No one "loves" Trump. The only one who loves Trump is Trump. Ane even Trump has no choice about his regard for Trump because he's so seriously and deeply mentally ill.
Anyone who could even think the following, let alone saying it in public, is an idiot whose public utterances should be ignored. "Ferguson explained that he had come to see the Capitol Hill riot as merely a combination of general pandemic-era craziness and a possibly deliberate failure of policing, and Trump’s role in it as an expression of a sincere belief that he had won the 2020 election." Now I need to reconsider his historical scholarship.
Agreed. That is nonsense, which doesn't make sense coming from an intelligent, educated, thoughtful person who recognized Trump as a tyrant and scoundrel eariler. I've heard Niall changing his tune over the last 5 years, and I don't get it. I wouldn't think that a contract with CBS would be enough to bribe a public personality like Ferguson. There are more pieces to this puzzle than we're seeing.
Ferguson political/historic endeavors in the beginning were masterpieces of thoughtful analysis, even when it had some fringe aspects. For example, his point that 1600 or so British soldiers conquered 250 million Indians. However, his works have moved much from explaining the values of huge empires. In supporting the current USA regime, he ignores the damage Trump is doing to an international rules based system which Ferguson has always supported.. His past support of the value of top down empires seems at variance with Trump bringing a wrecking ball to stability and global security. Before he goes into brainwashing CBS viewers to ignore the facts,, he sholud go back and reread hs own works.
This triggered a cascade of revised Ferguson thinking for me. I had viewed him (dimly) as a consistent George F. Will type figure even while he was declining rapidly into a cultist, embracing brain-dead fabulist crapola. Populist Hoo Ha. I suppose the Ali factor was at play for me. The U of Austin thing should have clued me in. He was better than this. Mea culpa.
Ferguson is a credulous boob. Thought Trump was going to solve North Korea. He is just another one of those horse’s asses sucking on the bong of contrary takes.
Michael McFaul is a fellow at the Hoover Institution, and he was Ambassador to Russia during the Obama administration. He is a liberal Democrat whose latest book is “Autocrats vs Democrats” (2025). Another Hoover fellow is Stephen Kotkin, another Russia expert, whose politics is centrist, and who was the most recent guest on Shield of the Republic with Eric Edelman and Eliot Cohen here at The Bulwark. From what I’ve seen, the Hoover Institution is roughly 50/50 Republican/Democrat.
Both McFaul and Kotkin have been published in Foreign Affairs, a journal published by the Council on Foreign Relations. They are also both regular contributors to The Atlantic.
Then it’s diversified to become a place for famous people of various political orientations to publish and promote half-assed, unrigorous “work” that no serious journal or conference would consider.
Hoover used to, and as far as I know, still does churn out global warming denial bullshit, articles pushing “intelligent design” as an alternative “scientific” theory to biological evolution by natural selection, and plenty of other stuff that would get you laughed out of a publication with any actual rigor.
It’s as if the Claremont Institute happened to be located on the campus of Claremont McKenna College and people mistakenly thought it was a serious academic institution.
Curious, though, what you think made Ferguson switch. Was it that he saw Republicans re-embrace Trump after Jan 6th? Kind of a "if you can't be 'em, join 'em" thing? Did he just hate Kamala Harris so much that he sided with her opponent? What really happened with Ferguson between 2020 and 2024?
This is a little off-topic, but these days who among us Bulwark readers wouldn't like a small distraction?
My favorite quote in the article is "Ferguson didn’t always toe the party line". I always thought it was "tow" - as in help pull - something (e.g., a party line) rather than "toe". So I looked it up, and learned I was wrong! It is indeed "toe", especially when someone is stepping up to a "line" of some sort (e.g., a starting line in a race).
The fun part came when I visited the wikipedia page and learned that my misconception is an "eggcorn", which I initially read as "egg-cee-oh-emm" rather than "egg-cee-oh-are-enn", due of course to the font I first saw it displayed in.
The punch line here for me was in delving in a bit further to the origins of this term "eggcorn". It turns out that someone "had used the phrase egg corn for acorn"! For more, see the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggcorn
We now return you to our original, and much darker, programming.
