Dear Intelligent American,
This missive is off to Editor Lorna before dawn breaks on Election Day—who knows if the matter of President #47 will be settled by the time Civil Thoughts gets published. And even if it is settled, as emotions run at such a fevered pitch, who knows what the consequence will be in the immediate aftermath. Could there be civil unrest?
Could be. Were that there were more civil society—an antidote to what ails us. For example: The other night, at the Irish Heritage Society in Milford, CT, a little concert of popular songs took place, and those assembled—Democrats and Republicans and Independents—sang and danced and stomped (no, nay, never!) and engaged in goodwill and merriment and brotherhood and beer. For a few hours, there was not a thought about internal polls, betting odds, blue walls, and swing states. It was indeed a marvelous thing.
“A republic—if you can keep it,” said Franklin in 1787 when asked about what this thing was that the Constitution had established. Let us try to do that—keep it. And maybe the readers of this and similar missives will see that the local Irish Heritage Society and other voluntary associations in the vast galaxy of American nonprofits—made vibrant and flourishing by charity and participation—that engender camaraderie and embrace e pluribus unum form the principle way to accomplish that.
Comes Veterans Day this Monday! As it is so near Election Day, treat yourself to the great 1944 Preston Sturgess comedy that straddles soldiering and local elections, Hail the Conquering Hero.
You Win, and to the Victor Go These Spoils
1. At the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, Stephen Blackwood brags on a new college that rejects standard ideological indoctrination. From the article:
Ralston’s focus on Western civilization and its languages is sometimes described as classical learning—a tradition for which I have great respect, particularly as someone whose life has been blessed by opportunities to study the humanities, guided by remarkable professors.
The term “classics,” however, while greatly attractive to many, can be to others a misleading or unhelpful category. Some associate the classics and the ancient languages with narrow elitism, for example, and this is a great shame, for what I have seen firsthand in our first two graduated classes is precisely the opposite: how access to the great works of the past has helped to liberate them from the narrow confines of the present and to make the ancients their friends. This is indeed why Ralston generally avoids the dusty and potentially misleading language of “classics” or “great books” in favor of the fundamental principles and realities that animate these traditions at their best: the pursuit of truth; the freedom on which that pursuit depends; the apprehension of the beautiful; and the friendship, or fellowship, that enables us to seek after and discover these things with others.
The current fractious moment in higher education may come to support my conviction that the younger generation is deserving of a university experience that is focused on questions at the heart of a meaningful life—love and loss, mortality and suffering, freedom, justice, redemption, and so on—rather than merely instrumental or activist ends. Such an education is indeed possible only if the genuine and free adventure of the pursuit of truth is not subordinated to the indoctrination and ideology now plaguing so many institutions.
2. At Commentary, Irina Velitskaya came to America, only to find a “Gulag Archipelago” at Berkeley, where anti-Semitism is alive, well, and muscular. From the piece:
Back in Sinegorskiy, I had had to take the long way to and from school to avoid my anti-Semitic classmates. Now, as a student in good standing at Berkeley, one of the world’s most distinguished universities, I must take a detour many days, both ways, to get to my classes at Dwinelle Hall and other locations, because Berkeley’s famous main gate is effectively closed to free passage for students by pro-Hamas demonstrators. I sometimes am forced to avoid the Bancroft Library as well because of the intimidating protests there. Hassner’s symbolic protest of these judenrein blockades (he slept in his office for a time) was what led to the doxxing and slander he has endured.
I find myself feeling as though I am a leper. . . .
Then my friend asked me whether I display a mezuzah. Again, I said, “Of course,” but then I was forced to acknowledge that I have placed it on my inside door frame, not on the outside where it belongs, so that my apartment will not be targeted.
And so it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut said. I have become numb to the posters all over campus depicting Netanyahu as a beast with dripping fangs, and to the daily chants on campus of “Globalize the intifada” and “The only solution is intifada revolution.” I walk to and from class surrounded by an all-pervasive miasma of contempt for my very existence as a Jew. Curiously, even though I am Russian, my national background is never the reason I fear for my safety, nor are there any audible chants or visible posters denouncing Russia or threatening its destruction, despite the fact that Russia indisputably started its war with Ukraine by means of an invasion. The fact that Israel, on the other hand, was the entity that was invaded—by the Iranian proxy group Hamas—seems of no interest or relevance to Berkeley’s anti-Israel mobs.
3. At National Review, Wilson Bailey warns that “campus despotism,” instead of getting expelled, has gone soft. From the article:
It has become obvious that DEI, despite its name, does not actually support diversity, equity, or inclusion. It has stifled the most important type of diversity—diversity of thought—in favor of considering a classmate’s intersectionality before his or her merits and personality. And it has sowed discord.
But DEI is only a symptom. So though we may still wonder whether it really is on its way out—for which there is growing evidence—the better question is: Why did it take root in the first place? The answer is found in the often moderate but undoubtedly liberal groupthink present on almost every university campus.
In this light, the decline of DEI is not a conservative victory but a progressive loss. There is a difference. If conservatives and Bari Weiss–style liberals see the collapsing of the DEI movement as “mission accomplished,” universities will continue to reject rigor and embrace orthodoxy.
Liberals invested in a doomed doctrine because they are so secure in their ideological hegemony over higher education. This is not the ideology of the privilege walk or of the land acknowledgment.
4. At The Lamp, Eduard Habsburg-Lothringen bites into Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It’s going to leave a mark. From the reflection:
But now, reading the novel again, I have discovered that the original, unabridged version of Dracula is a wild collage of diary entries, letters, newspaper clippings, and notes. It includes many, many more main characters than I remembered from the movies. (Of course, as a teenager, I was captivated by the book, but I skipped over certain passages which simply seemed too long and did nothing to move the story along. I also remember being irritated by the format of the epistolary novel.) To return to Dracula in the age of Internet is surprising and once again proves that good books should be read over and over again because they are completely different each time you open them. Besides the thrilling and—for the year 1897—very modern story, I noticed for the first time how much of a technology geek Stoker is. He seems to be absolutely fascinated by the latest technological advances, new modes of travel, the telegraph, and, most of all, the phonograph. . . .
Even more interesting are Stoker’s other structural effects; some of the faux newspaper articles cited are pointed and even parodic. In a novel that is largely rather dramatic in tone, we find here some glimpses of the humor and media satire seen in Stoker’s short stories (which are much sharper and more gruesome than even the scariest passages in Dracula). I know it is perilous to imagine what Stoker would have written if he were he alive today, but I suspect he would probably write Dracula as a website filled with YouTube news clips, vlogs, and mockumentary-style riffs. He clearly enjoyed harvesting little details from one medium and planting them in another, a clever little jigsaw puzzle. Through the very believable articles, the novel gains an element of realism.
5. At Tablet Magazine, Alana Newhouse finds that the self-perception of American Jews is undergoing a revolution. From the assessment:
That kid would be right at home among the dozen people in their 20s I recently interviewed, the vast majority of whom consider their own views in flux. For the first time, a significant segment of smart young Jews are putting politics downstream of their Jewishness, as opposed to the other way around. They refuse to buy the propaganda that partisan politics and party affiliation must be paramount in their identity, and that the outrage circus it’s a part of must be central to their lives. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my fertile days arguing with people about politics,” one of them told me. “I want my friends and I to be able to have partners and kids and houses and good jobs, and I want those things for other Americans too.”
That this is happening among Jews in their 20s will be catnip to Jewish communal professionals, who’ve spent the past three decades thirstily obsessing over this age cohort. Sadly, these “experts” will likely again miss the exact obstacle that tripped them up this whole time. Over the past 25 years, the Jewish philanthropic landscape has been littered with one project after another meant to target young Jews, but which inevitably ended up siloing them away from any larger community they might meaningfully join for the rest of their lives. As a result, almost none of these projects had any meaningful success.
Fortunately, a segment of young Jews today absolutely perceives a Jewish future for themselves, but it’s because they see, or at least intuit, that they’re part of an unexpected coalescing of very disparate Jews, of all ages: Orthodox as well as those who have never lit Shabbat candles; converts and non-Jewish relatives, many of whom are often more open and adventurous when it comes to Jewish experiences; right wingers and gay men and women; third- and fourth-generation Ashkenazim, as well as new immigrants from around the globe. What these people have in common is also what separates them from the majority. They are all looking reality head-on and, without denying how bad a lot of it seems, reflexively deepening their connection to two things: Jewishness, and America.
6. At First Things, Mary Eberstadt explores the huge importance of the bandwidth of brothers that’s influencing young American men. From the essay:
Identity politics? The bros are over it. Even back in 2020, in an interview with Barstool Sports, candidate Trump was channeling criticism of NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, the first to “take the knee” in 2016. Barstool Sports host Dave Portnoy was one of the first in the guy-o-sphere to grasp the synergy between enthusiasm for sports and contempt for political correctness. On another mostly male and heretical plane, the so-called Intellectual Dark Web, diverse thinkers on YouTube, X, and elsewhere find related fusion between repudiating identity politics and standing for freedom of expression. Imitators and admirers of both models abound. . . .
Pornography—about which one hears nothing from team progressive, apart from prim reminders about free speech—also figures into the gap. Some of today’s more popular male voices sound less Howard Stern than Fulton Sheen. Theo Von speaks openly and often about pornography's dangers, including in a podcast with media personality and addiction specialist Dr. Drew Pinsky. Many other thriving, non-religious podcasts issued from men, to men, similarly condemn smut. When JD Vance says things like, “we made a political choice that the freedom to consume pornography was more important than the public goods, like marriage and family and happiness,” he’s blazing down an open zone before a go-for-it crowd. The same happens when he shares related forbidden wisdom, whether with the Nelk Boys or anyone else who’s listening: men and women are different, sterilizing kids is wrong, marriage and family are the way to go.
7. At Plough Quarterly, Amanda Held Opelt navigates the aftermath of Hurricane Helene on the battered roads and bridges of Appalachia. From the piece:
That moment was the beginning of my newfound obsession with roads.
It’s an obsession shared by most residents of western North Carolina these days. My family and I made it across the bridge that day, but what remained of our journey to my parent’s house was equally harrowing. Much of the ground beneath Highway 194 had slid into Meat Camp Creek and Howard’s Creek. Pavement had buckled where water bulged above culverts. We bumped along, white-knuckled and unsure of what hazards lay ahead. When we finally made it to my parents and found enough cellphone signal to check social media, we learned that our bridge and our highway were in good shape compared to many roads in the region.
Roads are something I had taken for granted, unlike my Appalachian ancestors, who knew the vital significance of a way in and out. I never really thought about who mapped them or made them, never wondered what life would be like without them. They had always been there. And I assumed they always would be.
The value of a road has long been articulated in poetry and song, in metaphor and meaning-filled motifs. Robert Frost took the road less traveled by, and apparently it made quite a bit of difference for him. In Cormack McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic world, The Road is a symbolic pursuit of hope against all hope. “Country Roads” took John Denver home to a place he truly belonged, and we all know that home he referenced had to be so much more than a house.
8. At National Affairs, Aaron Rothstein investigates the many underlying causes of the growth in support of the modern euthanasia movement. From the essay:
Dying also occurred in the public eye, as Philippe Ariès explained in his brilliant history, Western Attitudes toward Death. Children were brought into the dying family member's bedchamber. Dying was so communal, in fact, that according to Ariès, by the end of the 18th century, "doctors who were discovering the first principles of hygiene complained about the overcrowded bedrooms of the dying." In short, dying was a collective event, not an individual one.
This changed dramatically in the 20th century with advances in medical technology. Hospitals transformed from poorhouses into medical-care facilities. Doctors fought death with miraculous treatments, which required intense training and specialized equipment. Patients no longer burdened their loved ones with dying. As Ariès wrote: "One no longer died at home in the bosom of one's family, but in the hospital, alone." His observation reflects the data: In 2000, 48% of deaths in the United States occurred in the hospital. Though that percentage has been steadily decreasing (it still sits at about a third), the majority of Americans continue to die in hospitals or hospital-like institutions, such as nursing homes and long-term care facilities. And yet, most of us would prefer to die at home. Such glaring discordance should give us pause.
9. At The American Conservative, Mark Episkopos considers the work of the late Christopher Hitchens, and sees where it goes right, and goes wrong. From the critique:
What’s noteworthy isn’t that Hitchens was wrong on Iraq, but that he was wrong for all the reasons that the neoconservative mandarins of his time wanted to be right. Here was a bona fide man of the left, a self-described Trotskyist with all the activist credentials to boot, defending the Iraq debacle—or, in Hitchens's preferred phrasing, the “Anglo-American intervention in Iraq” and, when he’s playing to an audience, “the Mesopotamian War”—with some of the finest prose ever authored on the issue. Hitchens consecrated the war on terror as a chiliastic civilizational battle in terms that would be familiar to Americans today, and with many of the same figurants. “Who says [Bush] wasn’t right to call that an axis of evil? Everything we found about these countries is much worse than we thought,” Hitchens said in a 2005 address, referring to the Bush administration’s bundling of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as enemies of the United States.
His conviction that the West must secure a “military victory over the alliance between autocracy and jihad,” while shaped on the contours by his approach to the whole topic of religion, is in essence indistinguishable from countless other neoconservative formulations of the same underlying belief that international politics is a battle to the death between incompatible value systems, and that the energies of Western civilization must be directed with unyielding focus toward vanquishing the world’s many evildoers.
10. At Roots & Wings, Frank Furedi gets autobiographical and dishes on self-censorship. From the article:
The first time that I was directly confronted with the phenomenon of self-censorship was two decades ago. After publishing my book, Where Have All The Intellectual Gone: Confronting 21st Century Philistinism (2014), I received dozens of emails and letter from fellow university professors who congratulated me for having the courage to criticise the conformist turn of higher education. What bothered me was that many of my correspondents also indicated they could not make their support public because they feared that if they echoed views like mine their career would be put at risk. In an apologetic tone they indicated that they had no choice but to self-censor until they became full professors and were therefore in a strong position to push back against would be university censors. . . .
Regrettably during the past decade, the phenomenon of self-censorship has become more and more evident to me and at times it feels as if has become the new normal in contemporary Anglo-American culture. Survey after survey indicates that a growing number of members of the academic community self-censor. As Robert Van de Noort, the vice-chancellor of Reading University observed in February, universities risk becoming ‘uniformities of rigid views and self-censorship. If anything, in the United States, the situation is even worse. One survey after another show that the majority of undergraduate students self censor. Since the outbreak of the War in Israel the problem of self-censorship has become far more prevalent, and a significant section of society fears to reveal their view in public.
11. At the Giving Review, William Schambra and Michael Hartmann expose when nonprofits and philanthropy subvert democracy. From the beginning of the piece:
In August, the San Francisco’s District Attorney’s office’s chief of staff sent a memo to the MacArthur Foundation that declared, “Our office will not be used as sharecroppers to a foundation’s vision of criminal justice reform.” As first reported by Joe Rivano Barros in Mission Local, the memo was written by Monifa Willis on behalf of District Attorney Brooke Jenkins. Directed to Monique Garduque, director of MacArthur’s Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) program, it responds to the foundation’s decision to suspend payment of $625,000 in grant funds. The money was to have been the final installment of some $5.2 million in criminal-justice reform grants to San Francisco dating back to 2018 and would have been a small part of the $380 million MacArthur has spent nationally on criminal-justice reform during the past 10 years.
This episode is the latest reminder of the threat that can be posed to democracy by the philanthropic support of traditionally governmental functions. Willis’s memo, which runs seven lively and spirited pages, is the sort of feedback every foundation deserves when it seeks to flex its power over elected public officials. According to the memo, MacArthur focused excessively on one particular “deliverable” in the grant agreement, namely, the goal of reducing the jail population. “Success is solely being measured by how rapidly we release people from custody regardless of their risk to the public,” Willis writes. “The Foundation’s simple focus on jail population numbers, not holding people accountable, and/or offering no consequences for unsafe behavior is irresponsible.”
12. At The Free Press, Peter Savodnik reports on two chemically tortured American towns, Flint and East Palestine, and their forgotten remaining residents. From the piece:
“It’s like we’ve been discarded,” Tammy said. “This derailment and chemical bombing was a catalyst, and it opened like a Pandora’s box, and when you looked in, you see all this evil, meaning the corruption, and once your eyes were open because of that catastrophe, it was a sense of shock, and then it became like, ‘Well, this is just reality.’ ”
The poisoning of East Palestine mirrors that of another Rust Belt backwater: Flint, Michigan, 294 miles to the north and west. A decade ago, its water supply was contaminated by lead from aging pipes—killing twelve people. The youngest victim was 30-year-old Jassmine McBride, who passed away in 2019.
Like East Palestine, Flint had once been the epicenter of a booming economy. The locals worked at bustling factories and belonged to unions. Their kids went to solid public schools, and when they graduated, they could look forward to a job on the assembly line and a house and a car that was a little nicer than their parents’ had been. They knew they would find a spouse, join a church, have children, a pension, maybe a lake house.
The only major difference between the two places was race. While East Palestine was nearly 89 percent white, Flint was 56 percent black.
Lucky 13. At WCDB Charleston, Raymond Owens reports that a fundraiser will help keep open the doors of VFW Post 3433 in Summerville, South Carolina. From the story:
“We got a letter in the mail saying that our liquor liability wouldn’t be resolutely renewed. And it’s a state issue. It went from $9,000 a year to $70,000 a year,” said Post Commander Robert Zdenek.
They held a concert fundraiser last weekend to help reopen—it turns out, the event was a success, and the group raised more than $20,000. It was enough to put some money down on their premiums and reopen for business.
It also means their 56 employees will be able to get back to work.
“We have a meeting, actually today, our reopening meeting to get things back in order, and bring our bartenders back to work. We’ve had 56 employees, who have been unemployed for the last two months about so they’re gonna go back to work,” he said.
Bonus. At Hoover Institution’s California on Your Mind, Lee Ohanian dissects a homeless-sheltering plan that is big on tiny houses and crazy spending. From the analysis:
It is not just the delay that is the problem with the tiny homes plan. It is also the cost. San Jose, one of the four locations chosen for this project, will be spending $30 million for tiny homes that will add 144 beds to an existing tiny homes site in the city, consisting of 72 single-occupancy units, which do not have plumbing, and 36 double-occupancy units, which have a bathroom but no kitchen. The standard sizes of these units are 70 square and 120 square feet, respectively. This works out to about $208,000 per bed and about $278,000 per unit. . . . Images of the 70-square-foot unit show space for a twin bed, a small desk, and two shelves, with clothes hanging below the bottom shelf.
The cost of these units also needs to include the value of the 4.4-acre plot dedicated for the tiny homes. Silicon Valley land is among the most expensive in the country. I estimate the value of this land is about $11,400,000, based on the June 2024 sale of an adjacent property. Including the land value yields a cost of about $254,000 per bed and about $338,000 per unit for San Jose’s tiny homes expansion. This works out to about $3,900 per square foot.
To put these estimated costs in perspective, note that the value of the median US single-family home is about $180 per square foot; it’s about $485 per square foot for a California single-family home. The cost per square foot of a tiny home exceeds these values by factors of about twenty-two and eight, respectively.
So, why does such bare-bones shelter cost about the same per square foot as the most expensive housing in the country, such as Jeff Bezos’s $79 million, 1.9 acre estate on a private Florida island, or more than twice as much as the Beverly Hills estate currently being purchased by Jennifer Lopez?
For the Good of the Cause
Uno. “DAFs”—the acronym for donor advised funds—is the subject of a Center for Civil Society via-Zoom free webinar (to be hosted by Your Intrepid Correspondent) on Tuesday, November 19th, from 3:00 to 4:00 p.m. (Eastern). The three experts who will tell their DAF war stories are Gabe Conger, president of the Bradley Impact Fund, Peter Lipsett, vice president of DonorsTrust, and Cecilia Diem, director of donor advisory at AmPhil. You can get complete information, and complete details, right here.
Due. At Philanthropy Daily, Rich Todd provides six tenets for Christian investing. Read it here.
Tre. Also at Philanthropy Daily, Emily Marble explains that there’s more to charity than the contents of your wallet. Read it here.
Quattro. At Philanthropy Daily, Aiden Miller adds to the ongoing "Works of Mercy" series with a piece on sheltering the homeless. Read it here.
Cinque. Nonprofit worker bees who have a hand in writing grant applications should avail themselves of the Center for Civil Society’s forthcoming “In the Trenches” Master Class on “Elements of Grant Writing.” The invaluable three-hour training takes place Thursday, December 5th. Get complete information, and register, right here.
Department of Bad Jokes
Q: What are the most polite military weapons?
A: Tanks.
A Dios
What does normality mean for a nation? We need very much to return to it, even for a mere day, a simple week. A vacation: from knee-jerk opprobrium, from cable high-dudgeonry, from walking on eggs and self-censoring, from being victimized, from cussing and taking the Lord’s name in vain, from public freakouts and social-media breakdowns, from airplane fistfights, sidewalk sucker-punching, classroom cancelling, house-squatting, and quad-intimidation of our brothers and sisters in Abraham, from callousness toward the unfortunate, from ignoring the Sabbath, from the elite’s supremacy and the denigration of young men and . . . .
May We Merit the Blessings of the Peacemakers,
Jack Fowler, who is gorging on leftover Halloween candy at jfowler@amphil.com.
