“Six hundred years ago, when elsewhere they were footing the blame for the Black Death, Casimir the Great—so-called—told the Jews they could come to Krakow. They came. They trundled their belongings into the city. They settled. They took hold. They prospered in business, science, education, the arts. With nothing they came and with nothing they
California’s homeless crisis is now visible to everyone living in the state. Along with tens of thousands of homeless who are concentrated in various parts of major cities, additional thousands are widely dispersed. If you drive into most major urban centers, you will see tent encampments along freeway junctions, under bridges, along frontages, and beside
Pushing through the market square, so many mothers sighing News had just come over, we had five years left to cry in News guy wept and told us, earth was really dying Cried so much his face was wet, then I knew he was not lying –David Bowie, “Five Years” (1971) One has to wonder
The radical fringe of the Democratic Party, the extremists of the 1960s and 1970s, have become the “mainstream.” Bernie Sanders, the avowed Vermont socialist who honeymooned in the Soviet Union, almost won the Democrats’ nomination for president in 2016 (only to have Hillary Clinton steal it with her “superdelegates.”), and the old radicals have now
“Covenant was the binding together in one body politic of persons who assumed through unlimited promise, responsibility to and for each other, and for the common laws, under God. It was government of the people, by the people, for the people, but always under God, and it was not natural birth into natural society that
The tiresome subject of “cancel culture” is now, unfortunately, one that cannot responsibly be avoided. An old tweet surfaces, and all of a sudden a comedian, an actor, or even some hapless, powerless citizen, is at the center of an online tribunal. A series of recent events have enlivened the debate. Comedian Shane Gillis lost
I would like to share a short reflection with you on the subject of globalism, from a reading of Friedrich Nietzsche. In The Will to Power, a book that some say does not exist, since it would have been composed from fragments chosen by Nietzsche’s sister—that is an interesting controversy, by the way. But the
When Thomas Paine appealed to “common sense” to make the case for American independence, it probably never crossed his mind that there would ever be a need to make the case for common sense itself, at least not in America. But common-sense thinking has fallen out of favor. Because it has been under attack for
If you’re just hearing about the "Intellectual Dark Web," or if you’ve heard the term but never delved into its meaning, you might think there is an entire parallel internet out there, filled with subversive content that is too politically incorrect to weather the shadowbans and deboosting algorithms in our well lit, mainstream online world.
Writing in the December 1991 issue of Academic Questions, Fred Siegel, associate professor of history at Cooper Union and a self-described liberal and Democrat, bemoaned a fashionable trend in history writing. The “New Historians,” he quipped, saw American life as “a story of defeat, despair, and domination. American history became a tragedy in three acts:
