A Dozen-Plus Stimulants, Gathered for Your Edification and Inspiration
Dear Intelligent American,
This issue arrives by email on Friday, April 4th, the evening of which the youngest of our daughters, Elizabeth, gets married to Benjamin. A lovely and loving couple they are and will be, with God’s love and mercy and, if you will be so kind, your prayers too. Your Humble Correspondent is deeply appreciative.
Something Borrowed . . .
1. At Deseret News, the late Mia Love, former Congresswoman from Utah, knowing her losing battle with cancer was soon concluding, shared her wish for America. From the reflection:
Watching my father and mother work odd jobs in order to provide for us and maintain their independence taught me valuable lessons in personal responsibility. When tough times came they didn’t look to Washington, they looked within. Because the America they knew was centered in self-reliance, the America I know is founded in the freedom self-reliance always brings.
What makes America great is the idea that when government is limited and decisions are made closest to the people they impact, people are free—free to work, free to live, free to choose, free to fail and free to achieve. The America I know provides everyone an equal opportunity to be as unequaled as they choose to be.
The America I know gives back. Americans, regardless of financial status, are the most giving people on the planet. On their own, without government requirement, our people give their money, their time and their attention to causes, communities and people in need whether it is across the street or around the world. I’ve experienced this generosity throughout my life and during my battle with cancer. I am so grateful.
2. At Tablet Magazine, Maggie Phillips tells of how Methodists remain deeply involved in disaster relief in the hurricane-devastated hills of rural North Carolina. From the beginning of the piece:
Faithbridge United Methodist Church in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, looks a bit like a mountain lodge. Large timber beams support the pediment on the small church’s otherwise plain and unassuming facade. The busy Middle Fork of the New River, the site of a rubber-duck race each summer, runs next to the campus. Faithbridge’s nonprofit partner, Casting Bread food pantry and cafe, occupies the same hillside. I recently visited on a warm, sunny March day, when Casting Bread board members were preparing a hot dog cart for its maiden outing. An outsider seeing the balloons and smiles would have had little indication of the destruction that Hurricane Helene had visited on the church when it assailed western North Carolina barely six months ago, killing over 100 people, destroying thousands of homes, and causing nearly $60 billion in damage.
Founded in 2006, Casting Bread serves everyone regardless of who they are, where they’re from, or what they believe. Although a distinct entity from Faithbridge, Casting Bread partners closely with the church and shares its campus. It is part of what researchers from the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute and Partnership for Sacred Spaces have called the “economic halo effect” of Methodist churches in rural North Carolina, where the denomination’s charities and other social services have an outsize impact on their surrounding communities. Especially after the devastation of Hurricane Helene last autumn, Casting Bread’s mission to feed the hungry is more vital than ever.
In keeping with the spring atmosphere of renewal, the hot dog cart was being repurposed. For the first time since the hurricane had flooded the building in September, destroying kitchen equipment and causing irreparable structural water damage, Casting Bread Cafe had been reimagined for the time being as the smaller, portable “Casting Bread Cantina,” which allows them to serve food pantry clients a hot meal at outdoor picnic tables next to the church.
3. Encounter Books offers a taste of fan favorite Daniel J. Mahoney’s new book, The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impolse Then and Now. From the excerpt:
This book aims to provide nothing less than a full-throated defense of moral and political sanity against the latest eruptions of ideological mendacity in our time. Its thesis is simple enough, but it needs the full resources of applied political philosophy to explain with adequate clarity and depth. The thesis? That the “ideological” project to replace the only human condition we know with a utopian “Second Reality” oblivious to—indeed at war with—the deepest wellsprings of human nature and God’s creation has taken on renewed virulence in the late modern world, just thirty-five years after the glorious anti-totalitarian revolutions of 1989.
