A Dozen-Plus Stimulants, Gathered for Your Edification and Inspiration
Dear Intelligent American,
Pew Research Center has just dropped an intriguing study on “How Americans Are Engaged With News, Politics, Religion and Civic Life.” This missive (Civil Thoughts) by the Center For Civil Society—which especially cares about civic life—would like to think you, Fair Reader, might find it of interest. There are no bombshell findings, but how the study groups Americans—into “Mobilizers,” “Connectors,” “Spectators,” and “Outsiders”—and defines their attributes, is worthy of contemplation. You might even ask, “Where do I fit in?”
(Unless you are a misfit.)
Non sequitur: On X there is going round a sharing of “the ten best comedies all time according to me” (here is an example from Jon Gabriel, a fine writer, and another from old colleague Mark Hemingway). Yours Truly chimed in with a selection of ten oldies: My Man Godfrey, A Night at the Opera, The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, City Lights, The Philadelphia Story, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, The Producers (the 1967 original), Hail the Conquering Hero, It Happened One Night, Some Like It Hot, plus a bonus—The Quiet Man.
What would your choices have been?
And speaking of choices, what follows are fourteen choice readings to get you through the weekend. Enoy.
I’ve Got a Little List
1. At In Pursuit, biographer Troy Senik tells of the POTUS he knows best, Grover Cleveland. From the article:
Throughout his two terms in Washington, Cleveland remained similarly immovable on several fronts, often to his political detriment. Seeking to arrest the abuse of Native Americans, his administration clawed back 80 million acres of Western land that had been wrongly distributed to railroads or awarded via fraudulent homestead claims. He irritated his fellow Democrats when he rebuffed efforts to inflate the currency during the Panic of 1893, an economic downturn so severe that it was known at the time as “The Great Depression.” He provoked their ire again when he deployed federal troops to Chicago in 1894 to put down the Pullman Strike, which threatened to paralyze commerce throughout broad swathes of the country. And he defied growing imperialist sentiment by refusing to sign on to an annexation of Hawaii—where the government had been overthrown in a coup abetted by the American ambassador—writing “I mistake the American people if they favor the odious doctrine that there is no such thing as international morality; that there is one law for a strong nation and another for a weak one . . .”
In many ways, Grover Cleveland fit the abstract ideal that most Americans profess to have for our presidents: self-made, scrupulously honest, and dedicated to the public good rather than to the politically expedient. Yet while his career can be interpreted as a rebuke to political cynicism, an equally plausible reading would emphasize that standing on principle came at a high cost. Whatever its other merits, Cleveland’s disregard for the give-and-take of politics proved disastrous for his party. In the 1894 midterm elections, Democrats suffered the biggest loss in the House of Representatives in American history. By the time of the 1896 Democratic Convention, Cleveland had become a punching bag within his own party. And after his departure, Democrats would not reclaim the White House for another 16 years.
2. At National Review, Dominic Green assures that reading is not dead. From the essay:
The function of literacy has changed. Reading was our master epistemology. It inculcated the critical and ethical values that stabilized the claims of competing epistemologies and established a canon of cultural literacy. But literacy has become ancillary to the new visual and auditory epistemologies that McLuhan described, and these are creating a new culture. On an Instagram reel, the spoken word runs as a chyron: text reinforces image and sound. This reversal of value crushes epistemes, which is how the Greeks described the building blocks of knowledge, into memes, a mere rubble of information. The teachers’ unions, which cannot see a standard without wanting to lower it, complete the vandalism by dancing among the ruins. But it would happen anyway; as McLuhan saw, the ways in which we formulate and transmit information have changed.
The authority of the written word is undergoing what social scientists call a “crisis of replication.” Our schools repeat the educational experiments of mass culture in the analog age, but the procedures no longer produce the old results. The dynamic epistemologies of the academy and the popular arts no longer transmit their dynamism. The university is a debt farm and indoctrination camp for Americans and a finishing school for foreign elites. Hollywood has never been less effective at recycling other nations’ plotlines. American popular music has shed its complexity along with its humanity. The American novel went into a coma around the time that David Foster Wallace combined a necktie with a headscarf. The book industry we knew has broken the spine of its economic model. But it’s not all bad news.
