A Dozen-Plus Stimulants, Gathered for Your Edification and Inspiration
Dear Intelligent American,
Are you ever struck by the sudden thought or pang, as you are otherwise going about your business: What badness is being inflicted on others, or pain is being borne by the afflicted—and what can I do about it?
Such guilty thoughts (how can you too not be unhappy when others are?!) seem to come more frequently, and maybe deservedly . . . why? Could it be to remind that there, but for the Grace of God, goeth He Who Is Obtuse? Or perhaps to prod a flabby conscience to get on those uncalloused knees to plead for mercy’s dispensing . . . wherever You see fit, Creator: Maybe to that spouse grieving somewhere in, who knows, Africa . . . or to the guy having a panic attack in the drunk tank in Houston . . . or to the scared new resident (there are thousands from whom to choose) of the nursing home.
The praying-prodding sounds like a plan. Recently a video popped up claiming there are nuns who intentionally awake in the middle of the night in order to pray for mothers who, at that same moment, somewhere on God’s world, are despairing from their crying and inconsolable babies. Wow.
Below there is suggested reading about Jimmy Lai, the Hong Kong freedom fighter convicted by Red China’s horrid government for, well, for bravely loving liberty. His reward for courage is incarceration. One wonders: What is he enduring right now—at this moment? More than wonder, one might count one’s own many blessings and then—like those nuns—find it a goodly moment to hit the ground and pray for him, or for someone else who could use tender mercies instigated by strangers. There are thousands—no, millions—from whom to choose.
You Wanted Suggestions? OK, You Got Some. Now What Are You Going to Do About It?
1. At The Daily Signal, Tyler O’Neil commends Ben Sasse’s powerful deathbed testimony. From the article:
None of this means Sasse—who attended Harvard as a wrestling recruit—is just going to throw in the towel.
“I’m not going down without a fight,” the former senator writes. “One sub-part of God’s grace is found in the jawdropping advances science has made the past few years . . . Death and dying aren’t the same—the process of dying is still something to be lived.”
Sasse viscerally feels the pain of losing the muscle he was so proud to have put on as a youth. His body is breaking down, but he isn’t giving up his fighting spirit.
Most importantly, he’s using the last few public messages of his life to share something important with the world. His hope isn’t found on earth, but in the promises of Jesus. Ben Sasse may not be able to stop the decay of his body, but he can encourage us to take hold of the thing that gives him the most important hope.
2. At Civitas Outlook, Juliana Geran Pilon explains why Benjamin Franklin was the quintessential American. From the article:
It seems that he simply could never stop inventing. Obligated to cross the Atlantic no fewer than eight times, for example, he was the first to discover and map the Gulf Stream, which lengthened the passage of ships. By avoiding it, they could save several days—a benefit both comforting and strategic. Also, in the interest of efficiency, while inspecting post offices in America, he invented a crude odometer to streamline mail delivery. Not that he shunned theoretical science, having proposed that electricity was a single fluid with “positive” and “negative” charges that were conserved, which the celebrated historian of science I. Bernard Cohen considered “of the same fundamental importance to physical science as Newton’s conservation of momentum.” Practically, Franklin distinguished between insulators and conductors, thereby developing the concepts of capacitors and batteries. Of course, his immense international reputation was due above all to the lightning rod he had invented in 1752. But what gave him the greatest pleasure was not fame but finding, upon his return home from France in 1786, that his own home had been saved by the rod. Whereupon he quipped: “Thus the invention was of some use to the inventor.”
Yet notwithstanding his recommended triumvirate of desiderata—being “healthy, wealthy, and wise”—Franklin never registered or patented any of his discoveries. When the governor of Pennsylvania offered him a lucrative patent for the immensely popular Franklin stove, he flat out “declined it.” His reasons, as explained in the Autobiography, were philanthropic: “As we enjoy great advantages from the invention of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.”
3. At TomKlingenstein.com, fan favorite Daniel J. Mahoney shares the good news of the Commie-lost Chilean elections, and excoriates the abuse of language by a biased media. From the article:
In the Soviet Union, Leninism was treated as the political center, and anything outside it was dismissed as “reactionary” or “fascist.” In the United States, as wokeness rose to cultural dominance, a 1990s-style New York moderate became, in the parlance of the established media, “far-right.” And in Chile, as revolutionary socialism re-stakes its claim to the rhetorical center, a pro-market family man has been transformed into a “far-right” bogeyman.
