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.
Anyway, back to Mona. (Hope it’s okay to call her that.) I’m not sure what material of hers I ran into first, but at some point I started listening to her podcast on NR with Jay Nordlinger (another great conservative voice) called “Need to Know,” which was basically two old friends opining about the news of the day. They were great, but then one day Mona said that it would be her last episode as she was moving over to The Bulwark. She now has a podcast with them, Beg to Differ, and writes periodic columns. The podcast has regular participants and some special guests. There’s a real effort to get a variety of viewpoints from, as Mona says in her introduction, “center left to center right.” It’s almost always a fascinating round table of ideas.
So what would be a good summing up of Mona Charen’s political stance these days? I think if you knew nothing else about her you’d get a sense of what she’s made of if I told you that she was booed off the stage at CPAC a couple of years ago for saying the following very, very true statement:
I am disappointed in people on our side for being hypocrites about sexual harassers and abusers of women, who are in our party, who are sitting in the White House, who brag about their extramarital affairs, who brag about mistreating women—and because he happens to have an ‘R’ after his name we look the other way … This is a party that endorsed Roy Moore for the Senate in the state of Alabama even though he was a credibly accused child molester. You cannot claim that you stand for women and put up with that …
Ain’t it great? I’m going to post a video of this episode below. Be sure to take note of how the boos and hisses start as soon as people start realizing that she’s daring to criticize Donald Trump. As I say, this one example sums her up. And trying to cram in everything she’s done in her public career would make this post way too long. I will just mention that she worked in the Reagan White House and has written several excellent books, with her most recent being Sex Matters: How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love, and Common Sense. The title tells you where she’s going; I have read the whole thing and can’t recommend it enough.
Here’s the promised video. Head over to The Bulwark and read her stuff, and then go onto your favored podcast platform and subscribe to her show.