A Dozen-Plus Stimulants, Gathered for Your Edification and Inspiration
Dear Intelligent American,
From when this is typed to the day this missive is published, affairs in Iran and Venezuela may have changed dramatically, but the family crystal ball broke, and the Magic 8 Ball can’t be located—so there shall be no predicting. Let us hope and pray that oppression remains backpedaling.
But also let us admit that before us are examples of socialism’s reality, exposés of how a minority of tyrants can and will persecute the masses—and do so in the guise of brotherhood and charity and maybe even climate change—with the requirement and that the brotherhood, the less equal of the equals, had better like it and maybe even applaud . . . or else.
Actually, mes amis, the claptrap in the French Revolution roots of Leftism—Liberté, égalité, fraternité—has an oft-forgotten chaser: Ou la Mort. Or death.
Comes a point when people have to risk something, maybe even la mort. It’s a point many have reached, or are slowly approaching (Ireland, Britain, Sweden, Germany—pick any “migrant”-inundated European nation). People seem to be rousing from the shock of having their civil societies hijacked, abused, and plundered by elites and eminents and the very representatives they elect to parliaments and governorships and mayoralties. The percolation occurs here too, on our fruited plains and land of lakes, as John Q. Public looks in the mirror only to see reflected a sucker who subscribes to Superman’s code of truth, justice, and the American way.
Has that American way been replaced by a new code? You know, that one which recommends lining pockets by creating Potemkin daycares and bogus autism centers, abetted and cheered on by political hacks and ideological bureaucrats?
Let us hope not. Actually, let us embrace hope, and find our own way to become more actively engaged in civil society, because the stronger it is, the weaker are the prospects of tyrants.
While You’re Thinking, Maybe Reflect on These Interest-Packing Writings
1. At City Journal, James Piereson remembers the late Commentary editor, Norman Podhoretz. From the essay:
When Podhoretz reviewed the transition that his magazine had made in the previous few years, he pointed to two large events that accounted in great part for the shift in his positions. The first was the Six Day War in 1967, in which Israel waged a successful preemptive strike against several Arab countries seeking to wipe out the Jewish state. It was not so much the war itself that was important but rather the aftermath, in which a wave of anti-Zionism swept the world, especially in left-wing intellectual circles.
The second event was the New York teachers’ strike of 1968 that pitted black activists seeking to control local schools against unionized teachers, many (or most) of them Jews. The strike, which continued for months, brought forth expressions of anti-Semitism from activists, along with white liberals and radicals, who felt that blacks should control the schools their children attended. It was a fraught situation in New York, home to large numbers of Jews who had supported black causes over the years but now found themselves branded as “oppressors.”
Podhoretz drew an important conclusion from these events: “Whatever the case may have been yesterday,” he wrote, “and whatever the case may be tomorrow, the case today is that the most active enemies of the Jews are located not in the precincts of the ideological Right but in the ideological precincts of the radical Left.” Commentary, he wrote, had been fighting the battle against the radical Left in defense of liberal values in America, but as events proceeded, it was clear that this defense coincided with the fight to defend Jewish security both at home and in Israel.
2. At Public Discourse, Colleen Sheehan explores the genius of Jane Austen. From the beginning of the essay:
Why are the novels of Jane Austen considered classics, having stood the test of time and still beloved by readers around the world? What about the current generation, Gen Z—so edgy and cool that they can’t possibly look to Austen for entertainment, let alone guidance or wisdom, can they? Em . . . well, they do. There is a whole industry of Austenalia on TikTok, actually. This even though (or is it because?) Austen’s world is so markedly different from today’s and, in important respects, contradictory.
This year, as we mark Austen’s 250th birthday, we celebrate the brilliance and timelessness of her work. The words on her pages are strung together like a ribbon of pearls: elegant, rich, beautiful, and expertly woven. Her art is as insightful and charming today as it was in the century it was written.
It is no exaggeration to say that Jane Austen is situated at or very near the apex of literary genius. She occupies a place in one of those inner circles of Heaven, where only the most extraordinary of God’s creatures reside.
