Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
Excellent reporting by Olga Khazan in The Atlantic: Why Soviet Refugees Aren’t Buying Sanders’s Socialism. She has interviewed some older-generation Americans of Soviet-Jewish extraction and found them categorically opposed to Sanders and leaning towards Trump. It seems at times that…
Back to Zeynap Tufekci’s insightful op-ed in The New York Times. Trump comes across as a talented populist with a fine ear for his electorate’s whispered aspirations: He uses Twitter as a kind of gut focus-group polling to pick up and amplify…
An interesting story in The New York Times by Zeynep Tufekci, Adventures in the Trump Twittersphere. It was actually the author’s name that caught my eye and made me start reading. The first name is a variation on the female Arabic name Zaynab. The…
…unaware that in 2016, a certain American public intellectual of anti-Communist persuasion would pick him as US president over a New York billionaire! The neoconservative historian Max Boot was born in Moscow in 1969. His last name, whatever its provenance, sounds…
At the last candidates’ debate before the South Carolina Republican primary, Jeb Bush made this remarkable comment: While Donald Trump was building a reality TV show, my brother [George W. Bush] was building a security apparatus to keep us safe.…
Donald Trump’s latest comments on Putin and the press: “If he has killed reporters I think that’s terrible,” Trump replied. “But this isn’t like somebody that’s stood with a gun and he’s taken the blame or he’s admitted that he’s…
As I’ve said, an armed Trumpster Volunteer Force has so far failed to materialize, and historians interviewed by Peter Bergen of CNN agree that the absence of a movement akin to the black shirts, the brown shirts, or the Minute…
Eighty years ago, Sinclair Lewis published It Can’t Happen Here, a nightmare tale of the 1936 presidential election gone wrong. In the book, the Democratic nomination went to a populist demagogue called Buzz Windrip, not to FDR as it actually did,…