Dear Jolters,
Crazy stuff happening today on the World Wide Web. Jim Geraghty picked a good week to vacay. Well, I did get a few things written before systems went kaflooey. So, here’s a truncated Jolt. As I used to tell me folks — it’s not my fault!
The man can write. If you want to see a terribly swift pen loose some fateful lightning, read Kyle Smith’s look Inside the Delightful Suicide of Gawker. Here’s a slice of brilliance:
Gawker saying its mission is to make war with the unkind is like the Queen of England decrying nepotism. Gawker’s very escutcheon was cruelty, obnoxiousness, unkindness. It published stories too nasty and sleazy for tabloids, and wrote them up with sophomoric zeal for vulgarism and profanity. I happily worked at tabloids for many years, but I felt ashamed of myself every time I read Gawker. I can hardly imagine what it must have been like actually to work at such a flatulence farm, a scum ranch, an academy of pus.
EPA boss Scott Pruitt lives up to the billing, and drops the hammer on the leftist madness that turned the federal WOTUS (“Waters of the United States”) rule into an excuse for land grabbing that equated, get this, wet grass with the Mighty Mississippi. NRO has an excellent editorial on Pruitt reining in the out-of-control regulatory agency.
“Any day now, they’ll kill Charlie Gard.” Ian Tuttle writes an unnerving report on a sick little British boy and the courts that rule he is better off dead. Weep for our culture.
That’ll do for NRO. Elsewhere in the ether let me suggest the following:
‐ Is “Throwback Thursday” still a thing? If it is, here is a classic edition of Firing Line, from 1987, with Bill Buckley, of course, and Allan Bloom. The subject: “Higher Education Has Failed Democracy.” Watch it here.
‐Here’s a short and worthwhile video on Jack Phillips, the Colorado cake-baker being tormented by foes of religious freedom.
‐ Is the West “too tired” to defend freedom? Over at Gatestone, Giulio Meotti bemoans the descent. He wisely quotes from James Burnham’s Suicide of the West.
Tomorrow we’ll provide a fuller Jolt once Al Gore fixes the Interweb. Until then, behave.
Best,
Jack Fowler
P.S.: Interested in what’s up in New York politics? Then check out empirereportnewyork.com.