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
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
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
