Crate Expectations

Dear Intelligent American,

Maybe it was all those years (long ago) as a delivery boy working on Tony’s fruit-and-vegetable truck—driving the streets of the Bronx and Yonkers selling to little old Italian and Irish ladies grapes, string beans, and potatoes (and, strangely, dresses, the hot kind, that happened to, errr, fall out of the back of other trucks—ifinya know, ya know),, while taking the occasional bet (“I’ll have three pounds of apples, a bunch of bananas, and two dollars on Sea Biscuit to win in the Fourth at Yonkers Raceway”—this was a full service trade)—that prompted an abiding affection for that lovely American art form: the fruit crate label.

Often they are picked to adorn Civil Thoughts when published on Philanthropy Daily, and there doesn’t seem to have been a theme or name or plan that hasn’t found itself highlighting a box of produce. Names? Pick one—how about “Buddy?” No problem: Buddy wants to sell you some apples. Native Americans? Cal Chief has pears by the boxcar. Pretty ladies? Glamour Girl’s got the veggies, while Tootsie has a load of grapefruits in her apron (she’s far less risqué than the lady selling melons). Space age? Rocket is flying your way to deliver Valencias. Christmas? Santa is hauling lemons. Patriotism? Bald eagles, Uncle Sam, Lady Liberty, Old Glory, and Honest Abe have you covered for all things juicy and nutritious.

This label-loving is apropos of nothing in the news, or from the front lines of our culture contretemps—chalk it up to a latent desire to visit that colorful intersection of commerce and art. Granted, that’s not something uniquely American—but boy oh boy (Andy Boy, Danny Boy, Frankie Boy, Jackie Boy—pick one, some, or all) did our parents and grandparents make a big and lovely deal of it.

 

Attend to the Bounty that Weekly Awaits

 

1. At the New York Post, Iseult White, grandchild of Amnesty International’s founder, spotlights the organization’s embrace of ideology. From the article:

Slogans like “sex work is work,” “trans women are women” and “I am who I say I am” become mantras chanted with a fervor bordering on the religious. For many years the halo effect accrued through their acknowledged good work has meant that they have not faced public scrutiny.

This fervor led to the bizarre situation Amnesty found itself in last month, denouncing Beira’s Place—a sexual-assault support center—as anti-rights. The group was founded and funded by J.K. Rowling to create a women-only space for survivors of sexual abuse and rape. It had to be created as The Edinburgh Rape Crisis Center failed to provide women-only services. The ERRC’s CEO at the time, a transgender woman named Mridul Wadhwa, had made headlines for saying rape survivors hoping for such spaces needed to “reframe their trauma” and be re-educated out of their bigotry.

By my count, about half of the 117 organizations identified by Amnesty, like Beira’s Place, believe that sex is material in law and policy. In general, they advocate for the right of LGB people to associate in single-sex spaces, the exclusion of males from women’s spaces, and the protection of the women’s category in sports. Some also challenge the lack of evidence and safeguarding in youth gender medicine. These are principled positions in a hotly contested public debate.

 

2. At The European Conservative, Juan Carlos Aguilera Pérez wonders if the Left will be consumed by identity politics. From the piece:

Ideas do not emerge spontaneously. They have a history. They develop gradually, shift their emphasis, adopt new vocabularies and, at times, produce consequences their original proponents never intended. This, arguably, is precisely what happened with the rise of woke ideology.

From the decades following the Second World War onward, an important current within the Left progressively shifted the centre of its intellectual attention. Economic questions ceased to occupy the exclusive focus they once had, giving way first to culture, then to language, and finally to identity. Social conflict was no longer understood primarily as class struggle but increasingly as a network of relations of domination extending into the family, education, sexuality, language, religion, and virtually every institution shaping common life.

