A Dozen-Plus Stimulants, Gathered for Your Edification and Inspiration
Dear Intelligent American,
Old amiga Asra Q. Nomani once toiled as a Wall Street Journal reporter, then did a long author / mom / parental-rights tour (she was a leader in the fight of Northern Virginia parents whose successful-student high-school kids were getting kneecapped by woke educrats), and now finds herself spearheading investigative journalism at Fox News, where she has done profound work on spotlighting the ideologue activists who are gaming the American public square, where civil society has been sorely tested.
If you think “No Kings” rallies and their like are spontaneous things, well, Asra’s reporting will have you thinking again. And yes, the underwriting of the street theater is trés ChiCom. Find an example of her journalism here. And please do know that this is suggested in the spirit of Sister Honoria, who in the 5th Grade dispensed repeatedly the nugget that “A word to the wise is sufficient” (although some of us knuckleheads thought she might have been referring to Wise Potato Chips).
Lent’s Over, So Enjoy All This Intellectual Candy
1. At Michigan Enjoyer, old amigo John J. Miller profiles the new church mural of Joseph Macklin. From the piece:
Church art can be deliberately anachronistic. Biblical figures in the paintings of Caravaggio, for example, sometimes appear dressed in Renaissance garb. Pieter Brueghel the Elder made Bethlehem look like a Flemish village in winter.
Macklin’s mural belongs to this tradition—and locals who gaze upon it will notice churches from the Diocese of Lansing and buildings from downtown Jackson, including many of the vivid murals that decorate them. Macklin was so determined to represent them accurately that he even included a tiny rendering of the Alice Cooper mural at 105 E. Michigan Ave.
Perhaps that’s appropriate. Alice Cooper is the stage name of Vincent Damon Furnier, a Detroit native who became a 1970s rock star with songs such as “School’s Out.” Today he’s an active Christian who reads the Bible and prays before concerts.
2. Close the Drapes: At Minding the Campus, Jared Gould and Lilla Nora Kiss report on Gen Xers turning to AI for intimacy. From the piece:
Apart from using AI to cheat, one in five high schoolers has begun using these tools for emotional and even romantic engagement. In fact, one analysis of more than a million ChatGPT interaction logs found that sexual role-playing ranked among the system’s most common uses, second only to creative writing—the very task large language models were originally designed to perform.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has faced lawsuits over the risks associated with its algorithms. Beginning in 2023 and continuing through 2025, a series of lawsuits alleged harms ranging from defamation to negligence and emotional distress tied to AI-generated content. In response to growing public and regulatory pressure, OpenAI introduced stricter safeguards across 2024-2025, including limits on sexually explicit content, tighter moderation of romantic role-play—especially for minors—and expanded parental control. Restrictions on mainstream platforms such as ChatGPT, however, are largely ineffective, as alternative platforms designed specifically for intimate interaction continue to proliferate.
3. At Forza . . . for Education, Jeanne Allen calls out governors playing political games over a school-choice tax credit. From the analysis:
Imagine living in a state where your child is not meeting his potential—Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago—where schools are struggling, enrollment is declining, and closures are becoming routine. And yet your governor refuses to act, not because the policy is flawed, but because Donald Trump supports it and the unions oppose it. That’s the practical absurdity in front of us.
Governors are responsible for all children in their states—not just those aligned with a particular political coalition. Refusing to opt in for political reasons, while taxpayers in your own state can still send resources elsewhere, is not strategy. It’s folly.
The Federal Tax Credit Scholarship is not a niche program. It’s a broad expansion of educational freedom—privately funded, family-directed, and widely accessible. Beginning in 2027, individuals can receive a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit of up to $1,700—$3,400 for married couples—for contributions to approved scholarship-granting organizations. Nearly every K–12 student could benefit, but the greatest impact will be among families with the fewest options, especially those in traditional public schools. That’s why this debate matters—and why the politics surrounding it must be called out plainly.
