Short reviews of On Resistance to Evil by Force, by Ivan Ilyin, and Sentimental Education, by Gustave Flaubert.
Author: Alexander Riley (Alexander Riley)
Post
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.
Post
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.
Post
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.
Post
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.
Post
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.
Post
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.
Post
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?
Post
Countering the Racial Revolutionaries
Heather Mac Donald documents the absurdities imposed on America by those who put racial equity above all else.
Post
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.
Post
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.
Post
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.
Post
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.
Post
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.
Post
What We Are Reading: September 2023
Short reviews of Middlemarch, by George Eliot, and Shane, by Jack Schaefer.
Post
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.
Post
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.
Post
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...
Post
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.
Post
Advanced Ideological Disease in Academe
It's Not Free Speech is a poorly argued attempt to defend the so-called expertise of woke academics.
Post
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.
Post
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.
Post
What We Are Reading: March 2023
Brief reviews of Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and The Death of Punishment, by Robert Blecker.
Post
Books in Brief: March 2023
Brief reviews of Science in an Age of Unreason, by John Staddon, and Criminal (In)Justice, by Rafael Mangual.
Post
What We Are Reading: February 2023
Short reviews of Commentaries on the Gallic War, by Julius Caesar, and What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense, by Sherif Girgis, Ryan T. Anderson, and Robert P. George.
Post
What We Are Reading: December 2022
Short reviews of Feminism & Freedom, by Michael Levin, and the Sword of Honor trilogy, by Evelyn Waugh.
Post
Books in Brief: December 2022
Short reviews of The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism, by Matthew Continetti, and The Black Boom, by Jason Riley.
Post
What We Are Reading: October 2022
Short reviews of Days of Rage, by Bryan Burrough, and All the World's Mornings, by Pascal Quignard.
Post
The Progressive Worldview Destroys Cities
Michael Shellenberger gives an insightful, heartbreaking account of how profoundly the worst radical ideas have corrupted cities like San Francisco, from the highest levels on down.
Post
Sleepwalking in the Nanny State
In Purchasing Submission, legal expert Philip Hamburger documents the power of the federal government to control and coerce by the granting and withholding of federal funds.
Post
Marxism Misunderstood
In American Marxism, Mark Levin baldly misunderstands Marxism and tries to link it with woke totalitarianism and anarchism. But the term “Marxist anarchist” is an oxymoron and does nothing to help identify the real enemy.
Post
The Shadow of Sodom
Allyn Walker's audacious Long Dark Shadow is a thinly veiled attempt to normalize pedophilia.
Post
What We Are Reading: June 2022
Short reviews of The Double Life of Paul de Man, by Evelyn Barish, and The Road to Hell, by Paul Liberatore.
Post
Affirmative Action’s Destructive Force: An Interview With Amy Wax
Amy Wax talks about issues of race, merit, intelligence, and virtue as well as the discriminatory effects of Affirmative Action.
Post
Man of the West: An Interview with Glenn Loury
Glenn Loury has taught economics at numerous universities, including Northwestern, Michigan, Harvard, Boston, and presently Brown, where he has been a professor of economics since 2005. He is the author of The Anatomy of Racial Inequality (2002). The following conversation comes from an interview with Glenn earlier this year. Alex Riley (AR): What are your...
Post
Labor Betrayed by the Progressive Left
The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America by Gabriel Winant Harvard University Press 368 pp., $35.00 Once upon a time, there were academic historians on whom the public could rely for help in accurately understanding the world in which we live. Scholars such as Samuel Eliot...
Post
‘Woke’ Evolution
A Most Interesting Problem: What Darwin’s Descent of Man Got Right and Wrong about Human Evolution Ed. Jeremy DeSilva Princeton Universtiy Press 288 pp., $27.95 The complex debate about the place of Darwinian theory in discussions about humankind’s nature has been further complicated by an academic left that has taken up trashing Darwin—who is, after...