A number of thinkers and intellectual movements played decisive roles in this transformation. Antonio Gramsci argued that cultural hegemony was as important as economic power. Various representatives of the Frankfurt School broadened social criticism beyond economic structures to encompass cultural and institutional life. Michel Foucault interpreted power as an omnipresent web of relationships permeating every dimension of society. Jacques Derrida transformed deconstruction into a method for reading all discourses. Judith Butler applied this logic to sexual identity, while Kimberlé Crenshaw developed intersectionality as a framework for understanding the convergence of multiple forms of discrimination.

 

3. At National Review, Charles C. W. Cooke stands athwart the divide between reality and nostalgia. From the beginning of the article:

Political types are often tempted to ascribe their opponents’ undesirable ideological positions to their being paid, evil, stupid, or in thrall in one way or another to a dastardly enemy lurking somewhere behind the scenes. This temptation is understandable but misguided. There are, indeed, a few among us whose commitments are the product of perfidy, ignorance, or greed, but mostly we remain infantry within what Thomas Sowell famously termed our “conflict of visions.” Why is it the case that, as Sowell put it, “the same familiar faces can be found glaring at each other from opposite sides of the political fence, again and again”? Because, he proposed, each side is animated by an opposite “sense of how the world works.” In consequence, Sowell concluded, the bulk of our contemporary political disagreements are the result not of varying exposure to the facts but of differing moral intuitions and value judgments.

Sowell was writing in the 1980s, and he focused on the divide between the left, which exhibits what he terms the “unconstrained vision,” and the right, which exhibits the “constrained vision.” To my mind, his work is as persuasive today as it was then, and it continues to explain many of the fault lines within our politics. Nevertheless, I might offer an addendum to his theory that I believe is of growing importance in our era: that, in addition to one’s view of human nature, the most potent predictor of one’s current political disposition is whether one is comfortable living in America as it actually exists in the year 2026 or one so resents the present for its many perceived failings that one wishes one had lived in an earlier time.

 

4. At The American Spectator, Anne Hendershott finds that Hannah Arendt’s views on totalitarianism remain very relevant. From the piece:

Societies under stress instinctively search for a group to blame—the surrogate victim who can absorb collective fear and frustration. Since Fauci was still viewed as authoritative and beyond criticism, and he continued to deceptively claim that the virus emerged spontaneously from a wet market in China, the blame for the continued COVID cases shifted to the unvaccinated, who became viewed as the real reason why normal life had not returned. The unvaccinated became the symbolic obstacle to reopening schools, churches, and businesses. Vaccination then became a marker of virtue. Declining the vaccine became a sign of selfishness or moral defect as the unvaccinated became social pariahs—the true scapegoats in our society.

Arendt reminds us that the constant revisions of official truth throughout the COVID crisis left citizens unable to judge at all. When arrogant authorities treat truth as flexible, and scapegoats are created from within our own families, friends, co-workers, and neighbors, to absorb public frustration, the conditions Arendt identified as precursors to totalitarianism emerge. We did not become a totalitarian society during those dark days, but Arendt shows how quickly democratic judgment can deteriorate when truth becomes second to political expediency. Her work resonates today because it teaches us to recognize the danger before societal divisions and fearful acquiescence to government power harden into something far more destructive.

 

5. At Gatestone Institute, Guy Millière explains that Europe is in a bad way. From the analysis:

These reactions unfortunately have not changed the terrifying fact that Europe's erasure as a civilization is underway. Europe is on a path toward rapid, widespread decline—potentially irreversible. It is already extremely late in the day. Unless drastic actions are taken to reverse firmly entrenched trends, European civilization, simply demographically, will soon be part of the past.

Economically, Europe is in ghastly shape. In 1980, the nine member states of the European Economic Community (today's 27-member European Union) accounted for approximately 27% of global GDP, according to the IMF. By the end of 2025, the figure for the same nine countries (plus the former East Germany) had fallen significantly to just 15.5% of global GDP. Some European economists explain this disparity by citing the rapid development of China and the East Asian nations. A look at the US economy, however, shatters that explanation: in 1980, the United States accounted for 25.3% of global GDP—less than the EU's share. By the end of 2025, the United States accounts for approximately 26% of global GDP—slightly more than in 1980.

For nearly five decades, the European Union's economic growth and productivity rates have lagged behind those of the United States. Statistics also show that the total general government tax revenue as a percentage of GDP has increased in almost all member countries of the European Union—a trend not seen in the United States. Today, general government tax revenue accounts, on average, for more than 40% of the European Union's total GDP. The figure for some countries is lower (22.4% for Ireland), but higher for several others: Denmark (45.8%), France (45.3%), Belgium (45.1%), and Italy (42.6%). The total general government tax revenue (federal, state, and local taxes plus social security) in the United States in 1980 was 25.6% of GDP. Today, it is still 25.6%. On average, populations in European Union countries pay far higher total taxes than Americans do, despite significant US investment in defense. The gap between the European Union and the United States has become immense.

 

6. At Comment Magazine, Brad East shares a photo essay of a French pilgrimage. From the piece:

The morning we awoke on Mont-Saint-Michel was a Sunday. Matthew was our trip planner—he’d sketched the whole trip more than a year prior; we simply nodded our heads to his itinerary—and he’d been keen to arrange our time in France around just this moment: worship on the mount with fellow pilgrims.

But before mass we toured the island in the light of day.

Mont-Saint-Michel, we learned to our surprise, is a popular destination for non-religious tourists. Its tiny streets are packed wall to wall with moneyed visitors looking for coastal beauty and architectural selfies. The shops are gaudy and filled with cheap trinkets. We had imagined monastic quiet and solitude. We got the opposite.

Nevertheless we were able to attend mass, which was said by a priest from the Monastic Fraternities of Jerusalem, a group that took leadership of religious services in the chapel only a few decades ago. Like so many Catholic sites in France, Mont-Saint-Michel was expropriated by the French Revolution and for a time converted to a prison. Too many such places exist now as memorials to their own seizure and desecration. Revolutionaries looted the relics of Saint Genevieve once held in the Église Saint-Étienne-du-Mont; rioting Protestants threw the bones of Saint Irenaeus into a river. Perhaps one reason Calvin lies buried in an unmarked grave is so that no one returns the favour.

 

7. At Public Discourse, Marianna Orlandi explains a study that finds young women to be sexually free but emotionally numb. From the report:

Between July 2025 and January 2026, our research team at the Austin Institute interviewed fifty-two unmarried men and women between the ages of twenty-four and thirty-five. We asked them questions about their families of origin, past and present romantic and sexual relationships, views on marriage and childbearing, and desires to settle down. Notwithstanding their diverse backgrounds and beliefs, our interviews of twenty-nine women revealed that this cohort keeps dreaming of the married life. More than two thirds of them stated it clearly: they want to be married at some point. “I think that’s important for me to grow up in a house [where parents] love each other and I would not want to have kids before getting married,” one woman said. In the words of a more traditional single woman, “marriage is also the stepping-stone to . . . building a family. And I do believe a lot in the institution of family, for sure, because of the safety and the belongingness that a family will provide.” Only one of them was clearly opposed to the idea of marriage, with the remaining six being ambivalent or unsure, but unwilling to rule out marriage entirely. The Austin Institute’s “Relationships in America 2025” nationally representative survey data offer a similar picture, with only 10 percent of young adult women strongly agreeing that “marriage is outdated.”

Though these women largely downplayed the importance of the marriage covenant, they seemed to be aware of the emotional, legal, and financial benefits attached to the legal contract. And they seem to welcome the prospect of this permanent bond and the personal and financial security it provides. (With the “the logistics of living in this world, it would also be very nice and helpful to get through it with someone,” one interviewee mentioned.) One participant voiced her desire for a prenuptial agreement as a preventive measure: “I would be happy with [a prenup], and I would honestly be the one to suggest it.” Having witnessed the distress that her parents’ divorce caused her family, she seemed to desire some security in the likely event her marriage would end; this was her implied belief (“I would 100 percent have a prenup just to make it easier,” she remarked). Another participant—polyamorous, nonbinary, and proudly unconventional—conceded, too, that she could still envision marrying her boyfriend, who she described as a potentially great father and “kind of more traditional than I am,” perhaps in a pagan wedding ceremony. Lastly, a lesbian woman said she would consider marriage too, though only in the next ten or fifteen years, and only if her partner wanted children.

 

8. At Law & Liberty, Luke Sheahan reflects on Robert Nisbet’s “neglected insights” on power. From the essay:

Nisbet provided an early and thorough account of the danger that war poses to the health of a traditional society. War always undermines social institutions. It does so because it plausibly claims the necessity of military power intruding into that of the kinship bond and every other non-military relationship. In the earliest societies organized by kinship, the first challenge to the authority of the paterfamilias and the materfamilias was that of the war chief. This pattern of intrusion is prominent in the twentieth century. President Woodrow Wilson’s “four-minute men” were authorized to interrupt any meeting in the country to make the case for war, and various legislative efforts to suppress private schools from teaching German were two of Nisbet’s favorite twentieth-century examples of the intrusion of the wartime community into the authority and relationships of the social realm.

In addition to the claim of necessity, war is imaginatively compelling. It provides a captivating vision of oneness that trumps the general mundaneness of other relationships and authority structures. In another of his works, The Social Philosophers, Nisbet wrote, “From the integrating effects of conflict . . . can and very often has come especially in the mass-based societies of the twentieth century, the sense—or illusion, as the case may be—of community.” The overwhelming sense of unity in community comes out of the solidarity of the military community itself. This exhilaration in community provided by the war community trumps any sense of community in family, town, occupation, or religion.

 

9. More L&L: Danton Kostandarithes heralds the great author of children’s literature, Thornton Burgess. From the essay:

Drawing upon his love of nature, Burgess used animals as the protagonists in his tales. Their trials and tribulations served as direct, poignant moral lessons for children. Unlike today’s children’s stories, Burgess’s teach distinct lessons about right and wrong, illustrating the baseness of envy, greed, narcissism, and dishonesty. There were no environmental or cultural circumstances to explain away bad behavior.

Through lively creatures, Burgess taught children that mean and selfish actions are morally wrong, but also part of nature. He did not urge them to become social activists or nurse grievances. For example, in “A Fisherman Robbed” (1919), the predatory King Eagle robs poor and hungry Plunger the Osprey of his hard-caught fish. An outraged and puzzled Peter Rabbit asks wise Jenny Wren to explain. “He isn’t kingly in his habits,” she states, “not the least bit. He never hesitates to rob those smaller than himself.” Yet she adds: “The best thing I can say of him is that he takes a mate for life and is loyal and true to her as long as he lives.” Thus Burgess notes that even a flawed animal (and implicitly a person) can have redeeming qualities. It’s a jarring contrast from the self-appointed judges of cancel culture.

Burgess also shows how people themselves are injured by their vices. An illustrative example of the wages of resentment and self-love would be “The Adventures of Danny Meadow Mouse” (1913). This story finds Danny weeping and feeling sorry for himself because his tail is too short. Burgess bluntly states that such fretting is “foolish” and that making yourself uneasy makes “everyone around you equally uncomfortable.” In other words, your self-absorption has an impact not just on you, but also on those around you. Burgess brought his characters to life with simple and candid self-admissions that any child who has envied a family member can relate to. “Mr. Toad,” sobs Danny, “how can I get a long tail like my cousin Whitefoot of the Green Forest?” Distracted by his self-pity and envying his cousin Whitefoot, who has a long tail, Danny nearly becomes the dinner of Old Whitetail, the Marsh Hawk, who is surveying the fields. “All because”, Burgess sternly wrote, “he was envious. It’s a bad, bad habit.” No extenuating circumstances are given.

 

10. At City Journal, Shawn Regan profiles the dystopian descent of Los Angeles. From the article:

Los Angeles’s Sixth Street Bridge was supposed to be a triumph. Completed in 2022 after years of delays and cost overruns, the new structure connecting Boyle Heights to downtown L.A. was hailed as a civic landmark. At $588 million, it was the most expensive bridge project in the city’s history. Its ten soaring arches and thousands of LED lights led its designers to call it the “Ribbon of Light.”

Today, the bridge is dark. Within months of its opening, thieves began tearing copper wire from its electrical infrastructure to sell for scrap. By one estimate, nearly seven miles of copper were stripped from the bridge, extinguishing what was meant to be its defining feature. The city’s new showpiece soon became a monument to broader civic dysfunction: deprived of its lighting, covered in graffiti, and dangerous for pedestrians. Despite repeated efforts to secure the electrical system, the thefts have continued. Officials now estimate that repairing and relighting the bridge in time for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics will cost $2.5 million.

 

11. At Plough Quarterly, theologian Adam LaSalle, blinded by a paternal bullet, tells of finding spiritual sight. From the reflection:

My father took things to extremes in other ways. Once Alex Haley, the author of Roots, was going to come tour the house and slave quarters. The night before, our father made us dust the dining room floor on our hands and knees. Each time we said we were done, he would take a flashlight and shine it parallel to the floor. If he saw any dust, he would berate us and tell us to do the whole floor over again.

But everything wasn’t bad. The empty hours between visitors gave me time to read countless books from my father’s substantial library. I devoured everything from Martin Luther King Jr., Winston Churchill, and Thomas Paine. My father was an intelligent, cultured man and his library reflected that.

Those books planted seeds in me that would eventually grow to help me see my father for who he really was, and to rise above what he did to me. In later years, as I reflected on my four and a half difficult years at Springfield, I became convinced that God was using those books, and several experiences during that season, to prepare me for the most difficult trial of my life, which was soon to come.

Although most people admired the beauty of the Springfield manor house, I preferred the landscape surrounding the house. Springfield was not a warm and inviting house to me, undoubtably because it was the epicenter of my abuse. Especially at night, the old two-story house felt quite eerie, nestled deep in the Mississippi woods where the nearest neighbor was five miles away. The spooky sensation became most intense on school nights around eleven. I’d stand nervously at the bottom of the staircase, hesitant, because about halfway up those stairs was a window opening onto the pitch-black of those vast, untamed woods surrounding the house. I would bolt past it as fast as I could, imagining fiery red demonic eyes watching me from outside. I hadn’t yet realized that the true monster was already inside the house.

 

12. At Zeale, William Nardi makes the case for Christian men being providers, prudent about life’s choices and obligations. From the article:

Regardless of the type of industry in which you work, men with families are called to humility and resourcefulness. If your calling does not pay enough to support your family, then you must become the kind of man who can supplement it. Consider that Saint Paul worked as a tentmaker while also doing full-time ministry.

No honest work is beneath you. Cultivate the virtue of industriousness. If you find that there isn’t enough work in one income stream, you may need to develop multiple ones. You should aim to make more than what you immediately need—not just to save for retirement, but to invest and build wealth you can pass down to the next generations. That may mean working multiple jobs or making money through side hustles.

At the same time, this does not mean you should reject all comfort or work yourself into exhaustion. Working so much that you become absent, resentful, or consumed by the pursuit of luxury is not the goal. The point is not to chase money endlessly but to provide well.

 

Lucky 13. At Commentary Magazine, Joseph Epstein reflects on turning ninety. From the piece:

“The happy man needs friends,” or so says Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle divides friendships into three kinds: friendships of utility, of pleasure, and those based on mutual love, with the last named the most complete kind of friendship. Spending time together and delighting in each other, he notes, “are thought to be the greatest marks of friendship.” For Aristotle, “two things that contribute greatly to friendship are a common upbringing and similarity of age.” He also thought that “it would seem actually impossible to be a great friend to many people” and set the number at six. Owing to death and dementia, I am now down to three such friends. In their company, our respective health has become one of our chief subjects of conversation.

Intellectually, I feel myself the last of the Mohicans. Surely I must be the last person alive who wrote for the now long-defunct English journal Encounter. I had relationships with the two Irvings, Kristol and Howe. Saul Bellow was my friend, and he introduced me to Edward Shils, who in turn introduced me to Arnaldo Momigliano, François Furet, H.R. Trevor-Roper, and other European scholars and intellectuals. Such people no longer walk the earth, and earth is poorer for their absence. So, of course, am I.

Then there are the many things I have lost interest in. Travel is high among them. Offer me free use of your apartment in Paris for the month of August, and I shall find a way of politely turning you down. Europe, once the center of culture, has lost all its allure for me. An Anglophile as a young man, I now view England, whose intellectual aristocracy lay behind my Anglophilia, as the nation of Sir Mick Jagger and Sir Elton John. France and Germany of the current day provide no figures of intellectual or artistic interest. Italy has good food and classical buildings, but that’s it. The Europe to which we provincial Americans once looked up now seems inhabited chiefly by men and women in Nike shirts and gym shoes. Should you need to be in touch, like as not you’ll find me at home.

 

Bonus. At Front Porch Republic, Joseph Palange reports, sans romanticizing, on an honest working-class day. From the piece:

He was famous for contorting the half hour we had for lunch—innovatively finding ways to double it. He would make an important personal call at 12:30, suggest he make a run to the supply shop at 11:30, head to the tool trailer at 11:40 only to never return, or sometimes simply feign negligence as if he had lost track of time. That ostensible negligence with which he watched the clock as it approached 12:30 was a tricky game though. He’d lose the excuse if the boss caught him and, like any other spent munition, would have to wait until a new one was manufactured. It can’t be the case that you’re accidentally late returning from lunch every time the superintendent shows up. He had to be seen working at 12:31 a few times first.

Worst of all was that working with him necessitated constantly babysitting his expectations because he seldom wanted to do what the work required. Thus, he fought me incessantly on every detail—all of which were essentially non-negotiable. Had I given in on any of them I would have gotten it worse from those in charge of us. “You don’t let a man like Tommy Keough direct the work,” I had been told once when he wore me down. It was as if every detail of the work was putting the man out. It was like asking someone to pick you up from the airport ten times a day. He huffed and berated my decision making and claimed I had no idea what I was doing. Even so it was mostly bluster, and he talked and worked with a smile on his face. The man loved me, and for all his faults I loved him too. When we were up against it and you could genuinely feel the weight of how important the work was and how tight time was, Tommy always came through for me. And over the years—and over 2x4s and whaler loops, and turnbuckles, and the magical substance that is hydraulic cement—I learned about the man.

 

For the Good of the Cause

Uno. At Philanthropy Daily, Abby Taylor reports on a vocation-supporting nonprofit that is making headway on social media. Read it here.

Due. More PD: Shaka Mitchell says Goodbye Dolly. Read it here.

Department of Bad Jokes

Q: Why was the abacus a good friend?

A: Because you could always count on it.

 

A Dios

The son now has a bride, so the family expands: three daughters-in-law, one son-in-law join the original quintet. Somehow the beloved interlopers have found the cheat codes (explaining endless Sponge Bob references, and embracing the familial patois, such as replacing “over” with “ogre,” as in “Dad when are you coming ogre?”—grrrrrr!) and fit in. Or, they are doing a pretty good imitation of such. Thanks for your prayers for the happy couple.

May We Be Unafraid to Place Worries at the Wounded Feet,

Jack Fowler, who can be reached at the virtual bunker via jfowler@amphil.com.

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