Dear Intelligent American,
Ecclesiastes duly warned us, that among the things for which there is a season, there is indeed a time to love, but also a time to hate.
Speaking of which . . .
The deeply troubling controversy that erupted last week—involving Tucker Carlson’s affectionate interview with the bubbly, unchallenged anti-Semite Nick Fuentes—will not be a passing thing in our politics and culture. About it: Yours Truly has the fortune to host, twice weekly, a podcast, “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” and in the episode released on Tuesday, November 4, the matter of giving a lots-of-eyeballs platform to a venting crank, sans pushback by the host, received almost exclusive attention and elicited much wisdom from VDH. Titled “William Buckley Showed Conservatives How to Interview Extremists” (indeed he did), you can watch the episode on YouTube, right here.
Some Reading as We Prepare to Honor Our Veterans
1. At The Common Reader, Henry Oliver tells of how Americans are by nature busy, engaging in civil society. From the beginning of the article:
We started the weekend by going to the book sale at the library. It is an American custom, twice a year, for libraries to hold large sales of books they no longer need in stock and books that have been donated to them. I was told that some ten thousand books might change hands in Arlington that weekend. Many are given away as well. This raises a significant part of the library’s budget. The prices are reasonable. I picked up some Naipaul, Dickens, Grail legends, Tobias Wolff, and several others. There are discounts for homeschoolers.
These events are models of the American attitude. People arrive early with bags, trolleys, carts. As soon as one of the shelves is half empty, with books collapsing in the middle, someone arrives with a box to re-stack. The whole place was as busy as a hive. It went on and on. Everyone was cheerful. No-one fussed and bothered. Once again, in the country most supposedly dedicated to so-called atomised individualism (a muddle-headed concept), I found myself in the middle of a teeming community. Here is one of Tocqueville’s “civil associations”. Free individuals who can freely associate very often make the best societies and platoons!
And once again, I want to know: why doesn’t this happen in England?
2. At Plough Quarterly, Morf Morford tells of a near-death experience and the lesson it holds. From the piece:
As a seventeen-year-old boy, I had no answer for either question. I hovered near the bottom, as if I were waiting for a verdict. The whole experience felt as if I had opened a wrong door and stepped into a meeting I was not invited to.
I felt the pressure of the water pull me down even more, I reached my arms out and felt a hand grab mine to pull me out. It was my girlfriend. She pulled me to shore, and I staggered to the nearest log and flopped down.
My friends were already chattering again, talking about rides and food and going home, but the questions continued to echo in my head. I didn’t tell my girlfriend, or anyone, what I had just experienced. When I returned home, I didn’t tell my parents either.
I only found out some years later about the death of my uncle and how similar our circumstances had been. My mother would almost certainly have died of grief if she had lost a brother and a son to drowning. So I carried that memory as a kind of silent compass point, a companion or reminder of . . . I’m still not sure what. I could never put aside that involuntary glimpse into an adjoining reality.
3. At The European Conservative, Chadwick Hagan finds that conservative institutions are in crisis. From the piece:
What the Right requires is depth: a new generation of thinkers, administrators, and strategists who can turn popular support into durable governance. Every conservative victory is reframed by the commentariat as a mistake or an accident. Failure is magnified, success dismissed, and power remains concentrated in the hands of unelected managers. The Right remains strong in conviction but weak in structure. It shines in moments of crisis but struggles to sustain power. Conservatism survives because citizens still prefer order to chaos, responsibility to indulgence, and belonging to abstraction. Yet instinct cannot substitute for organization. What is needed now are institutions capable of thinking strategically, educating leaders, and linking movements across borders.
For too long, conservatives have fought in the language of values while surrendering the machinery of policy. The Left understood that systems matter: the committees, funding boards, and frameworks that decide what a nation permits and prohibits. The task now is to rebuild the architecture of influence in law, education, media, and culture. Without strategy at the institutional level, even moral victories dissolve into symbolism.
4. At The American Spectator, John Mac Ghlionn defends Winston Churchill from a stream of crank-conservative distortions. From the article:
This is the paradox of Churchill. His greatness and his flaws were, at times, inseparable—the mark of a visionary shaped by empire, and limited by it. The internet, sadly, is allergic to such nuance. In this age of instant outrage, every figure must be saint or sinner, fascist or freedom-fighter. Context is a casualty of convenience. Revisionists don’t seek to understand history. Instead, they seek to weaponize it. They call it “questioning the narrative,” though what they really mean is reshaping reality to fit their fantasy.