3. At Law & Liberty, Wilfred McClay makes the case for the Declaration as it begins Year 251. From the piece:
But we have indeed lost sight of it—in a great many ways. For more than a century, progressive politicians and academic theorists have campaigned against it, taking the position that it had become obsolete. “We are not bound to adhere to the doctrines held by the signers of the Declaration of Independence,” Woodrow Wilson insisted in a 1907 speech. “We are as free as they were to make and unmake governments.” The Declaration, he asserted, came out of an eighteenth-century world in which the equilibrist dynamics of Newtonian physics reigned. But that world had been superseded by Darwinian ideas of endless organic adaptation and development, in which the coordination of collaborative forces, rather than the countervailing effects of opposing ones, represented the proper modus operandi of a modern regime. “Government,” Wilson stated, “is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton.” The Declaration was fine for its time, and for those who were hopelessly stuck in the past, addicted to railing against George III; but insofar as it failed to address itself to “the questions of our day,” it could be seen as “of no consequence to us.”
But the Declaration did not succumb to this dismissive treatment, and it found an eloquent advocate in President Calvin Coolidge, whose 1926 speech for the 150th anniversary of the Declaration was one for the ages, a rousing defense of the Declaration as a “spiritual” document, which set forth the unchanging ideals by which American government was to be conducted. It has continued to be esteemed as a quintessential expression of the nation’s ideals, as “American scripture,” in the historian Pauline Maier’s words.
4. At The Free Press, Niall Ferguson and John-Clark Levin assess the death of history. From the essay:
By contrast, the podcast boom of the late 2010s saw the rise of “anti-history”—a new brand of Holocaust denial that threw off the shackles of quotes and footnotes altogether in favor of freewheeling YouTube rants and edgy Rumble livestreams. Its standard-bearers were well-groomed and affable. They wooed viewers with the transgressive thrill of supposedly forbidden knowledge. Showcased by Carlson in late 2024 as “the best and most honest popular historian” in America, anti-historian Darryl Cooper jumped straight to explosive moral conclusions: “Churchill was the chief villain of the Second World War.” Although “millions of people ended up dead” in Adolf Hitler’s camps, Cooper said, the Nazis had simply misjudged the logistics of capturing so many people, so may have finished them off to spare them, humanely, the agonies of starvation.
Having dropped their bombshells, such anti-historians usually retreated whenever challenged by real scholars, vaguely conceding some Nazis atrocities and insisting that they were ordinary folks “just asking questions.”
The millennial and Gen-Z firebrands who followed them in the TikTok era have quickly dropped even this pretense. They mainly deny the Holocaust not by disputing historical events, but by brazenly doubting that the mass slaughter of Jews was wrong in the first place. Myron Gaines, a leading “men’s rights” influencer whose macho finance and dating advice has propelled him to over a quarter-billion views on YouTube alone, pulls no punches: “Yeah we like Hitler,” he posted to X in October last year. “No one gives a fuck what you woke jews think anymore. [Hitler] was a revolutionary leader and saved germany. The jews declared war on Germany first.”
5. At his Substack, Michael Pakaluk explores the semantic roots of “Anti-Semitism.” From the piece:
In the early 1800s, German racialists wanted a name for the peoples themselves who spoke these languages. Thus, they coined and adopted the word “Semite.” This noun is what etymologists call a “back formation.” Usually nouns precede adjectives. But in this case the noun comes later. It is a contrived term based upon “Semitic.”
In 1879, a German ne’er-do-well named Wilhelm Marr coins the term “Antisemitismus” to stand for a movement which he thinks Germans must join, for an inevitable struggle to the death between the German and Jewish peoples. Before then, people spoke of “Jew hatred.” But Marr wanted a term which was based on race, not religion or culture. Someone who was Jewish by religion or culture could assimilate, after all. But Marr believed the Jews would never assimilate and, unless opposed, would subjugate the Germans. “Anti-Semitism” was just the word for this new movement. It looked scientific. It referred to race. And it cloaked a specific hatred of Jews under the guise of a view that “those peoples in general cannot assimilate.”
