A Dozen-Plus Stimulants, Gathered for Your Edification and Inspiration
Dear Intelligent American,
By coincidence, Yours Truly graduated from the same high school and college as did one Anthony Fauci—years later, of course. The schools’ social media groups on Facebook are alive with commentary on the controversial (understatement!) ex-bureaucrat’s culpability as to the Covid virus’s origins (US-taxpayer-financed “gain-of-function” research conducted at a commie military lab in Wuhan) and lockdown protocols and vaccine mandates and . . . The commentary is shocking, but maybe there should be no surprise. After all, for years so many fellow alumni have marinated in reflected I went to the same school as glory (curious: can reflected glory marinate?) and basked so religiously in same that they hold tightly, dearly, and angrily to the defense of this self-defined stand-in for “Science.”
There is a party line from which no dissent is permitted. So go the comments: Can you PROVE it was gain of function, huh? Show me the proof! . . . the evidence is clear it was likely from a wet market! Smart people, very smart people, say such. Alongside the sugar plums, do they dream of a wandering, diseased pangolin? You know, the one that is the source of the deaths of millions globally; it remains unfound; maybe it’s chilling with Godot or the Great Pumpkin. Seems like the embrace of innocence for this individual force of civil-society mayhem will have to be clutched out of their cold, dead hands, to sorta quote Charlton Heston, about guns, pardon the convolution.
So go alumni, elite donchaknow, whose boosterism arcs towards sycophancy, and who are threatened by the new transparency of our last six years of crisis, now exposed by Dr. Fauci’s infamous flip-flop filled diaries. Alas, if his halo is tarnished, won’t mine be, too?
Saddle Up and Ride to the Sound of Excerpts
1. At Commentary Magazine, John Podhoretz tells of the Jewish-American story, the pre-October 7th edition. From the reflection:
Movies, radio, television, the American popular song—these were in large part the gifts given to America and the world by a tiny people given permission by this country’s political system and frontier spirit to let themselves loose for the first time. The Eastern European legend of America as the goldene medina—the land where the streets were paved with gold—was, like all legends, a fantasy. Most American Jews before World War II were poor; most struggled. But they had been poor before they came, and their struggles had been worse, living as so many did under the threat of sudden violent attack or lifetime conscription or simply without the resources to improve their standing and their lot. No, Jews weren’t going to get off the boat and scoop up gold from the streets of America. But they might. And that was something entirely new for the stateless diasporic people. America gave them a chance. And two generations later, their grandchildren did. Three generations after those grandchildren became full participants in the American dream, American Jews (save for those from the Soviet Union) have no direct connection to the past from which the American immigration delivered them. They have no emotional connection to the world-historic change from Jews being an unwelcome people to being . . . just people.
So we loved America, and we should have, and we should still. Jews have lived in this country as they never lived anywhere before, ever, and the story of America is a story of increasing tolerance, acceptance, respect, and freedom for Jewish people to be the best we can be. We have had it so good that even anti-Semitism, of which we were well aware as a phenomenon and to which we reacted with alarm at the United Nations and in relation to the treatment of Israel and the treatment of Jews in the increasingly Islamicized Europe, played almost no part in our lives day-to-day.
2. At Plough Quarterly, Robert Lynch tells of a familial disdain for waste while defending frugality. From the piece:
As a kid, I thought my parents were idiots. Why would two working adults spend twenty minutes scrounging around in a ditch or risk getting carjacked at a gas station in Detroit? And it wasn’t that they were all that cheap. They may have spent a lot of time arguing about which gas station didn’t charge for air, but they’d drop seven thousand dollars on a family trip to Europe every summer.
What I didn’t understand until I was much older was that I’d had it backward. It wasn’t a calculation—it was a discipline. And it leaked into every aspect of their lives: what they threw away, what they let stay broken, how they treated the people around them. What I’d mistaken for stinginess was a practice. There’s a word for it, though we mostly use it now to mean cheap. The word is frugality—and we’ve forgotten it was ever a virtue at all. I caught the tail end of it, just before our culture stopped treating wastefulness as a vice and before we forgot that there is such a thing as wanting too much.
My grandparents would have recognized it instantly. My children have no idea it exists. My father was born in Detroit during the Depression. My mother’s parents were Mennonites who grew up in Ukraine during the famine of 1921 that killed as many as a million people. My oma told us stories of eating grass and the straw from the roofs of their houses, in a countryside ravaged by civil war. A few years later, the family emigrated to Canada. The empty pop bottles were an echo of all of it.
Hey, This Is Important . . .
This coming Thursday, August 13, from 3:00 to 4:00 p.m. (Eastern) is when the Center for Civil Society airs its next (free!) “Actionable Fundraising” webinar—The Marathon Before the Sprint: How to Get Started on Your Year-End Fundraising Now. Yes, this is timely must-attend for nonprofit fundraising pros, who will benefit from AmPhil wisdom dispensers Steph D’Anselmi and Chas Baines (who answer questions posed by Yours Truly). Giving Tuesday will be here before you can say “Jingle Bells”—so register.
