2020 watch: Warren Scams Her Volunteers

Though Sen. Liz Warren touts herself as a workers’ champion, some of her supporters are claiming “the lowest tier of her campaign structure doesn’t match the image she projects,” reveals The Daily Beast’s Hanna Trudo. Warren’s campaign offers volunteer fellowships that two applicants for the position say are a “loophole . . . to exploit free labor.” The applicants claim the process is irregular and “deceptive,” misrepresenting “the availability of financial assistance” and requiring “highly restrictive nondisclosure agreements.” Warren’s campaign denies the allegations. Says one accuser: “Their application kind of took advantage of people who were really eager to get experience.” The other applicant says he was just relieved to be able to secure a paid position elsewhere “after not hearing about the housing arrangements days before he was expected to relocate.”

Media critic: Why Did Journos Guard Mueller’s Decline?

At his hearing last week, Robert Mueller appeared feeble and confused. As mainstream reporters were aware (but apparently couldn’t report till now), the Mueller who over saw the collusion probe “was not the Mueller of old,” Fox News’ Howard Kurtz notes. He asks: If mainstream media “knew that Mueller was a hands-off leader with dwindling stamina . . . how did that remain such a closely guarded secret?” Could it be that they didn’t want to “jeopardize their access and the possibility of future leaks”?

Iconoclast: Impeachment Will Last as Long as Trump

Mueller’s testimony last weak was a disappointment for pro-impeachment Democrats, but The Washington Free Beacon’s Matthew Continetti suggests “the real truth is Mueller’s testimony was never going to interrupt preexisting trends.” For years, polls have shown a steady 40 percent of registered voters favoring impeachment and 50 percent opposing. Mueller could’ve changed those numbers only by “offering new evidence incriminating Trump or by saying definitively that Trump obstructed justice.” But “Democrats have called for impeachment since Trump’s inaugural,” and won’t stop now. As long as Trump remains in the White House, his “adversaries will continue to search for the annihilating angel who will deliver them.” Impeachment was never about Russian collusion or any other criminal act: “It is about whether he and the forces he represents are entitled to rule.”

Culture beat: Hitch Would’ve Hated the Culture He Created

In The Spectator, Will Lloyd notes how literate TV viewers bored by the artless punditry on offer on cable news might be tempted to cry out: “Give me a Hitchens!” Yet there’s good reason to think that, were he around today, the acerbic ex-radical-turned-Iraq-War-booster would quickly find himself “slapped, slagged boxed, needled, cuffed and tossed around by sad Twitter partisans and slippery blue-tick hacks for things he said and wrote in the past.” His vitriolic attacks on Islam, for example, would be instantly denounced as “problematic” by today’s intelligentsia, and “he wouldn’t have been ­allowed to lead the [anti-Trump] Resistance,” even if he were so inclined. Yet this is the pundit world Hitch made: “Though they rarely have his flair for expression, most pundits (and these days a pundit is anyone with an Internet connection) share Hitchens’ absolute certainty that they’re right about whatever tidbit they’re chewing on.” In other words, we are “dwelling in a landscape molded to Hitch-like contours and vistas — even if he would have hated living in it.”

From the right: Time To Part Ways With Libertarianism

Neuroscientists working at Silicon Valley to help “addict our children to devices and applications” earn much more than their colleagues curing Alzheimer’s disease, observes JD Vance at First Things. Such perverse disparities, he argues, should impel conservatives to move beyond libertarian paradigms. Ditto for pornography, which conservatives “have allowed . . . under the guise of libertarianism to seep into our youngest minds through the channels of the Internet.” Vance concludes: “I cannot defend commerce when it is used to addict [my son’s] toddler brain to screens and to addict his adolescent brain to pornography. I cannot defend the rights of drug companies to sell poison to his neighbors without any consequences because those people chose to take those drugs.”

— Compiled by Ashley Allen & Sohrab Ahmari