Some of the confusion in thinking about matters of race stems from the ambiguity in the terms that we use. I am going to take a stab at suggesting operational definitions for a couple terms in our discussion of race. Good analytical thinking requires that we do not confuse one behavioral phenomenon with another. ...
Colorado officials last week announced that several counties had moved into the “red level”—the second-highest measurement on its COVID-19 dial—and would be forced to implement new regulations on restaurants, gyms, and other parts of the economy to combat the virus. Then something remarkable happened. Weld County, a county in the northern part of the state...
Participants in Pfizer and Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials can’t stop blabbing. The media is overflowing with testimonials explaining “Why I Volunteered” or “What It Was Like To Participate In The Clinical Trial For Moderna’s COVID-19 Vaccine.” Loudmouth liberal writer Molly Jong-Fast publicly begged for beatification: “Call Me the Joan of Arc of Coronavirus Vaccine...
We seem to hear little this year about the arrival of the Pilgrims in Massachusetts in November 1620. Perhaps the coronavirus is the cause, or maybe the ugly mess and turmoil of our presidential election has overshadowed its remembrance. Or maybe political correctness has claimed another victim. Whatever the case, the 400th anniversary...
Dismissing President Donald Trump’s claim that the 2020 election remains undecided, Joe Biden has begun to name his national security team. Right now, it looks Democratic establishment all the way. Antony Blinken, a longtime foreign policy aide, is Biden’s choice for secretary of state. Jake Sullivan, one of Hillary Clinton’s closest aides, is said to...
While the results of the 2020 election aren’t yet certain, Joe Biden is proceeding with his transition and putting climate change and energy policy at the top of his agenda. Biden assured voters during the debates that he does not support Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal plan, which envisions drastically cutting fossil fuel production to reduce...
The Politics may be the most influential study of political theory and political practice ever written. Aristotle put the book together while investigating different regimes in the Greek world and elsewhere. The philosopher denies the existence of an ideal government applicable to all societies; instead, he looks at various governments that are appropriate for different peoples in...
With the Pentagon’s announcement that U.S. forces in Afghanistan will be cut in half—to 2,500—by inauguration day, after 19 years, it appears the end to America’s longest war may be in sight. The Pentagon also announced a reduction of U.S. troop levels in Iraq to 2,500 by mid-January. In 2003, we invaded and occupied Iraq...
There are public protests against lockdowns in Denmark, Italy, France, and all over Europe. They are growing in numbers and fury. Why not the U.S.? Scott Atlas suggested in passing that Michigan residents “rise up” against new lockdowns in Michigan, and major media collectively fainted in shock. Preposterously, he was forced to clarify that he didn’t mean...
The gray, gloomy days of November have set in, and this year it seems harder than ever to banish them. I was feeling the oppression of these gray days when a note from a friend landed in my inbox. He made some joke in relation to election voter fraud and suddenly I found myself giggling....
Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, recently published an article in Foreign Affairs which encapsulated the agenda of the globalist elite for the incoming Biden administration, should the former vice president be sworn in on Jan. 20. “When he first enters the Oval Office,” Haass writes, “President-elect Joe Biden will be greeted by an inbox...
In 1917, wearied and angered by the slaughter on the Western Front, French soldiers marched toward the battlefield past the general staff bleating like sheep, protesting what they correctly surmised would be another blood bath. Later they would openly mutiny against these attacks, willing to defend the front but unwilling to continue charging across No Man’s Land...
Those suffering from endless COVID shutdowns may find a spark of hope in the words of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. While the governors of Minnesota, Michigan, Oregon, and other states were preparing new restrictions during the pandemic, Alito gave a speech to The Federalist Society, calling such lockdowns “previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty.” I’m now going to say...
It seems a newer virus is now infecting American citizens. It can be deadly, killing off joy, compassion, reason, and objectivity. It renders its victims deaf to argument and blind to facts, creating in some of them so fevered a passion that they wind up in cloud cuckoo land. This virus goes under the name...
Because of Donald Trump, Vice President Joe Biden thundered during the campaign, the U.S. “is more isolated in the world than we’ve ever been … America First has made America alone.” Biden promised to repair relations with America’s allies. And he appears to have gone some distance to do so in the congratulatory phone call...
For hypothetical purposes, let’s say Joe Biden had spent the last four years in the White House and Donald Trump was the challenger. What if Biden was the one being dumped from office, despite evidence that Trump supporters engaged in questionable electioneering? What if election workers in heavily Republican areas had mistreated poll watchers in...
“Truly striking.” “Tremendous.” “Extraordinary.” “Miraculous.” “A great day for science and humanity.” Those are just a few of the hyperbolic responses from government health officials and Big Pharma cheerleaders to preliminary COVID vaccine trial data released by Pfizer and Moderna this past week. If it all sounds too good to be...