3. At Comment Magazine, Yuval Levin explains why functional institutions remain vital to civil society. From the beginning of the essay:
Calls for institutional renewal often strike the contemporary ear as hopelessly genteel—like an appeal to etiquette in an era of outrage. Such calls evoke responsibility, restraint, decorum. All of those have their place, but all sound thoroughly disconnected from the frantic, performative ethos of our moment. For some people, the juxtaposition is the appeal, or at least a sign of how necessary such renewal is. But those are the people who least need to be reminded of the value of institutional formation. To persuade those who really need to hear these calls for institutional commitment, we need to emphasize what stronger institutions could offer in this moment, not just what they demand.
What they offer is agency. And that is precisely what our moment sorely lacks. This should be obvious, but it is obscured by two habitual assumptions of modern social analysis.
The first of these assumptions is that social breakdown is a function of unrestrained impulses and uncontrolled energies. This is a familiar and generally reasonable conception of threats to human flourishing, but it is not adequate to describe this peculiar moment. The assumption is rooted in the fact that human beings are moved by passionate desires for things like pleasure, status, wealth, and power, and our pursuit of those goals can deform our lives if we don’t subject it to some formal structure and formative moderation through marriage, schooling, work, religion, and other binding commitments. Disordered lives are therefore frequently products of pushing too hard, recklessly rushing, and losing control.
4. At The New Criterion, Victor Davis Hanson tells of America’s warriors and warfare at the Revolution. From the essay:
They rarely saw unconventional forces as antithetical to traditional armies or as connoting lesser social status. Instead, they envisioned irregulars as complementary and ideally suited to the geography and local populations of Colonial America. The key was to draw on all manpower available without prior conventional restrictions. Washington, who believed victory would be achieved only when his orthodox infantry matched the caliber of the British army in set battles, nevertheless encouraged irregular and ad hoc militias, raiders, and guerrillas to work in tandem with his own Europeanized army.
General Nathanael Greene, perhaps second only to Washington in tactical and strategic insight, gained Washington’s confidence to form an irregular hit-and-run force of about a thousand infantry and eight hundred cavalry, to be supplemented by local militia. Greene himself avoided pitched battle with the better-equipped and larger British contingents in South Carolina. He wrote Washington, “I must make the most of a kind of partizan war.”
Washington was impressed, and quickly responded, “[I] approve of your plan for forming a flying army.” Greene’s “flying army,” soon working in tandem with Brigadier General Francis Marion (the “Swamp Fox”), saw a greater number of battles and engagements in South Carolina than took place in any other theater of the war. Indeed, one in five American war deaths occurred in South Carolina, a state that the much-larger British forces could never completely subdue.
5. At First Things, Mark Bauerlein wrestles with the recollection of traumatic experiences. From the piece:
To have an image in your mind, unpleasant or disastrous, which may pop up at any time, with or without a relation to the present, isn’t so different. Many people experience memory-flashes, and though the objects are less intense and lethal than those of Freud’s subjects, the mechanics are the same. It used to be that everyone in America recalled exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard that JFK had been shot. A special announcement, the newscaster’s voice, the look on the face of a person beside you, all rushed into consciousness whether you wanted them or not. The memory has a will of its own. Freud described how hard it is to discuss these visions when they reach traumatic levels: The patient “is obliged rather to repeat as a current experience what is repressed, instead of, as the physician would prefer to see him do, recollecting it as a fragment of the past” (emphasis in original).
This is correct. When the deer flares up these days, shying back too late, my reflex too slow, I’m not remembering. The moment is repeated (not by me), and the bus I’m riding or the corner I’m standing on dissolves, and I’m back on the road in the dark, and the impact is coming. I can’t do anything with this apparition, can’t make it stop or start, can’t find a meaning in it. When I recall the moment deliberately, the effect is different, a shiver, not a jolt. It doesn’t help; I can’t be cured. My desires are sometimes shameful, but at least they’re human. This occurrence isn’t human at all. Freud gives it a name, “repetition-compulsion,” and tries to grant the nightmares a purpose when he says they are the mind’s attempt to face danger by staging over and over the traumatic moment as if it were an exercise, so that we can better respond when another threat arrives.
