And it came to pass that fear did grip all of the Swamp, from Foggy Bottom to DuPont Circle; and it did spread unto all of the region beyond the Potomac. For behold, Steve Bannon had come. Or, if we prefer not to use the familiar “Steve,” Stephen K. Bannon. The K must not be...
Author: Aaron D. Wolf (Aaron D. Wolf)
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Wrestling With God
In the prison yard, we’re told, men who sexually abuse children are given special attention, and not the favorable kind. In Euless, Texas, at a public school that bears the unlikely name Trinity, sexual abuse is a celebrated part of the program. In late February, every major newspaper carried the story of Mack Beggs, a...
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Don’t Just Wound It: Kill It
The Department of Education must be destroyed. This holdover from the Carter administration costs us $80 billion per year, for which we have received in return a centralized educational bureaucracy beholden to wildly leftist teachers’ unions and the proliferation of ignorance. Cut this monstrous budget in half, and federal spending on education is still not...
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Refugees in Trump’s “Theocracy”
President Trump’s executive order restricting travel and refugees from seven Islamic countries evoked utter hysteria from the mainstream media, Democrats, some Republicans, and even some church leaders. That it was handed down so abruptly, providing Week One photo and protest ops for leftist demonstrators shouting “f–k Trump,” “not my president,” and “the ban is racist,”...
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Dope Fiends of the West
Are addictions real? We talk as if they are. Many women say they are addicted to chocolate. Actor David Duchovny has been diagnosed with having a sex addiction. In the early 90’s, when crack was all the rage, one Christian pop singer encouraged young people to get off drugs and get “Addicted to Jesus.” What...
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A Victim Must Be Found
Gilbert & Sullivan’s enduring operetta The Mikado is funny because it skewers Victorian British society by allowing us to laugh at the absurdities of the fictive Japanese town of Titipu, where flirting is a capital offense, according to the autocratic rule of the emperor (Mikado). Nanki-Poo loves Yum-Yum, who is pledged to Lord High Executioner...
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Rise of the Alt-Left: After This, the Deluge
Images of those traumatized by the election of Donald Trump are indelible. I mean specifically the sight of empaneled experts, red-eyed, choking, and stuttering as they said things like “CNN is now prepared to call the state of Wisconsin for Donald Trump.” Or of rainbow mobs of sign-wavers in urban centers declaring (absurdly and solipsistically)...
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Team Donkey in Rebuild Mode
In the immediate aftermath of their drubbing on November 8, and following Hillary Clinton’s career-ending injury, the Democrats faced the question every rebuilding team faces: Who is the quarterback of the future? DNC interim chairperson Donna Brazile is not the answer. She’s still undergoing the concussion protocol, after a helmet-to-helmet collision with WikiLeaks in October,...
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Trump’s SCOTUS Nominee: Don’t Trust, Just Verify
As I wrote on the Day After the Election, it is incumbent upon America’s Deplorables not to sit idly by, content with a mere victory in a presidential contest, as if suddenly all of our problems are solved. The rabid mainstream media, still licking its wounds, is working 24/7 to undermine any agenda item that...
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Christmas Fruitcakes
Angela Merkel isn’t as nutty as she sounds, or so she would have you to believe. She simply wants to have her Obst kuchen (“fruitcake”) and eat it too. The Obst kuchen, in this case, is liberalism, whereby people from every tribe under heaven—including the Islamic ones—live happily together in the Motherland, and all ethnic,...
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A P.C. Little Christmas
Christmas is a time of wonder, when the best and the worst of our sputtering culture is on display. For every magnificent four-part rendition of Stille Nacht, we seem destined to endure umpteen episodes of godless grinches screaming about tolerance and diversity in order to keep authentic Christmas symbols out of the public square during...
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Abdul Artan: Muslim Snowflake
Another “lone wolf” Muslim has committed an act of terrorism on an American campus, ramming a crowd with a vehicle before slashing fellow-students with a butcher knife and receiving a fatal bullet for his reward. Fittingly, the New York Times, in reporting this barbarous and outrageous crime at Ohio State University, devoted three paragraphs to...