Boomer parents are frustrated by their lack of grandchildren. Meanwhile, millennials complain about the lack of romantic partners. Never fear, technology has provided a solution! No longer must millennials date to find the love of their life, marry, and have children. Now they can shop online to find the perfect person to breed with before...
Where’d everybody go? Whatever happened to the Jeffrey Epstein case? Traces of the Durham Report, which was investigating those who manufactured the story of Russian interference in the 2016 election, seem to have also disappeared from view. Or what about Hunter Biden? His laptop full of secrets and the possible corrupt practices of his father,...
Before the November 3 election, a foundational principle of the American republic—checks and balances—was on life support. The same inaccurate pollsters who predicted a blowout win for Biden also predicted the Democrats would take control of the Senate. With one-party Democratic control, America as we know it would disappear. The results of the election didn’t match...
The growing evidence of massive fraud in the 2020 elections should distress and sicken all voters, Democrats and Republicans alike. Kill voters’ trust in the election process, and you’re putting a knife into the heart of our republic. This whole year has shown that America’s elite maintain a culture that blithely ignores the concerns of...
For Republicans, the returns were mixed on Nov. 3. Though he carried burdens unrivaled by a president since Herbert Hoover—a plague that has killed 230,000 Americans in eight months and crashed the economy to depths not seen since the ’30s—Donald J. Trump amassed 72 million votes, the largest total in Republican Party history. And while...
Despite Pat Buchanan’s record as a Trump-supporter sans pareil, his most recent column, on why Trump’s challenges to the Biden victory are both futile and possibly harmful, is profoundly unsettling. It is also based on questionable assumptions. “It seems a certainty that not enough electoral votes could be flipped from Biden to Trump to overturn’s Joe Biden’s...
Many years ago, my family was partway through dinner on a Monday night when there was a knock at the door. Answering it, my father found—to his great surprise—one of the gubernatorial candidates for our state. This candidate was locked in a close primary battle, and, discovering he had some extra time between meetings, decided...
Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman somehow contorted the mixed, and yet unresolved, 2020 election results to simultaneously claim that mandates do not really exist, but that Joe Biden nonetheless has one. It is important to refute this spurious claim because Biden and Kamala Harris will use any excuse they can to push a laundry list of progressive legislation...
At 11:00 on the morning of November 11, 1918, the Great War, which some at the time innocently called “The War to End All Wars,” came to an end. The guns fell silent, the murderous slaughter of soldiers and civilians ceased, and the survivors in the trenches and on the battlefields realized they would live...
We, the 71 million Americans who voted to reelect Donald J. Trump, do not forgive. We, the 71 million Americans who voted to reelect Donald J. Trump, do not forget. We, the 71 million Americans who voted to reelect Donald J. Trump, do not surrender. We, the 71 million Americans who voted...
“In victory, magnanimity… in defeat, defiance.” That counsel about human conflict comes from Winston Churchill. And President Donald Trump, given all he has endured for five years from those piously pleading now for a “time of healing,” cannot be faulted for his defiant resolve to unearth any and all high crimes or misdemeanors committed in the...
In the eyes of much of the world the United States is now reduced to the status of a banana republic. The sordid spectacle of the past week—with the Democratic Party machine, the mainstream media, and social media barons forming a joint criminal enterprise to steal the presidential election—is reminiscent of similar ploys in the...
Joe Biden may have declared victory, but whether he or Donald Trump officially wins the presidency may remain undetermined for weeks, even months, and even then we may see the election brought before the Supreme Court. Who knows? What we do know is that this election has delivered a mess not seen since 2000, when...
Donald Trump may end up losing the 2020 election in the Electoral College, but he won the campaign that ended on Nov. 3. Democrats had been talking of a “sweep,” a “blowout,” a “blue wave” washing the Republicans out of power, capturing the Senate, and bringing in an enlarged Democratic majority in Nancy Pelosi’s House....
On the last days of the 2020 campaign, President Donald Trump was holding four and five rallies a day in battleground states, drawing thousands upon thousands of loyalists to every one. Waiting for hours, sometimes in the cold, to cheer their champion on, these rallygoers love Trump as few presidents have been loved. This writer...
There are numerous media savants and would-be intellectuals who suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome, and the renowned linguist and leftist political activist Noam Chomsky would seem to have one of the worst cases. Chomsky considers Trump to be the “worst criminal in human history” because he will have the United States completing its formal withdrawal...
Facebook has removed its mask and is playing censor-in-chief on the eve of the 2020 election. On Monday morning, we found that none of the scheduled weekend posts of our alternative web publication, Intellectual Takeout, were released to the public. When attempting to post new material, Facebook informed us that restrictions are now in place...
