Blog - Hugh Hewitt

Tuesday, December 23, 2025

This is the week of Christmas – usually a very slow news week, but my stack of stuff is much deeper than usual after only a day.  Sadly most of it is negative news.  I wanted to write good, uplifting stuff this week.  Part of the reason the stack is so big is I am purposefully ignoring stuff to try and find that positive story.  Then I ran across this local headline, “East TN charities seek end-of-year contributions amid national drop in donations,” followed the link trail a little bit and discovered this, “Most US adults aren’t making year-end charitable contributions, new AP-NORC poll finds.”  Things are not quite as bleak as those headlines indicate, but a less charitable Christmas was not something I can set aside for later.. . .

Monday, December 22, 2025

On Saturday the NYTimes carried a piece headlined, “These Young Adults Make Good Money. But Life, They Say, Is Unaffordable.”  Before I read a word I thought, “New York, DUH, it is unaffordable.”  And interestingly this story of anecdotes does not mention the location of its interviewees at all.  Very blue places, New York and Los Angeles among them, are in fact unaffordable.  In some ways the piece is about perception and location more than actually being about affordability.  It is also quite clearly a Trump hit piece.  But deep within its bowels there was gold.. . .

Sunday, December 21, 2025

It’s the Fourth Sunday of Advent, “Love” Sunday, Christmas Sunday.  There is a standard sermon for this occasion I have heard countless time in my life – that Christmas is about Jesus, not presents – that Christmas is a spiritual event, not a temporal one.  It’s a prescription against materialism.  So common is this sermon that it defined my knee-jerk reaction to this piece about the return of Christmas time tourism to Nazareth in Israel after the cease fire.  “How crass,” I thought, “that’s a very holy place – it should be about something more uplifting at Christmas than mere commerce.”  But then, as I sat here preparing to roll out the standard Christmas message, I thought again.. . .

Saturday, December 20, 2025

I grew up on comic books written by WWII veterans.  Many of those comics, especially Captain America, used Nazi sleeper cells as enemies.  The premise was simple, the Third Reich had planted cells of agents in the Allied world that then activated decades later and using the wonderous and futuristic tech of Nazi Germany threatened the world.  The tech made the whole thing seem preposterous and childish, but someone was reading those comics with a strategic eye and asking themselves if the war might have gone differently if the Axis had in fact infiltrated to the extent those comics made it appear.  The antisemitism that is so obviously on the rise and growing increasingly violent has been, in fact, exported to the western world, and we have welcomed it.. . .

Friday, December 19, 2025

I worked in the People’s Republic of China in the late 1980’s, just as they were attempting to liberalize their economy.  It seemed a time of great promise.  The Soviet Union was falling and China seemed determined to avoid the same fate and so sought a soft landing away from communism.  It seemed to be working for a while.  Sure the government remained quite centralized, but the economy was liberalizing rapidly.  But it was a shell game, three-card monte, a trick.  A way to worm their way towards major power status without direct conflict.  President Trump understands this and is fighting back.  Democrats, unfortunately, don’t get it just yet.  And so China is trying the same game in Trumpian terms. . . .

Thursday, December 18, 2025

Last night’s presidential address was part of the ongoing meme wars.  Democrats and their willing allies in media are trying desperately to make this administration look bad.  They report the bad, ignore the good and spin whatever they can.  Every administration, every one, does good and bad.  What makes an administration good or bad in the end is the balance between the two and, perhaps more importantly, the stories told about that administration. Deep reads into history (if anybody does that anymore?) will reveal administrations thought awful contemporaneously, but proven quite good by history – and vice versa.  But contemporaneous accounts are what move elections and so the battle rages on.. . .

Wednesday, December 17, 2025

Fox recently looked at the mounting evidence of grade inflation.  Covid has accelerated it and “raised awareness” (can we officially call that turn of phrase a cliché yet?) about it, but the problem existed well before.  The video piece in the link presents an educator that talks about the fact that there are a lot of good students still coming out of school, but I wonder.  You see, never talked about is the fact that grade inflation demotivates students actually capable of excellence.. . .

Tuesday, December 16, 2025

Yesterday saw the politicization of what is the most tragic small story I have encountered in a long time.  Families often carry a lot of tragedy, but rarely does that tragedy extend all the way to parricide.  Parricide accounts for only about two percent of all homicides and homicide, while way too common, is still something most people live their entire lives without encountering on a personal level.  Parricide involving a public figure is virtually unheard of – but there it was yesterday.  What kind of world do we live in that it turned, almost immediately, into a political spitball fight?. . .

Monday, December 15, 2025

I am a “boomer” – born post-war but with memories fresh, and just as the Civil Rights Movement was beginning to take shape.  I was born to a world that was determined to eliminate prejudice.  Having witnessed the atrocities of Hitler’s Germany, the Civil Rights Movement arose and gained ground precisely to make sure nothing of the sort could happen ever again. Race, creed, religion, or gender were not a basis for determining if person was good or bad.  We were told this over and over and over again.  You did not bear animus for groups of people, however they were grouped; you reserved your animus for those that “earned” it – individually.  Sure, in “lesser” parts of the world such prejudice still existed, but for us in the west, we were determined to make such prejudice disappear.  We have failed.. . .

Sunday, December 14, 2025

Lesson 1: Be careful with your bragging.  First the host’s beloved, as he tells us constantly, Ohio State loses the Big Ten football championship (something he barely mentioned this past week) to former Big Ten doormat Indiana University (a name never mentioned in the week past) and now Indiana’s quarterback, Fernando Mendoza, wins the Heisman Trophy over Ohio State’s Julian Sayin.  Bragging just makes the eventual humiliation that much more humiliating.  Sadly, now we must turn our attention to far more consequential, and unfortunately deadly, news and lessons.. . .