The irony is almost Churchillian. Once, propaganda flowed from the CIA outward—calculated, funded, deliberate. Now, it rises from the grassroots upward, unfiltered, viral, and far more potent. Yesterday’s radio transmitters have become today’s podcasts. The same techniques of suggestion, repetition, and moral inversion are at play, only the sponsors have changed. And perhaps, in a perverse way, the CIA finally got what it wanted: a world contaminated by “heretical thinking,” where no truth remains unchallenged for long.
But understanding Churchill requires more than contrarian flair. It demands we hold two opposing truths at once—that he defended civilization when others faltered, and that he also represented some of its more complicated instincts. He embodied Britain at its best and its worst. He could summon bardic thunder in Parliament and bleak indifference in the colonies. That duality isn’t a contradiction. In truth, it’s human nature under history’s harshest light. It’s evidence of the impossible moral terrain of his age.
5. At Tablet Magazine, Rina Raphael laments the dumb-naming of Jewish kids. From the article:
It used to be that faddish progeny trends were more prevalent within our gentile neighbors, but not us—we who name after our beloved Bubbes and Zaydes and a long lineage of Jewish leaders, Biblical characters, and that one female Israeli prime minister. I come from a generation in which every other Jewish kid was named Talia, Ilana, or Rachel. Now I see those very same peers opting for Coyote, Striker, and Roxstar.
It’s sometimes hard to square away these peculiar pairings—an unorthodox first name with an often Jewish surname. Gravity Cohen? Aqua Levenstein? Cinnamon Goldberg? . . . .
Jews, of course, are not immune to cultural trends, and what’s trendy now is “uniqueness.” To have people snickering over your kid’s moniker is the point: if people are talking about it, you’ve presumably succeeded. We live in the attention economy, after all. But it does make you wonder what kind of uniqueness my peers are seeking, because there are differences in why people choose distinctive names.
6. At Front Porch Republic, Hakan Altinay ponders the detachment of civic responsibility from unalienable rights. From the beginning of the article:
We have strangely detached notions of our rights from our responsibilities. Many are quick to posit that we have a wide range of rights, yet we are almost tongue-tied about our responsibilities. It may be interesting and worthwhile to explore whether this division is viable.
At first glance, our myopia is not challenged—and may even be reinforced—by foundational texts. The American Declaration of Independence (1776) was the first to herald that we were all endowed with certain unalienable rights. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) starts out, in its Preamble, by recognizing the “inalienable rights of all members of the human family.” The word responsibility does not appear anywhere in either Declaration. Incidentally, the same is also true for the French Declaration of 1789.
Yet if we had to imagine categories of people who have rights but not responsibilities, only infants and the most absolutist of all rulers would meet the criteria. No one would dispute that infants have rights but cannot conceivably bear meaningful responsibility. Absolutist rulers, on the other hand, have rights in the sense of licenses, but no—or very negligible—responsibilities. Given that both of these groups form a fraction of human populations, and that we do not fancy being infantilized or seeking dictatorial roles, why are we so muted on the relationship of rights to responsibilities and vice versa?
7. At The Imaginative Conservative, John Horvat considers author Laszlo Krasznakorkai winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, and finds it . . . absurd. From the beginning of the article:
Imagine literary works with plots in dystopian settings where the characters act within an unraveling social order. Apocalyptic events abound inside absurd situations. This is the literature of Laszlo Krasznakorkai.
There is more. Imagine an unreadable and drawn-out style. Think of run-on texts that are like rivers of black ink that frantically flow everywhere, following no rules. Some novels have no paragraphs. One novel, for example, is four-hundred-pages long, and yet consists of a single sentence! This is the literature of Laszlo Krasznakorkai.
Imagine obsessive characters, rain-sodden landscapes, and scenes of pathos and despair. Imagine dark narratives like those of Dostoevsky and Kafka, full of irony, satire, and the celebration of the absurd. This is the literature of Laszlo Krasznakorkai.
8. At Commentary Magazine, Christine Rosen finds the trans movement’s intensifying efforts pose a broad societal danger. From the piece:
At the state and local level, officials in liberal enclaves continue to refuse to contend with the damaging consequences of their trans policies. In Fairfax County, Virginia, a male registered sex offender has repeatedly exploited the county’s transgender policies to expose himself to girls and women in the locker rooms and bathrooms of multiple public-pool facilities. Richard Cox “told Fairfax County rec center staff that he identified as a transgender woman and, per the county’s transgender policy, was permitted to use the women’s locker rooms,” the New York Post reported. Nearby Arlington County’s public schools also allow people to use the public facilities based on their “chosen gender identity,” and the county has fielded multiple complaints of men exposing themselves to women and girls there.
Americans may be tolerant, but not of radical claims that human beings can change the basic realities of human biology, and not of things that have proven actively harmful to women and children. It is not bigotry, but the trans movement’s own intransigence, that has led us to this place.
