It happened on campus. Once upon a time, the foundation of an American college education was common sense. Common sense realism was the philosophy young Americans learned in U.S. colleges. In the words of the great American historian, Arthur Herman, “Common Sense Realism was virtually the official creed of the American Republic.” Another
Please don’t misunderstand. If you haven’t already seen the movie, my intention is not to persuade you to watch it. It is not even to warn you if you do decide to watch it that you had better be on the alert for the astonishing distortions inflicted on it by political correctness. My
“Will our Republic survive?” It is a fitting question for Memorial Day. For, as Abraham Lincoln noted in his Gettysburg Address, “It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.” The work of preserving our freedom
Our political reality is no longer Left versus Right. It is now the Left versus common sense—and that change is changing voting patterns in this country. The political Left in America has been trending so hard and so fast to the left in recent decades that it raises the question, “What lies beyond
I have a friend who is a retired public school teacher. She is very likeable and in some areas an independent thinker. One day in conversation she brought up the terrible poverty and near-anarchy that prevails just on the other side of America’s southern border. It quickly became clear that she believed America was at
I recently received an e-mail—you may have seen it, too—from a person who has been a prominent spokesman for the GOP and now is a NeverTrumper. He notes that the GOP and American conservatism appear to have arrived at a turning point. Perhaps, he suggests, we should abandon the label “conservative” and reclaim for ourselves
Immanuel Kant, philosopher of the counter-Enlightenment. I suppose we must prepare ourselves for more pseudo-intellectual drivel about the Enlightenment from people who oppose Donald Trump. David Brooks of the New York Times appears to have gotten the ball rolling with “The Enlightenment Project.” Now Andrew Small has joined in with “The Counter-Enlightenment and
David Brooks, one of the New York Times’ in-house “conservatives,” recently attempted to mount an intellectual attack on President Trump. Brooks, you may remember, is the deep thinker who was awestruck by the crease in Barack Obama’s trousers. The article is a tangle of intellectual confusion. To address them all would probably require an entire
Friends who voted for Hillary Clinton and friends who viewed her possible election with dread and foreboding have asked me to explain Donald Trump to them. Some have asked me if he is even a conservative. Many Trump supporters have tried to get me to agree that whatever Trump’s political persuasion may be the people
A federal judge ruled recently that an inmate serving a life sentence for murder in California must receive sex-reassignment surgery at taxpayer expense. The inmate was Rodney James Quine, 57, twice married and the father of two daughters. I write “was” because while in prison he changed his name to Shiloh Heavenly Quine. Quine began