“I really wish this country would come into the middle,” Trump lawyer Michael van der Veen remarked on Fox News last month. “It’s so polarized on the Left and on the Right.” Van der Veen is not alone in this desire, expressed shortly after Trump’s second impeachment acquittal. Many commentators have noted that the country is “polarized”...
The other day I ran across a passage from That Hideous Strength which seems oddly applicable to our time. A dystopian novel written by C. S. Lewis at the close of World War II, That Hideous Strength finds one of its main characters, Mark Studdock, working for N.I.C.E., an organization which pulls the strings in a controlling, totalitarian society....
Friday, as the jury was being empaneled for the trial of fired police officer Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis City Council voted 13-0 to approve a record $27 million civil settlement with the family of George Floyd over his death in police custody. The jury will not likely miss this message sent by the city fathers: I.e.,...
A Somalian feminist and well-known critic of Islamic patriarchy, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, expressed the following critique of Black Lives Matter in an interview with the Hoover Institution last summer: What we are seeing now is this mishmash of people who call themselves Black Lives Matter have found the hook. They found a way of going about the...
The Biden administration is studying slavery reparations for African Americans. One of the prominent justifications for reparations is the racial income gap, and some proponents of reparations argue that wealth redistribution would put blacks on equal footing with white Americans. This analysis is misguided. A major reason for the racial income gap is the individual achievement...
Many thought that the government-imposed lockdowns of 2020 might result in a temporary reprieve of the United States’ falling birth rates. Unfortunately, it appears that this will not be the silver lining of COVID-19 after all. Economists Melissa Kearney and Philip Levine believe that there will be 300,000 “missing births” due to the pandemic, based on...
The “woke” crazies never quit. In the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen Mr. Potato Head attacked for his gender-bias and the Muppets “put into context” by Disney. Meanwhile, as Intellectual Takeout’s Annie Holmquist reports, the cancel culture mob is busy banning or assaulting other films and books. I believe there is a way to halt this...
Today, the four premier leaders of The Quad—the U.S., Australia, India, and Japan—conduct their first summit, by teleconference. The Quad, or Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, is an informal strategy forum of the major Indo-Pacific democracies that some wish to see evolve into an Asian NATO to contain China, as NATO contained the Soviet Union for 40...
One of the most prominent children’s book authors of the 20th century, Dr. Seuss, suffered a double blow to his legacy this month. His estate said they would no longer publish six of his children’s books that contained depictions of Africans and Asians that are “hurtful and wrong.” The Biden administration followed by unceremoniously dumping...
Before William Shakespeare there was Geoffrey Chaucer. The Bard borrowed at least one of his plots from his predecessor (“The Two Noble Kinsmen,” was based on the “Knight’s Tale”). Both English greats were, it could be said, refashioning Homer’s Shield of Achilles as they painted elaborate portraits of their entire societies, from the lowliest corners to...
Biden administration health official Rochelle Walensky announced Monday that vaccinated Americans can visit with others who are vaccinated in small groups at home. But when Walensky was asked about visiting grandchildren, she said no, unless the kids are local. Even vaccinated people must avoid traveling. “Every time there’s a surge in travel, we have a...
In the February 2021 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, Professor Mark Brennan declares, “My students look at me in amazement when I tell them I read 8 to 10 hours per day. I look at them in amazement when they tell me they play video games 16 hours straight.” Brennan then went on...
The general feminization of Western society has had many negative effects, not least of which is the poisoning of intellectual discourse. Research shows that men tend to act as warriors, who emphasize winning and proving points; women tend to be empathetic, and place far greater value on people’s feelings. But feelings have no business in academia. Intellectuals should...
During a Democratic debate in 2020, the candidates were asked if their health care plans would cover “undocumented immigrants.” Each raised his or her hand, including front-runner Joe Biden. From that stage, the message went forth: If the Democrats win this election, then it is amnesty for all and open borders in America. The message was...
Oprah Winfrey’s much anticipated interview with Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, has now hit the airwaves, causing a stir on both sides of the pond. On the surface, the big takeaways from the interview revolve around politically correct buzzwords. “Racism” appears with sirens and flashing red lights upon the revelation that...
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...
“That attack, that siege” of the Capitol, FBI Director Chris Wray told Congress, “was criminal behavior, plain and simple, and it was behavior we at the FBI view as domestic terrorism.” “Domestic terrorism,” said Wray, echoing his boss. For what had been President-elect Joe Biden’s reaction to the Capitol riot? “Don’t dare...
