A Dozen-Plus Stimulants, Gathered for Your Edification and Inspiration
Dear Intelligent American,
“De mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est”—or, speak no ill of the dead. Actually, only speak good of them.
Jason Arday—if we describe why he gained such attention recently, are we violating that mandate?—is indeed dead, seemingly by his own hand. As with everything in Western culture, race is poured, dolloped, and smeared into controversies, and the academic who was being investigated for significant plagiarism and autobiographical fabulism is being cast as a media-lynching victim by the likes of Ibram X. Kendi.
Of course.
As is the way today—and actually, the way since Pontius Pilate retorted to Jesus, “What is truth?”—ideology trumps certainty. Not only kings are wont to ask, “Who will rid me of this troublesome fact?” Of this young man’s troubled life, no lessons will be learned, but positions will surely be hardened, and white guilt—so nefarious in so much that is so wrong—will continue to wreck the impoverished, and meritocracy, and . . . truth.
No Lie: Fourteen Suggestions Await.
1. At The Imaginative Conservative, Bradley “Double B” Birzer tracks socialism’s rise. From the article:
The first inkling that they had done some serious damage came in the very late 1980s and early 1990s with the “politically correct” movement. Then, they ramped it up in academia with the unholy trinity of race, class, and gender. To be sure, the Old Left had cared most about class. The New Left and their offspring cared far more about race and gender.
Then, forming a truly strange alliance with radical Islam, the new New Left revealed itself about a decade ago with the rise of the so-called Squad (often combining Islam and socialism), with a New York City mayor (Muslim and socialist), and now, openly, an alliance between the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the Democratic Party.
Here’s the amazing thing. Conservatism over the past seventy years has done an amazing and admirable job of policing its own, nullifying extremists and racists. But the Left, just very recently, has embraced its extremists and its racists (think SPLC and Graham Platner), failing to police their own.
2. At the New York Post, fan favorite Daniel J. Mahoney recounts how the 1968 radical-student riots in France impacted America, and not for the better. From the reflection:
In May of 1968, France’s far-left sparked a massive social uprising similar to America’s ’68 Summer of Love but even more explosive. Thousands of students, furious with France’s conservative norms, threw up barricades, clashed with police, sparked a massive workers strike and tried to create a total revolution. These radical nihilists worked to bring down France’s decent and free Fifth Republic, lauded faraway Maoist-Communist tyranny, and dismissed the Judeo-Christian traditions of the West.
Just as America’s leftists have mythologized the 1960s counterculture movement, France’s progressives have mythologized the chaos and destruction of May 1968. The nihilistic radicals’ goal was to overthrow the government. They failed in this at the time, but in the six decades since they have largely achieved their aims.
3. At Lowcountry Weekly, Margaret Shinn Evans describes a narrowing horizon brought on by grief. From the column:
These days, it seems I can only muster interest in what’s right in front of me. The tangible and the personal.
As I write, I hear the noisy buzz of tree work happening across the street. Not the familiar pillaging we’ve all witnessed lately, all over town—thanks, Dominion Energy—but an entire Water Oak is coming down, limb by limb, in my neighbor’s front yard. We have a lot of old ones here in Pigeon Point, and when it’s their time, it’s their time. A dead Water Oak is not something you want anywhere near your house, especially during Hurricane Season.
We’ve had to bring down five—I think that’s right?—since moving into our house 24 years ago, and it’s always sad, no matter how necessary. When Jeff died last Hurricane Season, I was relieved that we’d recently had two trees removed—a couple of behemoths that really should have gone earlier, but I was too attached. It was one less thing to worry about in a sea of worries last year, but I remember crying when the tree guys sliced them up and hauled them away.
Today, as I listen to my neighbor’s tree being dismantled—and pop my head out the door occasionally, because I’m a masochist or, at the very least, a drama queen—I feel that old tug at my throat and the sting of tears behind my eyes.
4. At National Review, Gary Winslett visits Vermont and finds a city rendered hellacious by self-sabotage. From the article:
Every policy decision a city makes is a choice about who matters more. Burlington’s leaders have consistently deprioritized middle-class voters’ experience and businesses’ safety in favor of feeling “compassionate” toward drug users. They did this for all kinds of political reasons that I’ll get into, but it is near-undeniable that they did it.