A related topic: I sometimes hear people seem to say: "It's a tough road to hoe." I can't be sure, but it does sound like they're pronouncing a "d." How do they think a road is hoed? And why?
But then, many people these days have not had the joyous experience of hoeing a row, so the concept might be foreign to them.
I didn’t know basically anything about Ferguson until I started watching the GoodFellows show from the Hoover Institution on YouTube a couple of years ago. I may have discovered it during Covid lockdown because I think that’s when the show started (something for them to do when personal appearances and talks to live audiences were all shutdown).
The GoodFellows are Niall Ferguson, HR McMaster, and economist John Cochrane, all Hoover Institution fellows, moderated by Bill Whalen, also a Hoover Institution fellow and a member of the Federalist Society.
During the Biden years I enjoyed their criticisms of the “woke” aspects of that administration, but after Trump came back on the scene to run in 2024, all 4 of these guys suddenly became very enthusiastic about Trump and merciless in their criticisms of both Biden and Harris. Even HR McMaster was all in for Trump. Having seen that in depth, I cannot understand why Cathy Young calls McMaster a Trump critic. HR loves Trump and never says a harsh word about him. All through 2025 and now in 2026, McMaster is NEVER critical of Trump, and he fully supports Pete Hegseth as SECDEF. McMaster is 100% in favor of our actions in Venezuela and South America, and he even once said that Pinochet was good for Chile.
Cathy Young needs to revise her opinion of HR, do a little research, and write a followup column. Plus, Cochrane and McMaster also write for The Free Press.
Same history with this show. At first, HR was a big critic of Trump, having just written a book about working for Trump which wasn't quite a tell-all, but was quite critical. Cochrane is intolerable and constantly trying to apologize for Trump and MAGA. Ferguson was originally quite critical of Trump. But, as 2024 approached, the show changed its tune and became quite favorably disposed to Trump. That's when I stopped listening. It's hard to understand what happened with HR and Niall.
Thank you so much, Cathy. I was interested in Bari Weiss when she left the NYT, and subscribed to The Free Press, but was surprised at the amount of right wing talk in the Comments. I figured they liked her because she left the Times. No matter. I still thought she had some good stuff, and I liked Ferguson when he joined. But, I didn't think the FP response to Jan 6 was enough. The final straw was the resignation of Danielle Sassoon. A timid "good job" was buried at the bottom of Nellie Bowles' column. Definitely not enough. I unsubscribed. Later, they did a better piece on Sassoon, but I was done.
It seems like yet another wealth and power addiction.
I followed your same trajectory with The Free Press. The comments are a MAGA sewer. Especially “Kevin Durant?”. He’s a disgusting psychopath and they won’t ban him permanently. They just suspend his account for a few days to a few weeks, then let him back in where his foul mouth starts up right where it left off.
I don't regret my time there. I have been a registered Democrat for 50 years and was curious about why a liberal Jewish gay woman would leave the NYT. I learned a lot about woke from her. I was very confused about woke, didn't understand it. I am not impressed. Sounded good at first, but it just seems like Puritanism. I have nieces that are leftist, and they take the view that everything bad stems from Colonialism. White people are bad people. The US is bad. So, I learned what woke was about, at least what it has become.
Niall Ferguson at Bari Weiss's New and Un-improved CBS. What a surprise. But a logical gig for this pretentious gas bag spouting pseudo intellectual claptrap.
No one "loves" Trump. The only one who loves Trump is Trump. Ane even Trump has no choice about his regard for Trump because he's so seriously and deeply mentally ill.
UATX has Tim Kaine and others of depth and breadth. Ferguson, imploring us to see sanity in brutality and destruction, has lost me lately.
Anyone who could even think the following, let alone saying it in public, is an idiot whose public utterances should be ignored. "Ferguson explained that he had come to see the Capitol Hill riot as merely a combination of general pandemic-era craziness and a possibly deliberate failure of policing, and Trump’s role in it as an expression of a sincere belief that he had won the 2020 election." Now I need to reconsider his historical scholarship.
