A Dozen-Plus Stimulants, Gathered for Your Edification and Inspiration
Dear Intelligent American,
Those gathered before the boob tube didn’t know there existed a sitcom called “The Neighborhood,” and flipping the channels through the land of network television—rarely visited except to catch the occasional football game—Yours Truly caught about 30 seconds of this CBS show (long-running since 2018—who knew?!). Within the first 10 seconds the actors said, “son of a bitch,” “bastard,” and “balls,” generating canned laughter for the alliterative pigginess, each word a speck too stressed in sophomoric pride: Look at the words we’re saying that would have gotten your mouth washed out with soap back when Green Acres ruled the airwaves.
Flick . . . Then we came upon a spot for a forthcoming Pixar flick, Hoppers, which looks dreadful. That sparked a wistful memory, of an old Disney film we used to show the kids, Melody Time. Yes, from a different era and world. Here, in part, there is told the animated tale of Johnny Appleseed (from Leominster, MA, birthplace of Mrs. Civil Thoughts)—voice-acted and sang/sung by the happy tenor Dennis Day, who crooned the catchy tune “The Lord Is Good to Me.” And He is.
That movie was made in 1948. Can you imagine Disney making a movie in 2026 that might high-five the Almighty so innocently?
Hell—no.
The Sun and Rain and an Apple Seed . . . and a Dozen-Plus Excerpts.
1. At City Journal, the great Hadley Arkes lauds the late, extraordinary playwright, Tom Stoppard. From the remembrance:
The loss of Tom Stoppard late last month at 88 is the loss of a truly unique talent—one combining serious moral insight with the most urbane wit and high comedy. He had never been, as they say, to University, but he read widely and acquired a sure command of the quarrels that flared within the academy over moral philosophy.
Jumpers begins with the murder, in a curious setting, of a professor of philosophy. At a memorial service, his colleagues express the hope that Professor McFee will be there “in spirit”—“if only to make sure that the materialist argument is properly represented.” Over the course of the play, Stoppard also gives us an unmatchable portrait of a moral skeptic: a man reluctant to concede that the train for Bristol left Paddington Station unless he himself had been there to see it leave, for that report might be “a malicious fabrication or a collective trick of memory.” And even then, he would accept the claim only on the proviso that “all the observable phenomena associated with the train leaving Paddington could equally well be accounted for by Paddington leaving the train.”
Between 1973 and our own day, that fellow has moved from a caricature to the real thing. He walks among us, and he does such things as vote and raise children—even as he professes no sure grounds to guide his judgment on matters of right and wrong. In a country tuned to this temper, the moralist, as Stoppard says, is bound to sound like “a crank, haranguing the bus queue with the demented certitude of one blessed with privileged information.”
2. At The Washington Times, Clare Ath decries the left’s throwaway abortion culture and agenda. From the op-ed:
If we want to defeat abortion for good, we must recognize that killing the unborn is a terrible result of the throwaway culture itself. This culture teaches us that anything interfering with our plans—an unexpected child, a struggling family member, a demanding obligation—can be eliminated. It tells us that freedom means freedom from responsibility rather than freedom for love and sacrifice. In a culture that prizes convenience over responsibility, autonomy over solidarity and efficiency over love, abortion becomes thinkable and then acceptable and, finally, routine.
Recognizing this reality is vital because it means the pro-life movement must focus not only on legal victories but also on cultural reformation. Although laws can restrain evil, it is culture that embeds it, and only culture that can uproot it.
Ultimately, the root of the throwaway culture lies in our broken relationship with God’s creation. From the earliest age, we are now imbued with the idea that there is nothing sacred in the created world. Rather, everything is mere matter that can be manipulated, abused and disposed of for our comfort.
3. At National Affairs, Charles Fain Lehman makes the case for prohibiting vice. From the essay:
This panoply of vice, and the swiftness with which it has come to dominate our culture, has caused many people to recoil with shock. A backlash has ensued. In polls, majorities now favor aggressive regulation of online sports gambling and a ban on betting on college sports altogether. Laws to control minors' access to pornography are on the books in 25 states and were recently upheld by the Supreme Court. A majority of Americans now say marijuana use is individually and socially harmful; legalization initiatives were rejected in several states in 2024. Congress also recently voted to re-ban accidentally legalized hemp-derived THC products.
This backlash makes sense. Millions of Americans are now dependent on addictive, harmful products, which they can freely purchase at the touch of a button. Surely there is something wrong with this state of affairs. Our natural discomfort, even revulsion, must correspond to some actual problem that deserves social or legal response.
But it is not possible to build a campaign against vice on disgust alone. After all, the proliferation of addictive products is downstream of arguments against disgust. Over the past six decades, Americans have increasingly embraced the idea that simply finding something alarming, revolting, or otherwise unsettling, does not mean that we can use the law to control it. A powerful strain in public philosophy and legal theory argues that the law should not be used to regulate vice, insofar as it is "victimless"—meaning that it does harm at most to the users and not to the society around them. "You may not like that people smoke pot, watch porn, and bet on sports," the argument goes, "but what business of the state is it that they do so?"
4. At National Review, Thomas Duesterberg reflects on the history of Aspen-proximate St. Benedict’s Monastery, no longer to be home to monks but to a billionaire. From the reflection:
Less visible but in many respects more important to creating a spiritual revival was the founding of the Benedictine monastery in 1956, just outside Aspen. The first years of the Catholic mountain center for contemplation and searching for mystical discovery of the creator featured the more rigorous Trappist set of rules, notably the rule of silence. I discovered this personally many decades ago when a stern note of reprimand was left for me on a visit to the monastery grounds.
But the Benedictine order, the oldest in Latin Christianity, is more oriented to community life—described as cenobitic, Greek for common life. This rule differs from the more ascetic, hermit-like life that many understand monastery life to be. Because of this, and also as a bow to modernity, the Snowmass site largely dropped the rule of silence and eventually integrated further into community life. A retreat center was built on the grounds of the 3,700-acre property, which was leased to local ranchers and farmers, and church services were opened to outsiders.
In a sign of the power of the experience, a resident monk noted that the Aspen Institute corporate program in classical texts sometimes brought its students to the monastery. One admittedly secular participant remarked, “I do not completely understand what I saw there, but I know that I am permanently changed—and for the better.” The brother responsible for the change said, “There is something of the monk that exists in all of us.”
5. At UnHerd, Edward Luttwak urges against nation-building. From the analysis:
For Trump, the Venezuela scenario presents significant intertwined problems. Firstly, his officials must come up with “stabilization” policies to rebuild, or at least patch up, the country’s horribly decayed public services — the result of years of thievery and neglect. Secondly, he must persuade his own followers, who are devoted to the credo of “America First”, that what is going on is not, repeat not, “nation-building” — the infamous military malpractice that ensured the very expensive US defeat in the Vietnam War and, decades later, in Afghanistan.
By stating that Venezuela’s notoriously hardline vice-president would remain in place to rule in place of Maduro, implicitly over an unchanged government, Trump was signaling to his alarmed followers that he was not seeking “regime change” and that the US would not start spending billions to build the government of a new and democratic Venezuela. The only spending that he has so far mentioned is the investment of US oil companies to rehabilitate Venezuela’s long-neglected oil fields and increase their output and profitability.
6. At First Things, Ricky McRoskey says what might seem obvious, but still needs explaining: Work is for the worker. From the piece:
Our great task, when it comes to markets and the economy, is to weigh the true costs and benefits of things. We gain a more complete and nuanced view as we learn more. This is in the nature of negative externalities—things whose true cost is hidden or not immediately apparent. Dumping a factory’s garbage into the river may boost profit margins in the short term, but it exacts a terrible cost from society over the long term. The idea, then, is that over time people or governments recognize this hidden toll and amend it.
What is striking about the debate over artificial intelligence is how haphazardly we’ve weighed the negatives. The powers of AI are mind-blowing and immediately apparent. In twelve seconds, you can write a press release, code a website, or analyze the use of foreshadowing in Hamlet. Artificial intelligence clearly aids the objective ends of work. It mows a lawn much better than I can.
But as a society, we have overemphasized AI’s progress toward work’s objective goals and underemphasized what it does to work’s subjective ends. Pope Leo stressed this point at the Vatican’s recent AI conference, saying that any judgment of artificial intelligence “entails taking into account the well-being of the human person not only materially, but also intellectually and spiritually. . . . The benefits or risks of AI must be evaluated precisely according to this superior ethical criterion.”
7. At Law & Liberty, Richard Reinsch worries that the Declaration is not properly understood as America approaches its semiquincentennial. From the essay:
Many now refer to the American Creed, particularly on the “new right,” as merely “an ideological proposition,” one that commits America to perpetual revolution and, in particular, to limitless immigration. But the Declaration’s creed never demands that we sacrifice prudence about membership, nor the judgment that any community must be formed over time and not subjected to ongoing disruption. What this also ignores, though, is something even more profound: We are a revolutionary people, but we are not engaged in an ongoing revolution. How so? The creed is essential to American citizenship, but only its full reading and grounding can reveal who we are as a people and what we should do.
The 28 grievances in the Declaration, frequently unread, further develop not only the colonists’ reasons for separation from Britain but also establish America’s political commitments in consent of the governed, majority rule, deliberation, civil control of the military, trial by jury, immigration, free trade, rule of law, limits on government, and the distinction between private and public. As James Stoner argues in his superb essay, “Is There a Political Philosophy in the Declaration of Independence?,” the self-evident truths are concretized and made actionable through the record of grievances of British violations of the common law. This record also furnishes the self-governing principles on which the colonists had built their new states. The “Revolution Principles,” to use John Adams’ term, are also tethered to the old law, which the colonists have made their own. And the grievances that became the colonists’ governing commitments would also be addressed in the Constitution of 1787.
8. At Sola Veritas on Substack, Virgil Walker explains how tragedy can become a tool. From the reflection:
Tragedy creates a moment of moral gravity. When a life is lost, serious societies slow down. They pause. They resist the urge to rush judgment or put the weight of a death to work for their own ends. But that pause has grown rare. Increasingly, the instinct is to move fast, to seize the moment, to turn loss into leverage.
The question is no longer what happened, but who benefits. Even when new facts emerge—as they often do—that clarify responsibility, the deeper problem remains unchanged. The real danger is not confusion in the early hours of a crisis. It is the settled habit of treating death itself as a tool, something to be deployed in service of power, protection, or political advantage.
We’ve watched this pattern repeat often enough now that it no longer surprises us. A crisis erupts. The details are incomplete. Emotions run hot. And almost immediately, people begin assigning meaning before responsibility, intention before evidence. Tragedy becomes a kind of accelerant. Longstanding grievances are revived. Unrelated failures are obscured. Power moves are justified as urgency. By the time the facts begin to settle, the narratives have already hardened, and those who benefit most from the confusion are the least interested in clarity.
9. At The European Conservative, Paul Birch reports on the flag wars in used-to-be Jolly Old England. From the piece:
Our area is almost exclusively ethnically white (aside from the small, but increasing, number of foreign workers employed by the local NHS), and many of the residents are comfortably middle class. They have chiefly moved up from London because—irony of ironies—they’d rather not bring up their children in that vibrant, multicultural Eden. Luckily for them, they were wealthy enough to leave and watch its decline from afar.
These people have also brought their bourgeois lifestyle with them. Artisan bakeries, coffee shops and art galleries now sit where agricultural suppliers, butcher’s shops and garages used to be. Windmills and watermills have long since been converted into homes, as has almost every barn. Buildings that were once healthily weathered and which displayed the evidence of proud labour are now painfully twee and wouldn’t look out of place on a Christmas card. Many have painted their houses a lovely shade of pink, completely unaware that, until recently, it was a mixture of limewash and pig’s blood that would have given them that colour. . . .
If flag wars can happen here, they can happen anywhere. It demonstrates that the very real concern about the nation’s future is not just the preservation of the former industrial towns and cities of the United Kingdom, but of folk in rural communities who are not directly affected by issues such as mass migration and ethnic Balkanisation. And the response of the clerisy is the same; it is always the same. Rather than confront the crisis directly, they choose to defame those ‘low information’ people who liked their country just as it was.
10. At Comment Magazine, Richard Reeves explains that institutions are critical to the making of men from boys. From the essay:
Rituals are an ancient social technology for learning self-control. Indeed, there is strong evidence that participating in religious rituals has a greater influence on self-control over the long run than religious belief. It’s the doing, not the believing, that seems to matter most on this front. Rituals, according to anthropologist Roy Rappaport, are humanity’s “basic social act” and require institutional support. This is one way in which institutions fulfill their role as mechanisms for social learning, especially across generations. They are, to paraphrase Mary Douglas, how we remember what we would otherwise forget.
And throughout human history one of the most important lessons has been how to be a man. As Wood told me, “Being a man is more of a role, more of a social construct, than being a woman is.” Yet the question of how to be a man too often goes unanswered now. Some might even argue that it does not require an answer. The results of a generation of men coming of age without one, however, have not been salutary; millions of young men feel lost. A much-shared essay by an anonymous twentysomething woman published on Scott Alexander’s blog Astral Codex Ten in August 2025 with the title “Dating Men in the Bay Area” was, despite the clickbaity title, a thoughtful meditation on the social construction of masculinity.
“Gone are the days of carefully defined rituals, initiations, expectations, and stepping stones,” she writes. “Now young men are expected to figure out the map through a bewildering mixture of movies, TV, social media, video games, books, news articles, and school.” She points out that while the map to womanhood has been redrawn, it has been retained because “being a mother is still a respected role in society.” By contrast, men have been left with something “scrawled by a half-blind cartographer tripping on acid.” I think she is exactly right.
11. More City Journal: Stu Smith exposes the nonprofit bankrolling the pro-Maduro protests. From the article:
The People’s Forum is a “movement incubator” and “a home” for over 200 left-wing groups. Its Manhattan location offers “co-working space, conference rooms, a theater for film screenings, a media laboratory, a lending library, and [the] People’s Café,” as well as an art space, “ideal for art builds, poster making, screen printing.” Part of what makes the organization so quick to respond is that outsourcing isn’t necessary—everything is in-house.
The speed that awed many on Saturday was largely due to this preparatory work. Soon after Maduro’s arrest on January 3, TPF founder and executive director Manolo De Los Santos—who met with Maduro in 2021—joined a protest in Times Square. The New York Post later reported that TPF had organized Maduro-related demonstrations in Times Square and Brooklyn over the weekend, and called for “emergency protests nationwide.”
The group has drawn congressional scrutiny for its behavior and alleged Chinese connections. Last year, Senator Chuck Grassley contacted the Department of Justice about TPF’s “reported Chinese Communist Party ties.” Representative Jason Smith, chairman of the House Committee on Ways and Means, urged the IRS to revoke TPF’s tax-exempt status, citing its role in “inciting riots and violence, supporting illegal activity, and conducting other activity contrary to the public good.”
12. At The Federalist, Nathanael Blake concludes that the solution to America’s fertility crisis is not illegal immigration. From the article:
What actually boosts birth rates are marriage and religion. The solution to low birth rates will not be found in immigration policy but through people going back to church, rejecting the sexual revolution, and getting married. It really is that simple—and that hard.
The core difficulty is not material. Yes, there are policy changes that could help encourage having more babies, starting with making housing more affordable by making it easier to build more of it. We should look for ways to ease some of the burdens of parenthood.
But there will always be burdens, and lightening them a little bit may not do much to persuade people that they are worth bearing. That requires a change in priorities, a realization that what really matters in life is people. It requires us to stop worshipping the idols of status, wealth, and amusement. It requires us to realize that true fulfillment is found through giving ourselves away in love rather than hoarding ourselves for ourselves.
Lucky 13. At Andy’s Newsletter on Substack, nepo writer Andrew Fowler explains that what America needs more of is what has made it great—religion. From the article:
The virtues of peaceful coexistence, social justice, and the Golden Rule also stem from religious fervor and tradition. Historically, these values have fueled charitable giving; equality under the law; the abolition of slavery; the construction of hospitals, universities, and schools; scientific discovery; to even the establishment of free market economic practices, which raised more out of poverty than its antecedents.
More than simply binding a people together, as Ian Speir argues in Mere Orthodoxy, religion has been the means of cultivating virtue by governing one’s passions, and fostering a robust civil society. On the latter, a plethora of organizations were inspired by faith like the Salvation Army, Knights of Columbus, the American Red Cross, Samaritan’s Purse, and even the YMCA. As a nation, the U.S. government has a long-storied history of granting public funding toward humanitarian aid and nonprofits. This impulse, no doubt, was spurred on by a Christian sense of duty to thy neighbor.
In short, the West has been, and continues to be, “utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions,” as Tom Holland notes in Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. And when an injustice does occur, like racism, greed, murder, sexual assaults, or other crimes, we predominantly view it through this moralistic lens.
Bonus. At Persuasion, Yascha Mounk lends an ear, but can only hear the left’s silence on the Iranian people’s quest for freedom. From the article:
But the sympathies of every single person who believes in freedom and equality and the basic rights of women should be with those courageous millions in Iran. And yet, across the West, there has in the face of these historic protests been a deafening silence.
This silence has been evident in mainstream media outlets, from the British Broadcasting Corporation to National Public Radio, that have been oddly slow to grasp the importance of this moment. Worse, when those outlets did deign to cover the events, they often downplayed the significance of the protests; in a few especially egregious cases, reporters even seemed to harbor sympathies for the country’s brutal regime. (At the outset of the protests, The Guardian even published an op-ed by Abbas Aragchi, Iran’s foreign minister.)
The silence has been even more deafening in the left-wing newspapers and magazines of the anglophone world. On Saturday morning, I searched the principal publications of the American left for any mention of Iran. There was nothing on the websites of The Nation or The New Republic or Jacobin or Slate or even Dissent.
Bonus Bonus. At The74, edu-guru Bruno Manno explains that states must now step up as Congress has permitted Pell Grants to be used for workforce training. From the article:
Now comes the real news and the real test. In December, the U.S. Department of Education’s rulemaking committee reached consensus on proposed regulations for Workforce Pell, which launches July 1. It is up to the states to identify, approve and submit eligible training programs, with the department providing oversight and verification. These programs must demonstrate that they lead to in-demand jobs.
Participating programs will typically last eight to 15 weeks (or as little as 150 hours), catering to adults who can’t pause their lives for a two- or four-year degree. The department’s examples include emergency medical technician and automotive mechanic training, credentials that are directly tied to employment.
This performance element is key, because the U.S. has a long history of short-term programs with glossy marketing and weak payoff. If Workforce Pell becomes an ATM for low-value credentials, it won’t expand opportunity; it will expand regret. So accountability is built into its program eligibility requirements, something unusual in higher education policy.
Bonus Bonus Bonus. At The Watch Fire, Lee G. Barkley resolves to share his 2026 resolves. From the piece:
Why “resolves” and not “resolutions”? Well first, it sounds fancier. Part of my shtick here is framing civics in our time through the lens of the Founding era, in hopes of both 1) making the principles of the American Founding more tangible to a historically checked-out generation, and 2) compelling some of the relative idealism and civility of that age into our own. So I’m going to pick the fancier, more powdered wig/hear ye hear ye word whenever I get the chance. Second, and not that I need another reason since this is my blog, but resolves as a concept is also a more precise description of how we ought to frame civic engagement, and furthermore is in line with how Americans from the dawn of our nation would have as well. To them, a resolve was a serious, considered statement of substance and action. A simultaneous assessment of a circumstance against core principles paired with a tangible response. Take for example the Suffolk Resolves or the Virginia Resolves. These were statements made by the people, often through their representatives, asserting their views on critical topics of the day and what they were going to do in response. In that vein, I offer today some civic resolves for an important civic age.
For the Good of the Cause
Uno. At Philanthropy Daily, Jeremy Beer explains the seven principal reasons why civil society matters. Read it here.
Due. More PD: Heather Murphy exposes “Only Philanthropy.” Make sure the children leave the room . . . now read it here.
Tre. 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.
Department of Bad Jokes
Q: Why did the cold man sit in the corner?
A: Because it was 90 degrees there.
A Dios
Hey, if you missed the recent Center for Civil Society webinar in which Yours Truly interviewed the great scholar Matthew Spalding about his new book on the Declaration of Independence, The Making of the American Mind, you can watch it here.
May He Free Us from Worry, Doubt, and Anxiety,
Jack Fowler, who doubts he is anxiously worried at jfowler@amphil.com.