And it is not right that a man who sought to assassinate a Supreme Court justice for political reasons should get a pass from a judge in part to ease his path to a gender change. That is not tolerance; it is madness. Scandals like the Boardman sentence can turn into hinge moments in history. They can open the eyes of those who have not been paying close attention to the ways elite decision-makers can easily cease seeing reason and begin living in dangerous fantasy—and by acting as they do, they can turn their dangerous fantasies into catastrophic realities for the rest of us.
9. At Brussels Signal, Ralph Schoellhammer reports from Germany on growing unrest between the elite and populist classes. From the article:
Today, four groups drive this dynamic: activists consumed by apocalyptic visions and overrepresented in media, politics, and academia; politicians eager to virtue signal for social approval, especially on platforms like Twitter; corporations pandering to fashionable trends for profit, regardless of genuine conviction; and finally, the silent majority—those who pay their taxes and want to lead peaceful lives, yet find their world increasingly encroached upon by top-down directives.
Take Germany, where the unilateral abandonment of nuclear power was made on ideological rather than practical grounds. Citizens, assured that wind and solar would replace the energy shortfall, now face the harsh reality of rising costs and diminished reliability. Despite significant progress in renewable energy adoption, Southern and Eastern Europe continue to grapple with retail energy bills that remain 40-70 per cent higher than pre-crisis levels. Similar patterns emerge in agricultural policy across Europe, where the European Commission has been forced to roll back various Green Deal requirements in response to sustained farmer protests. In each case, democratic societies find themselves ruled not by the majority, but by a narrow coalition of highly active, highly visible interest groups.
10. At Civitas Outlook, Thomas D. Howes assesses the decline of Tucker Carlson, platformer of cranks, and the risk it poses to the conservative project. From the piece:
Those of us guided by the fusionist, American constitutional-democratic philosophy linked to Reaganite conservatism, have had to realize that many of our allies in the conservative movement are motivated more by the communal side of politics than by rooted philosophical principles. This communal aspect has increasingly drifted away from reason and the sober limits of what politics can achieve. Many of the older conservatives who were strong supporters of Reagan have gradually shifted over the past few years through this tribal conflict with the left. That’s why they fail to recognize that they now support ideas vastly different from those they championed during the Reagan era. The recent incoherent reaction from some on the right to the Canadian free-trade ad featuring Reagan—with many acting as if the ad was deceptive for showing Reagan defending free trade—illustrates the kind of cognitive dissonance that arises when they try to reconcile Reagan and Trump philosophically, much less Reagan and Tucker Carlson.
So, how bad has Tucker Carlson become? If one considers how radical, illiberal, bigoted, and anti-American Nick Fuentes is, one sees clearly that Tucker Carlson is leading an army of fury and unreason. Those who have followed Carlson to this point had better jump off if they do not want to lose everything that ever mattered to American conservatism and to our country.
11. At Providence Magazine, Shiv Parihar analyzes the flop of “Christian Marxism.” From the article:
The interplay between Christianity and Marxism as a secular faith that tried (and failed) to supplant faith in Christ is well documented. Famously, it was a coterie of ex-communists that fired an opening literary salvo of the Cold War under the title The God that Failed, a theme carried forth by Whittaker Chambers, a Soviet agent turned devout Quaker, in his stellar memoir Witness. In the same vein, the German theorist Karl Kautsky (1854 – 1938) was known as the “Pope of Marxism” for his systematizing and popularizing of Karl Marx’s ideas. Kautsky influenced such figures as Vladimir Lenin in the Socialist International while he authored the programmes of the German Social Democratic Party, the largest socialist party in Europe in the lead up to WWI.
The global socialist movement turned their back on Kautsky, however, when he came to oppose his former Russian proteges’ Bolshevik revolution in 1917. Even so, Kautsky’s thought remained vital to future Marxist theoretical arguments and practical experiments. Central to Kautsky’s views was his historiography of Christianity, which he attempted to recast as a proletarian class struggle avant la lettre.
Kautsky first made this claim about Christianity in his Forerunners of Modern Socialism, published in volumes beginning in 1895, which he then further developed in Foundations of Christianity, published in German in 1908 and translated into English in 1915, the first full-length Marxist exposition of the Bible and Christian tradition.
12. At Modern Age, Nicholas Mosvick takes a critical view of Craig Shirley’s latest book on Ronald Reagan and the political-philosophy strains that influenced him. From the review:
Shirley understands Reagan as the voracious reader who “read everything under the sun on political philosophy.” But his conclusion that Reagan recognized, “as did all thinking conservatives, that Locke was the true father of American conservatism” is controvertible. Even the degree to which Locke was the primary source of the American founding is a vexed question—not just for conservatives trying to pinpoint the intellectual sources of the founding in order to rightly discern the traditions and principles they are defending but also for historians who seek to understand the intellectual history of the nation. Conservatives have spent decades arguing over whether the abstractions of Lockean liberalism and social contract theory, divorced from a proper understanding of the nature of man and the vitality of Christian civilization, could ever form a basis for conservatism.
