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
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
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