. . . And Now Back to Other Important Stuff . . .
3. At the Wall Street Journal, Ian Rowe and Brad Wilcox connect academic success to family structure. From the op-ed:
None of this excuses a school system that has failed black, Hispanic and low-income families, or denies the need for broader test preparation and access to better schools. But these debates often miss a fundamental reality: A student’s success can rise or fall on the structure and stability of his family more than by his skin color or his family’s bank account.
Our forthcoming report from the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies shows how thoroughly Washington has neglected this critical point. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, the gold-standard federal exam known as “The Nation’s Report Card,” has asked students about their family structure since 2013, but it doesn’t break down math and reading scores by that measure. Instead, it reports results by sex, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, disability and English-learner status—the categories Washington requires. That reporting is valuable, but it has the unintended consequence of training a generation of educators, researchers and journalists to treat those categories as the only ones worth considering.
4. At UnWon, Keely Covello reports on how there is no room in the Texas FFA for Christian farmer groups. From the beginning of the story:
For almost 20 years, students attending the Texas FFA Convention in Fort Worth have stopped by the Fellowship of Christian Farmers International (FCFI) booth. Volunteers pass out beaded bracelets depicting the Christian gospel—the “Wordless Message”—and talk with students about faith, mission trips, and service opportunities. Every year, retired ag teacher and FFA advisor Art Free looked forward to seeing the kids. Some would stop by the booth to show him they were still wearing their bracelet.
But this year, when FCFI applied for its usual booth, something had changed. There was a new policy, and they were no longer welcome.
Free was blindsided. “I almost cried when they told me,” he says. “I couldn’t believe it.”
FCFI is one of at least two Christian groups barred from exhibiting at the 98th Annual Texas FFA Convention due to a new policy that prohibits groups promoting “specific political or social ideologies.”
5. A National Review editorial explains the roots of Spain’s Ceuta crisis. From the piece:
Much of the controversy over the influx into Ceuta revolves around [Prime Minister] Sánchez’s responsibility for it. Earlier this year, his government forced through an amnesty for illegal immigrants. About 1 million people applied, roughly double the official, but widely disbelieved, estimate. Eventually, family reunification provisions may increase the total admitted or regularized to, on some estimates, between 2 and 3 million. After, typically, five years of legal residence, they will be able to settle elsewhere in the EU. Unsurprisingly, the news of this amnesty horrified many in a bloc already wrestling with the consequences of mass immigration and badly scarred by the Merkel debacle a decade ago. Thanks to the EU’s rules on free movement within its borders, an immigration problem in one member-state can easily spill over into another.
The amnesty sent a signal to would-be immigrants. It was not the first in Spain, and there was no reason to think that it would be the last, Moreover, just weeks ago, the Spanish Supreme Court had opened a loophole in the special immigration regime in place for Ceuta and Melilla. Under this, asylum-seekers can be turned back at the border but, the court ruled (for reasons that are now being addressed), not if they swam there.
6. At Man of Steele on Substack, Eli Steele tells a tale of white guilt found in the debunking of the “Cambridge Fabulist.” From the article:
The targeted professor is Jason Arday who was celebrated in 2023 as Cambridge’s youngest black professor ever. He specialized in the sociology of race, inequality, and education and is known—ironically—for his study on how institutions fail black people.
The Times Higher Education journalist, Jack Grove, investigated a claim that Arday’s doctoral thesis contained sentences that were not his own. The inquiry was simple: did you write these words or did someone else? This line of questioning is race-neutral.
It is important to keep in mind that, as of now, the facts of this case remain contested. Cambridge insists that they cleared Arday of any wrongdoing. Liverpool John Moores University, where Arday’s doctorate was granted, says that the thesis stands. Arday himself denies all plagiarism accusations, including the allegation that his 2015 PhD thesis contains over 180 passages identical or near-identical to the 2009 thesis by Paula Zwozdiak-Myers of Brunel University. However, my interest in this story goes beyond the plagiarism question to what happened when a journalist asked a legitimate question.
When Arday received the email from Grove in September of 2025 he was given the customary courtesy to respond. Grove did not get an answer. He got a letter from Carter-Ruck, a law firm retained by Arday, and they told Grove that his inquiry may have been racially motivated. The Times Higher Education killed the story shortly afterward.
7. At Coolidge Review, Alexander J. Field finds the genesis of America’s economic might within the glook of the Great Depression. From the essay:
In most other eras, growth in output also reflects increased availability of inputs—more worker hours, more physical capital. But private-sector input growth was effectively absent between 1929 and 1941.
