Marty Feldstein was a giant

in the long run, a society that has a bulletproof legal right to speak but that has no meaningful culture of free speech will end up, in practice, without either.

And another one

Interesting followup to the Douthat piece

This places the target of the attack in a dilemma. Allow the falsehoods to issue unchallenged, and you can see your reputation — built up over decades of writing, litigation, and activism — left in tatters in large quadrants of the conservative movement. Respond, and the attackers cheer their ability to provoke you. They thrill to their ability to trouble you enough to trigger an answer. Even worse, each public attack from the people with larger platforms triggers swarms of additional personal attacks often made in steadily darker terms, culminating in zombie elements of the alt-right lurching up to take their shots.

/ sounds like tje neighborhood civic club

It's not just the David French Resistance. With so much up in the air, the Right is turning on itself.

This controversy, like the debate over Tucker Carlson and capitalism earlier this year, has been a full-employment bill for conservative pundits. But it probably seems impossibly opaque from the outside, since superficially Ahmari and French belong to the same faction on the right — both religious conservatives, both strongly anti-abortion, both deeply engaged in battles over religious liberty (where French is a longtime litigator). Indeed it is somewhat opaque even from the inside, prompting conservatives engaging with the dispute to wonder, “What are we debating?”

they should have run this closer to July 4

So I decided shortly after to start a competing project, which I intended to be just one single large volume that emulated Arthur Schlesinger’s Age of Roosevelt—not biography as such but an ensemble political chronicle with Reagan as its main character—but when Morris finally came out with the insane and bizarre Dutch, it was so incompetent and inadequate that my project expanded and became two volumes, which is almost unheard of today for any American author not named “Robert Caro.” It ended up dominating ten years of my life—maybe the best ten years of it, though, because nothing was as fun as that. Had Deaver and Nancy Reagan picked David McCulloch (he was under consideration) instead, I doubt I ever would have taken up the subject.

// Though not a true biography, Hayward's two-volume effort remains the best political biography/chronology of Reagan - just stellar. Wish we could get him to town to lecture.