The Enchantment of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity; by Eugene McCarraher; Belknap Press; 816 pp., $39.95 When the German thinker Max Weber visited the United States in 1904, he was intrigued by the marked tendency of Americans to think about economic activity against a backdrop of religious morality. He tells of an encounter with a salesman of...
Humankind; by Rutger Bregman; Little, Brown, and Co.; 480 pp., $30.00 Rutger Bregman’s latest book is about what he calls a “radical idea” that has “long been known to make rulers nervous” and whose apostles will weather “a storm of ridicule.” When we learn that Bregman’s thinking is in radical opposition to Thucydides, Augustine, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Burke,...
Promised Land: How the Rise of the Middle Class Transformed America , 1929-1968, by David Stebenne (Scribner; 336 pp., $28.00). Dear David: I used the title of Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly as my grading rubric for your submission on the 20th-century American middle class. Your work recaps the period’s economic, social, cultural, and...
The Coming of Neo-Feudalism; by Joel Kotkin; Encounter Books; 244 pp., $28.99 In the summer of 2003 my bride, our three little kids, and I headed to Chicago for that all-important summer job after my second year of law school. We acquired a “summer lease” for an apartment on North Orchard Street in the highly sought-after neighborhood of...
In reading through the works of popular historian Victor Davis Hanson, I was reminded of a parody in an episode of The Simpsons. Bart and Homer watch a clip of Rainier Wolfcastle—the show’s Arnold Schwarzenegger-esque action hero—fly a UNICEF cargo plane full of pennies to impoverished children. A villainous cadre calling themselves the “CommieNazis” chase Wolfcastle in their...
Is the current left Marxist? In a provocative commentary, Bill Lind explores this genealogical question, and, unless I’m mistaken, the left and much of its media opposition would second his conclusions. Since Antifa describes itself as Marxist, when it’s not calling itself anarchist, and since leading figures of the Democratic Party, like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria...
The Politics may be the most influential study of political theory and political practice ever written. Aristotle put the book together while investigating different regimes in the Greek world and elsewhere. The philosopher denies the existence of an ideal government applicable to all societies; instead, he looks at various governments that are appropriate for different peoples in...
Can a culture celebrate those who want to destroy it and still stand? We are about to find out in this fateful November. Until recently, I thought the word “demonic” no more than a figure of speech. It carried a chill dislodged from religious myth and absorbed into literary aesthetics. As an accessory to prose, I...
The historical ignorance of The New York Times’ 1619 Project is difficult to accept. Is the newspaper truly that ignorant or is it disinformation in a propaganda campaign to destroy our country? What I know for certain is most colleges no longer require the U.S. History and Western Civilization courses once considered essential, and that leftist professors...
In one of the most important acts of his Presidency, on Sept. 26, 2020, Donald J. Trump announced his pick to fill the United States Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Amy Coney Barrett. The Supreme Court has recently been divided 4-4 in terms of judicial philosophy, with Justices Ginsburg, Stephen...
A shadow haunts the world. Over the last 75 years it has spread its errors over everything: art, education, music, architecture, manners, morals, and thought itself. What is this colossal Harpy? Cultural Marxism. Commonly known as political correctness or multiculturalism, cultural Marxism is an ideology that serves as a religion among America’s elites. You cannot...
If you ask historically literate lovers of classical music to identify the leading conductors from the 20th century’s early decades, they will supply a profusion of names: Arturo Toscanini, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Willem Mengelberg, Otto Klemperer, Artur Nikisch, Leopold Stokowski, Fritz Busch, Erich Kleiber, Bruno Walter, Felix Weingartner, Serge Koussevitzky, Pierre Monteux, and Sir Thomas Beecham, for...
One sometimes feels obliged to contextualize a disagreement, because the point in dispute has still not been clearly stated. I have written critically more than once about the works of C. Bradley Thompson, first about his study of neoconservatism, Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea (2010), and more recently, about a book he completed on America’s Founders, America’s Revolutionary...
I’m Thinking of Ending Things Directed by Charlie Kaufman ◆ Written by Charlie Kaufman (screenplay) and Iain Reid (book) ◆ Produced by Likely Story and Projective Testing Service ◆ Distributed by Netflix The Ipcress File (1965) Directed by Sidney J. Furie ◆ Written by W.H. Canaway and James Doran (screenplay), and Len Deighton (book) ◆...
I was rather taken aback by Fr. Brian W. Harrison’s letter in the September issue of Chronicles (Polemics & Exchanges: “Evil That Good May Come”). He could not have been more mistaken. Fr. Harrison asserts that the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan was unnecessary because the Japanese were effectively defeated and were ready to surrender, given...
If you thought “woke” hysteria killed comedy, fear no longer: Hollywood has come to the rescue. The Academy—a misnomer if there ever was one—has decreed that a movie can no longer be eligible for an award unless it meets certain criteria. All “Best Picture” nominees must include storylines about underrepresented groups, and a significant percentage of...