Friday roundup

What a way to re-enter the broadcast journalism fray: Megyn Kelly has the exclusive interview with the person, who worked for ABC, moved on to CBS and then got fired for being suspected of handing to Project Veritas Amy Robach's hot-mic moment about ABC squelching the goods on Epstein, Clinton et al three years ago.

Matt Walsh at Daily Wire distills the story to stress its significance:

To review: A woman at ABC discovered that the network was protecting a serial rapist and sex trafficker. She blew the whistle on the scandal and left the company. ABC then tracked the woman down and enlisted CBS to fire her on its behalf. Both of these networks, who colluded to punish a whistleblower, have spent the last many months and years breathlessly extolling the virtues of whistleblowing and the evils of collusion.

Why did the US become the world's first automotive giant in the 20th century, while the auto industries in other countries lagged behind for decades? Because the US didn't saddle itself with tariffs like they did.  

Hal Brands of the American Enterprise Institute says that the best way for NATO to reduce the risk of nuclear confrontation over the Baltic states is to bolster its conventional forces there.

Katy Faust, founder and director of the children's rights organization Them Before Us, writing at The Federalist about how Christian doctrine concerning marriage and family is essential to children having a sense of real belonging as they grow up:

As a pastor’s wife and a children’s rights activist, I have a great deal of patience for nonbelievers and my LGBT friends who have questions about my support for traditional marriage. I have clocked numerous hours conversing at the coffee shop in an effort to help them understand how I can love them wholeheartedly and reject gay marriage. If this is your first time to the child’s rights party, let me throw you a bone — it’s because the scriptural and historical purpose of marriage is child-centric, and gay kids need their moms and dads, too.

But Christian leaders who get sex and marriage wrong? Get off my lawn. Whether approaching the issue from a natural law perspective where male and female complementarity features prominently, or considering the most widely ratified treaty in human history outlines a child’s right to be known and loved by their mother and father, or through the lens of scripture where God joins together man and woman in life-long union because he is seeking “godly offspring” (Malachi 2), Christian leaders have no excuse for getting marriage wrong.

Ammo Grrrl (the nom de plume of a blogger who guest posts weekly at Power Line) has an interesting and amusingly written account of being stung in her Arizona kitchen by a scorpion while reaching for a roll of paper towels.

Erick Erickson writes a discomfortingly raw post at The Resurgent which starts with a bit of rambling, the way my "Back From Circumstantially Imposed Hiatus" post here at LITD yesterday did. He talks about his career and money issues, having to cancel the conference he was organizing, bailing on seminary, and his wife's ongoing cancer. It obviously took a level of courage and honesty we don't see much from pundits of any stripe these days:

See, here’s what I’m realizing — I don’t have all the answers and I’m not sure I have a lot of confidence in the answers and abilities I do have these days, but I know I don’t want to be entangled to a lot of other interests that might restrict me from being able to say what I think when I think I get to the answer. I get all sorts of people around me trying to sell me stuff and make money off me and I don’t know that I’m the guy to make myself rich, let alone other people. I just want to write and talk into a microphone and make sure other people know they aren’t alone.

I just don’t have all the answers people seem to think I do and we’re at peak paranoia where any deviation from tribal orthodoxy is met with suspicion and presumption that there must be something more there. The reality is I hate all the tribes these days. They are all run by a bunch of dimwits who just want power or to be adjacent to power. They’ve got no ideas, few principles left, and rely on a bunch of bullies on social media to keep everyone else in line. To hell with that. I don’t have enough time in the day to be that devoid of independent thought and have no desire to have people I disagree with shut up, censored, taken off TV, or hounded off Twitter by a mob.

As an aside, it is really just garbage to have a bunch of friends hate each other online these days so much that you’d prefer to have nothing to do with any of them lest you get dragged into middle school drama. If I wasn’t isolated enough before, this makes me kind of glad to be in Middle Georgia away from pretty much everyone I know outside of my immediate family.

They're eating their own in the communication studies field over identity politics.