A Dozen-Plus Stimulants, Gathered for Your Edification and Inspiration
Dear Intelligent American,
It’s a good thing “On the advice of counsel . . .” was not a drinking game this week, lest Americans watching the Senate hearing of Anthony Fauci—once a champion lover of cameras and spotlights and profiles—be struck dead not by a Wuhan-manufactured, U.S. taxpayer-underwritten pathogen but by industrial-grade alcohol poisoning. I am the science—goo-goo, g'joob (apologies to The Beatles)—took the Fifth “nearly” one hundred times, reported the New York Times, and “more” than one hundred times, reported CNN. Who can be blamed for losing the exact count?
(Fun fact: There are seventeen shots in a typical fifth, so in the roughly three hours of a Faucian Fifth-Taking Drinking Game one would have quaffed six bottles of vodka, whiskey, whatever—enough to kill any viral bug inside you, as well as you yourself.)
The lockdown this man stage-managed in 2020 proved disastrous for civil society, and the mounting evidence of this bureaucrat’s culpability deserved—and still deserves, given his refusal to answer senator questions this week—either his refutation, or admission—or that thing called . . . truth.
Alas, given our era, where shame has gone into witness protection, we likely shall not hear that from him.
You can drink to that.
Set ’Em Up, Barkeep
1. At Civitas Outlook, John Kitch argues that Exodus should be American must-reading. From the piece:
Benjamin Franklin’s line, “A republic, if you can keep it,” resonates powerfully with thoughtful Americans because it cuts to the heart of the Constitution. The particular legal arrangements that come to mark the American system rely on intellectual commitments that can only be sustained through broadly dispersed virtue. Walzer notes that both Franklin and Jefferson proposed that the Great Seal of the United States feature imagery from Exodus. Franklin wanted to see Moses, staff raised, presiding over the Red Sea as its waves crashed onto Pharaoh’s army. Jefferson preferred pillars of cloud and fire. What underlies the founders’ attraction to the Exodus story? Walzer puts it this way: “The Exodus is a journey forward—not only in time and space. It is a march toward a goal, a moral progress, a transformation.” The American founders sought to build something new and yet hoped to do it with the wisdom of the old. Of course, this moral zeal is sometimes used by unsavory revolutionaries. Indeed, Walzer’s book devotes significant attention to this fact.
What Exodus provides to violent utopians, though, it supplies even more profoundly to the American republican order. An insistence on virtue as the lifeblood of American life ties together the thinking of John Adams, Alexis de Tocqueville, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Dwight Eisenhower, to name a few examples. That an educated and morally sound citizenry is required for successful self-government is not an original American insight. Rather, our national contribution has been to audaciously attempt to put this principle into practice. The founding generation gave us no other bet to make. Exodus, in this light, deserves a place in the pantheon of American civic education. Nowhere else in the Western tradition do we see as stark a story of national birth. That both the Old Testament Israelites and the American founders brought to life a peculiar regime founded chiefly on virtue and law renders Exodus indispensable in understanding America’s political DNA.
2. At Law & Liberty, fan favorite Daniel J. Mahoney, responding to the great Wilfred McClay’s essay “Year 251,” makes the case for gratitude being central to the flourishing of this Republic. From the piece:
He reminds us that America has always been a “Land of Hope”—to cite the title of his magisterial history of the United States—and counsels that a return to the authentic self-understanding of the American Founders—especially as articulated in the Declaration of Independence—is a necessary element in any cultural recovery in an America that has increasingly lost its way. McClay reads the founding document with intelligence and grace. It recalls to us what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature” and lays out the essential attributes of a free, morally serious, yet spirited and self-respecting “people.”
The Declaration contains much more than an appeal to “abstract truths,” as if America is nothing but a “cosmopolis,” a people from nowhere and everywhere. Nor is our founding document, rightly understood, the first step on the road to pure democracy and indiscriminate egalitarianism. Rather, its commitment to human equality is both noble and measured, and alien to the levelling and tyrannical “passion for equality” that Alexis de Tocqueville saw as the nemesis of authentic democracy. Moreover, it was and remains a powerful bulwark against the “gangrene of slavery,” as John Quincy Adams put it in 1837, and against every appeal to oligarchical or collectivist domination and ugly racism.
