A Dozen-Plus Stimulants, Gathered for Your Edification and Inspiration
Dear Intelligent American,
Are the wheels coming off the bus in Gotham City? Here’s a New York Post headline: “Mob descends on NYC park for epic snowball fight—but scene turns chaotic as they torment cops.”
Maybe the era of nightsticks had its virtues. How can any city maintain civil society if its loud (and ideological) minority—as opposed to its silent majority (is there one?)—finds it permissible to assault its peace officers? Or if its elected leadership allows the homeless to freeze to death on the streets? Or lets those same streets become an archipelago of mini garbage dumps?
What’s happening seems not to be some phase, some societal hiccup. It seems ominous. Next stop: Detroit.
Who knew the lyrics—“a helluva town”—were really a prediction?
If You Came for the Excerpts, You Are in Luck
1. At Civitas Outlook, fan favorite Daniel J. Mahoney explains the importance of the late Norman Podhoretz. From the article:
Like many others of my generation, I admired and found inspiration in Podhoretz’s thoughtful and spirited defense of America, Israel, and Western civilization. More generally, I delighted in its most famous articles, such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s “The United States in Opposition” (March 1975) and Jeane J. Kirpatrick’s “Dictatorship and Double Standards” (November 1979), as they fearlessly spoke the truth about democracy, totalitarianism, and the realities of a world on fire. They stood out at a time when the intellectual class had collectively lost faith in America and the West and committed itself to an antinomian project of repudiation and negation whose bitter fruits we see all around us. Reading old issues of Commentary, one comes to see that our present discontents are by no means of recent origins. Far from it. The warning signs were already there and the rot had set in. However, far too many decent people were slow to wake up to the cultural revolution unfolding around them. They often became complicit in it without realizing their complicity. This despite the best efforts of Commentary and Norman Podhoretz.
As he himself put it, Podhoretz was “present at the creation” of both the New Left and of the most impressive and sustained resistance to it from old Cold War liberals and those so-called “neo-conservatives” who had the good fortune of being “mugged by reality.” In two arresting memoirs, Breaking Ranks (1982) and Ex-Friends (2000), he told the story of his break with a liberalism that had lost its soul and had come to aid and abet the enemies of civilization. As the titles indicate, this came at great personal cost. Along the way, though, he and his wife Midge Decter (herself a fearless thinker and gifted writer) made new friends and allies such as William F. Buckley, Jr., and Richard John Neuhaus.
2. At Saint Austin Review, Sean Fitzpatrick tilts at Don Quixote and finds a great Catholic character. From the essay:
Though Quixote often errs in his ideas—mistaking windmills for giants, sheep flocks for enemy armies, barber basins for mythical helmets, and strumpets for grand ladies—his ideals are always correct. Though his actions prove unreasonable in the last analysis, the faith behind them is reasonable, showing that the union of faith and reason can withstand the mistakes and the madness of imperfect creatures. Let it be said that this is not an excuse or an argument for error or irrationality, like a barrel of soul-buttering hogwash from Dickens’ sycophantic Mr. Skimpole.
Such unctuous apple-polishing has nothing to do with being quixotic, for being quixotic has nothing to do with being quaint or cracked. It means being committed to the epitomes of reality and the intrinsic indissolubility of faith and reason. It means being a lover of sublime truth and being unafraid to suffer for it. It means enduring rejection while rejoicing in the journey. It means using the imagination to clearly see and understand the divine subsisting in the things that have been made. To be quixotic is to be Catholic, as not only the life of the novel shows but also the life of its creator.
Though full of wonderful adventures and uproarious humor and magnificent romanticism, the story of Don Quixote is largely a story of failure—constant, discouraging, humiliating failure. Both in spite of this and due to this, there are perspectives that ren der the story of Don Quixote anything but a failure, for despite how many times he is bodily or mentally conquered, Don Quixote’s determination to do the good is never conquered.
We’ll Be Right Back After This Important Message . . .
Those nonprofit leaders and trustees who are contemplating a strategic plan—an actual one, or just the mere concept of such—should attend the free via-Zoom webinar (mark your calendar: Tuesday, March 10, from 3:00 to 4:00 p.m., Eastern) the Center for Civil Society will host in which Yours Truly will mine wisdom from strategic gurus James Davenport and Jason Lloyd. Want more information? Want to register? Of course you do: find all info, and sign up, right here.
We Now Return to Our Regular Programming . . .