6. At The Lamp Magazine, Peter Hitchens shares old locomotive memories, including one of a creaky train arriving at Jerusalem. From the article:
And this brings me to another oddity of memory and imagination. Eventually, I arrived at Jerusalem, and had to cope with the curious fact that a city which lived in my mind as a hilltop fortress of myth and miracle had a railway station and a municipal waterworks. Oddly, it was when I traveled there by train, by the old (and now abandoned) Turkish-built route through the Judaean hills, screeching and clattering through gorges and rocky outcrops, that I felt I had at last got to the Holy City in a fitting way. Every other time I had arrived by car. The train pulled quietly into a dusty station near the city walls, into a powerful silence, and the journey (as train journeys often do, in peaceful old landscapes) felt ancient and fitting. How I wish that train went on down to Jericho, or over the Jordan, perhaps crossing somewhere near “Bethabara, beyond Jordan.” I am told that scholarly opinion says the place where John the Baptist preached was in fact a little east of Jericho, very close to where the ugly, incessantly blown-up Allenby Bridge now stands, and where nobody is now likely to build anything as handsome or as benevolent as a railway line. But even so, this is where John was busily baptizing and had the wonderful conversation with the priests and Levites sent out to question him about who and what he was. This is gloriously set to music by Orlando Gibbons in “This is the Record of John”: “And they asked him, ‘What then? Art thou Elias?’ And he saith, ‘I am not.’ ‘Art thou that prophet?’ And he answered, ‘No.’” Is it just me, or is John, despite his austere garments and his unappealing insect diet, laughing at his interrogators?
7. At Verily Magazine, Meghan Murphy decries what casual sex hath wrought. From the article:
But the problem is that “casual sex” is a “freedom” that is really only desirable for men. Women, despite what we might tell ourselves or what we might like to believe, simply aren’t wired for endless one night stands. It’s not satisfying on a sexual or an emotion level. Men might feel nothing after sleeping with a woman and never seeing her again, but women tend to feel used, discarded, disrespected, and unfulfilled.
This may sound like sexist stereotyping but it’s rooted in biology.
Women are wired to bond through sex. Our brains are flooded with oxytocin—the “love hormone” which promotes not just bonding between heterosexual partners, but between mother and baby. It creates feelings of closeness, intimacy, trust, and attachment. It contributes to that “falling in love” feeling. Men might scoff at women who attach to men who’ve insisted they “don’t want anything serious,” but that’s not how women operate. You can be as rational as you like, but if you’re sleeping with us, we are most likely bonding to you and will want more, as it were. Forcing ourselves to disconnect and remain unattached is just that: forced. And most often a lie. We compartmentalize to avoid pain. And generally don’t actually end up avoiding the pain.
8. At Creed and Culture, Walter McDougall, author of the forthcoming book The Mighty Continent: A Candid History of Modern Europe, explains the mindset that empowered Europe to take to the world’s oceans. From the excerpt:
Finally, Europeans displayed a unique curiosity about other cultures. While they believed in the truth of their Christian religion, they did not conclude from that conviction that they had nothing to learn from encounters with other places and peoples. On the contrary, Europeans were voraciously interested in any practical knowledge that would serve their material interests.
That Europeans’ motives were various and, morally speaking, less than pris tine hardly made them exceptional. Why else do peoples seek contact with alien others except to plunder them, trade with them, study them, conquer them, or convert them? What made Europe exceptional lay in its means, not its motives, which brings us back to techne. Fascination with the physical world and its laws of nature; eagerness to borrow and improve on the tools and ideas developed by others; boundless self-confidence and willingness to take outrageous risks in hopes of acquiring honor, glory, power, and wealth in the service of church, state, and self—during the late medieval and Renaissance eras such qualities were on bold display in Europeans’ innovative shipbuilding, sail rigging, rudders, navigation, mapping, cannons, and muskets. Most striking, perhaps, was the sheer fortitude of the Portuguese and Spanish captains and sailors, plus the Italians in their service, who dared to sail beyond the sight of land in faith that their skill, good fortune, and divine protection would bring them to safe harbors somewhere out there in the vast unknown.