We’re only a few months beyond the turn of the calendar and already I have a candidate for the word of the year: Censorship. Examples are proliferating at such a fast rate that it seems like a game of whac-a-mole just to keep up with all of them. A few of the most recent include:...
Someone’s head must have rolled at the Aspen Institute when Anand Giridharadas’ book came out. Giridharadas didn’t miss a rung as he climbed the American establishment’s social ladder: born in Shaker Heights, schooled at Sidwell Friends, the University of Michigan, and Harvard, employed at McKinsey, the International Herald Tribune, and The New York Times, and mic’d up...
With reparations, there is the issue of who pays. Do African countries owe reparations to Black Americans? After all, Harvard’s director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Henry Louis Gates, wrote that 90 percent of those enslaved and shipped to the New World were sold by Africans to European slavers. All...
CNN’s recent criticism of the reopening of Texas and Mississippi has once again proven its journalists merely engage in partisan coverage. This time it is accompanied by the added demerit of not understanding the nuances of federalism in America’s governance. With Govs. Greg Abbott and Tate Reeves both deciding it is high time to re-open...
In a recent article for Intellectual Takeout, I looked at possible explanations for an apparent decline in IQ averages in Europe and America. Since then, I have begun to wonder whether this drop in intelligence might play a part in some of the goofy programs coming out of Washington D.C. of late, and in our inability to exchange...
The other day I was sent an Instagram video of a little boy having story time on his mother’s lap. The little boy was precious, the time spent on his mother’s lap special, but the choice of reading material was… “woke.” The selected story was The GayBCs by M. L. Web. “A is for Ally,” repeated the little boy,...
Thursday, in its first military action, the Biden Pentagon sent two U.S. F-15Es to strike targets of Kataib Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed Iraqi militia just inside the eastern border of Syria. The U.S. strikes were in retaliation for a missile attack on a U.S. base in Irbil, capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, which killed a contractor and...
Recent broadsides from the French government, and most conspicuously from French President Emmanuel Macron, against the American woke Left and U.S. cancel culture drew a mixed reaction from me. Frankly, I find no reason as a European historian to believe that French journalists and academics are any less infected than our own with political correctness....
It didn’t take long. Barely five weeks after assuming control, the new foreign policy team in Washington confirmed its interventionist credentials by bombing “Iran-backed militias” in Syria. The “defensive precision strike” on Feb. 26, according to the Pentagon statement, was supposed to send “an unambiguous message” that, acting to protect American and Coalition personnel, “we have acted in...
This week I celebrated my 70th birthday. I like the sound of 70. In terms of human years that number seems possessed of dignity and wisdom, and though I may lack both attributes, 70 provides a façade leading others to think that age has endowed me with these prizes. Regardless, I have reached the age when...
Nearly every Wednesday night for the past seven years I’ve watched Married at First Sight, a reality show which finds expertly matched couples meeting each other at the altar. My wife finds it inexpressibly tasteless, and two of my daughters who watched it with me, each once, expressed irritation that I made them sit through...
I was a sheltered white girl working my way through my teen years, when circumstances suddenly threw me into regular contact with minority children and families in inner city Minneapolis. Although it was a bit of a culture shock and sometimes difficult, I quickly grew to love the time I spent teaching, talking with, and...
“I don’t know if he’ll run in 2024 or not. But if he does, I’m pretty sure he will win the nomination.” So says Mitt Romney, the sole Republican senator to have voted twice to convict President Donald J. Trump of impeachable acts. But is it possible Trump could win the nomination in 2024? What...
Most readers upon seeing the title of this article likely thought, “Well duh.” However, The New York Times opinion page apparently needs a reminder of this basic fact of metaphysics, as philosophy professor Crispin Sartwell argues that this idea is “a good candidate for the originating idea of Western thought. And a good candidate for the worst.” There is...
Sitting in a pew last summer, waiting for a small funeral service to start, I saw a young woman walk to the podium and begin to speak. To my surprise, she introduced herself as the minister who would be conducting the service, and then she began to lead those gathered to remember the departed through...
