A Dozen-Plus Stimulants, Gathered for Your Edification and Inspiration
Dear Intelligent American,
Certain summers—1968 and 2020—come to mind as disruptive and chaotic, as settings of political conventions and riots and looting, of statue toppling and gunshots and cancellations. But other years proved more tender, especially from youth. Ahh, those happy, dredged memories of baseball games squeaking on transistor radios on hot, cicada-serenading nights, following days spent playing endless sweaty games at Indian Field in Van Cortlandt Park.
Two summers in particular were special, for different reasons. Patriotism was on full display in 1976—the “Tall Ships” visited ports as part of “Operation Sail,” and “Bicentennial Minutes” were pervasive in our TV culture. We were aware that there was something special to celebrate. Yes, Mr. Greenwood, we were proud to be Americans. The summer of 1977 left harsher memories in the Big Apple: There was an infamous blackout that unleashed widespread looting, while the hunt for the murderous Son of Sam escalated neighborhood fears (typical stoop scuttlebutt: “I hoid he’s gonna kill someone tahnight in the 47th precinct”).
Will the summer of 2026 pass calmly (and patriotically)? Will there be hot fun as Sly and his suggested? Or will your town be so hot—bullied by a heat wave perhaps—that the people will be looking half dead when they’re not dancin’ in the streets? Whatever the Fahrenheit, try to enjoy the days and nights ahead . . . and get your flags flying all you ‘Murcans!
On Your Mark. Get Set. Read!
1. At City Journal, Luke Burgis proclaims the need to belong. From the essay:
D.C. long ago abandoned any serious effort to police the dirt-bike gangs that have seized many of its streets. Chasing them, the reasoning goes, is too dangerous—for officers, riders, and bystanders alike. So the gangs have grown increasingly emboldened, popping wheelies down residential blocks where kids play. The riders have learned that there is strength in numbers: reach a critical mass, and no one will stop you.
Humans have formed tribes for as long as we have kept records. One reason is safety; another is community. Few members of a dirt-bike gang likely woke up one morning with a sudden passion for riding. It is an acquired hobby, embraced by young men desperate for something to belong to. As much as I dislike these gangs—and as much as I blame them for the bullets that struck my home—they are symptomatic of a broader problem: the erosion of the small, meaningful associations through which people once bonded, not to race through the streets, but to inhabit them.
We need intermediary institutions of civic association, as the sociologist Robert Nisbet understood three-quarters of a century ago. That a new-mothers group chat was the only “institution” that helped us find an answer suggests how much thicker forms of association have declined. In place of the hunting club, the cooking club, the card table, or the Elks Lodge, we have group chats, from which we expect a sense of community they were never designed to provide. The more associations move online, the more our skills of real association erode.
2. More CJ: James Piereson concludes we are all of us living in Milton Friedman’s world. From the piece:
In history courses, some of us read Keynes’s Economic Consequences of the Peace, his critique of the Treaty of Versailles. His theories about aggregate demand, fiscal policy, and government borrowing both explained the Great Depression and pointed to ways out of it. His successors reasoned that if fiscal policy can get us out of depressions, then it can prevent them in the first place—a significant leap from that premise, and one that has caused much damage, including, today, a $40 trillion government debt and the long-term erosion in the value of the dollar.
Friedman, along with his coauthor, Anna Schwartz, offered an alternative to this doctrine in their 1963 volume A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960, albeit without directly attacking Keynes or his followers. This remarkable work, for which Friedman was cited by the Nobel Prize committee, established several important themes that were fundamental to economic and financial debates in the modern era.
The authors demonstrated, for example, that a contraction in the money supply had preceded nearly every recession during that era. Perhaps more importantly, the authors, citing historical data, showed that there is no regular connection between economic expansion and rising prices, in contradiction to the widely held view that there is a trade-off between economic growth and inflation. The Great Depression, they showed, was due to the misguided policies of the Federal Reserve Board. The governors of the Federal Reserve, whose members were deadlocked about what they should do to stem the recession that began after the stock market crash in 1929, allowed the money supply to collapse between 1930 and 1932, thereby turning a recession into a full-fledged depression. The book also established the principle for which Friedman is widely known, namely, that inflation and deflation are always and everywhere monetary phenomena, caused by excesses or deficiencies in money supply.