3. At National Review, John Gustavsson reports on the growth of populism in Australia. From the beginning of the article:
Australia has long been immune to the populist, anti-immigration politics that have taken hold in much of the Western world. But that is now changing, with the populist right-wing One Nation party rising to 25 percent in the polls—an astonishing surge from the country’s election of nine months ago, when the party received around 6 percent of the vote. Still, the question remains: Can One Nation mature into a party ready for government?
One Nation is not the new kid on the block. After being founded on an anti-immigration platform in 1997 by first-term parliamentarian Pauline Hanson, One Nation performed surprisingly well in the elections the following year, scoring over 8 percent of the vote. After that, however, Australia’s right-wing Liberal-National Coalition government took decisive action to curb immigration. Policies included setting up offshore detention centers in Papua New Guinea, as well as on the isolated island nation of Nauru, where asylum seekers arriving by boat were housed while their cases were processed. . . .
It seems that Australia and One Nation are following a similar script to that of the Britain, where after a landslide defeat in 2024, the Conservative Party now finds itself trailing Nigel Farage’s Reform UK in the polls.
4. At RealClear Investigations, Joel Kotkin and Bheki Mahlobo share the news that there is a return to worship in America, especially among Gen Z men and the “highly educated.” From the beginning of the analysis:
The decline of religion remains a fundamental reality in most Western countries, particularly in Europe, where over 50% of those under age 40 do not identify with any faith. Even in more religious America, some estimate that as many as 100,000 churches will close in the near future. Meanwhile, the ranks of “Nones,” those outside religious communities, have grown so large that their numbers rival those of Catholics and evangelical Protestants.
Yet, as we document in a new report for the Chapman Center for Demographics and Policy, there are signs that religion is enjoying more than a nascent revival. Data emerging from the 2020s suggest that we are witnessing a complex spiritual restructuring that intersects with economic mobility, demographic resilience, and a profound intellectual realignment.
For the first time in decades, Pew Research notes, in the U.S. at least, Christianity has stopped its nosedive as more people begin to see the efficacy, and the rewards, of religious faith and practice.
5. At the American Enterprise Institute, Bruno Manno argues that “opportunity youth” need to be given clearer routes from learning to earning. From the study:
To better understand how to help these disconnected young people, it’s important to understand exactly who they are. One of the most important insights—often missed in politics and punditry—is that opportunity youth are not monolithic. Some care for family members. Some are recovering from trauma. Some have been pushed out of school. Some are working off the books or cycling through unstable jobs that don’t show up as steady employment.
RAND research points to two additional realities to sharpen the picture. First, many disconnected young people have at least a high school diploma, so boosting graduation rates alone will not solve disconnection. Second, place matters. Disconnection rates are higher in communities where fewer adult men are employed, underscoring that the on-ramp to disconnection is partly a neighborhood condition, not only an individual choice.
Notably, early warning signs indicate possible future disconnection for youth. School suspensions for males, early pregnancy for females, and documented special education needs are all risk factors for later disconnection. And such disconnection doesn’t fade with time, as an Educational Testing Service cohort study of millennials shows. Rather, in that study, disconnection rose as young adults aged, growing from 1 percent at age 18 to 5 percent at age 20 and 12 percent at age 26. Among those disconnected at 26, about two-thirds were actively job searching, while one-third had dropped out of the labor force.
6. At Providence Magazine, Elizabeth Edwards Spalding recalls how the “Iron Lady,” Margaret Thatcher, confronted socialism. From the article:
By dint of her family upbringing, Christian faith, and education, Thatcher lived by and championed individual liberty, personal responsibility and hard work, community rather than collectivism, free markets, and a limited state. She believed that Karl Marx and his heirs regarded socialism as a transitional stage on the way to full communism and thus meant the end of the West; she took on the most destructive political ideology yet created by man from the start of her career. “We believe in the freedom of the democratic way of life,” she wrote in her 1950 New Year’s Eve message as a first-time, prospective candidate for Parliament. “Communism seizes power by force, not by free choice of the people. . . . We must firstly believe in the Western way of life and serve it steadfastly. Secondly we must build up our fighting strength to be prepared to defend our ideals, for aggressive nations understand only the threat of force.”