The best and only book on Marr, if you are interested, is by the Israeli historian, Moshe Zimmermann, published by Oxford University Press, 1986, entitled Wilhelm Marr: The Patriarch of Antisemitism.
6. At Tablet Magazine, Ben Freeman finds the recent increase in antisemitism, in its way, a lucky break for American Jews. From the article:
Thank God they threw us overboard. It may have been the only way for us to have avoided going down with them.
For years, many of us worked to earn a permanent berth on those ships: a faculty appointment, a board seat, a spot at whatever table seemed to matter that week, on the theory that enough usefulness would eventually purchase real belonging. That theory only holds if the ship is going somewhere worth arriving. Some of them were not, and no amount of usefulness was ever going to change their heading. Far from leaving us stranded, losing our place on board returned us to a vessel we already owned, one we had spent 2,000 years building in exile and then, against every reasonable expectation, actually finished building in our own land.
Better than that, we now have clarity. We are no longer laboring under illusions, bidding for affection that was always going to be withheld. They were honest with us, in the end, and that honesty is its own kind of freedom. We can go our own way now: not into a ghetto (we still have real allies) but into self-determination, as individuals and as a global people.
7. At Science Direct, Andrew Hartz and Sonia Yanovsky spotlight where the field of psychology is quite ideologically broken. From the investigation:
Psychotherapy is designed to alleviate individual suffering, enhance functioning, and cultivate insight and agency. When clinicians or researchers adopt an activist stance, they risk imposing normative judgments or making social change an implicit goal of treatment. Even when therapists don’t take an explicitly activist stance, biases, blindspots, and gaps in training can still impair their work. These biases can lead to ruptures, weaker therapeutic alliances, and patient dropouts; they can even discourage certain populations from seeking psychotherapy altogether. Similarly, strong ideological identification or moral certainty from a clinician can interfere with therapeutic dialogue, as well as prematurely curtail a well-rounded understanding of sociopolitical issues that may be affecting patients. All these biases can also impinge on patients' sense of agency, divert time and energy from evidence-based interventions, and/or undermine therapeutic efficacy in myriad other ways.
What is needed now is a systematic effort to correct this imbalance: a research and therapy agenda that identifies and addresses the overlooked issues and underserved populations affected by sociopolitical bias. Such a project requires a renewed commitment to scientific openness and intellectual humility. As Alam and Rueda (2025) argue, the health of any helping profession depends on viewpoint diversity, constructive disagreement, and open inquiry, qualities that allow practitioners to engage with human complexity rather than conform to prevailing ideological expectations. Their example can be followed by other mental health professionals.
8. At his website, Daniel Greenfield adds the numbers and finds there are twenty-five million Communists in America. From the piece:
The “Very Favorable” rating for Communism of 15% by Gen Z and 13% for millennials is in sharp contrast to the 7% rating for Gen X and 2% rating for Baby Boomers who were once seen as the most radical generation. The Communist Party in the 1950s had only 50,000 official members while the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) which is run by Marxist and Communist caucuses already has more than double that many members.
Edgar Hoover’s estimates of Communists and fellow travelers stood at under half a million. The level of “very positive” supporters for Communism among Gen Z is already projected to stand at 10 million, another 9 million or so for Gen Z, another 4.5 million for Gen X and another 1.3 million for the Baby Boomers for a combined projected total of over 25 million Communists.
And that’s only counting those who are “very favorable” to Communism, not the additional 35 million who are only “somewhat favorable” to the murderous totalitarian ideology making for a total of 60 million Americans who are positively disposed towards Communism.
9. At The Daily Signal, Jarrett Stepman explains how downwind Americans are fuming over Canadian smoke. From the article:
Even if we accept that global temperatures are rising—by the hand of man or naturally—Canada has responded poorly to the fire threat.