Agreed. That is nonsense, which doesn't make sense coming from an intelligent, educated, thoughtful person who recognized Trump as a tyrant and scoundrel eariler. I've heard Niall changing his tune over the last 5 years, and I don't get it. I wouldn't think that a contract with CBS would be enough to bribe a public personality like Ferguson. There are more pieces to this puzzle than we're seeing.
Especially since CBS News is rapidly losing its audience with no obvious way forward.
Ferguson political/historic endeavors in the beginning were masterpieces of thoughtful analysis, even when it had some fringe aspects. For example, his point that 1600 or so British soldiers conquered 250 million Indians. However, his works have moved much from explaining the values of huge empires. In supporting the current USA regime, he ignores the damage Trump is doing to an international rules based system which Ferguson has always supported.. His past support of the value of top down empires seems at variance with Trump bringing a wrecking ball to stability and global security. Before he goes into brainwashing CBS viewers to ignore the facts,, he sholud go back and reread hs own works.
This triggered a cascade of revised Ferguson thinking for me. I had viewed him (dimly) as a consistent George F. Will type figure even while he was declining rapidly into a cultist, embracing brain-dead fabulist crapola. Populist Hoo Ha. I suppose the Ali factor was at play for me. The U of Austin thing should have clued me in. He was better than this. Mea culpa.
$$$$$$$$$$$$$
That's how.
Ferguson is trash with a long tongue. I am sure he could use some kneepads. Tons of them indeed. Good boy Ferge, must be fun to be a lapboy.
Ferguson is a credulous boob. Thought Trump was going to solve North Korea. He is just another one of those horse’s asses sucking on the bong of contrary takes.
Deport this wanker
Bragging about being a fellow at the Hoover Institution, like it’s a prestigious academic position is pretty funny.
It’s a place for right wingers to publish and promote half-assed, unrigorous “work” that no serious journal or conference would consider.
Michael McFaul is a fellow at the Hoover Institution, and he was Ambassador to Russia during the Obama administration. He is a liberal Democrat whose latest book is “Autocrats vs Democrats” (2025). Another Hoover fellow is Stephen Kotkin, another Russia expert, whose politics is centrist, and who was the most recent guest on Shield of the Republic with Eric Edelman and Eliot Cohen here at The Bulwark. From what I’ve seen, the Hoover Institution is roughly 50/50 Republican/Democrat.
Both McFaul and Kotkin have been published in Foreign Affairs, a journal published by the Council on Foreign Relations. They are also both regular contributors to The Atlantic.
Then it’s diversified to become a place for famous people of various political orientations to publish and promote half-assed, unrigorous “work” that no serious journal or conference would consider.
Hoover used to, and as far as I know, still does churn out global warming denial bullshit, articles pushing “intelligent design” as an alternative “scientific” theory to biological evolution by natural selection, and plenty of other stuff that would get you laughed out of a publication with any actual rigor.
It’s as if the Claremont Institute happened to be located on the campus of Claremont McKenna College and people mistakenly thought it was a serious academic institution.
Curious, though, what you think made Ferguson switch. Was it that he saw Republicans re-embrace Trump after Jan 6th? Kind of a "if you can't be 'em, join 'em" thing? Did he just hate Kamala Harris so much that he sided with her opponent? What really happened with Ferguson between 2020 and 2024?
This is a little off-topic, but these days who among us Bulwark readers wouldn't like a small distraction?
My favorite quote in the article is "Ferguson didn’t always toe the party line". I always thought it was "tow" - as in help pull - something (e.g., a party line) rather than "toe". So I looked it up, and learned I was wrong! It is indeed "toe", especially when someone is stepping up to a "line" of some sort (e.g., a starting line in a race).
The fun part came when I visited the wikipedia page and learned that my misconception is an "eggcorn", which I initially read as "egg-cee-oh-emm" rather than "egg-cee-oh-are-enn", due of course to the font I first saw it displayed in.
