A Dozen-Plus Stimulants, Gathered for Your Edification and Inspiration
Dear Intelligent American,
Don’t believe it. Yes, the headlines, like this one from the Daily Mail—"America's most prestigious investment bank dumps DEI and says it will only hire new board members based on merit“—may be applicable anecdotally, but those who believe this cultural and ideological beast has been slayed should think again.
Central to the premise of leftism is that the vanguard of the proletariat needs an object of hate. In 1984, it was Goldstein. For Stalin, it was the kulaks and then just about everyone else. And victims can only find empowerment by accusing victimizers, who are convicted by some form of grouping—it could be based on geography, ethnicity, faith, pigmentation, creed . . . whatever suffices in the moment.
Also central: detesting merit. You know, that thing at the core of American exceptionalism.
Perhaps it had grown to hate the face looking back in the corporate mirror? Doubtful, that. Still, good for you, Goldman Sachs, for your come-lately decision. But don’t expect us to forget that your big-footing was vital to all the mayhem we have endured in the era of acronyms (DEI, ESG, SEL) and hashtags (#MeToo) and cancellations.
It’s Lent. We shall fast and abstain in reparation for our deeper thoughts about you.
No Meat on the Plate but There’s Plenty of Meat in These Excerpts
1. At TomKlingenstein.com, fan favorite Daniel J. Mahoney offers POTUS advice. From the article:
Trump’s efforts would be more effective and more widely supported if he occasionally cooled the informality and bombast that characterize him and made a sustained effort to be presidential when circumstances require it. I have many friends and family members, generally well disposed toward this administration, who were taken aback by the president’s crass remarks about the gruesome murder of Rob Reiner and his wife by their son. A magnanimous response here, setting partisan invective aside at least for a moment, would have been noble, high-minded, and in the president’s own interest.
I’ll conclude with a word regarding Glenn Ellmers’ suggestion that Trump adopt a form of Machiavellian realism by being bad in the service of being good. Like him, I’m concerned about the pathological softness Nietzsche diagnosed in modern elites, but I also have reservations. Like Tocqueville, I don’t believe Machiavellian realism, with its infinite flexibility of soul, is morally or psychologically viable. It’s a philosophical fiction that would corrupt those who attempt it.
We have better models. Let us remain with the humane but tough-minded realism of Lincoln, Churchill, Strauss, and Jaffa. That, unfortunately, would be stretch enough for Donald J. Trump. But there is no need for the true realist to choose between decency and strength. The greatest leaders have aimed to be at once good and great. Nothing less will suffice.
2. At National Review, Rich Lowry takes umbrage at Olympian skier Eileen Gu’s “terrible choice.” From the column:
Gu would be carrying the weight of only one country if she had chosen to represent her native U.S. at the games, rather than a hostile totalitarian state.
Gu skis for China, a choice that is a little like deciding to represent a fascist country during the 1930s.
Gu’s explanations for why she turned her back on the country where she was born and raised (her mother is a Chinese immigrant) are tinny and unpersuasive.
China is bent on undermining U.S. power and supplanting Western values. It runs a gulag and has established a surveillance state that would make George Orwell blush. It is contemplating an invasion of Taiwan and is almost certainly the country most likely to nuke Los Angeles in a major war.
3. At UnHerd, Claire Lai writes about her father, the great Hong Kong advocate of freedom, Jimmy Lai, freshly sentenced to 20 years in Red China prisons. From the article:
On the morning of Feb. 9, my father was sentenced to 20 years in prison. At the age of 78 and in failing health, my father does not have 20 years; he doesn’t even have 10. Yet news outlets reported that he smiled and made a sign of gratitude to the crowd before leaving.
Many people wondered why or even how he could smile. But even in my heartbreak, I didn’t.
On Dad’s first day in prison, he told me he was in God’s good hands. He has repeated this multiple times throughout his imprisonment to his daughter, who is not good at very much other than worrying. Recently, when I left Hong Kong, five years into his imprisonment, I wrote to him expressing doubts about myself and about him. He chided me asking me why I doubted when God is so good.
He wrote: “So, my dear daughter, though I understand your frustration, why did you doubt? Trust that God leads you in his ineffable way. The way is darkness for us, but [also] the best possible way for us, because He loves us more than we love ourselves.”
4. At The Wall Street Journal, Tunku Varadarajan sits down with and presses Lech Walesa, Cold War hero. From the piece:
Is Mr. Walesa, in the end, a capitalist? “I am a practical man,” he says. “Communist principles are better than capitalism. ‘There will be no unemployment. There is to be equality and justice.’ Yet this cannot be achieved. Capitalism is bad when there’s unfair competition, and joblessness. But it can be achieved in practice. That’s why it wins. You have to understand that. Theory is not always better than practice.”