What, then, accounts for such a large increase in U.S. productivity during this era? I identify three main contributors.
First, U.S. factories completed the shift to electric power. Most of this transition had occurred in the 1920s, and it allowed a complete redesign of the American factory. Out were the overhead shafts and belts that were the signature of the nineteenth-century factory. In were small fractional-horsepower electric motors and single- rather than multiple-story industrial buildings. The shift to the use of electricity for the internal distribution of power brought huge leaps in manufacturing productivity across the board.
Second, during the 1930s the United States significantly increased spending on research and development. R&D employment stood at 6,274 in 1927. By 1933, after four of the worst years of the Depression, it had climbed to 10,918. And in 1940, after another seven years of double-digit unemployment, that number stood at 27,777. The private sector both refined existing products and developed new ones. Wallace Carothers, a Harvard chemistry professor recruited by DuPont, invented nylon. Meanwhile, Philo T. Farnsworth—backed by venture capital—developed the technology that would become the signature new consumer product of the postwar era: television.
8. At Academic Questions, Karl D. Stephan warns a library apocalypse is coming. From the beginning of the piece:
The other day I went to my university’s library to find a book. Since the last time I was there, the staff had begun a large shifting and sorting operation of some kind, and where the science section (Q in the Library of Congress classification) used to be, there were just rows of empty shelves.
I saw a staff person moving some books and asked her what was going on. She said that they were consolidating the collections that used to occupy two floors and putting them all on one floor.
“What’s happening to the extra books that used to fill up both floors?” I asked.
“If something hasn’t been looked at in ten years, we’re moving it to the storage facility off campus. That way the more popular items will still be here, and you can always request an item from storage.”
“I see.” This got me to wondering whether a larger trend was going on.
It is.
9. At Law & Liberty, Theodore Dalrymple explains that governments cannot be “generous.” From the piece:
But is the government that gives that dollar being generous? No, because generosity is a quality of individual persons, not of impersonal or collective organisations spending money that never belonged to those who make the decisions. A government may be wise or foolish, prudent or imprudent, perhaps: its policies may conduce to contentment or to misery, to wealth or to poverty, to justice or to injustice, to order or to squalor, though rarely having the same effects on everyone: but in any case it cannot be judged by the same moral criteria or characteristics as an individual is judged.
A government, moreover, has never to lose sight of the fact that its expenditure is that of the largely involuntary or forced contributions of taxpayers, which mostly represent the wages of their labour. Its redistributive “generosity” to some is therefore always at the cost of the labour of others, which is not to say that this “generosity” is never justified. Still, a government cannot in itself be kind or unkind; it can only achieve or fail to achieve its objectives, which themselves may be laudable or blameable—or, because of the tragic dimension of human life, may be both at the same time. But while the incontinent indebtedness of governments and individuals alike is imprudent, the kindness of individuals cannot be ascribed to governments.
10. At the University of Austin’s Substack, Alex Priou shuns low expectations and offers a how-to on being an elitist. From the piece:
What matters, then, is that we educate the young for greatness, regardless of whether they will ever encounter opportunities for it. On this topic, students set aside Churchill for Strauss, whose appreciation for the connection between liberal education and greatness proves much deeper. For Strauss, liberal education is above all the cultivation of our intellectual faculties, and such cultivation should be understood as precisely as the cultivation of the soil, as agriculture or horticulture. The term “culture,” therefore, should not be used in the plural and indiscriminately, as in our phrases “corporate culture” and “drug culture,” but in the singular, as “the culture of the human mind.” Our lax use of this lofty term leads Strauss to paint a much darker picture than Churchill had, with his “vacant Thrones” and “blameless mediocrities”: “If we contrast the present day usage of ‘culture’ with the original meaning, it is as if someone would say that the cultivation of a garden may consist of the garden’s being littered with empty tin cans and whiskey bottles and used papers of various descriptions thrown around the garden at random.” Dark though this cloud may be, it bears a silver edge Churchill’s does not. For Churchill is convinced that our age is a high plateau, well above the peaks of the past, yet lacking “a monarch peak, with base enormous, whose summit is for ever hidden from our eyes by clouds.” Strauss disagrees. He contends that the ancient peaks rise high above us today, no less than those in ages past. For “the greatest minds . . . are extremely rare. We are not likely to meet any of them in any classroom. We are not likely to meet any of them anywhere. It is a piece of good luck if there is a single one alive in one’s time.” Practically speaking, then, we have access to these minds “only through the great books.” But still, they rise high above us.
11. At The Spectator, the great Bill Kauffman finds an upstate New York Independence Day celebration an opportunity to recall friendships that forbid partisan sign-off. From the column:
Every July 4, whether at Picnic in the Park or the nearby Genesee Country Village and Museum, my late friend Barber Conable, for 20 years a paragon of statesmanship as our member of Congress, used to read the Declaration of Independence, with stentorian voice and actorly flourishes. For most Congress-dwellers this would be an annoying distraction from dunning donors for dollars. Puzzling, too: what’s all this talk about revolution and secession? Should we alert the Department of Homeland Security? See something, say something!