In 2020, the city council cut nearly a million dollars from the police budget; six years ago, Burlington fielded around 100 officers, and today it has fewer than 70. The county’s top prosecutor, Sarah George, has declined to seek cash bail and has centered restorative justice as an alternative to the traditional criminal legal system since taking office in 2017, reducing the volume of cases that result in charges or jail time. The result is a catch-and-release approach so lenient that one Burlington man has had more than 1,800 recorded encounters with police. George has also acknowledged that for a stretch, her office deprioritized low-level cases such as retail theft, saying “I absolutely own that we prioritized crimes of violence during that time.” Burlington hit a ten-year high of 467 theft incidents in 2023. These are not unrelated facts.
Local businesses feel abandoned. Outdoor Gear Exchange, an anchor store on Church Street, lost more than $400,000 to shoplifting in 2024 alone; workers opening up shop have to deal with needles, feces, and people passed out in the entryway before they can deal with customers. When a group of businesses wrote an open letter pleading for help, the city’s leftist coalition—pro-Palestinian groups, trans-rights activists, the local DSA chapter—denounced them for it.
5. At Freedom Frequency, Ross Levine makes the case for market-based capitalism. From the piece:
And then the harder questions: what undermines the rule of law that is the foundation of open, competitive markets, and what can a free people do to protect it. No society settles these questions once and for all. The same foundation that lengthens lives and frees people to build them is the one that, when it cracks, brings both down. Holding it in place is the never-finished work of a free people.
Let me be precise. Market-based capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production are predominantly privately owned, and in which decisions about what to produce, at what price, and for whom are coordinated largely through competitive markets rather than political direction. Such markets foster freedom and prosperity only when they are genuinely open and competitive—and they are open and competitive only under the rule of law.
By the rule of law, I do not mean law in general. I mean the institutions that forbid force and fraud, grant no special legal or regulatory favor, and bind the powerful as tightly as everyone else.
No real economy ever achieves this in full. The point of describing the system at its best is to see clearly what its rules are for, and then to assess where the real thing falls short—and what can be done about it.
6. At Crisis Magazine, Mark Bauerlein thinks poorly of those who think poorly about the poor. From the article:
I am not enough of a theologian to assess Leo’s distinction of the poor in this way. What I can say is that in the entire text of Dilexi Te I find nothing that resembles the characters I lived with long ago. In fact, in the 25 single-spaced pages and 130 citations of Dilexi Te, not a single individualized profile comes into focus, not one real person or place. Throughout the document, the poor are a generalization with a few blurry traits—needy, afflicted, discerning, and, above all, Christ-like.
It’s a curious description, at once profoundly sympathetic and empirically fuzzy. The circumstances of the poor are just as general as the people themselves, labelled with cloudy abstractions such as “social and structural causes of poverty,” “new forms of poverty,” “marginalized communities,” “precarious circumstances…adverse conditions,” “unjust social ideals and political-economic systems that favor the strongest,” etc. The goal of Christian education of the poor, Leo says, is to “giv[e] them the tools to transform their reality”—whatever that means. I’ve heard this blurry idiom before in academic settings when a somber professor rises to speak of this or that injustice but not specifically enough to allow for rejoinder. “Structural causes?” you might ask, “Such as . . ?” only to get a reply that amounts to “Are you so uncaring that you wish to quibble over details?”
That’s the rhetorical advantage of hazy language. Here, it plays a tactical role in the exhortation, which is to discount any blame the poor shoulder for their own poverty. This is very important to Leo, who praises Gregory the Great for “denounc[ing] contemporary forms of prejudice against the poor, including the belief that they are responsible for their plight.” A more concrete rendition of the choices poor people made and the habits they formed might dampen our sympathy. Leo’s poor are radiant and vulnerable—and utterly placeless and featureless.
7. At Brownstone Institute, Colleen Aldous and Eleftherios Gkioulekas ask an important question: Who owns the pandemic record? From the analysis:
The Fauci hearing matters because it revealed how much of the pandemic’s history remains contested and how vulnerable public understanding is when it depends on a polarising individual. But no nation should outsource its reckoning to the United States Senate.
South Africa has its own record to preserve and its own questions to answer. So do Australia, Britain, Canada, and every country that converted uncertain international advice into domestic coercive power. The relevant documents are not the property of a political faction, a health department, or a scientific elite. Subject to narrow and legitimate protections, they form part of the democratic record.
