Charlottesville was a shameful disaster, and the responses from America’s elites were far from encouraging. Most of them amounted to “Who started it?” That is the response of a child. But then again, “Antifa came better-armed and was more violent overall” is as morally asinine a statement as “Why didn’t Trump clearly denounce the KKK?” ...
Month: October 2017
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Realism of the Real
A century ago, the Kansas-born and Vermont-based writer Dorothy Canfield Fisher spoke of the importance of place, as well as of time, in the formation of a culture and in the shaping of individuals within a culture: Some wise man has said that the date of a man’s life depends not on the calendar, but...
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The Pernicious Myth of “Two Americas”
Earlier this year, Melinda Byerley, CEO of the TimeShareCMO marketing company in San Francisco, wrote a Facebook post in which she offered her fellow Americans some helpful advice for improvement: “One thing middle america [sic] could do,” Byerley suggested, is to realize that no educated person wants to live in a shithole with stupid people....
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Choose Your Side
The first thought that occurred to me upon receiving a review copy of David Garrow’s hefty biography of our former president was, besides its weight (four pounds), how the jacket photograph perfectly expresses what is revealed in 1,084 pages of text. It was taken in 1990 while Obama was at Harvard Law School, three years...
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Needed: Hands and Nerves
Decades before Donald Trump vanquished Hillary Clinton, Pat Buchanan heralded the themes that would put Trump in the White House. Yet despite all that lead time, Trump’s victory was still in one sense premature. In the interval between Buchanan’s presidential bids in the 1990’s and Trump’s victory last November, the Republican Party paid little heed...
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Who’s the Most Hateful of Them All?
No studies indicate, let alone demonstrate, that a significant percentage of ordinary white people “hate” black people, or black white, or indeed that an appreciable number belonging to any race in America today “hates” members of any other race. But there’s no question that a great many people who subscribe to any one of the...
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Making It Close
Following the publication of Wise Blood in 1952, whispered speculation commenced among the novelist’s relatives, who wondered how an innocent Catholic girl from a genteel Southern background could have acquired the worldly experience to write the early scene in which Hazel Motes enters a stall in the men’s room at the local train station, reads...
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The E.U.’s Soft Underbelly
E.U. enthusiasts have recently scored a hat trick of good news. First, there was the election of Rothschild banking protégé Emmanuel Macron to the presidency of France along with a parliamentary majority, followed by the much-improved pre-election poll ratings of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and now the Tories’ loss of their party’s once solid parliamentary...
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You May Say You’re a Dreamer
The unconstitutional Obama executive order known as DACA was rescinded by the Trump DOJ on September 5. Even as the courageous and unassuming A.G. Jeff Sessions made the announcement, thousands of tweets painted him as a hood-donning white-supremacist Russian agent. Nancy Pelosi effectively called for more public displays of Antifa violence across the fruited plain,...
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