Important Message Time . . .
On April 30, the Center for Civil Society will host another must-catch webinar, this one on “The Power of Planned Giving”—something overlooked by way too many nonprofits. Yours Truly will emcee the discussion with Sandy Shrader and Stephanie Conway, two of AmPhil’s primo planned-giving experts—it will all take place from 3:00 to 4:00 p.m. (Eastern) via Zoom, and of course, it’s free. Get more information, and register, right here.
. . . Now, Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Suggestions
4. At Open Inquiry in Mental Health, Stella O’Malley discusses the challenges of working with detransitioning youth. From the piece:
Working with detransitioners can be among the most meaningful, and at times harrowing, aspects of clinical practice in this area. These individuals typically view their medical transition as a form of self-harm and deeply regret the hormonal and surgical interventions they underwent, highlighting the potential risks of medicalization.
In the Beyond Trans support groups, participants frequently report deep regret regarding hormonal treatments, mastectomies, vaginoplasties, hysterectomies, and other irreversible procedures. Detransitioners remain a minority within a minority, yet their perspectives are essential to fully understanding the realities of gender dysphoria.
Consistent accounts reported by detransitioners underscore the urgent need to approach gender dysphoria with caution, compassion, and a focus on long-term well-being. Internalized and externalized homophobia is a recurring theme in clinical work with this population. Many young people who later identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual describe struggling to accept their same-sex attraction and now regret pursuing medical transition as a way to “trans the gay away,” a phrase commonly used online to describe this phenomenon.
5. At The 74, edu guru Bruno Manno explains why education needs to instruct students on the importance of forging relationships. From the piece:
This social capital—the knowledge of how to forge connections that make opportunities visible and attainable—is the missing curriculum in American K-12 and postsecondary education. And it’s a shortcoming with consequences.
Young people from well-connected families absorb social capital almost by osmosis when it comes to learning things like how to ask for help, follow up and signal ambition without arrogance. Others, equally capable but from less-connected families, must figure this out alone. The result is unequal starting lines and unequal outcomes—a yawning gap between social wealth and social poverty.
Social wealth means having not only knowledge and credentials, but relationships that open doors, including mentors who give advice, supervisors who challenge us when we need to grow and networks that surface opportunities. Social poverty is the absence of those assets. It is being a talented individual without advocates.
6. At Freedom Frequency, Glenn Loury explores the problems with “respectability politics.” From the beginning of the article:
In contemporary American discourse about racial inequality, the phrase respectability politics has become almost entirely pejorative. Among many progressive intellectuals, the term functions less as a description than as a rebuke. It is invoked to criticize those who emphasize behavioral norms—self-discipline, sobriety, industriousness, family responsibility—as relevant to the political fortunes of Black Americans. To speak approvingly of respectability, one is warned, is to blame the victim, to validate racist stereotypes, or to demand conformity to standards imposed by a dominant white society.
This critique contains an important insight. Respectability can indeed be deployed unjustly. Throughout American history, Black citizens have often been required to meet standards of conduct far more exacting than those applied to others. Appeals to “good behavior” have sometimes served as excuses for ignoring injustice.
Yet the contemporary rejection of respectability has gone too far. In the eagerness to avoid victim-blaming, many commentators have come to treat the cultivation of good character and honorable conduct as if they were politically irrelevant—or even morally suspect. In my judgment, this reaction reflects a profound misunderstanding of how societies actually function.
For minority populations in a democratic polity, the cultivation of respectability—understood properly—is not capitulation. It is prudence. And prudence, when joined to moral seriousness, can be a form of political wisdom.