This was not supposed to happen. Midcentury “progressive democracy,” as the Hungarian moral and political philosopher Aurel Kolnai called it in 1950, had already revealed itself to be an “incomplete totalitarianism” that, nonetheless, was capable, he argued, of rivaling Communism and Nazism by morphing into a “Third Rider of the Apocalypse.” For a long time, Kolnai’s forebodings about a totalitarian turn in democracy seemed exaggerated and not a little overwrought to me. But how prescient this analyst of the utopian mind turned out to be. That Third Rider has indeed come to threaten and repress, as Kolnai feared, all “essential opposition” to Autonomous Man, the human being defined by his desire to emancipate himself from the “alien powers” (as Marx called them) that subjugate Man. Included in these powers are all natural, transcendent, and inherited limits to human will. The totalitarian impulse has thus survived the “official” collapse of the classic totalitarian regimes and ideologies of the twentieth century and has come out strengthened, and less “incomplete,” in decisive respects. For a long time, Kolnai wrote, democracy, no matter how “progressive” its ultimate aspirations, had “contained and sheltered” precious “traditions of civilization and fragments of liberty” that it now jettisons with irresponsible abandon. Its “theory”—increasingly abstract, insatiable, unremitting—has come to triumph over its once salutary “practice.” The endless self-radicalization of democracy predicted by Alexis de Tocqueville nearly two hundred years ago has come to pass with unerring and unnerving accuracy.
4. More Mahoney: At The American Mind, the astute political philosopher makes the friendly case for common sense. From the piece:
One cannot adamantly oppose the repudiation of common sense and continue to ignore the grounding of free and decent political life in certain unchanging truths about human nature and the nature of reality. These provide the ultimate ground, the surest foundation, of a politics of common sense, as our Founders surely knew. Human beings are not autonomous, and liberty is always liberty under God and a non-arbitrary moral law. We aim to conquer nature—and human nature—at our own peril, as the 20th-century experience with totalitarianism, and our own recent experience with uncontrolled biotechnological experimentation, surely show.
Too many members of the common-sense coalition have unthinkingly adopted the language of gender (think “gender reveals”), not knowing that this mode of discourse implicitly liberates “gender identity” from any grounding in natural and biological reality. Hence, the truly mad assertion, as far from common sense as one can imagine, that men and women are just two possible “genders” among 73 or, for that matter, 173.
While a majority of Americans are right to assert the inherent dignity of our homosexual friends and neighbors, it was surely a mistake to separate marriage from any grounding in the nature of things (that is, the sexual binary, and the accompanying “production” of new human beings and citizens). We must face a damning truth: de-naturalized marriage led inexorably to the terrible excesses and fantasies of transgenderism.
5. At Strategika, Jakub Grygiel investigates the strategic and military pathways to a peaceful—but likely not permanent—settlement of Russia’s war against Ukraine. From the essay:
In brief, the likely scenario is that war will simply be interrupted, rather than reach a long-term settlement removing the initial causes of the conflict. No matter what the official term of the outcome will be—a de facto ceasefire, a formal armistice, a peace treaty, or a more generic plan of action—the reality is that the interests of the two sides are fundamentally opposed and non-negotiable: Ukraine wants to be independent, Russia wants her empire in Europe. Whether under Putin or his successor, Russia will not abandon her imperial aspirations to become a key European power through a full control of Kyiv. And the stronger China becomes on Eurasia’s eastern side, the greater Moscow’s need will be to maintain great power status by reentering Europe through Ukraine. This basic geostrategic interest will not change with a cessation of fighting in Ukraine.
The best-case scenario is that active fighting ends along the current line of contact, without a grand political settlement. There will be a recognition of de facto realities on the ground without the need to establish new—and for both Ukraine and Russia difficult to accept—de iure maps. After years of fighting and a large loss of blood, Kyiv cannot accept having lost forever large swaths of sovereign territories. And Russia cannot accept limiting her grand imperial scheme to slivers of new lands instead of a grand historic reentry into Kyiv. For Kyiv this would be too much; for Moscow this would be too little.
