Clare McHugh

@bethanyshondark 80% of the time.

Crowdsourcing a random question: Is the WiFi on Amtrak reliable?

@McCormickProf Be sane! A great motto for ‘26.

Don't be crazy. The idea that one or more of the attempted assassinations of President Trump was "staged" is insane. If you're tempted to go down that rat hole, please stop. Check yourself. Take a deep breath. Don't be crazy. What our country needs most now--from everybody--is sanity. Be sane.

@gothburz 9:47 is incorrect, 8:47

I am a senior coordinating producer for the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner. I have worked eleven of these. I was backstage at the Washington Hilton when the shots were fired. The first thing I heard was not the gunfire. It was glass. A champagne flute hit the floor of the International Ballroom at approximately 9:47 PM. Then a second. Then the sound that I have since been told was a 12-gauge shotgun, which from inside the ballroom sounded like a heavy door slamming in a parking garage. Then the Secret Service moved. They moved the President, the Vice President, the First Lady through the east corridor in under ninety seconds, which is protocol, which is practiced, which is the one part of the evening that worked exactly as it was designed. Everything else was improvised. I know this because I ordered the wine. 94 tables. Two bottles per table. 188 bottles of a Willamette Valley pinot noir that the Association selected in February after a tasting committee spent three meetings debating between Oregon and Burgundy. Oregon won. The budget was $14,200. I signed the invoice. I can tell you the vintage. I can tell you the distributor. I can tell you the per-bottle cost because I negotiated it down from $89 to $76. What I cannot tell you is how 147 of those bottles left the building during an active shooter evacuation. I can tell you what I saw. A correspondent from a network I will not name picked up two bottles on her way to the east exit. Full bottles. One in each hand. She was wearing heels and she did not spill. A man in a tuxedo tucked one inside his jacket the way you'd shoplift a paperback at an airport bookstore. A woman picked up a bottle, looked at the label, put it back, and took a different one. She checked the vintage. During an evacuation. That's editorial judgment under pressure. The theme of the dinner was "A Free Press for a Free People." The banners were still hanging when the evacuation began. I know because I hung them. Twenty-three banners, navy blue, gold serif lettering, $11,400 for the set. They were still hanging when 2,600 guests were directed to the exits by Secret Service agents, one of whom had just taken a shotgun round in his ballistic vest and walked to the ambulance on his own feet. The agent's vest costs approximately $800. The wine that left the building was worth $11,172 at Association cost. At restaurant markup, roughly $29,000. The guests saved more in wine than the vest that saved the agent. That's priority. The video went viral by 10:15 PM. Not the video of the evacuation. Not the Secret Service response. The wine. Three guests in formalwear grabbing bottles off white tablecloths while being told to move toward the exits, while a man with a shotgun stood in the same motor entrance where John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan 45 years ago. A woman near the service entrance was crying. She said "I just wanna go home." She was not holding wine. She was holding her phone. She was the only person I saw that night who looked afraid rather than inconvenienced. That's the distinction. The rest of the ballroom did not look afraid. They looked interrupted. An active shooter at the WHCD is a logistical problem. The dinner was disrupted. The timeline was off. The after-party at the French Ambassador's residence would need to be rescheduled. These are contingency matters. Contingency matters have solutions. Fear is for people who attend events without security details. I have produced eleven of these dinners. I have managed seating charts that require diplomatic-grade negotiations. I have handled comedians, cabinet secretaries, network anchors, and the editor of a major newspaper who once threatened to leave because his table was behind a column. I have never, in eleven years, seen a guest leave a $76 bottle on the table during an evacuation. I have also never seen a guest check the label first. Both observations are consistent. The bottle is worth taking. The evacuation is worth surviving. The instinct is to do both simultaneously. 188 bottles placed. 41 recovered. 147 unaccounted for. One agent shot. Zero guests injured. Zero bottles broken. A free press for a free people. The press is free. The wine was $76 a bottle. They took it anyway.

The royals are always fascinating to write about. Unraveling the Windsor Knot - by commentary.org/articles/clare…

@netflix No baby Carrie? Ma a redhead?

Laura, Mary, Charles & Caroline. Little House on the Prairie premieres July 9th.

@Doranimated @petersavodnik @jmurtazashvili WaPo opinions team is brilliant!