Thatcher developed her core understanding about big-brother communism and little-sister socialism, as she honed her communication skills to educate supporters and counter opponents. Politics and economics were morally and consistently intertwined in her position. In a 1968 speech entitled “What’s Wrong with Politics,” Thatcher, while Conservative shadow minister for fuel and power, maintained that “[m]oney is not an end in itself,” and that “even the Good Samaritan had to have the money to help, otherwise he too would have had to pass on the other side.” In her view, communism and socialism—in their varying degrees—suffered from the same source problem of “too much,” too big, and too centralized government, which robbed the people of their right and ability to practice self-government.
7. At The Federalist, Joy Pullman shares that “Red State” promises to deliver pro-American history curricula have fallen short. From the piece:
In 2024, Iowa’s legislature passed a law requiring the state board of education to revamp K-12 history curriculum guidelines, known as “standards.” It demanded the resulting rewrite be “the best in America.”
Iowa’s Department of Education tasked a prominent diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) advocate to coordinate the rewrite, as The Federalist reported in 2025. The new curriculum map Iowa’s State Board of Education approved last month failed to fulfill Iowa voters’ desire and the legislature’s clear mandate for “a focus on United States history, government, founding philosophies and principles, important historical figures, western civilization, and civics.”
Instead, says the National Association of Scholars (NAS), Iowa’s history curriculum rewrite “still impose[s] on Iowa the politicized framework and counterproductive pedagogy of radical national organizations such as the National Council for the Social Studies and the American Institutes of Research (AIR).” AIR, the organization said in a 2021 press release, “has made a strong commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), and cultural and linguistic competence (CLC). . . . Staff at every level are engaged in intentional and comprehensive efforts to integrate DEI and CLC into every facet of AIR’s work.” Approximately half of states have multimillion-dollar contracts with AIR for testing and other services.
8. At Creed & Culture, J. Budzsizewski claws back at the delusion that humans can be reduced to mere animals. From the piece:
But we aren’t just animals. We are rational animals, our bodies ennobled by the possession of rational life. Rationality doesn’t mean that we always act for good reasons. The world is well stocked with fools. But unlike all other creatures, we always act not just on impulses, but for reasons. It doesn’t mean that we are clever—to some degree, many animals are clever—but that we are capable of deliberating our choices and of aspiring to the truth of things. In this, the rational animal is unique.
Disregard of human rationality provokes a variety of disturbing responses. One is to say that since we’re nothing but animals, we may as well live like them. The Bloodhound Gang became famous for chanting, “You and me baby ain’t nothin’ but mammals, so let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel.” Yet a human who proposes to live like the animals is doing something which could never enter an animal’s mind: To follow an idea of how to live.
Another response is to maintain that since there is nothing special about human beings, we are free to treat humans like animals—or even worse than those animals we think cute. For example, we shouldn’t experiment with laboratory bunnies, but we may experiment with tissue from aborted babies.
9. At Law & Liberty, Titus Techera reflects on the death of the great actor Robert Duvall, whose Lonesome Dove performance speaks to the greatness of America’s spaces and character. From the essay:
Lonesome Dove is a late ode to rugged individualism, to the virtues of the men who settled the West and tamed the land. They are, accordingly, half-savage themselves, and seem to be looking constantly for some sign of their own nobility of soul in the character of the land they inhabit, the only measure they can find in the wilderness. Gus refuses to stay with his long-lost love Clara (Anjelica Huston) in Ogallala, Nebraska, saying “I’d like to see one last place that ain’t settled before I take up the rockin’ chair.” This fantasy of Montana, brought to them by Spoon, is what got them going in the first place. Growing old sitting around is not for such adventurous men. It goes without saying, they’re really unmarriageable, too much on the road, too often in danger to give such hostages to fortune. Self-reliance turns out to require major sacrifices, love and family among them.
The company a man keeps is primarily his horse, which accordingly is very important in the series. We begin with Call breaking a horse; one of his ranch hands, Dish Boggett (D.B. Sweeney) gets into a fight with a Cavalry scout over the demand to requisition his horse; Gus and Call hang horse thieves by whipping their horses to run from under them, and eventually have to chase down a band of Indians who stole some of their horses, desperate for food. A horse makes the difference between life and death in the West just as surely as a gun does. It is a better fit for the land than a man is, although the horse needs the protection of armed men. But altogether, a cowboy seems to be something more than merely human, able to survive and even to thrive in a dangerous world—which wouldn’t be possible or tolerated in a civilized place.