6. At Civitas Outlook, Richard Reinsch considers a new collection of the exiled Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s speeches, and assesses them to be of great importance. From the review:
These lectures stretch from 1972 to 1997, yet the perennial themes and ideas explored by Solzhenitsyn command the contemporary reader’s full attention. Moreover, the Russian patriot expresses sadness, if not a sense of betrayal, at the modern West for its lack of courage, deficient statesmanship, materialism, nominalist freedom, and adjacent socialism. There are moments in these lectures where Solzhenitsyn’s diagnosis leaps from the page and reaches across the decades to our recent political and cultural miasmas.
The problem of God and man informs these speeches from beginning to end. Solzhenitsyn traces the decline of the human spirit to the modern mind’s belief that it soars over everything in a spirit of supreme self-sufficient “autonomy.” In “An Orbital Journey,” delivered in Zurich in 1974 on winning the Golden Matrix prize from the Italian Catholic Press Union, Solzhenitsyn stresses that mankind is nearing the end of “a long orbital journey.” Modern man believed that the journey “would be endless, always forward, only forward, never sideways or askew.” Such a journey began in the Renaissance and continued through “the Reformation, the Enlightenment, bloody physical revolutions, democratic societies, and socialist projects.” The project so initiated, Solzhenitsyn states, was the “long era of humanistic individualism, the construction of a civilization based on the principle that man is the measure of all things, that man is above all.” Both the West and the East share this malady, this fundamental error to understand the human person as a being under God, Solzhenitsyn concludes. The resulting pollution spans our environmental, economic, spiritual, and social landscapes. What is needed is “the loftiness to discover once again that man is no crown of the universe, but that there exists above him a Supreme Spirit.”
7. At The American Conservative, Spencer Neale laments the chokehold of money on collegiate basketball. From the article:
For the first time since 2007, no teams seeded 11th or lower advanced to the Sweet 16. The biggest underdog success story at this year’s tournament is arguably a student manager, the boom-box wielding Amir “Aura” Khan, whose stereo-pumping walkouts in front of the McNeese basketball team has netted him more than $100,000 in NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness) deals. Topps, Under Armor, Buffalo Wild Wings, and Insomnia Cookies—they all wanted a piece of Khan’s viral videos, and they were willing to pay.
Big Money, whose influence once was consigned to the murky shadows of college athletics, is now being legally thrown around at record rates for the whole country to see. Actions that could once ruin a program, a coach, and its players are now commonplace in the new era of college hoops. When the Maryland freshman sensation Derik Queen was asked, following his buzzer-beating shot against Colorado State late Sunday night, why he listens to coach Kevin Willard, Queen summed up the new era of college hoops in one simple sentence: “He do pay us the money, so we gotta listen to him.” Audible laughs echoed through the press pool. Willard buried his face in his hands, clearly uncomfortable with the answer.
“The transfer portal is crazy,” Willard said the next day. “There are kids asking for $2–3 million right now. The money has exploded because we have no guardrails. We have no rules. It’s been as badly of a rule implemented as ever [sic]. And agents are taking advantage of it.”
8. At City Journal, Heather Mac Donald says the DEI Battle at Columbia and other prestigious colleges is just beginning. From the article:
Case Western Reserve University has just completed an almost identical rebranding. It replaced its Office for Diversity, Equity and Inclusive Engagement with an Office for Campus Enrichment and Engagement. The head of the “new” Office for Campus Enrichment and Engagement is the same black male who served as vice president for the “old” Office for Diversity, Equity and Inclusive Engagement. In his previous capacity as vice president for the “old” Office for Diversity, Equity and Inclusive Engagement, Robert Solomon posted a video of himself reading from the book, You Sound Like A White Girl: The Case For Rejecting Assimilation. The video was part of the office’s Hispanic programming. You Sound Like A White Girl posed the burning question: “How does my non-white, non-black identity contribute to the power of white supremacy in America?” Solomon is unlikely to have concluded in the interim that white supremacy no longer needs fighting.