3. At Law & Liberty, Daniel Dreisbach celebrates the semiquincentennial of the Virginia Declaration of Rights. From the essay:
In summary, the Declaration has sixteen articles setting forth the essential principles of republicanism—namely, that power is vested in and derived from the people and exercised through their duly elected representatives. It recognizes the inalienable right of “a majority of the community . . . to reform, alter, or abolish” any government that fails to provide “for the common benefit, protection, and security of the people, nation, or community”; separates the state’s “Legislative and Executive powers” from the “Judiciary”; and disallows taxation or the deprivation of private property for public uses without consent of the people or their representatives. It affirms due process of law, borrowing language from Magna Carta. It also enumerates, among other things, the rights of criminal defendants to be informed of accusations and “to a speedy trial by an impartial jury,” allows for the privilege against self-incrimination, and prohibits “cruel and unusual punishments” and unreasonable searches and seizures. It also protects the “freedom of the Press” and “free exercise of religion.”
The genius of the Virginia Declaration is not that it expressed original principles; rather, it distilled and harmonized the republican sentiments of the day, brilliantly summarizing the objectives of those Americans who aspired to be independent and self-governing. With remarkable brevity, it condensed the great principles of liberty derived from English common law and constitutionalism, including principles extracted from Magna Carta (1215), Petition of Right (1628), English Bill of Rights (1689), and the constitutional settlement of the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89. It combined a commitment to fundamental liberties with a brief expression of political and constitutional ideas expounded by Locke, Montesquieu, and others.
4. At Comment Magazine, Steven Kurutz returns to the old neighborhood on the day of its demolition. From the article:
Ever since I’d learned about the condemned houses, I had been thinking about the people who had lived in them, and for the same reason I hung a postcard of Hyner View State Park on the refrigerator in my apartment and subscribed by mail to The Record, clipping the obituaries of old acquaintances. At midlife, I had come to understand that leaving this tiny Appalachian town had been the most consequential act of my life. I still felt a strong pull back there.
Ontario Avenue was my street, my neighbourhood. The patchwork of row houses and fenced-in backyards was indistinguishable in my mind from childhood itself. And now they were going.
Around nine o’clock, a dump truck rumbled down the street. Three orange-vested men arrived in a pickup, followed by the foreman in his hard hat, barking orders. Finally, an excavator, moving on steel tracks, creaked into view. The yellow cab was rust-speckled, and its extending arm and bucket reached like a huge arthritic claw.
With the sky clouding over, I joined the crowd of onlookers now gathered in the street. The site of workers and machinery, if only to tear something down, provided some excitement. I stood beside Bees O’Brien, a childhood friend who had grown up in the last house of the condemned row. His mother, Patty, who raised five children in that small house, was watching with tears from across the street. The foreman struck Mary Lee’s front door with a sledgehammer, breaking his way in. The crewmen followed. The foreman soon re-emerged, cranked up a chainsaw and cut the saplings that had taken root along the brick foundation. When the brush was cleared and Mary Lee’s basement windows were again visible, the foreman, holding the sledgehammer again, reared back and smashed them out.
5. At Reason Magazine, Stephanie Slade explores the blending of liberalism and religion that spawned the American republic. From the essay:
Tocqueville went on to report that American clergymen took "a kind of professional pride" in standing aloof from politics. Like Madison before them, they realized that calling upon the coercive power of the state for spiritual purposes would jeopardize the church's credibility in the long run. "We have seen religions, intimately united with the governments of the earth, dominate souls by terror and by faith at the same time," Tocqueville wrote. "But when a religion contracts such an alliance…it sacrifices the future with the present in mind, and by obtaining a power that is not its due, it puts its legitimate power at risk."
It wasn't just prudence or pragmatism, though, that led people of faith to resist the allure of imposing their religious views on society through the force of law. The Judeo-Christian tradition had introduced the idea of moral equality, viewing every human person, regardless of social status, as created in the image of God and possessing an inestimable moral worth. Since we're blessed with free will, we have both the duty to strive toward excellence and the right not to be coercively interfered with in that pursuit.