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Pound: Barometers and Engines
What has become of poets and prose-stylists, essayists and novelists, composers and painters, philosophers and theologians, in this poststructuralist era, when everything (especially art) has been politicized and monetized? In this, our late-stage, moribund, materialist “sensate culture,” in which thought itself is a commodity? Is there any value to be found in an essay, a...
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Roll Up Your Sleeves, Deplorables
Trump has triumphed. Now what? A theme is reverberating on this, the Day After, and it goes like this: The media are buffoons who so obviously got everything wrong. How could anyone trust them ever again? All of the Network Gurus (save FOX’s) staved off the Trumpocalypse for as long as they could on Tuesday...
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Voting for the Antichrist
This morning, the morning before Election Day 2016, I read a social-media post from an old friend who, over the past year, has felt the Bern and is now calling Donald Trump the Antichrist. It reminded me of another political post, which declared that a certain presidential candidate is the sort who writes aghast the...
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Hillary’s Postmodern Job Interview
Laws passed by men are funny: No matter how precisely they’re worded, they don’t enforce themselves. They need someone to do the job of enforcing them. And the scope and magnitude of the laws in question don’t alter this existential reality; even the Constitution requires someone to execute its provisions. Some may recall from civics...
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Immigration: Deferred Courage
The Supreme Court, tacitly acknowledging that the great Justice Antonin Scalia is still dead, refused on October 3 to reconsider United States v. Texas. The tie remained at 4-4, same as it was in June when the Court first polled itself, but a petulant Obama Department of Justice asked for the case to be reconsidered. ...
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Obama and the Cool Kids
The world will little remember what Barack Obama said during his disappointing presidency, despite his messianic promise and his reputation as rhetor par excellence. His words were not memorable to begin with. (Try to recall a quotation, apart from his famous campaign slogan.) More significantly, his words were not intended to be remembered. They served...
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Love’s Brexit’s Loss
British marriage is on the rocks. No, this is not a press release from James Dobson. Rather, it is the consensus of the entire media establishment of the U.K. What is harming the most fundamental institution in the history of humanity—the very basis of civil society? Is it divorce, infidelity, loss of faith, pornography, drugs,...
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Donald Trump and Conservatism
Donald Trump has shattered the false consensus of the Republican Party, the hitherto unrecognized tautology that GOP is conservative because conservative is GOP, and vice versa. In the process, we’ve been confronted by an embarrassing reality: We really have no idea what we mean by the word conservative. There can be little doubt that Hillary...
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Bleep You, Liberals!
Political correctness has, since the 1990’s, been a tool the left has used to silence the proponents of traditional morality, society, and culture. Under the banner of “sensitivity,” which has the veneer of a Higher Morality, p.c. has infected the university, the high school, the grade school, the media, business, public office, and public discourse. ...
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We’re All Extremists Now
The timing of Omar Mateen’s shooting at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub was rotten for the Obama administration, because Secretary of State John Kerry had just published his carefully worded Joint Strategy on Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), in which the word religion or religious appears nine times, but Islam, Islamist, and Muslim appear nary a-once. The administration’s...
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The Racists and the Flag
The Southern Baptist Convention finally had its Appomattox, surrendering the flag of its ancestors at its annual meeting of messengers (representative delegates) held in mid-June in St. Louis. Reportedly, an overwhelming majority of messengers voted in favor of Resolution 7, in which they determined to “call our brothers and sisters in Christ to discontinue the...
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The LCMS: A Triumph for Conservatism
Conservatives may be tempted to wonder whether it’s worth fighting. In this soundbite, instant-dislike, tl;dr, flashsnipe, banal, fractious, impressionistic, politicized culture of ours, our instinct can be to retreat, to separate fully, to disengage. I’ve been there, and when I have, I’ve been wrong. So long as we are alive, there is ground to be...
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Diary of a Driftless Conservative
“Hillsboro’s a conservative community,” said Robert, and for three days and three nights I attempted to figure out what he meant. He said it right after we arrived at his shop, high atop a lush, sylvan hill off Beaver Creek Road, five miles south of Hillsboro in Western Wisconsin, the “Driftless Area.” It’s called “driftless”...
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Obama’s Atomic Wedgie
April may be the cruelest month, but this year May took the cake. It was then that we were reminded that human life is a political football, and that players on both sides of the line of scrimmage are suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy. When word came that President Obama was scheduled to appear at...
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A Powerful Non-Event Concludes
“I am prepared to stay here until hell freezes over,’’ declared Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) on Wednesday. Apparently, hell froze over at 2:05 PM Eastern on Thursday, when the Occupy Washington Democrats who call themselves the people’s representatives walked out of the House chamber to refresh their deodorant and head home to their districts for...
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Orlando’s Instant Hate
Orlando’s Little Sodom was shot up early Sunday morning by a Muslim who thought that pleasing Allah by murdering homosexuals was more important than being a husband, father, or living person. Before police bulldozed their way into one of the Pulse nightclub’s several spacious bathrooms where Omar Mateen was holed up and shot him dead,...
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The Good Times Ain’t Over for Good
My great-grandparents loved music. When I look through old sepia-toned pictures from hog-killing day—here’s one of my great-uncles dangling a fat pig into a 55-gallon caldron of boiling water—I always see a guitar or two in the background. The natural rhythms of life, of the year, were marked by celebrations. There were luxury items to...
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Just Don’t Tell the Truth
Well, shootfire: That didn’t work. U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) is against requiring women to register for Selective Service in our Brave New Military. Accordingly, he proposed an amendment to the 2017 defense-spending bill that accomplishes the opposite of what he believes. The idea, Hunter claimed, was that he didn’t want the executive branch to...
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See Dick Potty
We’ve lost, I regret to inform you, yet another civilization-shattering battle. I mean the one over your daughter’s right to use a public restroom without worrying whether there is a dude doing his business in the stall next to her. This would be the same as the battle over your wife’s right to undress and...
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What the Editors Are Reading
Asked by a Lutheran-pastor friend to recommend some fiction for summer reading, I immediately thought of Ole Rølvaag’s trilogy. I’d been thinking about revisiting these novels for some time, as questions surrounding the just and humane treatment of immigrants and immigration to the United States have swirled around in my head. How does immigration change...
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How the World Works
The Panama Papers appeared in April, promising to be the biggest bombshell dropped on the international community since Nagasaki. Combing through the 11.5 million documents that were (what follows is a euphemism for stolen) leaked by a purported whistleblower to the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung, an international team of journalists has connected a lot of...
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Trumpsteria: Dislike!
Chaos dominates the political scene today thanks to the success of the Trump campaign and the Trumpsteria that has accompanied it. This chaos is the subject of myriad essays, commentaries, and—most significantly—power grabs both brand new and repackaged. It was, in many senses, inevitable. Donald Trump is attracting large crowds, and his poll numbers are...
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Time for a Conservative Reformation
The fate of conservatism is thought to be hanging in the balance these days, and with it, perhaps, the fate of the country, of a political party, of presidential candidates, of a movement. Well, good. Now is the time for reevaluation or, dare I say it, reformation. “Conservatism isn’t just passivity,” wrote Joseph Sobran in...
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Moral Regress
David Daleiden, the “mastermind” behind the Planned Parenthood sting videos of the Summer of Gay Marriage and Caitlyn Jenner, and fellow activist Sandra Merritt face a grand-jury indictment in Harris County, Texas, as of this writing. Both are charged with violating Texas law pertaining to “perjury and other falsification,” for having used phony drivers’ licenses...
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The Wolf Week in Review: The Great Political Christian Contest
Another week has come and gone, and here are some highlights and cultural trends. Celebrity Apprentices Here’s a lede you didn’t imagine five years ago: The Pope and Donald Trump are engaged in a public feud over illegal immigration. Trump is “not Christian,” says the pontiff. This latest brouhaha comes with Pope Francis’s visit to...
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The Wolf Week in Review: Race to the 90’s
Another week has come and gone, and here are some highlights and cultural trends. Republicans Want to Draft Your Daughter Whether your daughter ought to be compelled to sign up for spilling her guts in a regime-change adventure that will ultimately bring to power another Islamic regime is a question that has gone mainstream. And...
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Incidentally White
“[T]o speak in general terms of the prototypical Southern conservative we would say first of all that he was not an alienated man.” —M.E. Bradford, “Where We Were Born and Raised” White nationalism has long existed on the borderlands of disaffected conservatism. Among its several denominations is the movement known as identitarianism, which combines the...
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Dropping the Ball on Us
The New Year is in full swing, and with it new laws and regulations carefully designed to enrich the lives of Americans who are insane. Because the essence of our approach to life together in our degenerate age is that, for every problem humanoids may encounter, there is a potential law that could solve it,...
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Roe at 43: Defy It
Today, many souls are braving the weather in Washington, D.C., to testify to the truth that the United States is a rich gutter country that guts millions of babies, guts women, and has disemboweled herself in an act of worship before the god of Mammon. Steaming and bleeding on the ground before her staggering and...
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Drafting Our Daughters
The leftist regime, incarnate in bold and belligerent Democrats and tepid, me-too Republicans, hates women, the same way it hates black people. The way you can tell is that you often hear them screaming (or sobbing) exactly the opposite, as justification for the passage of unprecedented social-engineering laws. Yet judging by the effects of both...
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Trump Said What?
The nation held its breath in mid-December when GOP candidate Donald Trump dared to suggest that, in the wake of an ISIS/ISIL/IS/Caliphate/Daesh-related terrorist attack on U.S. soil, all Muslim immigration should be halted, until “Congress can figure out what the hell is going on.” When the press finally exhaled, it started screaming and hollering, pausing...
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Black Lives Shatter
The media and the hand-wringing politicians who are dancing on the grave of the career of Columbia, South Carolina, School Resource Officer Ben Fields are pulling a fast one. They claim that, because “black lives matter,” the young woman who refused to relinquish her smartphone and leave math class at Spring Valley High School should...
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Islam in the House of Yes
Liberalism, as the recent attacks on La Ville Lumière have shown, cannot provide the basis for a sustainable society. By liberalism, I do not mean Democrats versus Republicans, or the ideology of invite the world versus that of bomb the world. I mean all of it together. There must be some basis for saying no...
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Abortion Delusion
Planned Parenthood Dominatrix Cecile Richards sat defiantly before a congressional panel on September 29, making little effort to conceal her disgust at the perfunctory speeches made in front of her. She exuded a fierce confidence that dwarfed the resolve of her Republican opponents, presaging the House’s passage the very next day of a gutted stopgap...
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Ploys of Summer
When Summer of Blood 2015 came to a close, 3,702 people had been killed in the United States by people wielding guns. That’s according to a website called Mass Shooting Tracker, a left-wing “crowdsourced” collective dedicated to reporting every single incident of “gun violence” and to using phrases like “gun violence” and “killed by guns.” ...
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I Heart Big Brother
Ashley Madison, the adultery website seemingly named for Honey Boo Boo’s fiercest rival, unwillingly yielded all of her secrets to the prying eyes of a hacker group that calls itself The Impact Team. At midsummer, the Team informed Ashley Madison’s parent company, Avid Life Media, that they would release all of the immoral website’s data—“all...
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The Tone of Trump
Donald Trump reveals something to us about ourselves, if we are honest enough to face it: We care far too deeply about presidential politics and not enough about our actual problems. Please, put down the pitchfork and listen for just a minute. Believe me, I understand. Trump has raised the very important immigration issue, and...
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Sobering Up With SSM
Same-sex marriage still does not exist. Yes, the Supreme Court of the United States issued an opinion, 5-4, covering Obergefell v. Hodges and three other cases, which effectively makes “same-sex marriage” the law of the land. But five “justices” or 50 million Facebook “likes” cannot change what is woven into the fabric of creation. Of...