3. At Front Porch Republic, Elliott Drago contemplates the rationale for the government’s bunker at beautiful Greenbrier in West Virginia. From the piece:
Historians sometimes quibble about “what-ifs?” in history, which they call “counterfactuals” (and which many find counterproductive). Realists who convince themselves of brute fact—the past happened as it happened, so why think about another path that never happened?—can sometimes forget the stakes of sites like the fallout bunker under the majestic Greenbrier. That existential counterfactual, i.e., the Soviets dropping a nuclear bomb on Washington, D.C., again made me ponder what exactly the Greenbrier was meant to protect. Was it designed to protect representative government? The republican experiment? Freedom itself?
I found myself thinking about more counterfactuals in American history where it seemed that the national experiment could come to a grisly and pathetic end. I thought about certain moments during the Revolutionary War when Washington could have been outmatched and surrendered, dashing the fledgling Patriot cause. I thought about the Battle of Gettysburg, the rebels capturing Washington D.C., and President Abraham Lincoln being hauled away to a jail in Richmond. I thought about the vicious assault on Omaha Beach, where the American boys fighting seasickness on their Higgins boat while daydreaming about their classmates’ graduations back home didn’t take the beach. What if the Germans successfully repulsed wave after wave, heaped them into a bloody morass, and pushed them back into the English Channel, never to return?
4. At the Wall Street Journal, columnist Bill McGurn reports on NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s war on landlords. From the piece:
There’s a method to Mr. Mamdani’s madness. Even the barest acquaintance with the record of rent control and other government efforts to keep housing costs down by subsidizing rents or artificially capping them shows they usually end in failure. The mayor will need to deal with the coming failure or distract attention from it.
Enter Saul Alinsky, the community activist in Chicago who wrote “Rules for Radicals.” For Mayor Mamdani, rule 13 offers a path forward: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”
It’s simple: Pick someone you can blame everything on and attack. In a city where most people have a landlord and renters outnumber owners 2 to 1, landlords are a fat target. If, like Marx, you believe rent is robbery, say so. Make a campaign of it.
5. At The Free Press, Arthur Brooks looks into looksmaxxing, whatever that is (and it is). From the essay:
Even though all of this might have seemed obvious to generations past, it has confused millions in the funhouse-mirror era of social media. The virtual marketplace is purely about generating quick hits, where physical attractiveness is the only input available and therefore acquires exaggerated importance. Hence, looksmaxxing. Besides sending the wrong information to young men about how to attract a mate, heavy social media use is associated with newly minted mental disorders revolving around body issues and health. These include orthorexia nervosa (an obsessive preoccupation with healthy food) and muscle dysmorphia (the belief that one is never muscular or lean enough). This leads to greater social isolation—completely counter to what making yourself attractive was supposed to achieve.
You might also wonder about the inverse: Are women, like men, unwittingly making themselves less attractive to the opposite sex? It’s true that over the past several decades, women have acquired more resource cues of their own—status, ambition, wealth—than at any point in human history. This is all well and good—though, from an evolutionary perspective, it does not send especially strong mating signals to men. Some commentators believe that women’s greater economic independence may be related to lower rates of long-term pair-bond formation. To compound the problem for women, efforts to grab the split-second attention available on virtual platforms require ever more audacious emphasis on physical attractiveness—displaying one’s body on social media, for example—than women would ordinarily be comfortable doing. This creates the opposite of men’s problem: Women are flooded with suitors, but mostly not those of desirable character. This explains the common complaint about the lack of quality men in the dating market.
6. At Tablet Magazine, Aaron Shuster warns that America must resist Islamic “entryism.” From the analysis:
France has completed the investigation America has yet to undertake. In May 2025, the French Interior Ministry published “The Muslim Brotherhood and Political Islam in France,” the product of a mission assigned to senior officials a year earlier. The inquiry examined political Islam, the Muslim Brotherhood’s role in spreading it, and the movement’s connections with affiliated European networks. French authorities concluded that the danger extended beyond jihadist violence. They described an assiduous campaign to acquire influence within the ordinary institutions of French life.