Shirley wishes to present Reagan as an enlightened Lockean liberal statesman. He accepts Charles Hobbs’s thesis, from his 1976 book Ronald Reagan’s Call to Action, that Reagan’s philosophy was “founded on the sacredness of the individual.” Shirley sees Reagan as following Ralph Waldo Emerson’s call to all Americans to “think again about their revulsion toward acquisition and achievement and see gain and conspicuous consumption as a happy and spiritual exercise,” and he considers Reagan “one of the few presidents who told the American people they could worship God and not feel guilty about acquiring wealth and property, and in fact, there was no contradiction.”
Lucky 13. At The Spectator, Damian Thompson finds that the occult has captured the modern mind. From the article:
Further down the food chain, technology, old-style magic and apocalyptic prophecies are combining in chaotic patterns. The number of self-identifying witches in the United States has now overtaken the number of Presbyterians, and almost all of them employ digital tools to refine their magic. They use ChatGPT and other large language models to write spells tailored to rival traditions.
These include Wicca, a pantomime of covens and pentacles invented in the 1940s by the retired English civil servant Gerald Gardner; Astral Magery, whose mathematical formulae are supposed to harness primordial forces; and Chaos Magic, a pop-flavored postmodern take on the occult that treats beliefs as mere tools for releasing psychic energy. Then there are versions of Shamanism, Voodoo and Santeria adopted by liberal western neo-pagans who need a magic formula to banish suspicions of ‘cultural appropriation’.
That’s where AI comes in handy. “Sometimes we don’t know what to say and need a little inspiration,” explains Dave Linabury, a veteran occult blogger and illustrator from Detroit known as “Davezilla.” ChatGPT will craft an incantation in the style of a Yoruba magician or the British occultist and sex guru Aleister Crowley, while AI will conjure up a Wiccan goddess. It’s the illustrations, incidentally, that sow discord among today’s witches: occult “content creators” are always accusing each other of infringing copyright or using AI to fake magical images.
Bonus. At Forbes, edu-guru Bruno Manno is jazzed about the many potential benefits of dual enrollment. From the piece:
Allowing high school students to earn both college and high school credit at the same time has gone from boutique to baseline. These dual enrollment programs blend the last years of high school with the first year of college, often in classes taught on high school campuses. They increasingly link coursework to career pathways that lead to good jobs. They are also an underrated form of K–12 public school choice.
Done well, dual enrollment gives students a first taste of college-level expectations, lowers the cost of a credential, and accelerates the path to a good first job. Done poorly, it devolves into random acts of dual credit, with scattered classes that don’t apply to a pathway, credits that don’t transfer, and equity gaps that widen instead of close.
For the Good of the Cause
Uno. On Thursday, December 11th, Yours Truly will host a Center for Civil Society webinar on “The Beauty and Importance of the Declaration,” in which Hillsdale College scholar Matthew Spalding will be one-on-one interviewed about his important new book, The Making of the American Mind: The Story of Our Declaration of Independence—another feature of the Center’s ongoing “America at 250” project. The webinar is free, via Zoom, and will take place from 3:00 to 4:00 p.m. (Eastern). Matt is soooo smart—you will want to attend and learn. Register here.
Due. On the new “Givers, Doers, & Thinkers” podcast, host Jeremy Beer talks digital addiction with Andrew Laubacher. Watch it on YouTube, right here.
Department of Bad Jokes
Q: How many people admit they are bad at fractions?
A: 5/4ths.
A Dios
A New York Post article details how Ukraine is prosecuting the war against Russia by motivating its drone operators thus:
Ukraine has rolled out a video game-style rewards system for its drone pilots, giving them new weapons and upgrades for every successful kill against Russian invaders, according to a new report.
The “Army of Drones Bonus System” has skyrocketed in popularity among Ukraine’s UAV pilots as about 400 units are now taking part in the competition on who can take out the most Russian soldiers, Ukrainian officials told The Guardian.
More than 18,000 Russian fighters were killed in September by Ukrainian drone pilots participating in the program.
Is it wrong to be shocked by that number? 18,000 dead Russians, in September alone, by drones alone—have we become inured to the scope and scale of the bloodbath in Eastern Europe? We end as we began, with Ecclesiastes: There is a time for war, and a time for peace. May the latter be upon us.
May God Bless Our Veterans,
Jack Fowler, who finds it is a time to weep at jfowler@amphil.com.