The punch line here for me was in delving in a bit further to the origins of this term "eggcorn". It turns out that someone "had used the phrase egg corn for acorn"! For more, see the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggcorn
We now return you to our original, and much darker, programming.
Interesting side note.
I read that scammers are using “.rn” to replace “m” in a URL like:
rnicrosoft.com
Your eye reads it like
microsoft.com
It's virtually impossible to see the difference!
A related topic: I sometimes hear people seem to say: "It's a tough road to hoe." I can't be sure, but it does sound like they're pronouncing a "d." How do they think a road is hoed? And why?
But then, many people these days have not had the joyous experience of hoeing a row, so the concept might be foreign to them.
I never thought of that one! Love it!!
Another spineless semi-intellectual claims to now love, respect, and admire a person who is the antithesis of an intellectual?
Oh. Wow.
Shocked am I.
I didn’t know basically anything about Ferguson until I started watching the GoodFellows show from the Hoover Institution on YouTube a couple of years ago. I may have discovered it during Covid lockdown because I think that’s when the show started (something for them to do when personal appearances and talks to live audiences were all shutdown).
The GoodFellows are Niall Ferguson, HR McMaster, and economist John Cochrane, all Hoover Institution fellows, moderated by Bill Whalen, also a Hoover Institution fellow and a member of the Federalist Society.
During the Biden years I enjoyed their criticisms of the “woke” aspects of that administration, but after Trump came back on the scene to run in 2024, all 4 of these guys suddenly became very enthusiastic about Trump and merciless in their criticisms of both Biden and Harris. Even HR McMaster was all in for Trump. Having seen that in depth, I cannot understand why Cathy Young calls McMaster a Trump critic. HR loves Trump and never says a harsh word about him. All through 2025 and now in 2026, McMaster is NEVER critical of Trump, and he fully supports Pete Hegseth as SECDEF. McMaster is 100% in favor of our actions in Venezuela and South America, and he even once said that Pinochet was good for Chile.
Cathy Young needs to revise her opinion of HR, do a little research, and write a followup column. Plus, Cochrane and McMaster also write for The Free Press.
Same history with this show. At first, HR was a big critic of Trump, having just written a book about working for Trump which wasn't quite a tell-all, but was quite critical. Cochrane is intolerable and constantly trying to apologize for Trump and MAGA. Ferguson was originally quite critical of Trump. But, as 2024 approached, the show changed its tune and became quite favorably disposed to Trump. That's when I stopped listening. It's hard to understand what happened with HR and Niall.
Thank you so much, Cathy. I was interested in Bari Weiss when she left the NYT, and subscribed to The Free Press, but was surprised at the amount of right wing talk in the Comments. I figured they liked her because she left the Times. No matter. I still thought she had some good stuff, and I liked Ferguson when he joined. But, I didn't think the FP response to Jan 6 was enough. The final straw was the resignation of Danielle Sassoon. A timid "good job" was buried at the bottom of Nellie Bowles' column. Definitely not enough. I unsubscribed. Later, they did a better piece on Sassoon, but I was done.
It seems like yet another wealth and power addiction.
Thank you for following this so well.
The comment section at The Free Press is the Trumpiest place I’ve seen.
I followed your same trajectory with The Free Press. The comments are a MAGA sewer. Especially “Kevin Durant?”. He’s a disgusting psychopath and they won’t ban him permanently. They just suspend his account for a few days to a few weeks, then let him back in where his foul mouth starts up right where it left off.
Oh, yes, I remember him well. Very arrogant.
I don't regret my time there. I have been a registered Democrat for 50 years and was curious about why a liberal Jewish gay woman would leave the NYT. I learned a lot about woke from her. I was very confused about woke, didn't understand it. I am not impressed. Sounded good at first, but it just seems like Puritanism. I have nieces that are leftist, and they take the view that everything bad stems from Colonialism. White people are bad people. The US is bad. So, I learned what woke was about, at least what it has become.
Too bad for Bari. She has a lot of talent.
Niall Ferguson at Bari Weiss's New and Un-improved CBS. What a surprise. But a logical gig for this pretentious gas bag spouting pseudo intellectual claptrap.