The actor France has identified is the Muslim Brotherhood and the political-Islamist ecosystem surrounding it. The method is entryism: the gradual penetration of schools, associations, religious institutions, charities, municipalities, political parties, and administrative structures. The objective described by French officials is the cultivation of communities in which Islamist norms gain authority while republican principles progressively retreat.
France has treated that finding as a threat to national cohesion. On May 5, 2026, the French Senate adopted legislation directed against Islamist entryism by a vote of 208-124. The measure seeks stronger powers to prevent, detect, and punish concerted institutional activity aimed at undermining the principles of the republic.
7. At National Review, Abigail Anthony grades the academic left an “F” for its knowledge of conservatism. From the article:
So, to summarize: There are too many conservatives in academia, but also conservatives are barely represented on campus so academia leans left, and conservatives need to stop complaining about a perceived ideological bias on campus, but we should maintain the existing left-leaning bias because conservatives are dumb and evil, yet most professors are apolitical and therefore there isn’t a detectable partisanship on campus. Conservatives are discriminated against because their views are immoral or unintellectual, but also there isn’t ideological discrimination because they actually just fail to meet scholarly standards, and conservatives are unwelcome in certain fields because they reject the left-leaning premises of specific disciplines, yet conservatives are the ones who resist intellectual challenges. The ideological imbalance is a figment of the conservative imagination, but also it is real and good.
But the most significantly flawed argument is represented perfectly in a handful of posts from different users, which I will quote: “Conservatives are not well represented in academia because conservatism is, for the most part, the ideology of the incurious. Abortion is bad because the Bible said so. Immigrants are bad because Fox News said so. Capitalism is good because Reagan said so.” Another person, when describing pro-life arguments and whether they should be evaluated seriously in academic discussions, said “every single argument is about controlling a woman’s body there’s nothing to discuss with people who want that.” To hire a pro-life ethicist in a gender-studies department would be equivalent to hiring a young-earth creationist in a geology department, another person claimed, because pro-life arguments are built on an “ideology” of “subjugating women.” An assistant professor at the University of Alabama suggested that hiring a geography professor with critical views on immigration is similar to a medical school hiring a pro-cancer doctor or a black studies department hiring white supremacists.
8. At The College Fix, Abigail Phillips reports on the “Front Royal Statement” promulgated by the leaders of traditional Catholic higher-ed institutions. From the article:
A group of Catholic bishops, professors, and other leaders have formulated seven “cardinal principles” for Catholic education, with a focus on confronting disaffiliation and a lack of belief.
The principles come from a meeting earlier this year, called the inaugural Front Royal Education Summit at Christendom College.
The “Front Royal Statement” addresses the decline in Catholic education, citing the closing of around 100 Catholic schools annually.
“Now is the time to act,” the statement reads, “Do we have the wisdom to read the signs of the times and the courage to respond? Or will we continue chasing secular models of education, treating only the symptoms while we lose still more schools and more young people?”
9. At the Washington Times, Dede Laugesen decries the assault on religious liberty in Nigeria. From the article:
In 2025 alone, mass killings in Benue and Plateau states claimed hundreds of lives, including displaced Christians sheltering at a Catholic mission. In Niger State, gunmen abducted 315 students and teachers from St. Mary’s Catholic School in Papiri—one of the largest school kidnappings in recent history.
The violence showed no let-up in 2026, as attacks timed to Christian holy seasons continued. A Palm Sunday massacre in Jos’s Ungwan Rukuba area killed around 30 people. On Easter Sunday in Kaduna’s Ariko village (Kachia Local Government Area), gunmen stormed an Evangelical Church Winning All congregation and nearby St. Augustine’s Catholic Church during services, killing at least 12. The Nigerian Army claimed to have rescued 31 hostages, but Christian leaders and local residents disputed the assertion, saying there was no rescue and many captives remained missing. Similar deadly strikes happened across Benue, Nasarawa and other Middle Belt areas.