Frankly, if everything climate doomers said were true, and we take them at their word that they are most worried about carbon emissions being pumped into the atmosphere, then there is no excuse for not making aggressive forest management a top priority.
In 2023 the worst year of Canadian forest fires (so far), an estimated 3 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide was pumped into the atmosphere.
That’s around five times what the entire Canadian economy produced that year.
So, all the best laid plans of mice and men and globalist climate engineers haven’t accounted for the overwhelming effect of forest fires that are natural, but containable. They demand that our lives get upended but fail to handle basic governance.
10. At The European Conservative, Hélène de Lauzun finds the woke roots of France’s defeat in the World Cup. From the piece:
When it came to football, the Left and the media had grown accustomed to playing with the ideas of racism and anti-racism as they saw fit and solely for their own ideological interests. Pointing out the excessive presence of Black players on the French national team is considered proof of racism. Highlighting its ethnic diversity, a badge of honour. Since last night, one of the few white players on the French national team, Lucas Digne, has been the target of a full-scale online witch hunt on social media for conceding a penalty to the Spanish team. But in his case, no one is speaking out to denounce the anti-white racism of those who are hurling insults at him.
For some time now, despite the media backlash, dissenting voices have been making themselves heard. The most recent example was former Prime Minister Rajoy’s statement about the absence of French players on the French national team, which in a way lifted the veil on a deeper defeat even before the match was played: the defeat of a country that no longer knows how to trust its own children.
If there’s one thing to be glad about, it’s that France’s defeat in the semifinals against Spain has dealt a serious blow to the myth.
11. At Front Porch Republic, homeschooling mom Jessica Burke reveals fears over the graduating high-school child. From the piece:
My kids don’t go to a traditional school, however. There is no one telling me what they must finish, learn, do, or achieve before we complete a high school education. The state of North Carolina has recommendations, but in the end, my husband and I are responsible for what must be completed. And so, graduating my children, I looked at them and wondered, “Are we there yet? Is this what a high school graduate is supposed to be able to do? Is this how they’re supposed to be able to think? Is what we did right? Is what we did enough?”
It’s a terrifying thing to graduate your children from high school, hoping they’ll be able to meet adulthood and be successful. If they aren’t prepared, I can’t blame the schools or the teachers for their failures.
Home schooling reveals all of my weaknesses and shortcomings. My temper flares when there are tears over math. My lack of mastery is revealed when I try to explain biology or chemistry. Even literature and grammar, content I was once paid to teach to other people’s children, can stump me. My own failures are revealed daily as I try to move my children on step closer day by day to being a well-educated, well-rounded adult. Why am I not there yet? How can I get them there if I’m nowhere close?
12. More FPR: D.P. Curtin exposes the ghosts of colonial America’s once-fledgling Swedish project. From the piece:
Historically, Americans have been encouraged to think of themselves as rugged, self-made individuals, free to detach themselves from any place or history. Our national roots are comparatively shallow beside those of many nations, which claim their origins deep in antiquity and prehistory. Yet our landscape offers a different kind of lesson. Our towns and cities have distinctive personalities, sometimes born from the vision of their respective founders, sometimes the result of their political histories. Every community is built upon foundations laid by older ones, and is at times the unconscious heir of the forgotten past. We inherit places we did not build and civilizations whose origins we do not fully comprehend. Understanding the cultural layers of our own civilization deepens our attachment to it. To know a place well, to be a denizen of a specific locale, is to know something of those who loved it before us.
It is fitting that there are no surviving Swedish inscriptions. The cemeteries attached to old Swedish parishes are either in English or their texts have been washed away by four centuries of rain. The ancient Psalmist writes, “As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more” (Ps. 103:15–16). Such is the fate of New Sweden. Its people were scattered, absorbed into a larger American story that is still unfolding, and its institutions and cultural distinctions disappeared from the banks of the Delaware. The kingdom that sponsored the Swedish colony would never again possess a foothold in North America, and the descendants of its settlers gradually ceased to think of themselves as being Swedes at all. Like the weathered foundations of an old homestead hidden beneath newer construction, New Sweden is overlooked, woven so deeply into the fabric of the Delaware Valley that most who live there no longer recognize what they are standing on.