The world is truly upside down! The Washington Post has published a brilliant article, written by, get this, a professor! To give you some flavor, here are a few choice lines by @jmurtazashvili: 1) "We are living through the first alt-war: a conflict in which the war fought online and the war fought in reality have diverged so completely that they might as well be happening on different planets. It’s not that people lack information, it’s more that they are constructing an entirely different alternate reality — one that confirms what they already believe." 2) "What worries me more than the fake videos are the people who cannot fathom that this war is going well for the United States, for Israel and maybe even for the long-suffering people of Iran. The strategic picture is more favorable than the online narrative suggests." 3) "Two weeks into the war, I watch otherwise reasonable analysts sprint to catastrophe. Former officials, thinktank scholars, credentialed professionals who are supposed to know how to read a conflict. Within days they had written the obituary: quagmire, overreach, disaster." 4) "The liberal internationalist left and the isolationist right — two camps that have agreed on almost nothing for decades — have suddenly found themselves in lockstep, racing to declare the war a failure before it had barely begun. This is the new blob: not the old foreign-policy establishment that the term originally described but a new amalgamation that has arrived at the same conclusion from opposite directions. Together they are the most powerful engine of the alt-war." The truth. In the mainstream media. By a professor. And written well. Four things I thought I'd never see again in my lifetime.

@rkylesmith Brilliant

THE BRIDE! - Jessie Buckley is the centerpiece of the movie, or rather its central headache. Her overacting meets Ms. Gyllenhaal’s over-filmmaking like the Hindenburg crashing into the Titanic.

@JuliaHB1 My life saved by a mammogram! Will never cease to be grateful.

This is utter madness. Mammograms are not enjoyable, it's true. But they save lives. I have 4 friends who found breast cancer because of their breast screening. All caught early enough to be treated. Ladies, you are certifiably INSANE not to go for breast screenings. Book today!

@HadleyFreeman Exactly. And it took NYTimes only a year to run an opinion piece endorsing everything Pamela Paul wrote.

This is abject misogyny and the National Magazine Award has totally discredited itself. No serious journalism award would celebrate a journalist attacking another journalist, and especially not for *telling the truth*

@doctor_rahmeh Looking forward to eating there.

The 'israeli' restaurant Erev in Notting Hill employs 300 jews/'israelis' who participated in the genocide. It is owned by two 'israeli' chefs: Eyal Shani: cooked thousands of meals daily for IOF terrorists. Shahar Segal: former spokesperson for the GHF—the organisation that shot and killed starving Palestinians. Erev should be permanently shut down in Britain.

Latest from me, this on the Kennedys. spectator.com/article/love-s…

Letter to a Catholic Friend tabletmag.com/sections/news/…

@MaryLouMcDonald No one will miss you

I will not be attending St. Patrick’s Day events at the White House this year. The situation on the ground in Gaza and the West Bank remains dire. Israeli attacks on Gaza have not ended. The genocide continues. It is important that Sinn Féin uses its voice to demand that international law is upheld and peace and justice prevail. Ties between the people of Ireland and the United States are very important. As a party, we have deep and enduring bonds with that go back decades. These relationships were critical in the peace process and in the campaign for Irish re-unification. Those relationships will continue.

@moneillsf Self-important and ridiculous

I have taken the decision not to attend this year’s St. Patrick’s Day events at the White House due to the situation in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. I deeply value the historic relationship between Ireland and the United States, and I remain committed to working with U.S. figures to strengthen our peace and grow our economy. However, despite the hopes and promise offered by the ceasefire agreement in Gaza, horrific Israeli military attacks continue. I cannot and will not look away from systematic human rights abuses and flagrant breaches of international law by Israel. It is my responsibility as a political leader to stand firmly on the side of humanity.

Such a wonderful profile of my father, just published. Two Drinks with. . . Dr. I Told You So thefp.com/p/two-drinks-w…

@St_Equanimity @larissaphillip Read “Try to Remember” next—

@Claremch @larissaphillip Wonderful! I just finished reading Mark Pendergrast’s Memory Warp and recognized his name just now.

Third piece in three days by the WSJ, this one mentioning all the greatest hits in this insane timeline. - JKR, Jesse Singal, Jamie Reed, and all of their heroic, informed efforts. - the shame of Science magazine, with “breezy inaccuracy” saying this protocol has been safely used since the 1980s; - and the AAP assigning a group of activists the job of defining its policy, -aand even John Oliver’s shameful comment that blocking puberty was just like “pressing pause on a remote control”. This is so overdue and so satisfying to watch. wsj.com/opinion/free-e…

@St_Equanimity @larissaphillip The very same. He’s been pushing back on damaging fads for forty years!

@Claremch @larissaphillip Question: is this the same Paul McHugh who spoke out against Recovered Memories back in the 90’s?

@ETsiegl Thank you! I will

@Claremch Your father is my hero too. A calm, steady voice in this sea of madness. Please tell him how much I appreciate him. Listening to him speak on the subject has comforted this momma's heart.

Writing about the Mitfords: Unity, Hitler’s upper class hanger-on, shares some traits with todays privileged campus radicals. Dis Unity – Commentary Magazine commentary.org/articles/clare…

@larissaphillip He was amazing throughout, despite abuse thrown at him, and shaky institutional support. He didnt relish being hated but he never doubted that he was standing up for vulnerable young people. A hero!

@Claremch It must have been so frustrating for him to watch the consensus go in the exact opposite direction.