There’s A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow

Dear Intelligent American,

At AmPhil, which cuts the paycheck for Your Humble Servant, there is a cabal who monthly gather around a virtual water cooler to discuss a specific film—this month’s being This Is Spinal Tap, the first of the “mockumentaries” created by Christopher Guest, inaugurating a stage company that came to include Catherine O'Hara, who passed away last week.

O’Hara was central to the best of the (beloved!) Guest films—Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, and A Mighty Wind—and like Bill Belichick not getting into the NFL Hall of Fame (the football reference was necessary given the weekend ahead), it is a headscratcher how the lovely song she sang with Eugene Levi (as “Mitch and Mickey”) in the latter film, although nominated for Academy Award for Best Original Song, did not win.

“A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow” was, and remains, quite touching. See for yourself.

Maybe the Center For Civil Society should be critical of these films—after all, they are gibes on associations (community theater, dog show competitors, folk song aficionados) and their in extremis zealous and flamboyant participants. But to some of us, the fun-poking aside, these movies reveal a beauty about when people do congregate around a theme: they seem to be more alive, and engaging with their neighbors, kookily or not, and making the world a better place—or at least a more charming one—which beats the heck out of playing video games in mommy’s basement.

The cultural je ne sais quoi owes a lot to Miss O’Hara—also Mrs. Bo Welch—a self-described “good Catholic girl at heart” whom we thank for her smile-inducing art and pray she has received the Creator’s sweet kiss at the rainbow’s end.

 

Ready. Down. Set. Hut . . . Hut . . . Excerpt!

 

1. At Freedom Frequency, Michael Hartney spots the speedbumps on the school-choice highway. From the piece:

Since it’s Super Bowl season, a football analogy seems apt. The school choice movement has made real progress moving the ball down the field over the past quarter century, but this is no time for spiking the ball in the end zone. And the reason is straightforward: there’s a big disconnect between the abstract, low-intensity support captured by public opinion polls—who’s against more “choice” in the abstract?—and what happens once specific choice policies are contested in real-world politics. Ballot initiative campaigns are a case in point. They don’t just inform voters—they mobilize opposition, elevate concerns about tradeoffs, and make local context and perceived self-interest especially salient.

 

These insights arise out of some new research I have undertaken at Hoover. In that work, my colleagues and I examined voting patterns in three statewide school choice referenda on the November 2024 ballot—in Kentucky, Nebraska, and Colorado. Despite years of polling showing broad support for school choice, all three measures were overwhelmingly rejected by voters.

 

Importantly, we found that support for school choice is highly contextual and self-interested. Voters who live in communities with low-performing public schools and in places where there are many private schools are supportive, but voters who live elsewhere and do not stand to benefit, or who cannot see how they would benefit, are more easily persuaded to vote against choice. And 2024 was no outlier. Since the 1970s, every single school choice referendum has failed, most by 2-to-1 margins. Again, it’s not that this poor showing reflects a rejection of the core idea of school choice. Rather, it demonstrates how voters respond once specific choice proposals are debated in real campaign settings.

 

2. At Brownstone Institute, Joel Salatin bemoans the loss of the human touch in food. From the article:

Over the last decade, the United States has lost about 28,000 farms annually. While some of the loss is due to urbanization, most of the land remains farmland, either managed by other farmers or simply abandoned. While there are 1.3 million farmers over age 65, only 300,000 are 35 or younger. In 2022, the average American farmer was 58—years older than the average age in other vibrant economic sectors.

 

The American business landscape is largely anti-people. The current rush to artificial intelligence reflects how eagerly most businesses seek to eliminate people. The farming sector illustrates this trend better than most.

 

Between 1960 and 2019, the percentage of disposable personal income spent on food dropped from 17 percent to 9.5 percent. Meanwhile, health care spending rose from about 9 percent in 1980, to 18 percent today. Could the two possibly be related? One more data point: In the last 80 years, the farmgate share of the retail food dollar fell from around 40 percent to just 15.9 percent in 2023.

 

Farming is out of sight and out of mind for most people. Food appears on grocery store shelves. It’s treated as a pit stop between life’s more important activities. Fortunately, the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement is beginning to shine a spotlight on food, including revised and more truthful dietary guidelines.

 

3. At Law & Liberty, Roger Berkeley frets about Ireland’s future. From the essay:

The consequence of rock bottom must be death or new life: civic indifference leads to either cultural extinction or a new Romantic Ireland. In 1913, cultural extinction meant succumbing to British colonialism; more than a century later, it is a vicious cycle of mass immigration to replace mass emigration. Yeats rebutted his earlier lament in “Easter 1916,” recognizing that his fellow Irishmen had, in fact, stood up against the oppressive British ruling elite. The Easter Rising was a deliberate analogy to spiritual warfare: Catholic Ireland—the land of saints and scholars—would rise from the darkness of Protestant British oppression at Easter. A new day would dawn, and Irish men and women would rise up in a new Romantic Ireland.