Lucky 13. At National Affairs, Steven B. Smith explains the role of prudent judgment in wise political practice. From the essay:
If judgment is a matter of practice, it is not a skill like computer science or auto mechanics; it is more like a well-developed sense of taste. A person can cultivate it, but it can also be an innate gift, like having an ear for music, a talent for drawing, or the ability to hit a 100-mile-an-hour fastball. These abilities can be honed, but for the supreme practitioners, they are more like a gift of nature that no amount of experience can provide. The genius of Shakespeare was not the result of practice.
Judgment includes the ability to imagine things before others see them. This requires intuition like that which discerns the coherence in a painting where others see only random brush strokes on a canvas. Someone with judgment can see how things hang together. This is not just a property of the mind; it involves the individual's entire personality.
The exercise of political judgment requires both mastery of a craft and the capacity for improvisation, like a great musician who creates unfamiliar riffs on a jazz standard, or the master chef who makes new combinations of tastes from a familiar palette of choices. It involves a kind of analytical imagination, working within an established idiom but expanding on it to develop latent possibilities. It is not the mechanical application of a rule or fixed standard to changing circumstances. Statecraft involves seamless and pragmatic adaptation to the ever-shifting conditions of political life. Most importantly, judgment entails a tolerance for ambiguity, and an awareness that no set of principles taken alone will suffice as a guide. "Finality is not the language of politics," Victorian prime minister Benjamin Disraeli wisely affirmed.
Bonus. At Catholic World Report, Alessandra Nucci looks at the Spanish Civil War and reminds how much murder and depravity Communists are capable of. From the article:
It is at last time for Catholics at large to answer the lengthy plea that was penned by the bishops of Spain and published on July 1, 1937, a year after the start of the military insurgence known as the “Alziamiento.” The bishops begged their fellow Catholics all over the world to help them spread the truth, a truth that is progressively being registered in the Vatican archives but not in the collective mindset of the people because, as noted by historian Eric Hobsbawm, the history of the Spanish civil war was not written by the victors but by the vanquished.
“Help us spread the truth,” wrote the bishops, “help us by spreading the content of this letter, surveilling the Catholic press and propaganda, correcting the mistakes of those who are indifferent or inimical to us. The enemy has abundantly sown his chaff; help us sow the good seed abundantly.”
What mistakes are there still to correct?
First of all, the massacres did not begin in 1936 because the conflict between, on the one hand, the left-wing parties that had “won” the elections and, on the other, their nationalist opponents. It began much earlier, out of an unprecedentedly brutal religious persecution carried out by well-trained communists, anarchists, and socialists, determined to wipe out the Catholic Church in its entirety.
For the Good of the Cause
Uno. At Philanthropy Daily, Will Nardi reveals how important planned giving has become as a means of supporting nonprofit missions. Read it here.
Due. More PD: Philip Smaldone is a font of fundraising knowledge. Read it here.
Tre. Even More PD: The great sculptor Sabin Howard shares his thoughts on how art disconnected from the divine (and became ugly in the process). Read it here.
Department of Bad Jokes
Q: Where do the whales play music?
A: In an orca-stra.
A Dios
Mass revealed a fascinating turn of phrase in Paul writing to the Romans, about the Holy Spirit—that He has our back: “The Spirit comes to the aid of our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes with inexpressible groanings.” Seemingly missed all these years (insert Catholic/Bible joke), the image of the Spirit’s “inexpressible groanings” struck powerfully (for those keeping score, the old King James version goes with “groanings which cannot be uttered”). The groan is a thing from deep within, it emits the sense of pain and the mystical and awe and cost—not of money, but of the essence. What is being done on our behalf is . . . profound, and of no small effort. Makes before meeting Saint Peter you might want to show a little appreciation to that member of the Trinity, eh?
May We Be Blessed by Graces That Heighten Wisdom,
Jack Fowler, who groans for other reasons at jfowler@amphil.com.