The unfolding of these ideas over time called into question the whole notion of rulers and subjects. When Thomas Jefferson declared that "all men are created equal" and "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights," he was drawing a causal link between the teachings of the Bible and political liberalism. The Founders established a constitutional order with robust protections for individual freedom and a foundational commitment to consent of the governed—incarnating to the best of their ability the spirit of liberty—because they were steeped in the spirit of religion.
6. At Quillette, Jonathan Kay umpires the mix of Major League Baseball and “Pride” uniforms. From the piece:
Amid all the brightly coloured balloons, it’s easy to know which version of Pride the Blue Jays are promoting at their Pride events—the sunny, upbeat, inclusive version that we all fondly remember. Very few people I know, progressive or conservative, have any problem with that type of Pride. But when an athlete (or anyone, in fact) is instructed to wear a generic Pride badge, the branding is more ambiguous. You don’t have to be a religious Christian (or, indeed, a Russian) to be wary of a symbol that may be seen as connecting you to a radicalised “queer“ political movement that even many mainstream gay and lesbian activists now denounce as alienating and misguided. . . .
Then. . . there’s the case of the San Francisco Giants. On 12 June, the Giants held what they called a “celebration of Pride and the LGBTQIA+ community,” which took place before the day’s scheduled game against the Chicago Cubs. In a city where one in six people identify as some flavour of LGB or T, that makes good marketing sense. But the team took things too far, and supplied the players themselves with rainbow-themed Giants hats to wear during the game, thereby turning their bodies into Pride props.
Three (evidently) religious members of the Giants’ pitching staff—starter Landen Roupp, plus relievers JT Brubaker and Ryan Walker, all of whom pitched in the game—protested by writing citations to Biblical verses on the caps—Genesis 9:12-16, which has become the go-to scriptural reference in this sort of situation (for reasons explained here).
7. At The Christian Post, Darcy Olsen explains the federal “Fostering the Future Accounts,” and how this July 4th has special meaning for kids aging out of foster care. From the piece:
We already know how the story ends for children who grow up in the system. More than 20,000 young people age out of foster care every year with no family, no home, and no money. As a result, these young adults face harrowing rates of suicide, homelessness, trafficking, and incarceration.
These outcomes are not mysterious. When teens leave state custody penniless and alone, tragedy is not surprising. It is predictable.
When the state removes a child from their home, it takes on a parent’s responsibilities, including preparing that child for adulthood. Decade after decade, the state has failed and failed badly. These children deserve more than a mattress and a case number. This new initiative offers genuine change.
Consider what an account could mean for a child.
8. At National Review, Kathryn Jean Lopez asks why England seems to be suicidal. From the piece:
A woman feels pressured to abort her unborn baby. She gets help to make another choice, but every single doctor appointment can be a continuing danger to the child’s life.
That’s right. The doctor is pushing death. And even if he isn’t actively doing so, just by continuing to note it’s an option is additional pressure.
(And on the pushing death point: I’ve had the general situation described to me as a “search and destroy” mission, at its worst. And I wish the worst weren’t so common, but in places like, say, New York, it is the norm.)
Why would we advocate for—or fall into, skipping over debate—more death, more pressure to encourage people to give up on life? And, yes, at the same time when in other contexts we put resources toward saving people’s lives—specifically, trying to keep people from suicide? The best anti-suicide campaign isn’t going to work if the law is saying it’s sometimes the smart or merciful or healthy thing to do—and according to the doctors!
9. At The New York Post, Howard Husock bets against excessive lottery advertising. From the piece:
A mayor who is truly concerned about the poor would be urging the state to stop tempting them with illusion-based ads to spend their money foolishly on what amounts to a regressive tax.
“Every New York Lottery ticket represents a world of possibility,” asserted New York State Gaming Commission Chair Brian O’Dwyer in rolling out the “Can You Imagine?” campaign. In reality, each ticket. leads to a high probability: that a low-income household will waste its paycheck.
Per the Tax Foundation, the lowest-income taxpayers spend three times as much on lottery tickets as those of higher incomes. As a study based on University of Chicago research found, “40 million households are habitual players, mostly in the lowest quartile of household income.” They spend an average of $2,500 a year, spending that “often represents a material fraction of their discretionary income.”
10. At Tablet Magazine, Vickie Paladino scores the scheme of New York City’s mayor to confiscate housing and hand such to allied nonprofits. From the analysis:
First and foremost, Mamdani will unleash Cea Weaver, the commissar of his Office to Protect Tenants, along with Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) “organizers,” with the full institutional and legal support of the city government to ramp up tenant complaints in targeted buildings. No complaint will be too small. No building will be too small. Full-scale demagoguery will ensue, complete with protests, rent strikes, street theater, and harassment of property owners.
Accordingly, the city’s Department of Buildings will be weaponized to begin writing as many violations as possible in order to bolster the city’s effort to justify a seizure. Mamdani has called them “roof to cellar” inspections, and the purpose is clear: to violate landlords out of their properties. It won’t matter how small or large the violations are; the total number will be breathlessly cited as evidence of mismanagement, making it impossible for landlords to clear them. In fact, the landlord will be lucky to walk away without doing time or being beaten to death in the street by an angry mob. (As Mamdani’s buddy Hasan Piker referred to landlords, “Let the streets run red with their capitalist blood.”)
The combination of a weaponized buildings department writing hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines, rent strikes, and constant threats and harassment against landlords by militant activists backed by the mayor’s own cadre of paid activist organizers will make the situation untenable for any property owner to realistically fight back. That’s entirely by design. The city would then seize the property.
11. At Plough Quarterly, Hannah Long ponders the reasons for visiting historic and hallowed places. From the essay:
Anyway, the solution to hagiography is not less study of history but more. A closer regard for historical detail may give one the ability to mythmake with more verve, but it’s just as likely to disrupt pat narratives of heroes and villains. That same weekend that my family went to Monticello, we also visited Appomattox. The location of the Civil War’s most famous surrender is a simple house in the middle of a flat field and looks like pretty much every other place in central Virginia. The courthouse is surrounded by a few other ordinary farmhouses. It’s unassuming. But it was the location of the last hurrah of the old world—of Thomas Jefferson’s world. Robert E. Lee walked into the room in full uniform, dressed to the nines, his sword ready to surrender.
Ulysses S. Grant hadn’t expected the meeting to happen this soon, so he arrived in what he called “rough garb,” the uniform of a private with “the straps of a lieutenant-general,” dropped off his horse and galumphed into the room, a true plebeian. Lee surrendered to the scruffy little Westerner, a man who some five years before had been selling firewood on the streets of St. Louis to bail his family out of debt.
Before the surrender, Lee greeted Native American Union officer Ely S. Parker with the quip, “I am glad to see one real American here.” Parker replied, “We are all Americans.”
How is one to interpret this exchange? Fitting it into our modern discourse is impossible. Is Lee self-deprecatingly dismissing the squabbles of a white nation of interlopers? Is he the true progressive, elevating the victimized out-group? And yet, surely this is a hypocritical posture given his fight for the nation of slavers. Or should we question Parker’s response—brushing race aside as a hallmark of “real” Americans, and welcoming back the Confederate rebels? It’s a fantastically pithy exchange, but it doesn’t really give modern readers an easy punchline with which to whip their opponents.
12. At The Daily Yonder, Astra Lincoln reports on a rural Idaho cat-astrophe. From the article:
On Huff’s lead, I went down to the river. There were hidey-holes everywhere, and the ambient air temperature felt fifteen degrees cooler—prime conditions for a cat-nap. But there were no cats, nor any signs of them—no scat, no piled-up skeletons from whatever portion of the 2.4 billion birds killed by cats per year. Instead, I counted two dozen red-winged blackbirds. A magpie swooped low over the water, where a pair of ducks bobbed for bugs. The air was thick with crickets, dovesong ringing in the air, the breeze ripe with the treacly scent of Russian Olive trees—it was the one week a year they were in bloom.
If ever there had been cats there, the habitat seemed totally undisturbed. The river corridor was city-owned, at least above the high-water mark, but the town doesn’t have programs to monitor the population levels of any animals other than cats.
I’d asked the concierge at my motel if she had any leads. “I have 20 cats,” she shrugged, gesturing back towards her on-site apartment. If the river had been a bust, maybe the town would prove better hunting. The night before I met McDaniel, I walked down Weiser’s main drag, prowling for cats, but the streets were empty all over town.
The only kitty anywhere was in the window of a bookstore, pawing at the scuffed-up pane. As soon as I walked in, the tabby wound itself around my ankles. In the back of the store, another cat caught my hand as I walked by the chair it was perched in and, in a single maneuver, pulled me into its armchair and plopped into my lap. Later, another cat piled on top.
Lucky 13. At The European Conservative, Liv Klingert claims that Christianity is the new counterculture for the Continent’s young men. From the beginning of the piece:
In the United Kingdom, a contested 2025 report—whose methodology has since been seriously questioned—claims a fourfold increase in 18-34-year-olds attending church at least once a month, with 20% of young men under 34 regularly attending compared to just 4% six years ago.
Yet, it is still hard to deny an interest in Christianity and a—very quiet—revival. At Easter 2026, 21,000 adults and young people were baptised in France, a 20% increase compared to 2025, which already saw a 32% rise in baptisms compared to the year before. For comparison, in 2021 there were around 4,100 adult baptisms.
Around 45% of young people in Spain (aged 15–29) identify as Catholic. This marks a dramatic shift in recent years, with Catholic identification among Spanish youth rising by nearly 50% compared to 2020.
A similar trend is seen in Denmark. But the question is, why have young men begun attending church?
Bonus. At Tradition & Renewal on Substack, the editors believe the unstained windows of Baltimore’s historic Catholic basilica offer a glimpse into the building’s American distinctness. From the piece:
The windows are clear, not stained glass.
This is the first thing the eye registers and the last thing most visitors think to recognize as theological. The American Catholic architectural sensibility, formed by the Gothic Revival that swept across the nineteenth century after Latrobe’s neoclassicism expects pictorial glass, with saints and scenes rendered in colored panels, and the nave bathed in filtered, refracted, distinctly interior light. The Baltimore Basilica stands athwart this. The light that fills the nave is real Baltimore daylight, uncolored and unfiltered, the same light that falls on the harbor, on the row houses, and on the people walking past. Archbishop William E. Lori put this beautifully in his 2021 bicentennial homily: Carroll retained Latrobe, he said, to provide a neoclassical structure “to be filled with light, so as to reflect the light of faith and the light of reason, and yes, the sunlight of authentic freedom.”
Stained glass insists, by its form, on a discontinuity between the sacred space within and the profane world without. The faithful, having entered, are removed from ordinary daylight and bathed in a qualitatively different form of light. Such light is undeniably beautiful, and not theologically wrong per se, since the Church does have her own interior life, but insofar as stained glass is a reflection of a theological claim and not merely an aesthetic choice, this specific claim reminiscent of the gothic and medieval periods about how grace and nature relate to one another has been superseded by theological scholarship of the 19th and 20th century.
For the Good of the Cause
Uno. At Philanthropy Daily, edu-guru Bruno Manno explains how donors can help opportunity take root. Read it here.
Due. More PD: Maria Parry has some assumption-debunking tips for fundraising letter-writers. Read it here.
Department of Bad Jokes
Q: Where did the fractions sleep when they went camping?
A: In tenths.
A Dios
The readings this past Sunday including the passage from Matthew where Jesus discusses birds and bald spots: “Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father's knowledge. Even all the hairs of your head are counted.” One tries to stay focused on the good word while it’s being uttered, but then that old memory returned, about the time walking up Lexington Avenue in the rain, and a drop made a direct hit on skin, which was the beginning of fewer hairs for the Almighty to count, at least on this noggin.
May We Be Led Beside Restful Waters,
Jack Fowler, who is reviving his drooping spirits at jfowler@amphil.com.