9. At Claremont Review of Books, in its special 25th anniversary issue, Christopher Flannery spotlights the importance of John Quincy Adams. From the review:
JQA’s ambition began with his parents’ ambitions for him. His mother, the formidable Abigail Adams, told him early on that he was destined to be a “guardian of his country’s laws and liberties.” He accepted that destiny. His father wrote him, when the 26-year-old was wavering a bit about his future: “You come into life with Advantages which will disgrace you if your success is médiocre.—And if you do not rise to the head of . . . your Country, it will be owing to your own Laziness Slovenliness and Obstinacy” (emphasis in the original).
JQA did rise to the head of his country, in his one term as president (1825-29), and he defended his country’s laws and liberties much more memorably in his eight years as secretary of state (1817-25). In those years, he created an American foreign policy dedicated to defending and perpetuating the American Revolution, a foreign policy that endured for the better part of a century. The spirit of it would still serve us well.
In a completely different role, JQA defended his country’s laws and liberties and strove to perpetuate the American Revolution in nine terms as a member of the House of Representatives (1831-48) after his one term as president. No president had ever served in the House after his term as chief executive, and Adams remains the only president to have done so. In those years in the House, he became known as “Old Man Eloquent” for his relentless resistance to what he called the Slavocracy. In many ways he anticipated Abraham Lincoln in taking his bearings from the Declaration of Independence and, whatever practical compromises he might feel to be necessary, insisting on treating slavery as an evil incompatible with the principles of the Revolution.
10. At The European Conservative, Sven Larson finds the continent’s economy situated in a dumpster. From the analysis:
While the euro zone certainly has been a disappointment in terms of macroeconomic performance (something we critics pointed out already at the time of its introduction), it is certainly not the only explanation of Europe’s crawling but seemingly unstoppable economic demise. Another factor has to do with the size of government spending, the burden of taxes, and the invasion of the regulatory state into the private sector. We need not look further than the detrimental effects of welfare state handouts on workforce participation and the depressing consequences of the ‘green transition’ on business investments.
On top of all these factors, Europe has made other short-term economic decisions with negative long-term ramifications. Foreign trade is one example: while the reconfiguration of U.S.–EU trade relations appears to have reached a productive point, Europe’s initial reaction has no doubt taken its toll on the EU economy.
Furthermore, the sanctions on Russia have led to higher energy costs in Europe and lost economic benefits from trade. As a result of the trade sanctions, Russia continues to transition its economy off Western dependency. While its trade with the EU fell precipitously—again—in 2025, its trade with the so-called CIS countries continued to expand.
11. At Civitas Outlook, Jonathan Miltimore reflects on Orwell, Hayek, and state propaganda. From the piece:
The phenomenon Orwell described was not moral relativism but factual relativism. It was a theme Hayek also addressed. The Austrian economist noted that in totalitarian systems, even basic facts—including mathematics—become subservient to state dogma. He reminded readers that in the USSR and Nazi Germany, ideology had consumed even the sciences. There was “German Physics” and a “Marxist-Leninist theory in surgery.”
“It is entirely in keeping with the whole spirit of totalitarianism that it condemns any human activity done for its own sake and without ulterior purpose,” he wrote. “Science for science’s sake, art for art’s sake, are equally abhorrent to the Nazis, our socialist intellectuals, and the communists.”
Hayek observed that as the state's power grows, the sciences become corrupted. Instead of advancing truth, they become tools in the hands of planners. “Once science has to serve, not truth, but the interest of a class, a community, or a state,” he wrote, “the sole task of argument and discussion is to vindicate and to spread still further the beliefs by which the whole life of the community is directed.”
12. At UnHerd, Valerie Stivers body-slams Vogue. From the beginning of the piece:
Little is more frustrating than watching beloved cultural institutions, already struggling under economic stress, hasten their own demise by betraying their customers with woke decision-making. We might call this the “no-bag” effect, referring to the irritation suffered by a customer who has just overspent on a pile of items in order to support a small business, only to be told by the supercilious clerk that the store does not provide bags. Well, next time I’ll just use Amazon, the customer thinks, and who can blame her?
