PicoBlog

In the summer of 2015,dozens of visitors descended on Fort Jefferson, a former military prison in the Florida Keys’ Dry Tortugas National Park wearing green shirts emblazoned with the words “Free Dr. Mudd.” The man they sought to “free,” Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, had not been there for 150 years and had been allowed to leave after a four-year stint in 1869 thanks to a pardon from President Andrew Johnson. Mudd was previously convicted by a nine-man military tribunal, convened by Johnson, of playing a role in the conspiracy to kill Abraham Lincoln, whose broken leg the Maryland doctor/farmer set when Booth and his companion David Herold arrived at Mudd’s house at 4 a.

If you saw yesterday’s post on the poem, “Gratitude,” you know that my husband is not well at the moment. We will have a low-key thanksgiving at our house tomorrow, probably eating our dinner on Friday, and we may spend a quiet day watching a couple of great films. For stories of gratitude, you can’t beat “The Inn of the Sixth Happiness,” a must-watch film we have recommended before. Another is today’s suggestion, “The Long Gray Line,” which was our first Film of the Week at Word & Song, when we had only a few subscribers.

It’s becoming more and more self-evident that the Nineties matter. John Ganz’s important new book, When the Clock Broke, focuses on how, in the early 1990’s, the seemingly crackpot ideas of what at the time appeared to be con men like David Duke and Pat Buchanan, infiltrated what remained Ronald Reagan’s optimistic, globalist Republican party. The seeds of Trumpian reactionary populism, Ganz believes, were sown by characters like Duke, Buchanan and the libertarian economist Murray Rothbard who confessed, in a 1991 speech, to wanting to break the clock of social democracy.

Taken Away . . . David Bowie missed John Lennon. As with millions of others, he felt the emptiness brought on by Lennon’s death, saying, “A whole piece of my life seemed to have been taken away; a whole reason for being a singer and a songwriter seemed to be removed from me.” A friend and collaborator was gone. In September ’75, Bowie secured his first U.S. number one single, “Fame,” which he co-wrote with Lennon and guitarist Carlos Alomar.

It’s been a long, long time coming, but the day has finally arrived: My memoir, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative is complete, and it’s available for preorder. Some sharp-eyed readers have noticed that it’s been listed on book sites for a while, but I wanted to wait until now to announce it officially. I’ve spent years of my life contemplating this project and many more years attempting to write it.

Part of what made Students for Fair Admissions’ case before the Supreme Court so compelling was the data. It was very hard to look at the numbers and not conclude that discrimination was involved in Harvard and the University of North Carolina’s admissions practices. This week on The Glenn Show, John and I are joined by the man behind that data, Duke economist Peter Arcidiacono. I feel like we’ve been talking about this case for a long time, but Peter signed onto the project back in 2015.

You might not know his name, but John Nelson Darby (1800-1882) might be one of the most influential protestant theologians – and one of the most politically consequential. Born into a family with elite connections on both sides of the Irish Sea, Darby attended Westminster School and then Trinity College Dublin, where he graduated in 1819 with a gold medal in classics. Feeling a call into Christian ministry, he abandoned his preparation as a lawyer and set up as a curate in a remote district in county Wicklow.

John Palfrey is the President of the MacArthur Foundation, a former Harvard Law School Professor and Head of School at the legendary Phillips Academy Andover high school. A celebrated educator, lifelong student of our national civic life, and special expert in digital subjects such as copyright, Palfrey shares his perspective on the crisis in American politics, in higher education, and in secondary education. He also confides in our audience with respect to his (objectively incorrect) first choice in pizza slice.

I’ve been corresponding with lawyers from Koch Industries and the Stand Together Chamber of Commerce in recent weeks, as they answer my requests for IRS tax filings from organizations controlled by Charles Koch. Beyond the dizzying complexity of how these 50+ organizations and companies are structured, there’s one tidbit in particular that caught my eye: John Stossel is one of Charles Koch’s top contractors. Each year since 2017, John Stossel’s company, JFS Productions, received a half million dollars to do media contract work for the Charles Koch Institute.