This campaign directly undermines religious freedom. Survivors describe communities too fearful to gather for worship, churches abandoned or burned, and clergy deliberately targeted. According to Aid to the Church in Need (ACN), at least 212 Catholic priests were kidnapped across 41 of Nigeria’s 59 dioceses between 2015 and 2025. Of those, 183 were released or escaped, 12 were murdered, and three died later from injuries and trauma; at least four remained in captivity as of late 2025. Agenzia Fides reported 145 priests kidnapped and 11 killed in the same period, with Kaduna among the hardest hit.
10. At World Magazine, Kim Henderson finds a rural Mississippi chess program that teaches more than checkmate. From the beginning of the article:
It’s a typical Tuesday at 2 p.m., and students are pouring into the Franklin Chess Center in Meadville, Miss. Most of the kids look a bit worn after a day of elementary school. Shoelaces are loosened, strands of hair fall across their faces. But within minutes, they’re seated around classroom tables with their eyes locked on a wall where a huge chess board and its pieces are projected. Pawn from the E4-square to D5? Or maybe F5? Any earlier distractions are as out of mind as the backpacks they piled up at the center’s entrance. For the next two hours, the only thing that matters is the next move.
Among the young chess players is 8-year-old Emma Nations, Mississippi’s reigning K–3 champ. Round-faced and serious, Nations is an every-afternoon regular here, and she’s fully engaged in the projection, something called “Puzzle Storm.” It’s not long before Nations bounds over to her instructor and whispers a possible solution into his ear. He responds. She grimaces.
In chess, every move has consequences, and Nations knows she will win or lose based on the decisions she makes. That certainty drives this rural chess hub. Wins are earned. Mistakes are exposed. Progress is easy to track.
11. At Nelligan Books, Jeff Nelligan remembers his old warrior pal, Smitty. From the piece:
At the beginning of 2012, he was found dead in his home of “natural causes” according to the Anne Arundel County coroner. At the funeral, his mother was defiant that “the war killed my son.” His sister insisted it was PTSD from Iraq, somehow amplified by his previous two deployments.
A dozen guys from the old unit gather in the cemetery parking lot after Smitty’s burial, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee and all of us are still shaken by the anger and rage of his Mom and sister. None of us knew what exactly had happened. And as with all guys who’ve served closely in a military unit, there was no lack of candor. One senior NCO, a real hardass though grudgingly admired, had driven 130 miles that morning to Hebron and he said, “Look, guys, you all know Smitty didn’t really like me at all and I didn’t really like him. We had some real blowups in Kosovo and at Victory [Camp Victory in Iraq] and all those rounds through the tent put us even more on edge. But I knew he respected me and I respected him.”
Regret was the dominant sentiment. Why hadn’t we made more of an effort to see Smitty? To all these guys, mostly vets with an experienced outlook on service, it was a mystery. One thing though: The anger of his mom and sister pounded in our heads.
12. Honk! At City Journal, Arpit Gupta assesses Uber versus autonomous driving. From the piece:
The study’s strongest statistical analysis looks at the risk of injury-causing crashes among different vehicle types. These data are taken from Waymo’s reporting to federal regulators and crash data from the NYPD indicating injuries or fatalities. Over 40,000 such cases occur in New York City in a typical year, allowing for a statistically sound comparison against Waymo’s record, whether deployed in San Francisco or nationwide.
The report’s key finding is that Waymos are involved in far fewer injury-causing crashes than either New York City drivers or for-hire vehicles: 0.71 crashes per million miles nationally compared with 2.15 for New York City’s taxis, Ubers, and Lyfts. This is especially striking because New York City’s lower speed limits and other infrastructure substantially reduce accidents relative to the national average. Waymo has reached a safety level that exceeds even that of New York City’s professional drivers. In fact, the authors found that Uber and Lyft drivers have slightly higher crash rates than other drivers, and yellow cab drivers have even higher crash rates than Uber and Lyft drivers. This may not be surprising because Uber and Lyft’s rating system allows for a greater reputational record than yellow taxis.