10. More Movies: At A Pilgrim’s Progress on Substack, Jenna Stocker recounts her search for America. From the rumination:
What I saw and learned traveling the country from North Platte, Nebraska, to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, is that this is America just as much as New York City, Los Angeles, or Washington, D.C. I learned more about what it was to be an American and live in America on those trips than in any college lecture hall or pages of the New York Times or The Wall Street Journal. This was Mainstreet—U.S. Route 66 to put a finger on it. It was the Great Diagonal Way; “The Mother Road” as John Steinbeck called it in his 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath. It started in Chicago. The rolling 9-foot-wide single lane, 2,448-mile road wove itself into the landscape, reaching like an outstretched arm pointing the way to California. Santa Monica was where the road terminated, but it didn’t end the idyllic vision of millions of travelers who chased the sunset before they were forgotten beneath the night’s dark shroud. For Steinbeck, Route 66 more represented desperation than hope, more abandonment than rebuilding. He writes, “How can we live without our lives? How will we know it’s us without our past?”
But where Steinbeck eulogized the America of his Depression-era works, the period’s American Everyman personified hope and optimism. Will Rogers was that American archetype. Born in Oklahoma into the Cherokee Nation on his parents’ Dog Iron ranch, he understood the frontier. He experienced the oppressive poverty too prevalent in his Native community, but arguably most importantly, he believed America was an open road, leading to a life that was ultimately up to him. He became a vaudevillian, a radio star, actor, humorist, and commentator. By the early 1930s, he became one of the most popular actors in America. Unsurprisingly, his favorite director was John Ford, with whom he made three of the over seventy films in his career, Doctor Bull (1933), Judge Priest (1934), and Steamboat Round the Bend (1935). The pairing was a showcase of Americana: Rogers’ widespread appeal and representation of the self-deprecating common man and Ford’s gift of transfiguring American idealism into the passions and soul of the individual moviegoer. A political Democrat who was never defined by party labels, he befriended both presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge. He was at once Bob Hope, Andy Rooney, and Buffalo Bill Cody.
11. At The Frank Forum, Frank Filocomo finds civil society may come in filtered and menthol. From the piece:
A TikToker with the username @justpeers articulated the communitarian nature of cigarette smoking well: "Cigarette smokers," she says "are the only people I've ever interacted with who give with no expectation of receiving anything in return."
That is, if one smoker sees another without a cigarette in hand, they'll offer them one from their pack with no questions asked, and with no expectation of immediate reciprocity. It's just the right thing to do. They look out for each other.
One comment to the video read: "'Can I buy a cig off you?' absolutely not pls take two."
We'll have to start asking ourselves which is worse: the risks of depriving ourselves of human interaction and the fulfillment that comes with meaningful social connection, or the risks of drinking and smoking?
I am, needless to say, no doctor, and can't advise one way or the other. The question, though, still needs to be asked.
12. At Page Six, Audrey Rock reports on a Hollywood star using his fortune to pay the medical bills of random people. From the story:
Kunal Nayyar of “Big Bang Theory” has been quietly paying medical bills for random families in need.
“Money has given me greater freedom and the greatest gift is the ability to give back, to change people’s lives,” Nayyar said in a December 2025 interview with the iPaper, which has been going viral on X.
“We also support animal charities because we love dogs,” he added of himself and his wife, Neha Kapur. “But what I really love to do is go on GoFundMe at night and just pay random families’ medical bills. That’s my masked vigilante thing! So, no, money doesn’t feel like a burden. It feels like a grace from the universe.”
Nayyar explained that his fortune does not “weigh heavy” on him, as he’s able to donate to worthy causes anonymously.
Lucky 13. At Academic Questions, John Kainer lowers the boomer on the relational mindset propagandized at the university. From the piece:
From the perspective of critical theory and its offshoots, any characteristic that an author shares with an oppressor group is proof of guilt by association. These intellectual paradigms view Plato, for example, as a white man whose philosophizing was subsidized by Athenian slave labor. They cast Dante’s Inferno as little more than the repressive teachings of the Catholic Church given life as an allegory. They contend Thomas Aquinas viewed gluttony as the least serious of the seven deadly sins because he was overweight—presumably because he was a glutton. In other words, critical theory and its offshoots begin their study of the liberal arts by looking for reasons to write off the thinkers, writers, and artists in the Western liberal arts tradition.
The issue is compounded because intellectual paradigms that draw from critical theory and postmodernism conflate absence with injustice. Thus, the metric used to evaluate past thinkers is their alignment with the ideals of modern social justice. All past thinkers are, unsurprisingly, found wanting. This severs the relationship to the past. . . .