7. At Religion & Liberty Online, Anne Bradley explains why the wealth tax must die. From the piece:
Just this past month we celebrated the 250th anniversary of the publication of Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Imagine arguing in 1776 that universal opulence would “extend itself to the lowest ranks of people,” but that achieving it required unleashing human creativity through the division of labor and a well-governed society. The reason we do not have a fixed economic pie in the United States is that we built those institutions, and the results are astounding. In 1776, life expectancy hovered around age 38, largely driven by infant and child mortality. Average incomes in the colonies were low by today’s standards yet still highest in the world at the time. Today the U.S. median income is the highest in the world and we’ve reduced child and infant mortality by 90% in the last century alone. Smith was right: Limited government and private property rights produce personal and societal wealth, turning a zero-sum scramble over a fixed pie into a positive-sum society. A market-based order grounded in the rule of law is, at its core, egalitarian, which is why Smith believed that everyone, not just the powerful, could experience wealth.
It is precisely the deviations from those institutions of economic freedom that distort markets, create winners and losers, and lead to bloated and ineffective government and cronyism, causing resentment and suspicions about the wealthy. In a free market you must look beyond your own interests and create value for others to earn a profit. The evidence bears this out, and while the U.S. does have a problem with cronyism, such as no-bid contracts that dominate the military industrial complex, subsidies, bailouts, and occupational licensing barriers, to name a few, American wealth is mostly a story of entrepreneurs who have created value for society far greater than their net worth. Innovators capture only about 2% of the social value they create; in other words, the social benefits far outweigh the private gains. Taxing that 2% further only reduces incentives to create entrepreneurial value. Less cronyism would mean even more growth and less structural inequality.
8. At American Enterprise Institute, Howard Husock explores the downside of legalized marijuana. From the study:
At the same time, ongoing medical research continues to reveal new health risks related to marijuana use, including increased risk of “major cardiovascular events.” The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warn that cannabis users are “more likely to develop psychosis . . . and long-lasting mental disorders, including schizophrenia,” especially users “who start using cannabis at an earlier age and use cannabis more frequently.” Further, because of its effects on “coordination, memory, and judgment,” “cannabis use can impair important skills required for safe driving.” The Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs found that recreational marijuana legalization has been “associated with a 6.5 percent increase in injury crash rates and a 2.3 percent increase in fatal crash rates.”
The combination of increased use and collateral health effects of recreational marijuana raises the question how government should educate the public and whether it should discourage or limit cannabis use as it does with tobacco, another legal but dangerous product. Unlike tobacco, however, marijuana’s unusual legal standing—illegal under federal law but subject to state legalization—means any attempts to discourage its use must be undertaken not by the federal government but by each state that has legalized the drug. Although technically still illegal under federal law, notwithstanding President Trump’s December 2025 decision to reclassify the drug as less dangerous—“the federal response to states’ legalizing marijuana largely has been to allow states to implement their own laws.” The absence of federal policy means there is no standard nationwide package warning for cannabis products as there is for tobacco, which includes 11 “cigarette health warnings, consisting of textual warning statements accompanied by color graphics, in the form of concordant photorealistic images, depicting the negative health consequences of cigarette smoking” required by the Food and Drug Administration.
9. At Public Discourse, Gerald McDermott predicts that if the country is to be saved, it will be due to classical education. From the essay:
I remember when I was in my PhD program studying the writings of Jonathan Edwards. The mountains of secondary scholarship on Edwards proclaimed that he was happy to let the world outside the church go to hell, in both senses of the word, and that he had no notion of what we would call politics or political theology. I had a hunch that could not be true for a theologian in the Reformed tradition that is typically interested in reordering the world. Following a lead from Harry Stout, who found treasures in Puritan unpublished sermons, I travelled to Yale’s Beinecke Library to explore Edwards’s unpublished sermons. In them I found, lo and behold, that “America’s theologian” had an extensive “public theology.” Many articles and books on Edwards and the public square (see here and here) have been published since that first little hunch.
Classical Christian education will not truly save this country. Only God can. But if God saves this nation from utter ruin, He surely will have used the young men and women being produced by classical Christian schools in this land. For they will have the intellectual firepower and strength of character to reform this nation both politically and socially. And even if other forces should prevail, the graduates of these schools will lead their families in knowing, as Boethius taught, that there are better things than good fortune in external circumstances.
