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...
For over a year now, governments across the world have introduced and enforced a series of arbitrary restrictions on their citizens and their businesses, but not without a certain degree of pushback. Some small businesses in Germany have found a creative way to maneuver around the diktats of Chancellor Angela Merkel and other governmental leaders. The...
Patrisse Cullors is a co-founder of Blacks Lives Matter. About her background, she said in 2015: “The first thing, I think, is that we actually do have an ideological frame. Myself and Alicia (Garza, BLM co-founder) in particular are trained organizers.” Cullors also said: “We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological...
In an age where feminism seems to rule, there’s a lot of pressure for fathers to start acting softer and more feminine in dealing with their children. Not a trace of that “toxic masculinity” should come through! Perhaps that is why we see increasing condemnation of competition (“everyone gets a participation trophy!”) or “dangerous” activities...
Riots have kicked off again in Minneapolis, this time touched off by an apparently accidental police shooting of an unarmed 20-year-old black man, Daunte Wright, who was attempting to flee police in his vehicle. Nighttime curfews have been imposed across the city but have been routinely ignored by groups of protestors, who are peaceful by day...
It’s springtime in America. In halcyon days, we’d ring in the new season with fresh starts and fragrant flowers. But in 2021, the arrival of April now ushers in yet another cycle of destructive urban riots—stoked and coddled by toxic journalists downplaying left-wing violence and demonizing all who dare call out the ruinous, race-based chaos...
In the driveway sits my nine-year-old Honda Civic, which I purchased two years ago after a deer demolished my Accord. Fingerprints of my grandchildren dot the rear interior window, the carpeting and seats are screaming for a vacuum, a large, reddish dent mars the paneling above the rear tire on the passenger side, and the...
What are Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping up to? In recent days, Russian tanks, artillery, armor, trucks, and troops have been moving by road and rail ever closer to Ukraine, and Moscow is said to be repositioning its 56th Guards Air Assault Brigade in Crimea. Military sources in Kyiv estimate there are now 85,000 Russian...
With tensions rising between nations such as Taiwan and China, as well as between Russia and Ukraine, many are wondering how involved the Biden administration will be. Should the United States leave these nations alone, or should they interfere? A look at the past through Stephen Wertheim’s new book, Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S....
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer’s recent rejection of packing the Supreme Court is another welcome addition to the debate, muted in recent months, of whether additional seats should be added to America’s highest court in order to dilute the power of its conservative majority. It also appears to have jogged President Biden’s memory of the...
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...
Given cancel culture’s daily attacks on anyone and everyone who exhibits the slightest deviation from anti-racist norms, one suspects it was calumny that gave up the ghost and handed over the title of Worst Sin Ever. The new title holder is the fuzzily conceived concept that the slightest hint of discrimination, mockery, or even simple...
When the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines first proved their efficacy, preventing nearly 95 percent of coronavirus infections in those who got the shots in test trials, a vexing issue immediately arose. Who should get priority in receiving these life-saving shots? Generally speaking, the answer, while differing slightly from state to state, was that those most...
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,...
Recently while driving from town to my house, I was running through some radio stations when I landed on the Glenn Beck show. His guest was Lara Logan, a journalist and commentator unfamiliar to me, and I was sickened and horrified by what I heard. I wish I were exaggerating, but what that woman had...
The trial of officer Derek Chauvin came up in a conversation I had with a friend this weekend. “Yeah, I really haven’t been able to follow it much, but I did see a few headlines,” was the essence of my friend’s comments on the issue. He then noted that the little he had seen made...
Lord Hastings Ismay, Winston Churchill’s trusted military advisor and NATO’s first secretary-general (1952-1957), famously quipped in the early days of his tenure that the purpose of the Alliance was to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” In the early 1950s Ismay’s adage made sense. Stalin’s armored divisions, encamped in...
A look around at our coronavirus-obsessed world leaves those of us still possessing common sense with one question: What on earth have we become? This question arises when viewing videos such as this one, where a pregnant, Catholic mother refusing to wear a mask is cited for trespassing during a Mass in Dallas, Texas. This young...