This last and most recent case is especially instructive. The BBC’s coverage of the Chilean presidential election shows how far this abuse of political language has gone. According to Ione Wells, that once-august organization’s South American correspondent, José Antonio Kast’s recent victory was a triumph of “the far-right wing” over the forces of “democracy.”
Kast’s opponent, Jeannette Jara, was a member of Chile’s hard-core and unrepentant Communist Party until mere weeks before the election. Yet she is described simply as “the left-wing coalition candidate.” The article even quotes a Chilean supporter lamenting voters’ failure to perceive her as the true “centrist” in the race.
4. More Mahoney: At The American Mind, the scholar profiles the great political scientist and writer James Burnham. From the analysis:
His conservatism was layered, and it came on him gradually. But it was indisputably principled and sincere. Byrne writes that “the young Burnham was a Marxist who believed revolution could regenerate the world. The middle-age Burnham was a Machiavellian who believed that the ruling classes must be resisted for tyranny to be thwarted. The most mature Burnham embraced Burke.” His most satisfying and compelling book, 1964’s Suicide of the West, is also his most conservative. Hart once speculated that if it had been published in 1987, when the full ravages of untrammeled liberalism had become more apparent, it might have been a bestseller along the lines of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind.
Suicide of the West was republished in 2014 in a handsome edition by Encounter Books, with thoughtful introductory reflections by John O’Sullivan and an overview by Roger Kimball. The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians are also freshly available in inexpensive paperback editions. And Byrne’s biography was preceded in 2002 by Daniel Kelly’s lengthier and even more sympathetic James Burnham and the Struggle for the World. Today, conservatives of diverse varieties invoke Burnham to critique the “soft managerialism” that has grown ever more heavy-handed and unaccountable in its domination of public and private life.
5. At National Review, Douglas Carswell explains that meaningful education reform must be parent-dependent. From the article:
This is great news—but more needs to be done. As a former British Member of Parliament now working in public policy in Mississippi, I am acutely aware of the risks of relying solely on top-down conservative reforms to fix local education systems. Back in the United Kingdom, conservative leaders could have implemented any education reforms they wished—and they did. They emphasized phonics and rigor, and just as in Mississippi, standards rose sharply. But so confident were they in their ability to drive improvements they overlooked the importance of giving families a say in their children’s education. Michael Gove, the conservative education minister, even rejected the idea of education vouchers.
Without parent power, their victories over phonics and much else proved fleeting. Once conservative leaders were distracted, the education bureaucracy reversed what it disliked. Parent involvement is the only reliable safeguard; political oversight waxes and wanes with the fortunes of different parties. Families wanting the best for their children is a constant.
6. At On Classical Education, Andrew Zwerneman stokes the fires for America’s semiquincentennial. From the piece:
We begin as classical leaders should, with a turn to anthropology: Who are we? Regarding history, Shakespeare’s Warwick says, “There is a history in all men’s lives.” (Henry V) The historian John Lukacs reminds us, we are by nature historical beings and uniquely so among all beings. History, he teaches, has a hold in this world through human memory. As the remembered past, history is what we remember.
Zooming in on America, we find in our history that history itself has played a seminal role in the order of American freedom. Works by Thucydides, Polybius, Tacitus, and Livy were part of the Revolutionary generation’s regular literary diet, and Plutarch’s Lives prevailed among all forms of history. More recent histories were highly popular too. Between 1770 and 1776, William Molyneaux’s The Cause of Ireland (1698), the story of another people subject to Britain, was so widely read by American readers that three new editions were printed in order to keep up with demand. While Locke and others played crucial roles in shaping the Revolutionary mind, our Founders, in fact, read more history than political theory.
7. At The American Spectator, Anne Hendershott decries the wimp-out by some big-city police chiefs. From the article:
Unlike academia, where the feminized turn in institutional culture may be annoying but largely inconsequential to daily life outside the university walls, the feminization of policing carries real-world consequences. Policing had remained one of the last bastions of a traditionally masculine ethic—a profession grounded in the ability to impose order in moments of chaos. As Helen Andrews Compact Magazine essay, “The Great Feminization,” suggested, “The rule of law is not just about writing rules down. It means following them even when they yield an outcome that tugs at your heartstrings or runs contrary to your gut sense of which party is more sympathetic.”
Portland’s police chief, however, responded in precisely the way Andrews warns against—letting emotion dictate the narrative and recasting the offenders as the “victims” of a law enforcement officer who was just doing his job.