The decades since the Cold War have tested Mr. Walesa’s faith in democracy. “I was a dissident who was committed to changing the bad old world order. And I believed that democracy alone, by itself, could win and make the world right. But it’s not going well.”
Why? “Because the masses do not believe in democracy anymore. Before there were the sort of media outlets there are today, the masses believed in politicians, and believed in democracy. But now they can see what’s really going on behind the scenes, how politicians behave,” and they’ve grown deeply cynical. “Nowadays, people elect demagogues, populists and scoundrels to office—even presidents.”
5. At Law & Liberty, Elizabeth Corey explains the benefits of “intellectual conservatism.” From the essay:
The problem in 2026 is that many of the most prominent intellectual conservatives have sold their birthrights for the fleeting fame promised by social media, podcasts, and coverage in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and other prestige outlets. They appear more interested in making names for themselves or “blowing up the system” than in doing the quiet, unobserved, humble work of renewing the institutions that are so vital to civil society. They are, at root, interested in winning the culture wars, and winning requires fighting. It’s what a friend has called “punch-in-the-face conservatism.” In borrowing methods from the cultural Left, many of them have become right-wing Gramscians. These men (and they are nearly all men) sense that America has arrived at an eschatological moment, and they definitely want everyone else to know it too.
I also think they find it exciting and invigorating. At last we have come to a crisis point that demands strategy and action! Enough with all the subsidiarity, little platoons, and institutional reform. Conservatives should be bold enough to grasp the levers of power and use them against the Left, just as the Left has used them against us. As one Claremont Institute commentator has written, breathlessly, “Practically speaking, there is almost nothing left to conserve. What is actually required now is a recovery, or even a refounding of America.” Helen Andrews has imagined a parallel crisis in the relations between the sexes. Her “great feminization” thesis lays the blame for “wokeness” on all those overachieving and schoolmarmish women who now dominate the white-collar professions. In her words, they are a “potential threat to civilization.” And on and on. It’s easy to adduce multiple examples of this overheated rhetoric.
N.B. Do check out L&L’s symposium on The Future of Intellectual Conservatism.
6. At Tikvah Ideas, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik reflects on George Washington and explains why the Jewish story is the American story. From the essay:
The first Jewish community to correspond with the president was that of Savannah; one Levi Sheftall wrote to Washington in June of 1790, glowingly reflecting how “your unexampled liberality and extensive philanthropy have dispelled that cloud of bigotry and superstition which has long, as a veil, shaded religion.” Washington responded in kind, exultantly writing, “I rejoice that a spirit of liberality and philanthropy is much more prevalent than it formerly was among the enlightened nations of the earth.” But then Washington went further, concluding with a scriptural reference, an exegetical interpretation, what Jews would call a dvar Torah:
“May the same wonder-working Deity, who long since delivering the Hebrews from their Egyptian Oppressors planted them in the promised land—whose providential agency has lately been conspicuous in establishing these United States as an independent nation—still continue to water them with the dews of Heaven and to make the inhabitants of every denomination participate in the temporal and spiritual blessings of that people whose God is Jehovah.”
Here, Washington reveals that he was not merely responding to a letter; he was making American Jews feel as if they truly belonged. What he tells them is that he sees the tale of the Exodus and of America as parallel: The God Who performed miracles for Jews in the past is the same Deity Who performed miracles for America in the present. The God Who saved Israel from tyranny saved America from tyranny as well. The Jews were to be welcomed in America not only because of the ideals of equality, but also because of the way in which the Jewish story inspired America itself.
7. At The Catholic World Report, Kevin Wells tells of a Depression-era Catholic priest who evangelized in West Virginia’s hostile back country. From the beginning of the article:
Few coal miners wanted anything to do with the stranger in the black cassock who arrived in town in 1933. It was the Great Depression in West Virginia—food was scarce and shifts were irregular. So nerves were raw in the pits when miners spoke about unionizing against deadly conditions. The last thing anyone wanted, as they emerged at sundown, was a young Catholic priest pressing his unfamiliar ways upon them.
Father Charles Carroll understood he was an outsider. In Anmoore, Wendel, Philippi, Brownton, Rosemont, Galloway, and Bridgeport, most families were rock-ribbed Appalachian Protestants—Bible-only believers who trusted Scripture, not Rome. The Catholic population was thin in this remote stretch of north-central West Virginia, where cold creeks cut through mountains and rolling green hills, and streams meandered into hollows.