Vogue’s online obituary for the late Brigitte Bardot is a case in point. The magazine long ago abandoned its mission of providing gorgeous inspirational eye-candy for young women who were never going to be able to afford the clothes, in favor of the dreariest woke-ism. So it’s no surprise that the Vogue cultural critic and body-positivity icon Emma Specter has written about Bardot’s politics instead of her style.
Bardot was a French actress, singer, sexpot, and style icon, whom Vogue could have celebrated for many things—her smoky eye, her blond beehive, her embodiment of French-girl chic, which combined bombshell cleavage with boyish, gamine stripes. I’ve never particularly liked Bardot—she had the cruel face of a small animal, a sclerotic trout-pout, and looked spray-tanned long before it was a thing—but you could learn a lot about scarves from her. The orange skirt, metallic jacket, and black beret she wore in the video for the song “Bonnie and Clyde,” with Serge Gainsbourg, was both playful and timeless, and would look good on the streets of any city today. If you wanted to know what to pair with pumps, or how to rock an off-shoulder corset top, or the scornful angle at which to hold a cigarette, Bardot was your girl.
Lucky 13. At American Reformer, Ben Crenshaw deciphers what an American is. From the essay:
American citizenship, the founders emphatically proclaimed, was not merely about being born within a certain kingly realm and thus tied in perpetuity to a potentate (i.e., the king’s political body). Instead, citizenship was participation in a self-defined and self-determining political body that, when joined by the bonds of common human society, becomes a “moral person.” American citizenship was demanding: as sovereign, the political community had the right to reject any immigrant wanting to join it, and for those who did join, permission had to be granted, and immigrants had to follow the law to gain naturalization. Instead of being sworn in allegiance to the king, citizens would swear allegiance to the Constitution and to what it represented: the American way of life.
Naturalization was neither easy nor assured; immigrants were vetted, first through ethnic and residency tests, then through characterological assessment to see if they were capable of the rigors of American republican citizenship. Those who were morally degenerate, slothful, conniving, or otherwise criminal were rejected for citizenship. After naturalization, immigrants were intentionally and sometimes ruthlessly assimilated into the American way of life. American assimilation was known as “anglicization” or “anglo-conformity,” which included learning English, submitting to Protestant norms, laws, and public education, and eventually, intermarriage with the historic American stock (majority English, minority German, Irish, Scottish, French, and Nordic).
Bonus. At Minding the Campus, David Randall explains how America has become a remedial nation. From the analysis:
But a crucial component in the decay of student knowledge is that their teachers don’t know what they’re teaching either. These teachers—themselves the mistaught students of an earlier generation—far too frequently have never learned the subject matter they’re supposed to teach.
If teachers never learned their lessons, how can their students be expected to?
The radical education establishment, which includes foundations, bureaucrats, and accreditors, has used licensure requirements as a central tool to gain power over America’s classrooms. These licensure requirements forced teachers and education administrators to undergo extensive training in educational pedagogy, and little in subject-matter content. The radical establishment, disconnected from real-world classrooms, used the requirements to restrict entry to leftist ideologues and careerists who could mouth politically correct buzzwords such as equity and social justice. They also generally reduced the supply of teachers and education administrators and wasted the time and money of would-be teachers by requiring them to learn a hollow curriculum rather than subject matter content knowledge or directly applicable knowledge of cognitive psychology and statistics.
The best way for Americans to improve student educational outcomes is to strengthen content-knowledge requirements for teachers. Teachers who know what they’re supposed to teach at least have a fighting chance of getting students to learn how to read and add—and to learn history, science, and everything else they need to know for college, career, and citizenship.
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, Frank Filocomo tells of RealClear Media Fund's important “Samizdat Prize” spotlighting courageous free speech heroes. Read it here.
Department of Bad Jokes
Q: What do snowmen have for breakfast?
A: Frosted flakes.
A Dios
The 12 Days of Christmas are spent—I hope yours were wondrous. Next stop, Lent.
May We Locate and Embrace the Courage Within,
Jack Fowler, who is ignoring resolutions at jfowler@amphil.com.
