The jury found Derek Chauvin guilty of all the charges. No surprise. Many others are now writing about the intimidation of the court and the jury by the politicians, media, and rioters who have been enforcing their distorted view of justice on the country for at least the last year. The thing that has occupied...
How NPR Taught Me to Worry About the Police and Trust the Jab
I am a social scientist who has written a little bit on media over the years, so sometimes, in the spirit of research, when I have a few extra minutes in the car, I put on the radio. In just 15 minutes or so this morning I gathered the following information. I heard this segment on...
Silencing the Dead
Tears sprang to my eyes in the fall of 2014 when I read of the short life and impending death of Lauren Hill. You may remember the story, too, though much in our culture works against the retention of stories like Lauren’s for more than a few news cycles. This ill-fated young woman was set...
What the Editors Are Reading: The French Revolution
The values of the French Revolution are those of every radical revolutionary movement that succeeded it, including the one currently dismantling the basic institutions of American society and culture. But there are few historians of the Revolution who can be trusted to avoid propagandizing for it as they write about it. Pierre Gaxotte’s splendidly literate account,...
Pizza Shop Guy, Donut Shop Guy, and Little Old Me
Eating takeout food frequently is not a good thing to do, experts agree. Fine, I won’t quibble too much with this. But that doesn’t prevent takeout from being an excellent source of research on the culture of work and the staying power of bourgeois values in America. I offer to you, then, Pizza Shop Guy...
The Woke Revolution’s Memo on Mass Shootings
Memo in light of recent events, for the immediate attention of all political and media leaders aligned with the Woke Revolution, which is to say, just about all of them: Mass shootings like those that just took place in Atlanta and Boulder are a tragedy, of course. But they are also one of the best...
Figuring Out Your 1960s Stance in One Question
The 1960s, according to Carl Oglesby, a former president of Students for a Democratic Society, “will never level out.” “It’s a corkscrew, it’s a tailspin, it’s a joyride on a roller coaster, it’s a never-ending mystery,” he continues. “Who won? Who lost? What were the terms of victory and defeat? We’ll always be discussing that.” I...
The Creative Expert Invention of ‘Far Right Terror’
In case you have been lost in the woods and have managed not to hear the news, the United States is facing a blood-chillingly scary white supremacist terrorist threat. The “stunning violence” of the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol is perhaps only a prelude of what’s to come, for all experts agree that the biggest...
Transitional Failures
Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters; by Abigail Shrier; Regnery Publishing; 276 pp., $28.99 You’ve seen the yard signs. “We believe…Black Lives Matter; No Human is Illegal; Love is Love…” The tone is pure emotive posturing, until you get to this statement: “Science is real.” This is the foundational rhetorical trick of the contemporary...
What the Editors Are Reading: The Unheavenly City
From the vantage point of a neighborhood in a midsized Midwestern city where I grew up, I witnessed a curious sociological phenomenon. On the south side of my house was a street filled with decay and depravity: broken-down dwellings, yards littered with auto carcasses, drunken men sitting on porches leering at teen girls and cursing at one...
Teaching About Riots and Democracy
[The setting: a classroom on a liberal arts campus somewhere in the American northeast. A young, very enlightened professor addresses students in her course “Getting Woke, Bashing the Fash: Intro to Critical Studies” following a screening of the 13-minute video of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot shown at the opening of the latest impeachment trial...
The Trauma of Her Moral Highness, AOC
The insufferable Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) was in the news again, having discoursed at length on social media about her experience during the bizarre events in the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The video showcases what she does best: talk lugubriously about herself and all the things that are causing her pain and suffering. Here’s some of...
MLK and a Modest Proposal for Real Resistance
No day in the American civil calendar is better calibrated to the kind of virtue signaling that is the favored activity of much of our elite class than Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Showing your full-blooded commitment to MLK Day events is a great way to demonstrate to everyone that you are on the right...
Ivory Towers Only Come in Blue
While attempting a fruitless, year-end clearing of my inbox, I came upon an email sent out to the faculty at Bucknell University, where I am employed, in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. The letter took a stark partisan stance on the election results, seeking signatories to a letter for the campus newspaper. Four...
The Disillusionment of Diversity
Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class; by Charles Murray; Twelve Books; 528 pp., $35.00 When I was a graduate student in the 1990s, the following joke elicited knowing grins even from those sympathetic to the impenetrable French postmodernist theory that was then making the rounds: Q: Have you read the new Derrida? A: Read it? I...
The Church of Money-Grubbing Toil
The Enchantment of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity; by Eugene McCarraher; Belknap Press; 816 pp., $39.95 When the German thinker Max Weber visited the United States in 1904, he was intrigued by the marked tendency of Americans to think about economic activity against a backdrop of religious morality. He tells of an encounter with a salesman of...
Remembering 9/11
How much do you remember about 9/11? Almost certainly—unless you are quite young—you know the basics: Islamic terrorists hijacked planes and flew them into targets in New York City and Washington, D.C. But do you remember how many American victims were murdered that day? In Mitchell Zuckoff’s book published last year, Fall and Rise: The...
My Debt to Mike Adams
The outspoken, courageous conservative criminologist and prolific writer Mike Adams has died at age 55. Tragically, he took his own life, struggling under an unbelievable burden he has borne for years now as a result of the fact that he stood up so fearlessly to the bullying of the increasingly irrational leftist orthodoxy that dominates...
Black Power and the 1619 Project
Radically recasting America’s formative years would be damaging enough, but The New York Times’ “1619 Project” is applying that same radical intellectual perspective on American history to contemporary social issues and problems. That intellectual perspective has its own history. It developed in earnest during the tumult and chaos of the Black Power radicalism of the...