The Ku Klux Klan had a presence in this forgotten corner of the state, even in Fr. Carroll’s no-stoplight parish town called Grasselli, later known as Anmoore. Many of its members saw the Catholic Church as a foreign cult and an intrusion that threatened their settled country ways and established patterns of worship.
8. At The European Conservative, Paul Birch searches for the vanishing Anglo-Saxon. From the beginning of the piece:
The Romans can be studied without apology. Vikings are marketed with cinematic enthusiasm. Celts are endlessly romanticised, their mystique carefully preserved. But introduce the Anglo-Saxons, the civilisation-forming population that gave England (and, consequently, much of the world) its language, law, and cultural and political seedbeds, and just watch the institutional mood darken. Cambridge and Nottingham Universities are just the latest to have found the very phrase ’Anglo-Saxon’ sticking in their institutional throats.
Across academia, heritage bodies, and cultural bureaucracies, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is being methodically edged out of polite usage. University departments quietly rename themselves. Museum labels are sanitised. School materials grow evasive. In its place comes the bloodless substitute: ‘early mediaeval English,’ a term so neutered it could describe anyone and, therefore, means absolutely nothing. We are assured this is scholarly refinement. It is nothing of the sort. It is historical airbrushing driven by ideology.
9. At Civitas Outlook, Nathaniel Peters contemplates the ultimate purpose of the university. From the reflection:
Those of us who work in the traditional humanities have spent most of our time engaging critiques from the hard left. We now find the humanities and the universities that house them under attack from voices on the hard right, using arguments that echo their ideological opposites. They claim that power and force are life’s deepest truths, that our society is a conflict in which we can only have friends and enemies. Force wins this conflict; weakness and compromise lose it. And only the naïve, weak, or unjust claim that such conflict can or should be escaped—or that political efforts should be set aside for reading and discussion.
Universities are deeply corrupt and unjust actors in this political conflict, they continue. Since past efforts at reform have failed to bear fruit—the Ivy League resists both conservative intellectual capture and proposals to divest from Israel—they must be destroyed. What will replace them? Well, these critics admit, we aren’t entirely sure, but we need to destroy them to find out. With slight modification, this line of argument could come from a senior editor at The Federalist or a student pitching a tent in front of Butler Library.
These critiques made me recall a conversation I had with Columbia undergraduates in the fall of 2024. After the spring encampments and police action, it seemed like a good opportunity to discuss protest, academic freedom, and the university's purpose. We read together Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter’s famous 1968 commencement address, as well as a more recent essay on academic speech by Stanley Fish. Both argue that the ultimate purpose of a university is inquiry into human life and the natural world. If this is so, then the rest of the university’s life needs to be organized toward the attainment of that end, and it must move away from and actively prohibit things that inhibit this inquiry—including, Fish specifies, certain forms of occupation and protest.
10. At Comment Magazine, Scott Pell wonders if it’s all in the game. From the article:
Meanwhile, voids left by the disappearance of traditional youth socialization were being filled by new digital mediums as widespread access to high-speed internet facilitated the rise of social media and online multiplayer gaming. The young men who had spent their Friday evenings driving their cars up and down Wabash Avenue as part of an informal youth mixer known as “Cruise the Bash” presumably moved to Call of Duty when the city shut down the event in the 2000s. Young women moved to Facebook and Instagram. Both sexes, deprived of shared spaces, took to online dating.
All this to say, for Americans who did not transition well into the new economy—particularly men, whose wages have been stagnant for half a century—escapism into the digital world can be a rational response. Indeed, research shows that gamers who turn to games to relieve or evade real-world distress are significantly more prone to developing what clinicians term “internet gaming disorder” than those motivated by other factors. Distant economists, academics, and pundits might be able to grasp why a man in his early twenties who was deemed “not college material” might choose unemployment over working in the low-wage service sector that offers no prospects of financial independence or upward mobility, but thus far they have failed to recognize how aging demographics and “brain drain” have contributed to mass social isolation. How could they, given that they cluster in areas rich in social capital and continually replenished by youth in-migration?
11. At The Daily Signal, Tyler O’Neil explains that the Human Rights Campaign has seen the best of its bullying day. From the article:
How does HRC “transform” institutions? Its Corporate Equality Index gives every major company a rating to show just how pro-“equality” the company is. Investors in the environmental, social, and governance movement used the index to determine where their money goes, and this made the index extremely powerful.
Like the mafia or Al Capone, the Human Rights Campaign promises these brands protection from the Left’s activist investors and protester shock troops in exchange for a generous cut. In order to demonstrate their “inclusion,” companies make contributions to LGBTQ groups, partner with transgender influencers like Dylan Mulvaney, and promote rainbow products.
When Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, HRC released a list of policy preferences, and Biden’s administration met at least 75% of them. Examples include massive policies—like reinterpreting civil rights law to allow men to invade women’s spaces—and mundane policies—like directing Border Patrol to use the preferred pronouns of illegal aliens.
12. At RealClear Education, edu-guru Bruno V. Manno reveals that higher-ed accreditation is a culture-war battlefield. From the piece:
That’s why a process Americans rarely know anything about has become a consequential policy fight in higher education. The gatekeeper to federal money has stepped into the spotlight, pulled there by politics, a growing insistence on measurable outcomes, and a federal approach that treats accreditation less like a closed guild and more like a marketplace.
Accreditation is typically a once-a-decade quality assurance process. It’s regional, peer-driven, and largely invisible. The bargain is straightforward. Private nonprofit accreditors recognized by the U.S. Department of Education set minimum standards, and the federal government provides aid only to institutions that pass through that gate.
Everyone speaks in the dialect of higher education—continuous improvement, mission alignment, student learning outcomes. Months later, a letter arrives at the college, and life goes on. Except now, accreditation doesn’t feel like a letter. It feels like a lever. And that bargain is being rewritten.
Lucky 13. At WJFW News12, Jake Donoho reports on Wisconsin snowmobilers raising big bucks for breast cancer research. From the beginning of the story:
A snowmobiling tradition returned to the town of St. Germain this past weekend.
St. Germain Radar Run has raised over $100,000 dollars towards breast cancer research.
Thousands gathered on Saturday to watch the state's fastest sleds hit the track and raise money for a great cause.
Snowmobiles reaching speeds over 130 miles per hour was a common sight this weekend at the Hiller's St. Germain Radar Run. The run and bikini races took place on the ice of the west bay of Little St. Germain Lake.
Bonus. At Quadrant, Roger Underwood finds the odd old belief that fat men are jolly not applicable to Hermann Goering. From the article:
Worst of all, at least from the German point of view, Goering was not good at his job. For all his much-vaunted and boastful role as Reichsmarschall (a title created especially for him by Hitler), he oversaw only two successes in the Second World War and both were in situations where the Luftwaffe was scarcely opposed. The first was in 1939 on the eastern front, where his dive-bombers and fighters demolished first the Poles and later the Russians, neither of whom had an effective air force (the Russians reversed this situation by 1943). The second was in the early phases of the North African campaign, where the Germans and Italians triumphed over British forces who had almost no aerial support. Again this situation changed dramatically once the pressure to defend England lifted and the RAF could relocate Spitfire squadrons to North Africa and Malta. It changed even more dramatically after the Americans entered the war and began the co-ordinated African campaign with the British Eighth Army.
There were two aspects from Goering’s war career that I have always found especially revealing. The first was his refusal to take responsibility for anything that happened within his jurisdiction; the second was his destruction of the Bialowieza forest for the simple reason that if he couldn’t have it, neither could anyone else.
Bonus Bonus. At RealClear Politics, J. Budziszewski ponders as to why there is so much lying in politics. From the article:
But sometimes, some things do get worse. Truthfulness is taking it on the nose, and the virtue is even more endangered today than when my teacher quizzed me lo these many years ago. Ordinary people lie too, but the great masters of lying today are politicians—with this difference. A true master of a craft understands what he is doing. Habitual liars find it harder and harder to keep track of when they are lying and when they aren’t.
Some reasons for the increase in lying are pretty obvious. There are fewer consequences for lying. It is harder to bring them to bear. Honesty isn’t drilled into children as once it was. AI and social media have made it much easier not only to lie but also to organize to do so.
Less obvious reasons are advances in lying’s technique. Adolph Hitler promulgated the Big Lie: one so enormous that no one can believe you would tell such a whopper. Our version works not by size but by numbers: If you lie about everything, nobody can believe you would lie so much. Politicians who lie about everything also lie that everything their opponents say is a lie. The sun is shining? There you go again. I’m lying? You’re just trying to distract attention.
For the Good of the Cause
Uno. At Philanthropy Daily, Dennis Gerber reviews Jonathan Haidt’s important book, The Anxious Generation. Read it here.
Due. More PD: Carlos Baez, who knows his way around things postal, advises nonprofit fundraisers on the importance of the humble reply envelope. Read it here.
Department of Bad Jokes
Q: Where do cows like to go on dates?
A: To moovies.
A Dios
Kudos, Angelo, and here’s to another 40 M-M-M-My Sharona. And yes, those are secret messages.
May He Who Knows Every Hair Make Keen Our Yearning to Appreciate,
Jack Fowler, who swims in thick seas of obtuseness at jfowler@amphil.com.