Lucky 13. Alas, No Relation: At Claremont Review of Books, Joseph Epstein celebrates the centenary of Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage. From the review:
“Vulgarity,” “discretion,” “good manners,” “inconsiderate,” “rude”: one is not used to seeing such words applied to language, but to H.W. Fowler they are of language’s essence. English is perhaps as rule-ridden as any language, but Fowler cuts through all that might have been considered schoolmarmish in this realm to inform his readers when the rules truly apply. He begins his article on “Split infinitive,” for example, by writing: “The English-speaking world may be divided into (1) those who neither know nor care what a split infinitive is; (2) those who do not know, but care very much; (3) those who know & condemn; (4) those who know & approve; & (5) those who know & distinguish.” He then provides examples of all five cases.
A Dictionary of Modern English Usage also takes up that other notable schoolroom taboo, “Preposition at End” of a sentence, concluding: “Follow no arbitrary rule, but remember that there are often two or more possible arrangements between which a choice should be consciously made; if the abnormal, or at least unorthodox, final preposition that has naturally presented itself sounds comfortable, keep it; if it does not sound comfortable, still keep it if it has compensating vigor, or when among awkward possibilities it is the least awkward.” As for rules generally, Fowler’s view is that it is better to break the rule than to write something barbarous in attempting to avoid doing so.
Bonus. At Brownstone Institute, Wendy McElroy spotlights how “sex” has been surpassed by “gender.” From the piece:
When did sex get pushed to the curb by gender? In his book The Man Who Invented Gender, Terry Goldie claims that the sexologist John Money of Johns Hopkins Medical Center (Baltimore) first used the word “gender” in its modern meaning in 1955. Money pioneered the word to describe his famous John/Joan experiment that was conducted on a young boy named Bruce who’d lost his penis in an accident. To ‘prove’ Money’s theory that sexual identity was learned and not biological, Bruce’s parents raised him as a girl, complete with a surgically constructed vagina. The experiment failed. Bruce ultimately insisted on living as male, but he did not recover from the ordeal Money imposed on him, which he called torture. Bruce committed suicide in his 30s.
By then, however, Money had declared for decades that John/Joan was a complete success; discussions of “gender identity” abounded in ‘60s medical journals and academia. By the ‘70s and ‘80s, feminists brought the term to the streets, with “gender” describing a person’s self-defined sociocultural identity and “sex” meaning biology. Then, the word wedged its way into government. In 1993, for instance, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) replaced “sex” with “gender” in its literature. In 2011, “sex” returned to the FDA to mean biology while “gender” meant “a person’s self-representation.” The term went global. Also in 1993, the United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women (DEVAW) vaguely defined this aggression as “any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women.”
For the Good of the Order
Uno. At Philanthropy Daily, the great scholar Howard Husock spotlights the causes that philanthropy disdains, but shouldn’t. Read it here.
Due. More PD: Eileen Wallisch adds to the “Still Working for Mercy” series with an excellent look at a Milwaukee food center engaged in feeding the hungry after nourishing the soul. Read it here.
Point of Personal Privilege
At Philanthropy Daily, Yours Truly reviews the great scholar Howard Husock’s important book, The Projects: A New History of Public Housing. You can, and you should, read the review here.
And . . . the acclaimed poverty expert, Lawrence Mead, penned a reply to that review and allowed PD to publish it; those so inclined can read it here.
Department of Bad Jokes
Q: What do you call the economic calamity that devastated the wine industry in the 1930s?
A: The Grape Depression.
A Dios
It is comforting—please let it be so—for some women to know that cells and DNA of the baby, before the miscarriage, was, by God’s grace, transmitted to the mom. And there abides for decades. Lest one believe this to be Catholic or pro-life voodoo, it is plain old biology, operating since Eden, and it has a name: “fetal microchimerism.” Read about that here. Why? Do the baby’s cells hang around like souvenirs; are they left-behind tokens of a life unfulfilled? Actually, there is evidence that decades later, they come to the aid of mom when she is afflicted. Are love, gratitude, obligation, commitment to be found at the cellular level and in the strands of DNA? Seems so. To think the miscarried baby, years later, has mom’s back, and rushes to her aid—in God’s good time, may this reality soothe and offer solace to the broken heart.
Let Us Suffer the Little Ones,
Jack Fowler, who yearns for tender mercies at jfowler@amphil.com.