Our grandparents and parents, raised in a time very different from our own, are assumed to have nothing useful to tell us about our world today. Their views on our current cultural and political situation can be dismissed out of hand with a well-timed, “okay, boomer.” This despite the fact they lived through the changes that produced our current cultural milieu. So much for dialogue.
Bonus. At The Archdiocese of Baltimore, His Excellency William Lori positions America 250 as an opportunity to renew our political culture. From the pastoral letter:
The political crisis of our time is, at its root, a spiritual crisis. While the symptoms appear in our discourse, our institutions, and our communities, the deeper fracture lies within the human heart. We live in an age marked by distraction, cynicism, fear, and a sense of isolation that corrodes our capacity for communion. Many no longer share a common moral vocabulary; many struggle to articulate the meaning and purpose of their lives. ese wounds inevitably manifest themselves in the public square.
St. Augustine understood this dynamic with remarkable clarity. In the City of God, he describes two “cities”–not geographical locations, but spiritual orientations. e earthly city, he writes, is built upon self-love “to the point of contempt for God,”5 while the City of God is built upon the love of God “to the point of contempt for self.”6 orientations exist within each person, within every community, and within every age. Politics becomes disordered when the earthly city dominates–when the pursuit of power eclipses moral truth, when fear overrides charity, when parities and ideologies become idols.
Augustine did not propose withdrawal from public life. Instead, he called Christians to engage the earthly city with the virtues and hope of the City of God–anchored in eternal truth yet deeply committed to the welfare of their earthly communities. is is the spiritual task before us today. Our political atmosphere becomes toxic when souls become untethered from the love that grounds them. Healing the political crisis therefore requires tending to the spiritual crisis beneath it: the crisis of hope, identity, and communion.
Bonus Bonus. At Via Mediaevalis on Substack, Robert Keim—with Lent upon Christendom—discusses the practical realities of fasting. From the article:
Faith was almost universal in the Middle Ages; heroic sanctity was not. It is unwise to sever ourselves from the pious or penitential practices of the noble past by assuming, perhaps subconsciously, that modern bodies and souls just can’t do what medieval Christians did. Today I have attempted to briefly demonstrate that, generally speaking, the strict and extended fasts of the Middle Ages pose no threat to bodily health and will not lead to catastrophic weight loss or severe fatigue. Indeed, many people nowadays are fasting in a rather Lenten way simply because they want to improve their health, and we should be thankful that modern science is confirming ancient wisdom—namely, that fasting is one of the safest, most efficacious, and most widely applicable therapies in existence.
The information I’ve shared today is, in my life, neither a burden nor a guilt-trip. It is simply freedom: the freedom to skip a meal or two when eating is inconvenient; the freedom to help my body detoxify without spending any money; and yes, the freedom to fast as my medieval forebears did. In the eleventh century, the progenitor of the Keim family fled the world and lived as a goat-herding hermit in the Alps, and his son fought in the First Crusade. These sound like people who made fasting an important part of their life, and I’m glad that it can, in some small way, be a part of my life as well.
For the Good of the Cause
Uno. At Philanthropy Daily, Abby Taylor profiles nonprofits that are helping relieve the financial burden facing those with religious vocations. Read it here.
Due. More PD: Evan Holguin finds that Lent has prompted him to think about Saint Francis. Read it here.
Tre. Even More PD: Bruno Manno suggests six ways philanthropists can help restore “third places.” Read it here.
Quattro. At Catholic Philly, Brianna Dauby, expectant mom, tells of carrying her baby into Easter. Read it here.
Department of Bad Jokes
Q: What did Frosty become when he developed a six pack?
A: The Abdominal Snowman.
A Dios
What’s your light reading? There’s nothing whimsical on the nightstand in this house. OK, there is section of The Epoch Times (taunting with its “Super Sudoku”), but alongside are the Old Testament (there’s a lot of war and bloodshed going on, Saul and David), Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (the intersection of trauma and hope), and The Black Book of Communism (big, dramatic, detailed, and shocking, cataloguing barbarities of Marxist-Leninism and its never-ceasing depravities). Could all that be the reason for restless sleeping?
May Their Sufferings Not Have Been for Nought,
Jack Fowler, who wonders when one becomes too old to shovel, pondered while he checks emails sent to jfowler@amphil.com.
