From the vantage point of a neighborhood in a midsized Midwestern city where I grew up, I witnessed a curious sociological phenomenon. On the south side of my house was a street filled with decay and depravity: broken-down dwellings, yards littered with auto carcasses, drunken men sitting on porches leering at teen girls and cursing at one...
[The setting: a classroom on a liberal arts campus somewhere in the American northeast. A young, very enlightened professor addresses students in her course “Getting Woke, Bashing the Fash: Intro to Critical Studies” following a screening of the 13-minute video of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot shown at the opening of the latest impeachment trial...
The insufferable Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) was in the news again, having discoursed at length on social media about her experience during the bizarre events in the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The video showcases what she does best: talk lugubriously about herself and all the things that are causing her pain and suffering. Here’s some of...
No day in the American civil calendar is better calibrated to the kind of virtue signaling that is the favored activity of much of our elite class than Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Showing your full-blooded commitment to MLK Day events is a great way to demonstrate to everyone that you are on the right...
While attempting a fruitless, year-end clearing of my inbox, I came upon an email sent out to the faculty at Bucknell University, where I am employed, in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. The letter took a stark partisan stance on the election results, seeking signatories to a letter for the campus newspaper. Four...
Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class; by Charles Murray; Twelve Books; 528 pp., $35.00 When I was a graduate student in the 1990s, the following joke elicited knowing grins even from those sympathetic to the impenetrable French postmodernist theory that was then making the rounds: Q: Have you read the new Derrida? A: Read it? I...
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...
How much do you remember about 9/11? Almost certainly—unless you are quite young—you know the basics: Islamic terrorists hijacked planes and flew them into targets in New York City and Washington, D.C. But do you remember how many American victims were murdered that day? In Mitchell Zuckoff’s book published last year, Fall and Rise: The...
The outspoken, courageous conservative criminologist and prolific writer Mike Adams has died at age 55. Tragically, he took his own life, struggling under an unbelievable burden he has borne for years now as a result of the fact that he stood up so fearlessly to the bullying of the increasingly irrational leftist orthodoxy that dominates...
Radically recasting America’s formative years would be damaging enough, but The New York Times’ “1619 Project” is applying that same radical intellectual perspective on American history to contemporary social issues and problems. That intellectual perspective has its own history. It developed in earnest during the tumult and chaos of the Black Power radicalism of the...