10. Please Weed This: At Front Porch Republic, Reid Makowsky advises that those seeking humility can find it in . . . gardening. From the piece:
The scrupulous person believes that everything, including matters that are actually amoral, is—or ought to be—within his control. The despairing man thus postures himself as knowing more than God. Don’t misunderstand me: I don’t mean to criticize anyone who suffers in these ways. Instead, I want to point out that the garden, where one’s will meets natural limitations, can be a modest training ground for combating these tendencies.
Merely because the farmer lacks a PhD in soil chemistry and can’t perform photosynthesis, he shouldn’t decide that he cannot learn how to garden in harmony with nature. If nature can’t be dominated, it doesn’t follow that it can’t, with patience and humility, be cultivated. Similarly, it would be a mistake for someone trying to overcome scrupulosity to conclude that, because the formation of conscience and the cultivation of virtue are difficult, the desire for sanctification is futile. Gardening and moral formation are as worthwhile as they are difficult, and an abandoned garden and moral apathy look much the same: all nettle, briar, and bramble.
11. At The European Conservative, Hélène de Lauzun offers a spirit-ed reflection on an ancient and mysterious elixir. From the piece:
From then on, Chartreuse was able to step beyond the monastery gates and set out to conquer the world. It captivated people, of course, with its taste—at once sweet and bitter, spicy, almost fiery—but also with everything it suggested: a hidden origin and a production process beyond the ordinary. In its bulbous bottles, its intense colour fascinated and drew the eye. This is the very paradox of this monastic production: the fruit of prayer and silence, designed to heal the body, this drink gradually became an object of desire, quick to set hearts ablaze.
Even more than its flavour, Chartreuse’s appeal lies in its air of secrecy. We know it is made from 130 plants. We can guess at some of them: lemon balm, thyme, angelica, hyssop . . . But the essentials elude the curious drinker, even the most refined of palates. The complete recipe is known only to two monks at any one time, who are responsible for preparing the herbal mixture. They never travel together, to prevent the secret from being lost should a tragic transport accident occur. These two are also the only members of the community permitted to leave the monastery, travelling to the distillery once or twice a week to check the measurements and the maceration process.
12. At City Journal, Bill McClay assures that free speech requires listening. From the article:
How should we think about the necessary preconditions of mutuality that undergird the practice of free speech? One way to gain insight is to consult a thinker not usually associated with debates over free expression: the Cambridge philosopher and political theorist Michael Oakeshott. He resists easy characterization, though his leading American interpreter, Timothy Fuller, aptly describes him as “the preeminent antagonist of all those today who wish to reduce the meaning of life to political action.” That formulation points to a recurring theme in Oakeshott’s work: the elusive but essential form of discourse he called “conversation.”
What is a conversation? Oakeshott called it “an unrehearsed intellectual adventure”—a setting in which “thoughts of different species take wing and play round one another,” without an arbiter, “not even a doorkeeper to examine credentials.” Most strikingly, he contends that “it is the ability to participate in conversation, and not the ability to reason cogently, to make discoveries about the world, or to contrive a better world, which distinguishes the human being from the animal and the civilized man from the barbarian.” From this perspective, the central task of education is to initiate students into “the skill and partnership of this conversation.”
Lucky 13. At Daily Wire, Alex Tarascio finds that your friendly neighborhood protest may be something that is very organized, planned, and bankrolled. From the beginning of the piece:
Foreign adversaries have figured out what American political campaigns are still learning: in a world where public opinion shapes policy, the battle for hearts and minds is fought on your phone. Iran, China, and Russia cannot compete with the United States militarily. But they can reach directly into your living room through social media, front organizations, and direct support of protest movements. All of this with the intent of making voters question whether the fight du jour, in this case Iran, is even worth it.