Post
The Political Hijacking of Science
Science Under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America by Andrew Jewett Harvard University Press 368 pp., $41.00 I came of age intellectually during the academic science wars of the 1990s. I was just beginning my dissertation when physicist Alan Sokal created a scandal for leftist postmodernist enemies of science by getting his...
Post
Vive la New Right
Guillaume Faye: Truths and Tributes by Pierre Krebs, Robert Steuckers, and Pierre-Émile Blairon Arktos Media 210 pp., $27.50 La puissance et la foi: Essais de théologie politique by Alain de Benoist PG de Roux 336 pp., EUR$39.00 I stumbled upon the writing of Alain de Benoist more than a quarter century ago as a graduate...
Post
Slavery as a Political Construct
The New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History by David North and Thomas Mackaman Mehring Books Inc. 378 pp., $24.95 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project by Peter W. Wood Encounter Books 272 pp., $28.99 Imagine a country in which the major newspaper of its most populous city launches...
Post
The Deplorables’ Academics
Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life by Jordan B. Peterson Portfolio 432 pp., Hardcover $29.00 The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas are Killing Common Sense by Gad Saad Regnery Publishing 235 pp., $28.99 Walmart is for deplorables, the left tells us. If that is so, then Jordan Peterson and Gad Saad must...
Post
The Strongmen Straw Man
Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism by Anne Applebaum Doubleday 224 pp., $25.00 Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present by Ruth Ben-Ghiat W. W. Norton & Company 384 pp., $28.95 For some among the chattering classes, the electoral defeat of Donald Trump in November must have been a mixed blessing, though they doubtless could...
Post
The Betrayal of the Spirit of Flight 93
We told ourselves we would never forget. We put bumper stickers bearing that slogan on our cars, we hung flags in front of our homes, and we repeated the names, deeds, and last words of the day’s heroes. We read books and watched movies about what happened. We gave the impression of a people grimly...
Post
Wrestling With Justice in the Midst of Sorrow and Loss
One year ago, I lost a friend, a good man who was driven to his untimely death by the wicked words and deeds of people determined to ruin his life if they could. People who loathed him—without knowing him in any meaningful human way—simply because he disagreed with their beliefs about political, cultural, and philosophical matters. It...
Post
CNN and the Dating Game Killer
On July 24 we learned that Rodney James Alcala, the so-called “The Dating Game Killer,” died at age 77 of natural causes. Alcala was given that name because in 1978 he appeared on The Dating Game television program, just at the same time he was carrying out a killing spree that included at least five known and...
Post
The Christian Roots of WEIRDness
The WEIRDest People in the World by Joseph Henrich Picador 704 pp., $24.00 Christianity has blessed us with essential elements of the Western world that we should want to preserve, even while it has also produced corrosive pieces of our current cultural predicament. The bizarre political quasi-religion of antiracist wokeism, with its ressentiment-driven obsession with...
Post
Olympic Schadenfreude
If there are two sports more ferociously woke than NBA basketball and women’s professional soccer, I am unaware of their existence. Unfortunately for athletes in these two sports, their commitment to wokeness and the language of equity is increasingly backfiring, so much so that I have found their recent Olympic adventures delectable. They are so...
Post
What We Are Reading: No Country for Old Men
When students hear me introduce No Country for Old Men as a deeply political novel with a right-wing position on contemporary American society, those who have seen the film adaptation by the Coen brothers perhaps wonder if the movie and the Cormac McCarthy novel are unrelated entities that just happen to bear the same title. What they...
Post
Transgenderism is the Latest Woke Insult to Sports Fans
The effort to make sports unwatchable for most fans continues at light-speed. What started as a handful of radical NFL players kneeling during the national anthem transformed in the blink of an eye into an organized NFL-wide ceremonial genuflection to BLM. The woke virus quickly infected the NBA, too. Only the threat of revenue loss pushed owners...