But the day meant something to Conable. One of his ancestors, Thomas Crafts, was a “True Born Son of Liberty” and both a participant in, and a supplier of the Mohawk dress for, the Boston Tea Party.
Conable was by no means opposed to hot dogs and fireworks, and he was a politician—but his capacity for friendship and his understanding that political differences must not poison personal relationships mark him as occupying another universe from both the Fox-crazed and the Trump-deranged who make the current scene so unpleasant.
12. At Daily Signal, Brenda Hafera scrutinizes Confederacy veep Alexander Stephens’s infamous 1961 “Cornerstone” speech. From the article:
Yet according to Stephens, the assumption of equality of the races was an error:
“It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the “storm came and the wind blew.” Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.”
Stephens’ words are jarring and repellent. But they are worth reading to understand the competing causes of the Founding and the Civil War.
Disputes throughout America’s history have often revolved around the meaning and role of the Declaration of Independence. It calls to Americans when we are not living up to our principles and unites us in the shared responsibility to realize our aspirations.
Lucky 13. At Modern Age, Susan Hanssen finds the importance of the marriage of John and Abigail Adams. From the article:
Through these three moments, John and Abigail moved from the pen names that they first facetiously adopted from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (Lysander and Hermia) to morally serious roles taken from his Julius Caesar (Brutus and Portia). Their youthful conceptions of piety to God, father, and country were no longer academic abstractions but had been forged into reality.
Our first snapshot of John and Abigail’s relationship comes from 1763, the year the French and Indian War ended. John opens with the greeting “Dear Miss Adorable” and a memorable description of Boston as “that noisy town, where Parade, Pomp, Nonsense, Frippery, Folly, Foppery, Luxury, Polliticks and the soul-confounding wrangles of the law will give me the Higher relish for Spirit, Taste and Sense, at Weymouth, next Sunday.”
He writes that his love for Abigail might awaken his patriotic concern for his country and that realizing this connection between romantic attachment and patriotic attachment might be the key to human happiness: “I begin to find that an increasing Affection for a certain Lady (you know who my Dear) quickens my Affections for every Body Else, that does not deserve my Hatred. A Wonder if the Fires of Patriotism, do not soon begin to burn! And now I think of it, there is no possible Way of diminishing the Misery of Man kind so effectually as by printing this Letter.”
Bonus. At City Journal, Lee Kuan Yimby, once a leftist, tells of a rightward drift after having spent time working in LA’s homeless bedlam. From the article:
Each evening, a van delivered 70 packaged meals, and about half were usually eaten. I was instructed to throw away the rest. Night after night, unopened Styrofoam clamshell containers packed with full meals went directly from the hot bag in which they had been delivered into the garbage. Residents often preferred food they had purchased themselves or came asking for late-night snacks instead.
It was when I was disposing of freshly delivered meals that had just been delivered in Styrofoam clamshells that I began thinking about all the money. The city was not withholding any resources. It was spending enormous sums, visibly and constantly. Yet the people inside the shelter didn’t seem to be moving toward stability.
I still had the desire and optimism to help our “clients,” and would chat with them in my downtime. Once, a resident showed me an expensive specialized electric bicycle. A nerd for e-bikes, I was familiar with the model and knew that it cost thousands of dollars. When I asked where it came from, she casually described traveling with other residents to the West Side to steal bicycles. Buyers sometimes met her outside the shelter.
The shelter, it turned out, had a full-scale theft ring operating inside it. New bicycles came in every day, and a huge pile accumulated on the lawn. I asked other staff members about this, and they said they were well aware that residents stole and sold bicycles, but there was no way to stop it. I remembered then the DSA organizer whose bicycle had been stolen, and how he saw it as a crime of necessity.
For the Good of the Cause
Uno. At Philanthropy Daily, edu-guru Bruno Manno explains that the “credential marketplace” is changing and growing. Read it here.
Due. More PD: Maria Parry spotlights a Raleigh nonprofit that helps parents bear the heavy grief of losing their preborn or infant children. Read it here.
Department of Bad Jokes
Q: What massive sea creature lends you money with high interest?
A: The Great White Loan Shark.
A Dios
Last Sunday was all about loaves and fishes . . . and a baptism in Virginia (sweet Natalie!) . . . and twelve hours of driving (half of that in heavy rain). Admittedly, there was Communion taken and oaths uttered (not proud of that). Seems like a confessional box should be on the short-term agenda.
May Humility Be Embraced,
Jack Fowler, who mutters $#@& at jfowler@amphil.com.