We cannot prepare for the next emergency by requiring citizens to forget the last one. Trust will not be restored by demanding it, nor by treating all institutional failure as conspiracy. It will be restored only when authorities demonstrate that they are willing to expose consequential decisions to fair, independent, and technically competent examination.
8. At Wall Street Journal, Brenda Cronin takes a pop at fancy sodas. From the op-ed:
In time my taste for soda dwindled. I didn’t lose my sweet tooth, nor did I turn away from carbonation. I still drink plenty of sparkling water, and who doesn’t like champagne? I happily sat out the energy-drink craze. These shots of concentrated caffeine are meant to be sipped, not sniffed, but one whiff of a ragingly popular one—bouquet de Dubble Bubble and wet sneakers—was enough to put me off them forever.
I should be reveling in the gourmet–soda parade. If only the flavors didn’t sound like products from Bath & Body Works (“Sweet Orange and Agave,” “Cotton Candy Clouds”) or taste like a mashup of SweeTARTS and Jolly Ranchers.
I gave them another try recently, when suffering through colonoscopy prep. No food all day, my doctor said, but clear liquids were fine. I chose a fancy soda and snapped it open. Vile. Let’s just say it made me look forward to a glass of my pre-colonoscopy potion.
9. More WSJ: at its “Free Expression” feature, the great John J. Miller accuses the Left of having it out for nuns. From the piece:
Sadly, the cult of transgenderism has compelled the state government of New York to do the wrong thing. Public officials are now locked in a legal fight with a healthcare facility founded by Hawthorne’s daughter in 1901. Rose Hawthorne Lathrop had just taken vows as a Catholic religious sister and became Mother Mary Alphonsa, head of the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, as they’re called today. At Rosary Hill Home in Hawthorne, N.Y., the sisters provide free medical care to poor people with terminal cancer. They don’t take a penny from any government or insurance company to fund their 42-bed complex. Sustained by private donations, their work is pure charity.
“We cannot cure our patients, but we can assure the dignity and value of their final days and keep them comfortable and free of pain,” said Mother Alphonsa, in what amounts to a credo for these heroes of compassion.
That’s not good enough for the New York’s Department of Health. Two years ago, it began sending letters to the Hawthorne Sisters. Rather than thanking the sisters for their kindness to the dying poor, the letters demanded that the sisters respect the “gender identity or expression” of their patients. It told the sisters not to keep males out of the ladies’ room or separate bedrooms by biological sex. It directed them to use “preferred” pronouns and to permit cross-dressing. It instructed them to recognize a “right to consensual sexual relations,” including sex outside marriage. In addition, the letters said, the sisters must enroll in “cultural competency” training. Refusal would risk fines, loss of their operating license and even imprisonment.
10. At his Substack, Mark Manson relates his low esteem of intellectuals. From the article:
But here’s the problem . . . Intellectuals forget that models are just models. They begin to believe their models are actual reality. And the consequences are often catastrophic.
Malcolm Caldwell spent 20 years studying Southeast Asian history and development. He created a model of understanding of that part of the world that was largely Marxist. Then, when he actually went to Southeast Asia and met a Marxist and tried to tell that Marxist all about his model—i.e., when his model finally had to confront reality—reality won.
Reality always wins.
But Intellectuals are rewarded for their models, not reality. And the data and analysis that looks elegant on paper is often disastrous on the ground. Yet, when their models are contradicted by reality, most intellectuals don’t have the courage to accept the reality, instead they double down on their models . . .
. . . and this is what turns them into idiots.
11. At The Free Press, Leo Lewis explains how his generation drifted towards antisemitism. From the article:
One word captures this new form of antisemitism: goy. A Hebrew word used to refer to non-Jews, it has been captured by the fringe right and used to imply that Jews see non-Jews as subhuman cattle to be controlled. A pro-Israel non-Jew, for example, might be called a “goy slave,” to indicate that he is loyal to his Jewish overlords.
Today, the word has migrated—through memes and TikToks—into the everyday vocabulary of young American men who in large part have no idea what it means. The chemistry teacher who gives too much homework might be called a goy. Bad food is called goyslop. There are TikToks with millions of views claiming that kosher-labeled food is healthier because Jews deliberately made non-kosher food into goyslop to keep non-Jews unhealthy, weak, and easier to control.
Other conspiracies and jokes abound. Benjamin Netanyahu is ridiculed as the “Big Yahu.” The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is slandered more than any political group. “Promised to you 3,000 years ago” has become a joke, implying that the Jewish claim to Israel is based only on a 3,000-year-old divine promise. The “Happy Merchant” meme—a caricature of a scheming, hand-rubbing Jew—circulates online and is even mimicked by people in real life.
