Matt Yglesias, formerly of Vox, says that “Nature is healing” because our critic-at-large, Kyle Smith, wrote an entertainingly scathing review of Jill Biden’s dissertation. Fair enough. I might even have chuckled — I like a little bit of good-natured ribbing — but he didn’t stop there.
Yglesias goes on: “I was wondering whether mainstream conservatives [sic] elites still believe in the Paul Ryan welfare state rollback agenda or if they’re prepared to abandon it forever, but the closest thing to a policy article on National Review is a Michael Brendan Dougherty piece about how snow days are good.”
Snow days are good, and you should read that piece, but I wonder whether it was laziness or deceptiveness that resulted in Yglesias’s error. At tweet time, there were articles on the homepage from Robert VerBruggen on the COVID relief bill, Alexandra DeSanctis on Representative Tulsi Gabbard’s pain-capable abortion bill, and an interview with the outgoing Education secretary courtesy of Frederick Hess. Other policy-oriented hits from yesterday include this on the Export-Import Bank, Ramesh Ponnuru on Trump’s economic record, and a Jim Geraghty post about Sweden’s approach to COVID.
Of course, I’m not sure why I feel so defensive. National Review doesn’t claim to be a p0licy-only journal, and we publish a lot of great stuff that’s not meant to scream “WONK!” in the reader’s face the way that everything at Yglesias’s old stomping grounds is. In any case, I’m sure we’ll swoop in to defend Yglesias when the Jacobins at Vox come for him again, which they will. Such is the burden of being a serious publication with a meaningful allegiance to its principles.