no place in the conservative movement and described such hatred as “disgusting.”

I wish Vance had kept going and included direct criticism of Tucker Carlson. Lately, Carlson has been attacking the idea that the West is a product of “Judeao-Christian” thought, arguing that this formulation is of recent—and artificial—origin, probably by those crafty you-know-who’s. Vance has come close to this territory himself in recent months, as I noted in a previous post contrasting how Ronald Reagan would likely have handled the prickly and plainly anti-Israel student at the University of Mississippi. (Reagan would have said, “It’s called the Judaeo-Christian tradition for a reason.” And let’s recall Churchill’s observation from the last volume of his World War II memoirs: ““No two cities have counted more with mankind than Athens and Jerusalem. Their messages in religion, philosophy, and art have been the main guiding lights of modern faith and culture.”

I know of a number of fervent MAGA conservatives and strong Trump supporters who have been dismayed at Vance’s equivocations, and telling me they were unlikely to support Vance in 2028. Perhaps Vance has seen some poll numbers on this, or listened to some wiser heads that he was trying too hard to curry favor with Tucker and the “Groypers.” Let us hope so.

• Finally, enjoy the Super Bowl, but skip the halftime show, until they finally wise up: