Judith Butler has made out of her gibberish a lifelong, well-paid gig, and she endeavors to advance her own radical worldview through her sophistical skills.
Author: Alexander Riley (Alexander Riley)
Freedom of Political Expression Only Goes One Way
Despite Donald Trump’s victory last week, supporters and voters on the right remain less likely than those on the left to be open about their political leanings.
The One Big Reason I Can’t Vote for Harris
Kamala Harris’s open contempt for Western civilization and the culture that built America is disqualifying.
Guns of Delusion
Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware partake in academia's mass handwringing over the indigenous “right-wing terror threat”—allegedly represented by the Jan. 6 riot.
What the Left Calls Voting Rights Cheapens Your Vote
The left’s incessant call to make voting easier is really about making it trivial and unimportant.
Against Self-Mutilation: Tattoos and Body Piercing
The increase in tattoos and piercings cuts across the political divide in America. But it is an indication that something is deeply wrong with our culture.
On Not Forgiving or Forgetting 9/11
You do not do something like this to my people and expect me ever to get over it.
The ‘All the Smoke’ Presidential Candidate
Light one up as Kamala Harris and her interlocutors take us on a ride to the bottom of America’s political barrel.
What We Are Reading: October 2024
Short reviews of Phenomena: Doppelmayr’s Celestial Atlas by Giles Sparrow, and Charlotte's Web by E. B. White.
No Terrorism to the Left
'Terrorist Minds' illustrates a consistent blind spot on the part of terrorism scholars—left-wing terrorism.
The University of Pennsylvania Strikes a Blow Against Free Speech
The university’s decision to suspend law professor Amy Wax for politically incorrect statements should concern all Americans who care about free expression.
College Sports Are Essential
Despite the resentful envy most academics have for athletes, sports are critical to a balanced education.
Yard Sign Disunity and Cognitive Dissonance
The Harris campaign of “joy and unity” might want to have a few words with its enthusiastic yard-sign-posting supporters.
White Guys and 9/11
Whiteness and maleness lately have been under constant attack. It’s worth remembering that 23 years ago our culture celebrated four white male heroes who stopped a terrorist attack in the skies above Pennsylvania.
The Same Old Brilliance and Blind Spots
Thomas Sowell's latest work offers a remix of his greatest hits on race, economics, the "expert" class, but he misses things of interest to those of us on the paleo-right.
Books in Brief: September 2024
A World Safe for Commerce: American Foreign Policy from the Revolution to the Rise of China, by Dale C. Copeland (Princeton University Press; 504 pp., $31.30). Woodrow Wilson’s April 1917 plea to Congress to “make the world safe for democracy” launched America on a futile messianic crusade that plagues us even today. Nowadays, “safe” includes...
Allen Ginsberg, Pedophilia, and the Corruption of the American University
The fact that our educational and literary institutions do not recognize the corrupted nature of Ginsberg’s and other “artists’” work is evidence of their own corruption.
What We Are Reading: August 2024
Short reviews of I Believed by Douglas Hyde, and Primal Screams by Mary Eberstadt.
Doubting Dawkins
Coming to Faith Through Dawkins provides a dozen accounts of former adherents of the Dawkinsian view who became apostates precisely because they looked closely at that dogma.
Christianity over Buddhism, Objectively
The life-affirming nature of Christianity seeks to overcome death while Buddhism, properly understood, embraces it.
What We Are Reading: June-July 2024
Short reviews of Who Are We?, by Samuel P. Huntington, and Lost Horizon, by James Hilton.
Ding, Dong! The Public School Is Dead
Cara Fitzpatrick chose fear over facts in her account of American public schools. The title, itself, fails living up to reality.
The Cop-Murdering Extremist Who Inspires Pro-Palestinian Campus Radicals
The celebration of Wesley Cook, aka “Mumia Abu-Jamal,” a cop-killing thug and member of a lawless cult of child abusers and anti-social criminals, by today’s campus radicals is telling.
What We Are Reading: May 2024
Short reviews of The Unheavenly City by Edward C. Banfield, and Beethoven: His Spiritual Development, by J.W.N. Sullivan.
A Pastime Made Politically Correct
Joe Posnanski gets out his sackcloth and ashes and mournfully chants the litany of baseball’s historic racist sins.
What We Are Reading: April 2024
Short reviews of On Resistance to Evil by Force, by Ivan Ilyin, and Sentimental Education, by Gustave Flaubert.
The Expanding Civil Rights Bureaucracy
American Multiculturalism and the Anti-Discrimination Regime is the definitive study on the transformative ramifications of the 1960s civil rights legislation.
What We Are Reading: March 2024
Short reviews of Vergil: Father of the West, by Theodor Haecker, and The Sociological Tradition, by Robert A. Nisbet.
The Winding Passage Back to Plato
In The Narrow Passage, Glenn Ellmers reminds readers of the need for a robust understanding of nature in any well-grounded conservatism.
What We Are Reading: February 2024
Short reviews of The Life of Samuel Johnson, by James Boswell, and How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy, by Batya Ungar-Sargon.
What’s Wrong With the Intellectuals?
The intellectual classes and the Gnostic revolution.
Out of the Toxic Fog of Feminist Anger
Domestic Extremist is a book we desperately need, hitting all the right keys and in the breezy, entertaining tone familiar to anyone who has read its author online.
Books in Brief: January 2024
Short reviews of The Making of White American Identity by Ron Everyman, The Weaponization of Loneliness by Stella Morabito, and The Significance of the German Revolution by Edgar Julius Jung.
Against ‘Progress’
Is today’s life of convenience really better, more human, and more fulfilling than the kind of lives our forebears lived in which the struggle of everyday life pointed always to the sacred?
Countering the Racial Revolutionaries
Heather Mac Donald documents the absurdities imposed on America by those who put racial equity above all else.
Books in Brief: November 2023
Short reviews of The Disputed Legacy of Sidney Hook, by Gary Bullert, and The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, & Healing in a Toxic Culture, by Gabor Maté.
When the Cure Is the Poison
John Agresto is full of ideas about what needs to be done to fix the broken liberal arts tradition. Unfortunately, his proposed plan won’t work—they're too liberal.
Down With Del Marxists
Elites who live in wealthy communities like Del Mar pose as revolutionaries and preach fellowship with the disenfranchised while holding America’s underclass in contempt.
What We Are Reading: October 2023
Short reviews of Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary, by Robert Nisbet, and The Power of the Powerless, by Václav Havel.
What We Are Reading: September 11, An Oral History
The agony of this story is close to unbearable, but we recall atrocities in order to respect those souls who were ripped out of this world and sent into the next.
What We Are Reading: September 2023
Short reviews of Middlemarch, by George Eliot, and Shane, by Jack Schaefer.
Books in Brief: September 2023
Short reviews of Tearing Us Apart, by Ryan T. Anderson and Alexandra DeSanctis, and Dollars for Life, by Mary Ziegler.
Do Not Spare the Rod, or the Iron Bars
The Myth of Overpunishment is a muscular response to the activists and politicians who cry over the supposedly too-high incarceration rate of the American justice system.
What We Are Reading: August 2023
Immigration proponents make obvious contradictory claims. They repeat endlessly that recent immigrants are integrating just as fully as earlier immigrants did. Yet they also want to turn the idea that “America is a melting pot” into a prohibited microaggression. If it really is happening, why is it a moral crime to mention it? They lose...
What We Are Reading: June-July 2023
Short reviews of Noble Savages, by Napoleon Chagnon, and The Natural Family Where It Belongs, by Allan C. Carlson.
Advanced Ideological Disease in Academe
It's Not Free Speech is a poorly argued attempt to defend the so-called expertise of woke academics.
Why Wokeism Is Not Marxist
At present, it is not a Marxian anti-capitalist left that most threatens our society. It is a wokeism perfectly happy to consolidate progressive business monopolies with massive economic power over individual lives.
Soldiers of Burden
Outsourcing Duty tackles the issues that arise in countries where a large majority of citizens avoid military service and isolate themselves from the risks and moral responsibilities that soldiers face.
What We Are Reading: March 2023
Brief reviews of Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and The Death of Punishment, by Robert Blecker.
Books in Brief: March 2023
Brief reviews of Science in an Age of Unreason, by John Staddon, and Criminal (In)Justice, by Rafael Mangual.