Every other aspect of Case Western Reserve’s Office for Campus Enrichment and Engagement is a throwback to the Office for Diversity, Equity and Inclusive Engagement. It will offer training, in the words of its website, to “ensure you feel welcome, respected and valued.” These terms, which gained currency a decade ago in diversity circles, apply to “marginalized” students’ allegedly vulnerable identities. The idea is that an affirmative effort is needed so that such students don’t feel unwelcome, disrespected, and undervalued. But no adult on a college campus today shows disrespect to students based on their identity; well-meaning, liberal faculty and administrators bend over backward to be “inclusive.” And it is not the function of a university, in any case, to make any group of students feel “welcome, respected and valued.” The only student “feelings” the schools are responsible for is a deserved feeling of academic mastery. Until that mastery is attained, students should feel humbled, frightened, and inadequate before the responsibility of taking on knowledge.
9. At The New York Post, Adam Coleman wants an end to liberal excuse-making for broken homes. From the piece:
Growing prosperity and a greater emphasis on individualism in our country have led to a cultural decline in our willingness to make sacrifices. In this widespread aversion to living sacrificially, it is our children that suffer the most.
With this attitude of selfishness and individualism abounding, what America needs more now than anything is better parents.
But selfish parents not only exist in our circles of family and friends but are also prominent figures who hypnotize the public with excuses for their neglect of their children to avoid scrutiny.
You’re not supposed to talk about these uncomfortable problems of family breakdown in the public eye. Everyone gets angry if you bring to light your family’s darkness. You weigh the risk of losing them with the hope of finding a resolution to your pain.
10. At TomKlingenstein.com, Scott Yenor opens cans of moxie in order to “talk about the trouble with Young Women.” From the piece:
Young women are the voter base of nearly every far-left political party and political cause in the modern world, from the German Left to Spain’s Socialist Workers Party. Estimates suggest that college-educated women made up nearly a third of the Democrat base in 2023, a proportion that has doubled in a generation. Young women, especially unmarried ones, broke hard for the Democrats in the United States in 2020 and 2022. They still broke for Harris in 2024, but not as hard. The Democrat Party is the single women’s party, as their media allies sometimes say.
Liberal young women support abortion on-demand, racial favoritism, gay rights, gun control, open borders, tax increases, and green energy. Brookings argues that young women are most interested in “sexual harassment, domestic violence, child abuse and neglect, and mental health problems.” A recent poll found that white women with college degrees have opinions far different from white men with or without college degrees and white women without college degrees. Unlike the other groups which are either sour or neutral on DEI and the war in Ukraine, for instance, white women with college degrees favor DEI by 31% and the war by 53%. They hate DOGE and Trump. They are hardly concerned about bread-and-butter issues like economic growth, unemployment or budget deficits. Young, credentialed women increasingly aspire to suppress speech in workplaces and through laws.
Issue-by-issue political beliefs do not fully capture their opinions. The “future is female” is a partisan vibe. Young, liberal, college-educated women are activists, disproportionately involved in public protests and proudly quarrelsome in public confrontations—especially in the pro-Hamas protests of 2024. They see themselves as disruptors. Well behaved women rarely make history!
11. At UNWON, Keely Covello wonders if it’s true, that the federal government has it out for ranchers. From the article:
Many of my sources believe federal agencies like the Park Service have a pattern of strong-arming producers into surrendering their land before terminating promised agricultural leases and forcing them out.
“The Park Service hates ranchers,” one tells me. She has close personal experience with the agency. I’ve agreed to keep her anonymous. “They lure people in, but when land has National Park or National Seashore status, ranchers have no rights or freedom anymore.”
During the years the Point Reyes ranchers were stuck in limbo with lawsuits from deep-pocketed environmental groups, the Park Service portrayed itself as a passive party.
“The Park Service works very, very hard to maintain its Ranger Image,” says Sarah Rolph, a writer who is authoring a book about the closure of Drake’s Bay Oyster Farm on Point Reyes. “They never get their hands dirty, they farm out the work of creating and promulgating the relevant false narrative to the activists, and then they collude behind closed doors in the course of their fake lawsuits. Sue-and-settle—it's a known scam.”
My anonymous source concurs.
“I believe these non-profit environmentalist groups and the National Park Service are in bed with each other. The environmentalists play the bad guy and the Park Service tries to play the good guy. But they’re not. They’re extreme zealots.”
