onald Trump did not mention Lincoln’s First Inaugural address in his speech commemorating the spirit of American Independence at Mount Rushmore on Friday night. But the president’s speech—perhaps his most forceful and eloquent to date—vibrated with the same energy and existential commitment that fired Lincoln in March 1861. Lincoln came to office at a time […]
atthew Spalding, a scholar of the Constitution and dean of Hillsdale College’s Van Andel Graduate School of Government in Washington, D.C., has written an important essay on the troubling possibility that the treatment of General Michael Flynn by the Obama administration and, later, by holdovers in the FBI, the Justice Department, and the CIA, represents […]
see that #CancelYale is trending on Twitter and elsewhere in social media. It’s a development I’d like to encourage—not, to be frank, because I think that canceling things is a good idea. Quite the opposite. But if the Left is going to pursue its dream of destroying every reminder of our past it doesn’t like, […]
ccording to Joe Biden, the basement candidate for president, ending “systemic racism” in the United States is “the moral obligation of our time.” Too late, Joe! Systemic racism in the United States ended with the Union victory in the Civil War. Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. On June 19 of […]
nti-Catholicism, it has been said, is the anti-Semitism of intellectuals. I’m not sure anyone would accuse Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) of being an intellectual. Her colleagues on the Senate Judiciary Committee such as Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) are also safe from that accusation (and simple courtesy requires that we […]
or the last couple of months, your inbox, like mine, has been awash in nauseating communiqués from every school, club, or business you had carelessly entrusted with your email address. “Stay safe,” they urged—and stay home. A great plague is upon the land, and we must all respond with displays of ritual purification and groveling […]
n the middle of my tiny neighborhood on the Connecticut shore, there is a nobbly, plinth-like stone about 2 feet high surrounded by a circle of grass and some simple decorative stonework. On one side of the stone there is a brass plaque to “the eternal memory” of the 26 men from the neighborhood who […]
et’s talk about John Brennan a bit. You remember John Brennan. He was Barack Obama’s director of the CIA. Once upon a time, he was an enthusiast for Gus Hall, the Communist candidate for president, for whom he voted in 1976. I can’t think of any better background for the head of the country’s premier […]
rises, even if they are manufactured ones, are great producers of linguistic mutation. Thucydides noticed this. In one of the most famous bits of his History of the Peloponnesian War, the great historian wrote that in a time of civil war certain words changed their usual meanings and took on new ones. For example, “reckless […]
am weary, I confess, both of the CCP Virus—COVID-19 for all you budding epidemiologists out there—and the shameful case of General Michael Flynn (the shameful thing in his case being the Obama Administration’s effort to destroy him). I am not sure how many pieces I have written about the former—probably a score—but by now it […]
urves are flattening worldwide thanks to stringent lockdown efforts.” That bulletin from one of my favorite magazines made me sit up. “Really?” I thought, “Is it because of the stringent lockdown that the ‘curves’ are flattening?” For that is what “thanks to” means here, right? Because, “propter” in Latin. No one needs to ask what […]
n March 14, when the current coronavirus hysteria was beginning to get going in earnest, I said “one of the silver linings” of this panic would be that “the people who will be blamed when it is over—which it will be, and soon—are the people who stoked the insanity.” That was a little over a […]
f I might adapt Keats, “much have I travell’d in the realms online, / And many goofy states and kingdoms seen.” And if my experience wasn’t quite like that of the “watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken” (or even “like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes / He […]
ecember 31, 2020. What a roller-coaster of a year it has been. In January, congressional Democrats were busy trying to impeach the president of the United States. That same month, news of a new, highly contagious virus leaked out of China and began to circulate in the West. The stock market stumbled, then recovered and […]
here seem to be shortages of everything these days, not least a shortage of commentary on the COVID-19 virus, also known as the Chinese virus, the Wuhan flu, known to some as the Chinese Communist Party virus, or the CCP virus for short. Since there has been so little discussion of this disease in the […]
ere’s something special: a headline in The Economist that speaks the truth: “In Europe, and around the world, governments are getting tougher.” You betcha. Last week, I wrote with contempt about San Francisco’s mayor who had just announced she would “legally prohibit residents from leaving their homes except to meet basic needs.” “Well,” I thought, […]
t a time of national crisis, it is important that we do everything possible to make sure that the important people without whom our society could not function are safe. I refer, of course, to our politicians, especially our distinguished members of Congress. Where would we be without their wisdom? How could we stagger on […]
re we about to get a new Journal of the Plague Year? In that 1722 novel, Daniel Defoe’s protagonist gives a detailed, supposedly eyewitness account of the progress of the bubonic plague through London in 1665. . . . in order to be certain of the truth, two physicians and a surgeon were ordered to […]