A Dozen-Plus Stimulants, Gathered for Your Edification and Inspiration
Dear Intelligent American,
Years ago, many, when these fingers typed for National Review, that institution made a big deal of attending/hosting the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, securing numerous tables and inviting as guests celebrities (Tom Selleck!) and politicians (Dick Armey) and the magazine’s advertisers, their shoulder-rubbing preceded by gossip-fest receptions where one could find Bill Buckley and Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia and Barbara Walters and all tuxedoed sorts and gowned types bending elbows and smoking cigarettes and munching pretzels. Hired photographers snapped it all—this was the pre-selfie era.
As in 2026, presidents attended the affair and told jokes (Bill Clinton poked fun at NR once. . . it’s lost to history but not to C-SPAN), and rather than a mind-reader there was a comedian on hand to entertain by roasting POTUS and the assembled, who laughed and laughed and . . . boy oh boy, was it ever a sobriety-abandoned night of self-importance, verified by the Hilton lobby’s mob of autograph-seekers and celebrity-gawkers.
A relatively harmless affair though. No more. As Ecclesiastes stated, to every season, there is a reason. Would that we would attempt to dwell on the divine purpose of the current one.
Let’s Get to Buffet
1. At Editor’s Journal, Myrna Blyth, octogenarian, contemplates birthdays and fearlessness. From the piece:
Now some people love birthdays and yes, I know, it beats the alternative. But I haven’t enjoyed celebrating since I was very young. Maybe because after a childhood birthday party, my mother, honest to a fault, sneered at the presents my friends had brought. I never wanted a party after that.
At 16 and living in the suburbs I took my two best friends to a Broadway matinee and a cheap Chinese restaurant lunch to celebrate that important birthday. We thought Egg Foo Young was exotic. Both friends are alive. We are now all 87. One used to send me a birthday greeting every year. Now she can’t communicate with anyone. She’s deep in dementia. The other is caring for a husband with Alzheimer’s. She’s not having an easy time.
When I was 80, the year before the pandemic, I finally gave a really big party. Entertaining makes me anxious. I spent weeks worrying about the catering, the weather, whether enough people would show up. More than 80 people came. Everyone said it was a great party. My older son, who knows me well, said: “Mom is enjoying this so much I’m sure you’ll be asked back in ten years.” Maybe. Who knows if I’ll be around to send out invites and death has already been culling the guest list.
2. At City Journal, Heather Mac Donald spotlights the climate-litigation swindle. From the essay:
The consumer-fraud theory of liability presumes that, had oil and gas companies disclosed their supposed gnostic knowledge of global warming, the recipients of that hidden lore would have changed their behavior enough to reduce or eliminate local climate harms. In fact, we have no evidence that they would have changed their behavior at all. . . .
Anti–oil and gas academics consume energy freely even as they attack energy producers. Marshall Burke, a professor at Stanford’s School of Sustainability, admitted at a Columbia Law School conference on climate litigation in 2025 that he was a “huge user of models.” Those models should run on renewable energy, he said, but until that happens, he is not holding back. Christopher Callahan, a contributor to attribution science, runs his simulations of global-warming pathways 1,001 times on supercomputers. He then runs another 10,000 variations, adjusting each step in the chain, Callahan explained at the same conference.
The use of smartphones and AI, jet travel to conferences and vacations, routine reliance on Amazon Prime and food-delivery apps, heat in winter and air conditioning in summer, the consumption of bottled water (an affectation almost everywhere, unless one’s municipality draws its water supply from a Superfund site)—all these accoutrements of modern life show no sign of abating in the communities now suing the sources of their lavish consumer lifestyle.
3. More CJ: Fan favorite Daniel J. Mahoney contemplates the legitimacy of papal views on pacifism and Islam. From the article:
Alas, Pope Leo XIV, in many ways an admirable shepherd and a sincere witness to the Gospel, repeats many of these claims, as if dissent can only arise from greed, self-interest, or a taste for conflict. He does not appear to be an especially political figure, and it would be a mistake to cast him as a full adherent of a secular “religion of humanity.” Nor should one expect him to endorse particular military interventions; his commitment to the “peace of Christ” is commendable. If his predecessor Pope Francis sometimes indulged leftist movements and ideologies (even those, like Castro’s Cuba, that persecuted his co-religionists) and was filled with an ideological animus against the United States, Leo seems motivated by specifically religious or spiritual considerations. Yet, troublingly, this rather apolitical pontiff appears to have adopted “humanitarianism” as his default position, so to speak.
As a result, the pope has issued a series of harsh, if general, admonitions directed at the efforts of the United States and Israel to prevent the Islamic regime in Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons, supporting militant groups, and waging repression at home. He has said little to suggest a clear grasp of the nature of the threat. Pope Leo has also remained largely silent about the Iranian government’s conduct toward its own people and its decades-long hostility toward the West.
His condemnations thus appear selective, a tendency often associated with pacifist, or functionally pacifist, outlooks. A fuller recognition of the regime’s ideological zeal, and of the links some draw between concepts like jihad and the subordinate status historically imposed on non-Muslims, might complicate the assumption that negotiation or dialogue alone can resolve every political or military conflict.
4. At World Magazine, amigo David Bahnsen explains what the Right is getting wrong about artificial intelligence. From the article:
Those on the right wanting to dismiss market principles out of fear for AI impact on jobs are dismissing their own principles and the clear lessons of history. In so doing, we inevitably ignore what should be our greater priority—fortifying a culture of dynamism and flexible retraining to accommodate shifting needs. In short, advocating for deep intervention into AI to keep it from impacting the jobs market is a catastrophic error that we should reject.
However, the inverse of this heavy interventionist error is perhaps even more alarming. At its core, the large language models that drive this new AI revolution require intellectual property. These require power and electricity. They invite complexity and challenges when it comes to privacy, child protection, and a host of other issues in an online world that were clearly underestimated the last time we went through this with the social media revolution. As much as people on the right should not advocate “shutting down AI” in the interest of economic interventionism and protectionism, we also should not adopt a careless and reckless carte blanche approach that ignores laws already on the books about intellectual property theft, that ignores the vital need to safeguard children, that ignores the damage done from fraud and misrepresentation through AI fakes, and that grants crony waivers to standard zoning and regulatory laws that all other economic actors in society must abide by.
5. More World: Les Sillars hails the return of the “Patriot press.” From the article:
The news industry has seen major changes in the last 250 years, but the style of Revolutionary papers still echoes across today’s media landscape. Take the once-venerated Washington Post, the paper that broke the Watergate scandal. It announced in February that it cut about a third of its reporters and editors, over 300 people, perhaps the most dramatic sign to date of the mainstream news media’s economic woes.
Commentators pointed to Post owner Jeff Bezos’ attempts to broaden the paper’s appeal. When Amazon’s founder bought the paper in 2013, most conservative readers had already abandoned it as relentlessly liberal. The paper cemented that reputation with its 2017 slogan aimed at the Trump administration but absent in the Obama years: “Democracy dies in darkness.” When, in an effort to moderate its image, the paper declined to endorse Democrat Kamala Harris in the last election and then tried to balance its op-ed pages, its progressive base revolted. In Revolutionary terms, it tried to act like a Loyalist paper with a Patriot audience. . . .
It shouldn’t be surprising that people today want news that attempts to persuade, to serve a larger purpose. The professional ideal of “journalistic objectivity” that produces “unbiased” news is not inherent to journalism; rather, it’s a century-long American experiment that is now winding down. It didn’t appear until after World War I, when ideas that had floated around journalism for decades coalesced into a package of professional standards and practices: accuracy, balance, fairness, nonpartisanship, and detachment. By midcentury, this paradigm dominated newsrooms.
6. At The Spectator, Mark Pulliam analyzes the “tawdry shenanigans” of the Southern Poverty Law Center. From the article:
The multi-count federal indictment is not SPLC’s first brush with controversy, but it is the most serious. As I recounted in an article for City Journal in 2017, SPLC’s entire legal staff quit in 1986 to protest the organization’s move away from cases involving actual southern poverty, such as pro bono representation of death row inmates, in favor of headline-grabbing lawsuits against impecunious KKK chapters – which served as fodder for lucrative direct-mail fundraising solicitations that became SPLC’s bread and butter. One disillusioned SPLC lawyer, Gloria Browne, charged that SPLC programs were calculated to cash in on “black pain and white guilt.”
Later, SPLC drew criticism for raising far more money than necessary to sustain the non-profit’s operations, leading to the organization receiving an “F” rating from the monitoring group CharityWatch. SPLC has so much money socked away that it maintains hedge fund accounts in the Cayman Islands. SPLC spends more on fundraising than on its legal program.
Founded in 1971, SPLC has been criticized for recklessly labeling mainstream organizations and individuals as “hate groups” and “extremists.” These included the Family Research Council (whose employees were attacked by a gunman in 2012, after SPLC listed the group on its “Hate Map”) and Ben Carson, the retired pediatric brain surgeon, former HUD secretary and one-time presidential candidate. More recently, in 2019, SPLC founder Morris Dees was fired for misconduct, and the group’s President, Richard Cohen, resigned two weeks later. The turnover did not end there. In 2025, amid employee turmoil and a no-confidence vote from the union representing SPLC’s workers, President and CEO Margaret Huang resigned.
7. At Capital Research Center’s InfluenceWatch, Robert Stilson explains the American-based support for Cuba’s communist regime. From the history:
The primary activity of the Venceremos Brigade involves organizing trips to Cuba for Americans, known as brigadistas, who wish to demonstrate their solidarity with the communist country and their opposition to United States government policy toward the island. Approximately 10,000 brigadistas from the United States have traveled to Cuba since the first Venceremos Brigade contingent in 1969. A large proportion of brigadistas have traditionally come from California and New York, as well as from other parts of the Northeastern and Southwestern United States.
In addition to touring and learning about the country, brigadistas perform work while in Cuba. In the past, this has included agricultural labor, construction and building maintenance, small-scale manufacturing, and gardening. Recent trips have tended to place higher emphasis on tourism and education relative to labor. Brigadistas visit local facilities and meet with representatives from institutions such as the Union of Communist Youth and Cuba’s one-party legislature, the National Assembly of People’s Power. They also attend cultural events and performances. In a video documentary produced for the group’s 46th anniversary in 2015, brigadistas are shown traveling around Cuba, dancing, singing, swimming, and visiting tourist sites, in addition to performing some work.
The Venceremos Brigade cautions prospective brigadistas that in Cuba they “will experience living conditions familiar to the majority of people in the world, but unfamiliar to most in the United States,” including rudimentary group accommodations and possible shortages of water and other supplies. The group attributes these conditions to American “economic warfare” against Cuba.
8. At Public Discourse, Adeline A. Allen explains Shakespeare, love adviser. From the essay:
It takes courage for a man to approach a woman. Granted, this would have been easier when there were more institutionalized social settings to do that, like a ball. But to the extent that embodied interactions still exist, however desolate the landscape of embodiment may be, if Romeo be any inspiration, young men should take the risk. Yes, an AI girlfriend carries zero risk of rejection, but it—emphatically not a she—is utterly inhuman and dehumanizing. Further, it makes a difference to a woman that the man chooses her, out of all others, that he approaches her and asks her out—unassisted and unmediated by apps and algorithms. It’s not, oh well, the system spat us both as a match to get matcha together. The man’s agency matters, and flatteringly so.
It is beyond the scope of this essay to explore the kind of romance, for good and ill, that Romeo and Juliet pursue. The point here is more modest: merely to encourage going up there. To be sure, none of us mere mortals could speak as captivatingly as Shakespeare’s lines for Romeo and Juliet. But men shouldn’t underestimate the potential of a thoughtful and charming pick-up line, first impressions, and the art of being a good conversationalist. Now, J. R. R. Tolkien did think that we ought to be studying and trying our hand at writing poetry. But if we at first (or ever) don’t write good poetry, let us use and quote Shakespeare, who lends his music and magic liberally and without reproach.
9. At The European Conservative, Paul Birch grimaces as Britain’s elites snarl about the country’s feast day, which honors Saint George, slayer of dragons. From the piece:
Now compare this with England. The raising of the St. George’s Cross is still, in some circles, enough to provoke unease. Public expressions of English pride are scrutinised for hidden motives. Is it inclusive? Is it coded? Is it, heaven forfend, ‘problematic’? The assumption is that English identity, unlike that of its Celtic counterparts, carries with it a risk. It must be handled carefully or diluted, lest it provoke the unwashed peasantry to take to the streets.
This instinctive suspicion reveals more about the elites than it does the English people. It reflects a deeply ingrained narrative in which England is cast primarily as the dominant partner in the United Kingdom, a historic oppressor whose identity must be softened, even suppressed, in the interests of harmony. There is, of course, some historical truth in England’s leading role within Britain and its empire. But the leap from historical complexity to present-day cultural self-denial is neither logical nor fair.
This asymmetry becomes especially visible each year on St. George’s Day. Rather than being treated as a straightforward celebration of national identity, it is usually accompanied by contemptuous commentary from the chattering classes. We are reminded, with weary inevitability, that St. George wasn’t English himself and that he is also the patron saint of a number of other territories. The implication is clear. English identity itself is somehow artificial, constructed or undeserving of the same emotional investment afforded to others.
10. At Comment Magazine, Hannah LaGrand tracks the arc from planning “better babies” to euthanasia. From the essay:
Of course, these screening technologies, with their sky-high price tags and often dubious scientific claims, may themselves seem rather distant—the domain of the Silicon Valley elite. However, in the past twenty years more rudimentary genetic screening has already become part of standard prenatal care in much of the Western world, alerting expectant parents to risks of Down syndrome and other chromosomal abnormalities. While such information can be valuable, it is not always clear that this technology dedicated to detecting differences is conducive to welcoming differences. In Denmark, for example, more than 95 percent of parents confronted with a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome choose to terminate the pregnancy. Since standard genetic screening was introduced in 2004, only twenty-five to thirty-five Danish children have been born with Down syndrome each year.
In a strange way, this desire for control around birth is mirrored in our approaches to death. Since its legalization in 2016, Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) program has proved unexpectedly successful, growing to be the fifth-leading cause of death in the country. In 2021 the program was expanded to include cases in which suffering may not lead to a “reasonably foreseeable” death. In 2027 the program is set to expand further to cover those whose suffering stems from mental illness. While miles away from Orchid’s smiling young couples starting their families, the flood of MAiD applications points to a similar anxiety—a turning away from the painful and unknown of the human, a retreat into the illusion of mastery.
11. At Harper’s Magazine, Samuel Moyn kvetches about America’s gerontocracy. From the article:
The overrepresentation of the elderly in political office is hazardous beyond the most obvious risks. Political theorists would call this situation a failure of “descriptive representation”: ideally, a political class resembles the people it serves. But it might not concern you who holds political office if they deliver good governance for you and yours. Indeed, one reason gerontocracy has escaped scrutiny until recently is that it was commonplace to believe that elderly politicians would act benevolently, as the best grandparents do. But the increasing mismatch between the nation’s demography and its leadership is clearly galling to many.
The prevalence of aged politicians is almost certainly increasing the mass abstention of the young from political participation. The older the politicians, the less credence younger constituents give to the idea that their votes matter. They may even start to doubt the basic worth of the political system and let it fail. A study comparing different countries, including the United States, concluded that the bigger the age gap between people and their politicians, the weaker the population’s confidence in democracy.
In short, it’s not just that our politicians are old. It’s not just the cognitive or bodily decline they suffer. What’s most important is that such leaders represent an aging constituency that controls the political system. They are also the visible face of the elderly’s domination of private forms of power, chiefly wealth: aging Americans control the biggest bank accounts and stock portfolios, partly as a result of living long enough to accumulate more and more without giving much away. The government is bought and paid for by members of the oldest generation, and it is organized for their sake. There is no way to separate the age of our elites from their ascendancy. In America today, age is the modality in which class is lived—with apologies to the late, great cultural theorist Stuart Hall, who said the same thing about race.
12. At Brussels Signal, Gabriel Elefteriu critiques the threat of pervasive high tech. From the article:
What is certain, however, is that we are hurtling towards a fast-approaching future of automated individual surveillance in which every aspect of our life and patterns of behaviour is sampled, registered and evaluated at citizen-level by “authorities”—a using private technology—against approved parameters set down in law. This is the realisation in actual fact of what seemed to be an exaggerated sci-fi dystopia in the film Minority Report where “crimes” don’t even need to happen before people are arrested based purely on “predicted” behaviour.
The scale of this ultra-tech threat for individual freedom, in an age of gargantuan and fiendishly complex regulatory regimes, bad and incompetent politicians, increasingly authoritarian governments, as well as judicial activism generally biased in favour of more censorship and control, is hard to comprehend.
The worst thing about this is that there will be no escape from it. Already, the ability of the individual to live a completely non-digital life in a modern Western society and, at the same time, to still enjoy the same access to public services, protection and fulfilment of his rights, and basic opportunities as the “connected citizen” is severely curtailed. Just try to get by without using the Internet, i.e. without email or without a smartphone and any apps, and see how you get on.
Lucky 13. At The Lamp, Peter Hitchens lauds fortifications. From the article:
I knew, as everyone in the city of Portsmouth did, that the giant forts which surrounded it (some of them were actually planted in the sea) were obsolete and useless. They are known there as “Palmerston’s Follies” because they were Lord Palmerston’s idea and were built in the 1860s, mostly of glaring red brick but with a little stone too. But the fear they embodied, and the strength of the power they were built to resist, were thrilling. One of them, though I did not know it at the time, was considered so secure and secluded that it is to this day the training school for the British Secret Intelligence Service—the original, if you like, for John le Carre’s fictional Sarratt. . . .
Another, which I won’t name in case it still gets someone into trouble, was not so secure. In fact my late brother and I, as schoolboys in short trousers, managed to penetrate its giant walls and venture (in my case very nervously) into the great man-made caverns where the ammunition had once been stored. It sits on a chalk hill, and its galleries deep underground were hewn by Welsh coalminers imported for the purpose. The marks of their pickaxes can still be clearly seen, fresh and sharp as if they had just been made, which I found moving. The thickness and height of the walls, the huge semicircles in which the great guns had once stood, were genuinely awesome, in the proper use of the word. What a battle it would have been, had they ever been attacked.
Bonus. At Tablet Magazine, Menachem Butler tells the history of the Strait of Hormuz—it covers a millennium of widespread choke-point reverberations. From the piece:
That thousand-year-old structure has hardly disappeared. It is visible again in the Strait of Hormuz, now at the center of international attention. The scale is different, as is the cargo. Ships are larger, and volumes are measured in millions of barrels rather than bales and chests. Still, the same underlying strategic and commercial geometry remains. The strait is not simply a body of water. It is a passage through which a substantial portion of the world’s energy supply must move, where traffic is compressed into narrow lanes and where alternatives, though available, are limited in capacity and costly to use. Movement depends on the assumption that transit will remain possible.
Recent events have shown how little is required to unsettle that assumption: threats, limited attacks, the suggestion of mines, the withdrawal of insurance coverage. Traffic falls off. Ships are forced to wait outside the strait or turn back. The interruption is not total, but it is significant enough.
As in the 12th century, no comprehensive control has been established over the system as a whole. The effect arises from pressure applied at a choke point. It is not necessary to dominate the sea in order to influence what passes through it. When movement through such a point is called into question, the consequences extend far beyond, affecting supply and the timing of transactions in faraway regions. The disturbance at a narrow passage does not remain there. It is translated, quickly and continuously, into cost, registered in markets, priced in real time, and transmitted across the system that depends on it.
Bonus Bonus. At Providence Magazine, Henry Long declares war on declaring war on Iran. From the article:
Proponents of war with Iran must identify one kind of damage from Iran that is lasting, grave, and certain. Multiple types of damage that each satisfy different criteria are not adequate. Otherwise, a country could point to a series of consistent but minor attacks in the past, imagine a possible grave attack, and use that imagined harm as a justification for waging war. Iran’s proxy and terror funding has certainly inflicted lasting damage on the United States. A nuclear attack on America would inflict grave damage. But neither type of damage on its own satisfies all three criteria—it is implausible that proxy funding constitutes grave damage, and a nuclear attack is far from certain.
That said, Iran’s funding of anti-American proxies and terrorists has had tragic consequences. Over the past fifty years, at least hundreds of Americans have lost their lives to Iranian proxies. But it’s far from clear that these tragic losses amount to the kind of grave damage that would justify a retributive war. As Fr. John McHugh and Fr. Charles Callan write in their early 20th-century comprehensive manual, Moral Theology, war is “a state of conflict, and so differs from passing conflicts, such as battles, skirmishes, campaigns,” the likes of which Iran has waged against the United States. Thus, it is implausible that these passing conflicts alone justify the United States’ campaign in Iran. The war, which has killed over one thousand Iranian civilians so far, is not a proportionate response to the decades of Iranian terror and proxy sponsorship.
For the Good of the Cause
Uno. At Philanthropy Daily, Trinity Chester has terrific news about a major donation to help the Church with vocations. Read it here.
Due. On the latest episode of the “Givers, Doers, & Thinkers” podcast, Jeremy Beer and Hanna Skandera discuss the Daniels Fund’s efforts to revive civic education. Watch it here.
Tre. More PD: Edu-guru Bruno Manno takes advantage of “Apprenticeship Week” to share some pointed wisdom. Read it here.
Department of Bad Jokes
Q: What do James the Lesser and Winnie the Pooh have in common?
A: A middle name.
A Dios
If of a certain age, you recall fondly beddie-bye preceded by Johnny Carson’s monologue, with some funny jokes mixed among the lame, and banter with Ed and Doc and Alpo appeals . . . but you never had the thought that the host had the thought that he was a seer, a Late Night Errant, the self-anointed Leader of the Opposition, a man with a partisan mission who found sanction and empowerment in the audience of sycophant WOOOOers. If only Carson’s heirs were even funny, a speck. Ah well . . . Ecclesiastes.
May We Learn to Cherish This Last Best Hope of Earth,
Jack Fowler, who dwells in nostalgia at jfowler@amphil.com.
