The ongoing border crisis is all the various rotting fruits of contemporary American politics pureed together. A putrescence smoothie. It has a bit of everything, for those of you keeping a diet log at home: hydrocephalitic bureaucracies in the last fits of their dementia and government agencies selectively ignoring laws. It has NGOs diverting billions of dollars in US tax money towards initiatives hostile to the interests of US taxpayers. It has sloganeering protestors in the streets. It has militarized police making sure those protestors duly respect the boundaries of the designated “free speech zones.” There are also impotent state […]

Nursing, as I have, a lifelong dislike for the Beatles, I’ve never put much stock in the proposition that however many “million fans of _________ can’t be wrong.” That’s nonsense. Of course they can be wrong. They frequently are, especially if that millions-strong cohort of fans is comprised mostly of shrieking teenage girls. I do, however, put stock in a somewhat related proposition, which is that no one is wrong about everything, no matter how grotesque in general are their tastes and habits and opinions. Not even Beatles fans are wrong about everything. In the end, there’s probably something to […]

Miley Cyrus, circa 2008, was frequently described as “squeaky-clean.” That was her whole shtick, actually. Of course she went by the name Hannah Montana rather than Miley Cyrus, but her character was a hardworking country girl with “down home values” and a publicly-espoused relationship with Jesus Christ. She had long hair. She dressed conservatively (well, for a pop starlet). She was supposed to be wholesome, something of an antidote, perhaps, to the crass, hyper-sexualized Brittany Spears types that populated the music diva pantheon at the time. A little breath of fresh air wafting in from more pastoral climes. Five years […]

Conspiracy theorists get a pretty bum rap in popular parlance. Those loons. They’re a favorite target of politicians and TV talking heads alike, who like to pooh pooh their piddling concerns. (I mean so what if the White House can legally assassinate US citizens without a trial? Who gets worked up over something like that?) Hell, conspiracy theorists get a pretty bum rap in private parlance. They’re social pariahs. No one wants to get cornered by them at a party and hear yet another rant about the Federal Reserve. No one wants them to spoil a pleasant dinner out with […]

I remember reading somewhere that grandmaster chess players have a hard time articulating why they make the moves that they do in competitive, tournament play. They make brilliant moves, obviously, so it’s not like they’re just shuffling pieces across the board at random. Nevertheless, if you asked them, as a virtuoso of their craft, to chart up a “If X happens, then do Y” protocol for their world-class play, they couldn’t do it. No matter how many branches you granted them for their flowchart. No matter how many pages or illustrations you allotted for their how-to manual. I tried to […]

In honor of the inaugural celebration of Annual Write About Religion Week here at our internationally renown e-magazine, I thought I’d do just that: sit here and type up some of my thoughts on faith and identity. The problem with that plan, though, is that I have neither the expertise nor the vocation to preach on such topics with any sort of authority. But I hope you won’t hold that against me. Instead, for your part, you just take whatever haphazard theological propositions this post includes with the necessary grains of salt. I, for my part, will try to stick […]

There are plenty of critiques out there of the non-aggression principle from libertarian political theory. And there are plenty of rejoinders to those critiques, and counter-rejoinders to the rejoinders, and all manner of interminable internecine squabbling. The kind that always attends communities of intellectual types trying to work out the implementation of abstractions as pure as the NAP. All of these expositions and exchanges are out there at the click of your mouse and the tips of your typing fingers. (I realize that, for most folks, that’s all of your fingers, but your humble correspondent hunts and pecks with mostly […]

You don’t pass your beliefs down to the next generation of youngsters by dressing those beliefs up as whatever cause du jour is currently netting the most retweets on Twitter. That was the takeaway of my stroll down memory lane in last week’s post. And it doesn’t matter whether the traditional beliefs in question are a religion or just a commitment to sober, conservative governance, either. The point still stands. The very substance of tradition, in fact, consists of the upcoming generation learning to adopt the precepts, attitudes, worldviews of the generations that preceded it—not in the tailoring and retailoring […]

Every once in a while, you hear from some (probably well-intentioned) conservative strategist that we on the Right need to have ourselves a reality check. You hear that we’re in denial, that the ship has sailed on some particular issue—drug use, multiculturalism, homosexual marriage, immigration, pick one—and that the upcoming generation has already accepted it wholesale. The only thing to do, they’ll assure you, is to accept this uncomfortable truth and move on to more important issues, to battles that we can actually win. These would-be thought leaders of the Right don’t want us to seem out of touch. They’re […]

When you get down to it, the opportunistic “we” that I’ve been describing for the past couple weeks here isn’t the end-all-be-all of progressive discourse. Hope I haven’t implied such a claim. It’s really just one particular manifestation. Just one of the many strange varieties of doublespeak and mendacity that thrive in the bizarre, sprawling ecosystem of leftist rhetoric. But it is a typical example, a representative one in many senses. It’s been noted on this very site, as well as elsewhere in conservative circles, that progressives have consistently won the battles of the culture war on the power of […]