Last Monday, in a single six-hour period, NATO launched 10 air intercepts to shadow six separate groups of Russian bombers and fighters over the Arctic, North Atlantic, North Sea, Black Sea, and Baltic Sea. Last week also brought reports that Moscow is increasing its troop presence in Crimea and along its borders with Ukraine. Joe...
The reincarnation of Hitler in some national leader and the heroism of Churchill, both stand-by props of neoconservatives, rear their head again in a recent commentary by Daniel Gelernter. Expecting neocons to abandon their continual reference of these props would be comparable to asking the Democratic Party to stop talking about “systemic racism” or Mike Pompeo to...
After months of praising the Chinese response to COVID-19 and trusting their data, the World Health Organization (WHO) has apparently finally found a bridge too far in their public relations game on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party. WHO’s Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and the governments of 14 countries let loose a series of...
The bullets of cancel culture have been flying fast and furious in recent weeks and it seems a new public figure falls almost every day. While many in “woke” society would suggest that cancel culture warfare is being waged for a just cause—to promote whatever their latest politically correct cause may be—many others increasingly disapprove....
If Joe Biden’s American Jobs Program, outlined in Pittsburgh, is enacted, then the federal government will take a great leap forward toward irreversible control of the destiny of the Republic. To finance this leap, to subsidize this giant stride toward socialism, U.S. corporations are to be forced to turn over to the government a far...
The most significant diplomatic event in the month of March was a rapid, seemingly irreversible deterioration of relations between the United States and China. Its signs were on display at the first high-level meeting between the two sides since President Joseph Biden took office on Jan. 20. Held in Anchorage, Alaska on March 18, it ended very...
The Biden administration’s vaccine passport scheme is just the teeny-tiny tip of a massive privacy invasion iceberg. A year ago this week, I began chronicling the worldwide weaponization of COVID-19 by big government and big business to trace and track the health data of untold hundreds of millions of human beings. Let’s review. In March...
In 2015 Michelle Malkin wrote a column, praising the wife of distinguished neurosurgeon and later Trump Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Ben Carson. Malkin appropriately designated her subject as the “anti-Michelle Obama.” Her description encapsulates some of the merits of Candy Carson, who graduated from Yale with a triple major in music, psychology, and pre-med,...
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...
Last week I invited my young neighbors, Becca and Sam, and their two little girls to supper. I prepared lasagna and salad, and Becca and Sam brought wine and freshly baked bread. After supper, the girls entertained themselves with the Lincoln Logs and Play-Mobile sets I keep handy for my grandchildren, and we adults passed...
“I’ve known Xi Jinping for a long time. … He doesn’t have a democratic—with a small ‘d’—bone in his body,” said Joe Biden in his first press conference as president, and then he ambled on: He’s one of the guys, like (Russian President Vladimir) Putin, who thinks that autocracy is the...
Even as COVID-19 vaccines keep rolling out in the millions, the fearmongering of the American media continues unabated. A recent CNN article instructs parents on “What to do if you’re vaccinated but your kids aren’t.” While the Pfizer vaccine is authorized for people 16 and older, the other vaccines are only approved for those 18...
“Our children need to learn more history and civics!” is a regular rallying cry for those who want to see America returned to its moral and common sense roots. That a greater emphasis on history and civics is needed is evident from The Nation’s Report Card, which finds only 24 percent of American high school seniors...
Two recent mass shootings in Atlanta, Georgia and Boulder, Colorado, have once again roused those whose goal is to destroy the Second Amendment. Before the bodies of the slain were buried, before the bereft were given even a day or two for grieving, these politicians and commentators were calling for new restrictions on gun ownership....
During a joint interview with Jens Stoltenberg, the Norwegian secretary-general of NATO, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, fresh from his bout with the Chinese in Anchorage, took on Angela Merkel and the Germans. Issue: Nord Stream 2, the Baltic Sea pipeline Vladimir Putin is building to complement his Nord Stream 1 and carry more natural...
