art memoir and part history, U.S. Senator Tom Cotton’s Sacred Duty recounts in vivid detail the stories of the men and women who make up Arlington’s military detachment—”The Old Guard.” Those military units comprise America’s oldest regiment (established in 1784), which includes the Revolutionary-garbed Fife and Drum Corps and Continental Color Guard, the skilled rifle-handling […]
Google tried to censor the Claremont Institute last week. The tech giant backed off under pressure, but the tactical maneuver was hardly a failure. To see why, we only have to think strategically. The Claremont Institute is a conservative think tank devoted to preserving the original meaning and vitality of the Constitution and Declaration of […]
[fusion_text columns=”” column_min_width=”” column_ rule_style=”default” rule_size=”” rule_color=”” ] [fusion_text columns=”” column_min_width=”” column_ rule_style=”default” rule_size=”” rule_color=”” ] The soul is the most difficult and paradoxical thing in the world. In classical thought, the soul is our form, which activates and animates the matter of our bodies and makes us rational and free beings. It thus provides […]
You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I’m talking about? —Morpheus, “The Matrix” Pop culture references go […]
One of my favorite journals, The New Criterion, recently posted an article by one of my favorite commentators, James Piereson (disclosure: I’ve know Jim for 30 years, since I worked for him at the John M. Olin Foundation), which pours some some clear water of Machiavellian realism into the muddy debate over Trump’s character. […]
Is it true that Twitter, Facebook, and Google are private companies, which can cancel, delete, or ban anyone they want at any time? Short answer: No. Here are some suggestions for how to think about the social media wars, and whether online censorship is simply a matter of private property rights. A lot has happened […]
Donald Trump never studied political philosophy; and for that those of us who have might say, “Thank God.” For one thing he would have been bored, and for another, if he had picked up any ideas from the effort, they more than likely would have been the wrong ones. More important, he didn’t need to […]
Day by day, the regressive Left drags American society closer to violent conflict. First, it was ok to punch fascists, or systematically to infiltrate an opponent’s campaign rallies and instigate conflicts. Now, senior officials in the Trump administration are targeted at their homes, and may not even eat or shop in peace. These examples are at […]
Sometimes a picture isn’t just worth 1,000 words, but 1,000 years of history. This tableau, justly famous already, depicts (with only slight exaggeration) the future of western civilization. For some decades, it has been clear that Europe’s elites are in a nihilistic death-spiral. While many ordinary citizens still have the spiritedness to defend their rights […]
As the first bloody spasm of liberalism’s utopian convulsions, the French Revolution is rife with antecedents. Portrait of an Average Woman, Christian Zweig’s masterful biography of Marie Antoinette, brims with vivid canvasses in red and black, describing the sanguinary and nihilistic terror that claimed 40,000 souls on the guillotine. A tweet thread today by one […]
During the 1980s—the heyday of the flamboyant, headline-grabbing New York mafioso, including Carmine “The Snake” Persico, Tony “Ducks” Corallo, and Vinny “The Chin” Gigante—an ambitious federal prosecutor named Rudy Giuliani made his bones sending wise guys to lock-up on Rikers Island, and sometimes (when the witnesses survived and didn’t lose their memories) federal prison. Today, […]
Never mind what you’ve read here, or here. The “deep state” doesn’t exist. But don’t take my word for it. The Nation says so, based on the word of Michael Hayden, formerly director of the NSA and CIA, and former deputy director of national intelligence. And, c’mon, who can you trust about these things if not […]
The very thoughtful Thomas Chatterton Williams, who I quoted in yesterday’s post about Ta-Nehisi Coates, has his own response to Coates’ Atlantic essay in The American Scholar. It’s worth reading the whole, relatively short, article. But two passages stand out: Coates “claims for himself, here and elsewhere, a Mullah-like authority to assert communal possession of […]
The latest installment of The Confessions of Saint Ta-Nehisi Coates, appearing yesterday in The Atlantic, takes the form of a jeremiad against the iniquities of Kanye West. Embedded in lengthy autobiographical ruminations that have become his trademark, Coates reflects on his memories of Michael Jackson, and how Jackson “had always been dying—dying to be white. […]
Last night, I got to hear Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, author of the best-selling 12 Rules for Life, speak at the Warner Theater in downtown Washington, DC. Before a packed house, he gave a 90-minute extemporaneous lecture on consciousness, honesty, setting goals, empathy, self-discipline, and the problem of not seeing gorillas. Peterson is on a worldwide […]
Journalism—the “professional” kind, the sort taught at the Columbia School of Journalism—is dead. Yet, zombie-like, it shambles on, eating the brains of both its consumers and its practitioners. There is a short but brutal chapter on journalists in Nassim Taleb’s Skin in the Game. You can trust Taleb’s judgment for the most part because he […]
Fans of the fantastic HBO series “Westworld” (the second season of which just started) will know that when one of the cyborg “hosts” encounters something that conflicts with its programming it will intone, “Doesn’t look like anything to me.” This response bears an uncanny resemblance to how the leftist collective deals with any news it can’t […]
A few months ago, Dave Rubin (one of the best podcast interviewers on YouTube ) spoke with the African-American writer and producer Candace Owens about how she was “red-pilled” and became a conservative. Last week, Owens spoke at UCLA where she responded to the Black Lives Matters hecklers in the audience by rejecting the victim […]
The amazing Thomas Sowell influenced me deeply when I was a young man, and at 87 he is still going strong. The first part of his new interview with Dave Rubin was just posted today. You won’t regret it.
A few weeks ago, in my northwest Washington D.C. neighborhood, I witnessed a most curious motorcade driving down Connecticut Avenue, transporting what appeared to be a very large crate. It turns out that “Spike,” the National Zoo’s new Asian elephant, was being delivered to his new home Today, instead of a zoo, the nation will […]