The bombs were falling on Iran when the protesters hit the streets. Within hours, people flooded Times Square and other cities across the country. Signs were already printed, chants rehearsed, and logistics arranged. That kind of speed doesn’t happen organically.
Bonus. At The Giving Review, William Schambra remembers the late Barbara Elliott and her passion for supporting local faith-based groups. From the article:
Peering out from foundation or corporate offices toward low-income inner city or rural communities, it is often very difficult to see beyond a handful of large, nationally known nonprofits, lavishly equipped with aggressive publicity and fundraising arms. These organizations are typically secular, or religious only in a rather nominal way. The faith-based groups discussed in this volume, by contrast, are almost invisible from privileged enclaves downtown or in the suburbs. They are located in old storefronts in the toughest neighborhoods, with mismatched furniture, water-stained ceilings, and duct tape on the carpet. They are often manned by unpaid volunteers, whose chief credential for service is that they themselves have, by the grace of God, transcended the circumstances out of which they are now trying to lift others. It’s usually more efficient for them to scrape by on small donations from their friends or from their own pockets than to try to master the demanding art of fundraising and report-writing. And yet these are the groups that are, person by person and block by block, reclaiming individuals and neighborhoods otherwise forgotten by the major institutions of government and philanthropy.
How do we equip these saints? How do we bridge the chasm between donor and grassroots, faith-based group? We need a guide—someone who is comfortable in both worlds, and who can mark the paths back and forth between them. Thankfully, we have such a guide in Barbara Elliott. Ms. Elliott is a compelling speaker and widely published author of books and articles on the role of faith in civic renewal. She has worked for major national think tanks and publications and in the White House, and has received awards at the hand of the president of the United States. She is at home in the most powerful and wealthy circles in the nation.
And yet, as this volume will demonstrate, she is not content to remain in that world. Her primary passion is to seek out and bring to our attention precisely those smaller, faith-based grassroots efforts that are otherwise so easily overlooked. She moves with ease in that world, as well, because she, too, values the deep spiritual nourishment and enrichment that she finds there.
Bonus Bonus. At The American Mind, Glenn Ellmers analyzes the challenges to America celebrating its 250th anniversary. From the reflection:
Within a few decades, this profound respect for the past would come under attack. Influenced by the German philosophers of historicism, higher education came to mean the conquest of the old by the new. Woodrow Wilson captured the radical essence of this view when he declared in 1914, “I have often said that the use of a university is to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible.” Education from this point on would gradually invert the framer’s expectation that greater learning would be commensurate with more enlightened patriotism and enlarged civic responsibility. Today, university education is not the bulwark but the enemy of republican government.
The mind-numbing dogmas promulgated in our elite colleges are destroying the very ability to think. As a result, Americans are divided not only by radically different opinions about our history and whether America was or remains good; we can’t even agree on basic questions of justice, morality, and human nature. Indeed, the most prestigious schools teach that there is no such thing as human nature. For a great many people today, the self-evident truths of the Declaration are self-evidently absurd. The mark of an elite education, 250 years after the Revolution, is to regard the laws of nature and nature’s God as white supremacist mythology.
For the Good of the Cause
Uno. At Philanthropy Daily, nepo writer Andy Fowler takes the cold plunge on behalf of civil society. Read it here.
Due. More PD: Ryan Corry has been listening to donors, and hears what they are saying. Read it here.
Department of Bad Jokes
Q: Why did the triangle and the rectangle leave the lecture about the sphere?
A: They thought it was pointless.
A Dios
The refereeing in the Michigan - UConn NCAA championship game was atrocious. It’s hard to say the Huskies were robbed, but what America deserved was a fair fight, and what it got left with was a bad taste in its mouth (which is of an unknown location, although likely in the Northeast). Also, if you can spare a prayer, offer it for Kevin, whose ticker is short-circuiting and could use some healing.
May We Seek the Wideness in His Mercy,
Jack Fowler, who welcomes missives sent to jfowler@amphil.com.