Sicily ’43: The First Assault on Fortress Europe, by James Holland (Atlantic Monthly Press; 599 pp., $30.00). By 1943, Hitler, given to paranoia and dreading loss of his North African outpost, had become obsessed with territory north of the Mediterranean out of concern that the Allies would gain a foothold in Sicily. With little confidence in...
Back in the 1990s, I was a Sunday school teacher, a member of my parish council, a small-business owner, and a leader in my sons’ Cub Scout pack. I even put in a year coaching five-year-olds in soccer, though what I knew about the sport could have been penned on a “Sticky Note,” one of...
Catholic & Identitarian, by Julien Langella (Arktos Media; 338 pp., $38.95). French commando Dominique Venner committed suicide inside Notre-Dame Cathedral in 2013 as an act of protest against unrestricted Islamic immigration. One cannot but censure Venner’s sacrilegious act. Yet, calling attention to the existential threat to the West in general and France in particular is a...
A smile came to my face as I drove past a school this morning. No longer was it a desolate ghost town; instead, I had to navigate a long line of cars and buses waiting to turn into the parking lot to drop children off. While it’s good to see kids going back to school,...
“What is America’s mission?” is a question that has been debated since George Washington’s Farewell Address in 1797. At last week’s Munich Security Conference, President Joe Biden laid out his vision as to what is America’s mission. And the contrast with the mission enunciated by George W. Bush in his second inaugural could not have...
Don’t look now, but a serious conflict is brewing with China, infinitely more dangerous than anything regarding Russia or Iran. The problem? China may have developed the ability to militarily defeat the United States and control the Far East. “U.S. policy between the end of the Cold War and 2017,” former Trump National Security Advisor H. R....
This week an older reader, Ed, sent me an email lamenting the current state of education in our country. He gave several examples, including “I remember when I was about nine years old, my dad who didn’t finish the Sixth Grade had to help my brother with Eighth Grade spelling.” Ed’s email took me back...
History—be it that of 1619, or 1776, or some other significant year or event—is often abused in this day and age. One of the latest victims of such historical misrepresentation are the Spartans, whom Lee Smith in a column for Tablet treats rather unfairly. Smith describes the blood-curdling behavior of the antidemocratic Spartans at the end of...
“I’m so glad to be back in the classroom!” a young high school student told me the other day. Her enthusiasm is understandable. As one of the first students to get back to some form of normalcy in public schooling, she’s probably the envy of many others who want to be in person with their...
Is President Joe Biden prepared to preside over the worst U.S. strategic defeat since the fall of Saigon in 1975? For that may be what’s at stake if Biden follows through on the 2020 peace deal with the Taliban to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by May 1—just two months from now. ...
Rush Limbaugh passed away on Ash Wednesday at age 70. I heard that news on the radio after leaving noon services at my church. At first, I felt a profound sadness and a touch of anger. The past year has thrown a barrage of punches at Americans. For those who loved Limbaugh’s program—I only listened...
Germany’s defeat in World War II was accelerated by Hitler’s unwillingness to accept reports at odds with his increasingly fantastical view of reality. His self-deceptions were believed with such firmness that, by mid-1944, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel concluded that the Führer was living in a Wolkenkuckucksheim (“cloud cuckoo land”). The same diagnosis applies to the establishment Right, both in...
Apparently one major problem facing the mainstream media today is the lack of editorial and political cartoonists from diverse backgrounds. In the wake of the successful transition to a Biden-Harris presidency, The Washington Post recently interviewed a number of female and minority cartoonists to get their perspective on this pressing cultural issue. “Fewer than 30 staff newspaper jobs...
In C.S. Lewis’s novel about totalitarianism, That Hideous Strength, we find this line, “Qui verbum Dei contempserunt, eis auferetur etiam verbum hominis,” which translates, “They that have despised the word of God, from them shall the word of man also be taken away.” This line occurs in a passage during which an elite who dreamed...
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...
Twenty years ago, when I was pregnant with my first child, I transformed into a total health nut. A lifelong couch potato, I started exercising, enrolled in Lamaze classes and even took vitamins for the first time. I halted my consumption of caffeine, Doritos, Spam, and sushi. After decades of obliviousness to food labels, I...
“Our historic, patriotic and beautiful movement to Make America Great Again has only just begun.” So said Citizen Trump Saturday on his acquittal by the Senate of the impeachment article of “incitement of insurrection” in the Jan. 6 invasion of the Capitol. “I look forward to continuing our incredible journey together...
[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...