It is essential to note that this cultural shift doesn’t require women to run police departments or occupy the chief’s office—although that is currently the case in some of the largest police departments throughout the country. In any institution, once enough personnel are hired from social science fields where therapeutic language, emotional validation, and consensus‑driven norms dominate, those habits begin to reshape the workplace itself. Policing is no exception.
8. At The Wall Street Journal, Thomas Sowell tells of his unhappy experiences with AI fraud. From the op-ed:
Tragically, the AI impersonation fraud is part of a much larger and much longer lasting undermining of the very concept of truth. At one extreme are those intellectuals who speak loftily of “my truth,” as if it were private property, exempt from challenge by facts or logic. But a privately owned truth is irrelevant to communication between people.
More important are whole institutions—including education and the news media—whose basic reason for existing is to convey truth, but who cannot resist the temptation to seek power instead.
If there are no serious consequences for either individuals or institutions that create frauds—whether by AI or by silencing other viewpoints—we will have no basis for settling our inevitable differences other than violence.
9. At Michigan Enjoyer, John J. Miller shares the sights from Wolverine State’s local post office—they’re not “Most Wanted” posters. From the beginning of the piece:
The post office is a place to buy stamps, ship boxes, and learn that nobody can locate your package even though you have a tracking number. In Michigan, about three dozen also serve as art museums: They display big murals painted in the late 1930s and early 1940s. And they are everywhere, from the southeastern village of Blissfield to the northwestern reaches of Iron Mountain.
These murals were part of a national effort to commission new art for public spaces. Most of them try to reflect the history, culture, and people of their communities. In 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt judged their achievement: “some of it good, some of it not so good, but all of it native, human, eager, and alive—all of it painted by their own kind in their own country, and painted about things that they know and look at often and have touched and loved.
10. At City Journal, Steve Malanga finds that building more housing—cheaply—and not 50-year mortgages, is the better solution to an American problem. From the article:
A proposal late last year by Bill Pulte, President Trump’s head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, to create a 50-year home mortgage sparked intense debate—and some political opposition. Though Trump embraced the idea as a way to lower monthly payments, he’s now said to be backing away from it.
That’s a good thing because, as critics note, while a 50-year loan would reduce monthly costs, it would saddle homeowners with far more interest and keep many paying into retirement. But that’s only part of the problem. The proposal is the latest in a long line of misguided federal “affordability” schemes that have caused market distortions, encouraged risky borrowing—and repeatedly ended in crisis. Our current housing troubles stem in no small part from the 2008 financial crisis, when policy pushed lenders to extend credit to borrowers who ultimately couldn’t repay, bankrupting institutions and choking home construction for over a decade. Rather than repeat those mistakes, the Trump administration should focus on reducing the cost of building homes in a country facing a severe shortage.
11. At National Affairs, Jon A. Shields and Stephanie Muravchik assess how American universities are fulfilling their obligation to form citizens. From the essay:
And, finally, some might object that not all courses need to include a broad range of perspectives. There is nothing wrong, after all, with teaching courses on critical theory, American conservatism, or radical political thought. But it's one thing to acknowledge that such courses have a place in the university, and another to say that students don't need to be exposed to the intellectual controversy around the issues that shape our public life. Perhaps that could be achieved if universities offered a wider mix of "one-sided" courses—that is, by increasing inter-class diversity rather than intra-class diversity. No matter how we do it, students need exposure to a broader range of ideas.
Why is it important to teach these controversies in full? While there are many compelling reasons to do so, we would emphasize those that touch on our duty to form good citizens.
First, students need to acquire some fluency in the intellectual controversies that shape our nation and world. If all we expose them to are disagreements within cramped intellectual spaces, then we are not preparing them to think seriously about contentious public issues, much less exercise power over them one day.
Second, wrestling with and discussing controversies in full will help students to acquire the civic skills they need to become citizens in a pluralistic nation. Classrooms are rightly understood as schools of democracy, places where young people practice democratic disagreement. That activity should also cultivate students' intellectual virtues, such as curiosity, critical-thinking skills, and intellectual humility.
12. At The Wall Street Journal, the editors attack Communist China’s abuse of Jimmy Lai, political prisoner. From the editorial:
His treatment in prison is worse than a mass murderer would receive. He is in solitary confinement in a smaller than normal cell. His cell has a window that is blocked so no sunlight comes through. A guard stands outside his cell at all hours but isn’t allowed to talk to him, and the cells nearby and above and below have been cleared out so he has no one to talk to.