After three weeks’ absence I am back with a piece untypical of my standard work: an attempt to reconstruct my battle with The Virus and the resulting double pneumonia. I took the first dose of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine upon returning to Belgrade following a three month absence. Booking it online at 48 hours’ notice was easy, and I chose the...
I remember once hearing someone who dealt with such things point out that there was one particular trait characterizing all cult religions: the lack of a sense of humor, not only with regard to others, but in relation to themselves as well. Cult religions, after all, are usually obsessed with one doctrine, to which all...
Recently The Michelle Obama Podcast revealed shocking information that should concern all white people. “When I’ve been completely incognito during the eight years in the White House, walking the dogs on the canal,” Obama explained, “people will come up and pet my dogs, but will not look me in the eye. They don’t know it’s me.” She further...
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...
In 2019, my then-fiancée and I met with our priest during the premarital counselling process. One of his questions was whether we wanted children. We said we did. That was good, he replied. If we didn’t, he would refuse to marry us. Although he would make exceptions for marriages beset by genetic, medical, or mental...
A recent survey found that more than one-third of Americans overestimate by as much as a factor of ten the probability a person with COVID-19 will require hospitalization. Researchers involved in the Franklin Templeton/Gallup study asked Americans in December what “percentage of people who have been infected by the coronavirus needed to be hospitalized.” The correct answer...
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...
A video of a white teacher from Loudon County, Virginia protesting the required Critical Race Theory (CRT) training for teachers is a highlight of Andrea Widburg’s article, “Maybe the pendulum is starting to swing on cancel culture.” Take one minute to watch this female fireball, and you’ll hear what so many of us are thinking but...
Our mainstream media largely ignored it, the world media did not. Ascending the stairs of Air Force One on Friday, to fly to Georgia, President Joe Biden slipped and stumbled. Getting up, he slipped again and then fell. The scene was jolting and disquieting. Adversaries abroad will use it as a metaphor for the decline...
A few billion years from now, the Sun will continue in its life cycle, become an expanding red giant, and most likely envelop the Earth. This spectacular solar smack-down should be no problem for humanity, however. We’ll have already met our demise, most likely via omnicide. Sound grim? Check out Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, a...
America’s Revolutionary Mind, by C. Bradley Thompson (Encounter Books; 584 pp., $32.99). Thompson’s examination of colonial America’s natural rights political culture and the effects of the Declaration’s oft-quoted passage about unalienable rights is not likely to please members of the traditional right, and as such I consider it required reading. Thompson presents copious evidence that those...
There is an advantage to being 70 years old, with no Twitter account, no interest in Facebook, no regular job, and no financial dependents. I can speak my mind. I refrain from pushing my politics on others, but if asked I will tell you I supported the Trump-Pence ticket and explain why. If asked my...
In recent days, various reporters have been turned away from the now infamous “George Floyd Square” as they tried to film or report from the scene. The area where Floyd died in May of 2020, setting off a chain reaction of riots across the country, has now become an autonomous, no-go zone, dangerous for any...
Asked bluntly by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos if he believes Russian President Vladimir Putin is “a killer,” Joe Biden answered, “Uh, I do.” Biden added that he once told Putin to his face that he had “no soul.” Biden also indicated that new sanctions would be imposed on Russia for the poisoning of dissident Alexei Navalny...
President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats have successfully passed the American Rescue Plan, with its $1,400 stimulus checks and its $1.9 trillion price tag. In total the federal government has now spent enough on COVID stimulus and relief to fund key moments in American history, such as world wars and moon landings, many times over....
Get a job. Get married. Have kids. Those seven words are part of the core message in Charles Murray’s The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead, a book I recommend to young people. Most of us have read these recommendations somewhere as a formula for a successful life, and conservatives in particular advocate this approach as the...
All of the presidents of the 21st century—Bush, Obama, Biden, and yes, even Donald Trump—seem a cut below the gravitas and statesmanship of the founding fathers. The first three were—and are—globalists, and as anyone with eyes can see, Joe Biden and his crew are busy taking a wrecking ball to our liberties. Regarding Donald Trump,...