12. At the London School of Economics blog, edu-guru Bruno Manno explains how the UK practices regarding youth work experience should be modeled on this side of the pond. From the analysis:
A landmark new study from Britain helps explain why that distinction matters and what’s required to close the gap. Published by the Education and Employers charity, it’s one of the most comprehensive examinations of youth employment ever conducted. Its headline is that young people who experienced the highest levels of structured work experience before age 16 had 80 percent lower odds of becoming NEET (not in education, employment, or training) than those with the least exposure to work.
After more than two decades of building the evidence base, the conclusion is now hard to contest. Structured work experience transforms the trajectory of young lives. The question for the US is whether it will build what that conclusion demands.
The British study’s most important finding is about who and how young people get work experience. Eighty-one percent of them find their placements through themselves or their families. Nearly eight in ten school staff say family connections are the primary reason some students benefit more than others. So, the access to structured work experience is rationed by social capital, or the relationships and networks they have.
Lucky 13. At The Columbus Dispatch, Kelly Tucker reports on an Ohio man who biked from sea to shining sea to raise nearly $9,000 for a local homeless charity. From the beginning of the story:
On a dark summer night in rural Iowa, 63-year-old Tony Ghiloni made his bed on the hard ground of a cornfield, armed with only his rainsuit to shield him from mosquitoes. It might have been the first time he slept tucked between rows of cornstalks, but it wouldn’t be the last.
“It wasn’t as comfortable as I thought it was going to be,” he laughed. “I wish I had my air mattress.”
While competing in the 2026 Trans Am Bike Nonstop race across the United States, Ghiloni spent most nights in hotels, but he also slept in a pine forest, behind a convenience store and even inside a post office. Sometimes he simply rode through the night until dawn.
Bonus. At his Substack, Jonathan Leaf, author of The Primate Myth, and no monkey’s uncle, or even cousin, finds the humans-are-souped-up-chimps advocates are afraid to debate him. From the piece:
In particular, it turns out that we’re not 98.6% genetically alike to chimps as has been frequently claimed. In fact, as a definitive study published in Nature magazine last April proved, we’re at least 13.5% different—and the genetic transformation especially turns up in things like the genes that determine how our brain functions.
My book explains why this is and why we are so different. In order to survive humans evolved to be highly cooperative animals who use speech and are domesticated. In doing so, we have taken on many of the traits of other large-brained animals with many of these same attributes. These creatures—like dolphins and elephants—are pack or herd animals, and they think and behave very differently from apes.
One subject the book pays particular attention to is human sexuality. It points out that the fossil record indicates that we and our ancestors were designed to be relatively monogamous, and this has been so for roughly three hundred thousand years. In addition to that, I show that there is no record of a polygamous human society ever becoming highly functional. The chapter of the book that discusses this was adapted for a National Review cover story that ran this past February.
I have repeatedly reached out both to those who promoted the ideas that humans are simply very clever chimps and to those who think that polyamory and polygamy can work in human societies, and I’ve asked them to debate.
For the Good of the Cause
Uno. For those who missed last week’s Center for Civil Society webinar on “End of Year” fundraising (you know, “Giving Tuesday” and all else that happens until 11:59PM on December 31st) know that you can watch it here.
Due. At Philanthropy Daily, Julie Wilson checks out women and philanthropy. Read it here.
Tre. More PD: Bill Meehan reflects on the continued importance of Bill Buckley’s powerful book, God and Man at Yale, on the classic’s 75th anniversary. Read it here.
Quattro. Yes, Still More PD: Yours Truly introduces the remarks of two brave detransitioners confronting woke corporate America. Read the article here.
Department of Bad Jokes
Q: Why do gymnasts make good bankers?
A: They can balance checkbooks.
A Dios
On occasion linked to here at Civil Thoughts, nepo journalist Andrew Fowler, son of Yours Truly and Mrs. Yours Truly, marries sweet Lauren tomorrow (Saturday, August 22). If you can spare a prayer for their happiness and being blessed with many children, then please do so. Such will be greatly appreciated.
May We Realize the Glory of the Flower of Sharon, the Lily of the Valleys,
Jack Fowler, who is practicing his rice tossing at jfowler@amphil.com.
