First, before I get to Mona Charen, let me urge you to read David French’s Sunday newsletter from yesterday if you have not already done so: “Evangelicals Have Abandoned the Character Test. The Competence Test Is Next.” I was going to add some of my own sterling commentary on this truly excellent article but decided that David French doesn’t need any help from me. I would, however (ahem), recommend an article I wrote earlier about Dennis Prager and this whole we-don’t-need-good-character-in-our-leaders blah-de-blah that he’s spouted throughout this whole sorry mess: “More Nonsensical Reasons to Support Trump from Dennis Prager.” I touch on this whole character issue in that post.
I said in my last post that I was going to move on to writing about The Dispatch, the new news outlet that was launched in January under the auspices of Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayes, and I’m going to do so soon, but I realized that I just couldn’t leave the subject of The Bulwark until I’d put in a plug for one more of their writers, Mona Charen. It’s amazing to me when I realize that before the spring/summer of 2016 I didn’t know she, or any of the other great conservatives I now read obsessively, even existed. What on earth did I do with my time? Read murder mysteries, I guess. Anyway, she was for a number of years a writer at National Review, but she’s now joined TB. Maybe she was as disgusted as I’ve been that NR was publishing utter nonsense from people such as Victor Davis Hanson, Conrad Black, and Dennis Prager. For awhile I kept answering NR‘s fundraising e-mails with the words “stop publishing Conrad Black!” They’ve finally stopped contacting me. (Black is a Trumpist of the first order, whose recent book Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other is a masterpiece of toadying. Although I guess the title is correct, in a sense). There are still good solid writers at NR, to be sure, but there’s been a bit of a Trumpier tone over the past year or so. I don’t check in with them very often these days.