12. At Religion & Liberty Online, Casey Chalk finds a secular yin to the yang of atrocities. From the piece:
The anti-religious character of the Khmer Rouge regime is important, [Thomas Albert] Howard argues, because in both academia and popular media, it is often an a priori assumption that it is religion and violence that go hand in hand. There is a Journal of Religion and Violence and academic texts such as the Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence and the Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence. Millions of Americans believe our nation is terrifyingly close to realizing the dystopian religious authoritarianism of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. “For many educated Westerners,” Howard observes, “the idea that religion promotes violence and secularism ameliorates the problem is a settled certainty, a doxa, an unstated premise of right thinking.” Yet, he further notes, if we are talking about numbers, the death and destruction exacted upon religious communities by secularist governments in the 20th century far exceeds the violence committed by premodern or early modern European confessional states.
But Howard’s argument moves far beyond the typical talking point (however accurate) that the anti-Christian regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people. Indeed, the professor of humanities and history begins by differentiating three different manifestations of secularism that are visible in modern political institutions: passive secularism, combative secularism, and eliminationist secularism.
Lucky 13. At Plough Magazine, Shira Telushkin believes there is a revival of cloistered nuns. From the essay:
The story that follows these statistics is usually simple: our modern, secular age has no ear for monastic callings. The life of a cloistered nun, with her endless prayers and heavy woolen headdress, is squarely in the past, and the allure of being an active sister, who ran hospitals and schools and fought for civil rights, belongs to a time when women had few other opportunities to work outside the home. Today, women who want to serve the world can be social workers, nurses, teachers, or directors of non-profits, all without the restrictions of consecrated life. The nun has outlived her purpose.
But this story overlooks a far more interesting development: not all religious orders are losing numbers, and not all at the same rate. In the past fifteen years, the most traditional, cloistered orders have found themselves awash in interest. New monasteries are being built; more land is being bought. Ancient forms of religious life, such as those for canonical hermits and consecrated virgins, are once more on the rise. Though it is true that most sisters today are active, the orders attracting younger members are contemplative: they pray the full office, wear traditional habits, and seek lives of worship and devotion away from the world, renouncing family, comfort, and travel—the type of monasticism that has existed in the church for fifteen centuries.
Bonus. At Verily Magazine, Katie Faley offers ten ways to declutter, without guilt. From the piece:
Extra Housewares: I recently read a satirical article about the extra spatula in the kitchen that’s ready to be used when the unthinkable happens to the primary spatula. How many of us have multiples? Answer: all of us. Chances are you have a set of plates, bowls, and kitchen gadgets that you prefer using over your “backup” items. Donate rarely used housewares to Habitat for Humanity, which helps families build a decent and affordable place to call home.
For the Good of the Cause
Uno. At Philanthropy Daily, Grace Phan Bellafiore thinks that time has come for good gifting. Open your tote bags, and your mind: Read it here.
Due. On Thursday, April 24th, Yours Truly will host a “Givers, Doers, & Thinkers” webinar—the first of a series of Center for Civil Society efforts to mark the forthcoming America 250 celebration—with renowned political philosopher Daniel J. Mahoney (author of the forthcoming book, The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now) on “The Divergent Causes and Consequences of the French and American Revolutions.” The free, via-Zoom event will take place from 3:00 to 4:00 p.m., Eastern, and discuss the competing visions of newly born America and guillotine-worshipping France for the relationships between man, the state, and the Creator, and how one nation’s choice led to exceptionalism, while another’s spawned a doctrine of totalitarianism that persists today. Learn more, and sign up, right here.
Department of Bad Jokes
Q: Why were the two antennae happy right after getting married?
A: They loved the excellent reception.
A Dios
Jesus’s divinity could have become public at a pickleball tournament, at the pharmacy pick-up counter, or while He was stuck in traffic on the Jericho Turnpike. Instead, it happened at a wedding feast. Consider why.
May The Creator Dispense Graces So That All Unions Last,
Jack Fowler, who is practicing his aisle-walking at jfowler@amphil.com.