When he is transferred for exercise (one hour a day) or elsewhere, he is forced to wear a full-body cloak that covers his head. This is probably to prevent photographs of Mr. Lai from leaking to the press, as one did in the early days of his confinement. . . .
His daughter Claire says her father, a devout Catholic convert, has been allowed to take the Eucharist only nine times in the last two-and-a-half years. He likes to draw religious pictures and send them to friends, but the prison no longer lets him send them.
Lucky 13. At Plough Quarterly, Sergio Bermudez has an idea what Notre Dame’s gargoyles are seeing. From the piece:
They stand in contrast with the majesty and beauty of the cathedral, and deliberately so. Notably, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux was not a fan. He wrote, “What is the meaning of these unclean monkeys, these strange savage lions, and monsters? To what purpose are here placed these creatures, half beast, half man, or these spotted tigers?”
In one sense the purpose is straightforward. “Gargoyle” stems from the French word gargouille, which translates to “throat or gullet.” Some have said the word is meant to mimic the gurgling sound they make when the water pours forth. In other words, the original responsibility of the gargoyle was to prevent rain from accumulating in pools on the roof, thereby reducing water damage. Many churches still possess gargoyles that function this way. However, some do not. Although we still refer to these snarling, laughing creatures as gargoyles, the technical name for them is “grotesques.” There is no definitive answer to Saint Bernard’s question. We do not know why these creatures were placed there.
Some say they exist as a reminder of the evils of the world (hence their facing outward from the church); in Barcelona I was told one of the gargoyles even points to where a brothel used to be in the old city. Others say they exist as “preachers in stone” designed to teach the illiterate of the ugliness of sin and that true beauty is found in God alone. The contrast of the grotesques occupying the same space as the divine appealed to Victor Hugo, who would write his famous novel about the church that watches all, and a lonely bellringer who longed to be a part of Parisian life.
Bonus. At Law & Liberty, David G. Bonagura spotlights Christopher Dawson and the need to put faith in faith to help restore liberalism’s spiritual consequence. From the essay:
But is a religious revival less likely, more complicated, and more rancorous than devising a new kind of regime or constitutional arrangement at a contested moment in the West? History offers repeated examples of religion unexpectedly and peacefully changing the world. Could anyone have predicted Christendom as a political reality while standing at the foot of a Nazarene’s cross on Good Friday or observing the battle at Milvian Bridge? The transition from Roman debauchery to Christendom did not happen overnight, yet in the end, Christian faith proved more persuasive and appealing than Roman and barbarian mores whose evils rival the worst immoralities now cheered as rights by adherents of the liberal ideology.
The American Founders built an incredible order, but they were intensely conscious that the nascent republic could not function without a virtuous citizenry. For them, virtue did not come from self-help groups or sharing sessions. It came from religion, as, for example, Presidents Washington and Adams famously expressed in their farewell and inaugural addresses, respectively. Christianity, with its rejection of the will to dominate others, its call to self-regulation and love of neighbor, and its elevation of heavenly rewards over earthly riches, provides spiritual bulwarks for the republic. As the liberal ideology’s descent into radical individualism has made plain, the spirit of the citizens, and with it, their attitude toward legitimate authority, has a greater influence on a commonwealth’s health than the constitutional or political mechanisms that make the commonwealth run.
For the Good of the Cause
Uno. Nonprofit worker bees should find themselves on Thursday, January 29th, between the hours of 1:00 and 4:00 p.m. (Eastern), on Zoom taking the critical Center for Civil Society master class on direct response fundraising. Why? Because that’s where you’ll learn how and why implementing offline and online fundraising techniques can boost your development program, how direct response should play a role in overall fundraising strategy, how to prioritize your mail and digital efforts to build donor relationships and balance costs, and much more. Get complete information, and register, right here.
Due. At Philanthropy Daily, Victor Davis Hanson recounts meeting Martin Luther King. Read it here.
Department of Bad Jokes
Q: What do you get when you cross a snowman with a vampire?
A: Frostbite.
A Dios
Wow, it is snowing here—as if we have lived in Panama all our lives. To quote Gomer Pyle, “Surprise, Surprise!” But fact is, “here” is Connecticut. Welp, time to find the shovel, the boots, the rock salt . . . may we take it easy as we use muscles dormant since the last time we battled the white stuff, and live to plow another day.
May the Ancient of Days Succor the Afflicted,
Jack Fowler, who is yearning for April at jfowler@amphil.com.
