I 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, … Continued
According 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 … Continued
Anti-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 … Continued
For 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 … Continued
In 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 … Continued
Let’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 … Continued
Crises, 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 … Continued
I 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 … Continued
Curves 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 … Continued
On 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 … Continued
