The Hugh Hewitt Show

Matt Continetti joined Hugh to review the news of the week and the Democrats’ Jewish problem

How do you explain where things are today? Said Michael Barone recently , “Even as California-based tech companies have reached market capitalization of $1 trillion, its state and local governments have sunk to levels of incompetence associated with underdeveloped countries.” There is an effectiveness gap and it should trouble us. Something is deeply fractured in our politics when people can get elected without competence.

Jill Biden's contention, that she worried her husband was having a stroke during the 2024 debate is one of the most obvious lies n political history. Lies so audacious are not born of simple attempts to “change the narrative,” cover up wrongdoing or some other self-serving reason. Such obvious falsehoods, spoken with such apparent sincerity, are a sign of self-delusion. Jill Biden was not lying to us, she was lying to herself. That makes it difficult to know how to react.

Best as I can tell, everybody has heard about the near disaster related to a tank in Garden Grove, CA. The emergency is subsided, the evacuation over . The predicted explosion or major release never occurred. Yes a lot of people were inconvenienced in the related evacuation, but that is the only consequence. Litigation now flies around like a swarm of locusts and the company owning the tank will have a major clean-up on their hands. Meanwhile, at roughly the same time, a tank in a Longview, WA paper plant mill imploded, killing 9 people and producing a fish kill in the water bodies that feed directly into the Columbia River that was affected for a period of time. But only news junkies know about it.

Back in 2020, when they endorsed Joe Biden for president, I wrote an epitaph for the magazine Scientific American . Sure, it is still being published, but it is now just another Trump bashing bit of media and no longer worth the effort necessary to pick it up. I haven't looked back, but just to prove my point they published an op-ed last Friday concerning the two tank incidents I looked at yesterday . (A friend sent it to me, I did not go looking. It may or may not be behind a paywall for you. I was able to read it for a couple of days before the paywall notice started to appear.) It is not science – it is anti-Trump drivel.

After the two major, one of them deadly, chemical tank incidents of last week, the drumbeats continue to sound for increased regulation. On Monday I covered the cultural differences between the two regions of the country. On Tuesday I covered how one cry related to regulation was, at best, specious. I have resisted to date speculating on the cause of these incidents. There is simply not enough information publicly available for such comments to be other than pure speculation – at least on a technical level. But given these drumbeats there is one aspect of causation that I think should be discussed.

Numbers are not supposed to lie. Lord Kelvin once said , “When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarely, in your thoughts advanced to the stage of science.” But then Lord Kelvin never met a modern day Democrat.

Sam Brownback joined Hugh to talk about his new book “China’s War on Faith”

Former Vice President Mike Pence joined Hugh to talk about his new book “What Conservatives Believe”

I have always considered politics a mirror of our culture. Right now, if we are completely honest, the image is not pretty. The image is one primarily of distaste, discord and hatred. Our politics seeks not to build, but to oppose. We don't hear much about lofty goals anymore – we only hear about “Candidate X must be stopped.” Sure Candidate X may need to be stopped because he or she is perceived to be opposed to some lofty goal, but somehow the lofty goal gets rapidly lost in the conversation, leaving only opposition. And with the lofty goal lost that opposition quickly turns to something much worse.