 

The revolution failed. A heavy-handed execution spree followed. Death served as the actual rock bottom. But when Ireland finally left the British Empire, the settlement excluded the northern province, Ulster. This loss of Ulster spawned an 11-month civil war and nearly a century of guerrilla-style violence known as The Troubles. Ireland’s rock bottom led to something short of a new life. Because of the Troubles, patriotism has become a dirty word. Romantic Ireland still waits in the shadows.

 

Ireland has been steadily losing its cultural identity since it gained independence. The formerly Catholic country has seen a fulsome re-embrace of ancient paganism. Christian festivals have been replaced in the government’s calendar by the four Irish pagan festivals: Imbolc, Bealtaine, Lughnasa, and Samhain—each funded by the taxpayer. Public celebrations of St. Valentine now involve the Pride movement; the annual St. Patrick’s Day festival logo subversively features the snakes of sin that St. Patrick banished, not his Trinitarian shamrocks of salvation.

 

4. At The Hedgehog Review, John Rosenthal opens a stranger’s tag-sale photo album. From the reflection:

As I turned the pages of the album, I thought I could see a narrative emerging—that of a semirural family determined to remain just as they were, in a fixed life without ambitions, generation after generation. I have since grown far more cautious about making such assumptions. Reading a life story into photographs of strangers is guesswork. Photographs touch only the surface of things, hinting at layers beyond their reach. To go deep, you need words—a story, if possible—especially if you, like most photographers, fail to recognize that the gaze behind your expensive camera is shaped by privilege. Almost seventy years after Walker Evans captured the hard, impoverished daily life of the sharecropping Burroughs family in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Floyd Burroughs’s grandson Phil told an interviewer that the photographs in the book had left a bad taste. Our grandparents, he said, were portrayed as being more ignorant than they were.

 

I looked for resemblances between the generations of the Atkins family: round eyes, full lips, and a long-limbed muscularity in the men; a self-conscious half smile with a hint of an overbite in the women. In a photograph dated 1965, Bobby, wearing short pants and a World’s Fair bucket hat, looks sour, holding his mother’s hand in front of the Johnson Wax exhibit. She looks like Loretta Lynn. . . .

 

Standing there in the flea market, leafing through that family album, I couldn’t help wondering how it found its way there, tucked between a dented toaster and a Princess telephone. The sticker price—fifteen dollars—made no human sense. I thought about buying it not because I wanted it or because the album had any documentary value (the Atkinses weren’t culturally exotic or dramatically poor) but rather to save it from the dented toaster.

 

5. At American Reformer, Mike Sabo condemns the invasion of church services. From the piece:

The anti-ICE protest at Cities, termed “Operation Pull Up,” was co-organized by the aforementioned Armstrong, a Black Lives Matter activist who calls herself a priest. Armstrong formerly served as the president of the NAACP in Minneapolis, where she seems to be right at home when it comes to separating people from their money. She reportedly received more than $1 million in salary and benefits when she headed an antipoverty nonprofit—which was more money than the nonprofit disbursed in grants during that same span of time.

 

Kelly is a well-known activist who regularly targets Christian churches. He has been part of a group of protestors who have been harassing congregants of Christ Church in D.C., a plant of the CREC, due to the attendance of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.

 

As Joe Rigney told The Daily Wire, Kelly and his fellow agitators “play music or yell and scream and use bullhorns and loud sound amplification to try to prevent us from singing psalms and hearing the Word preached.” In one case, a church member was sent to the hospital because of a shattered eardrum. Tactics have also included “screaming obscenities at minors as families are entering the sanctuary, forcing a need for police escorts.”

 

6. At The Human Life Review, Victor Austin celebrates noisy babies in public spaces. From the piece:

We heard from other babies in other rows of that airplane, which put me in mind of churches, another public place in which babies’ cries can fly through space. A high-ceilinged church which is well-constructed for sound to travel: what better place could there be for a baby to practice vocalizing! A church that is built to hold five hundred people allows a lot of sound-wave experimentation.

 

As a pastor, I have always wanted children, including the youngest ones, to be present in church, to experience the special actions of worship. It is hard to think of any other public space where we do what we do in church. We sit, then stand together. We listen, then we speak together. We sing. We hear loud music and quiet music. Imagine you are from Mars and you have no idea of what church means: you would notice these things people come together to do which they don’t do in their homes or in stores or restaurants, things done in church, more or less every week, which are unlike everything else in the week.

 

I have imagined that children, even before they can understand words, are nonetheless able to have a pre-verbal understanding of the worship of God that happens when we gather in our worship assemblies. God can reach them, and therefore they ought to be there.

 

7. At The New York Times, David Brooks signs off as a columnist. From the piece:

We’re abandoning our humanistic core. The elements of our civilization that lift the spirit, nurture empathy and orient the soul now play a diminished role in national life: religious devotion, theology, literature, art, history, philosophy. Many educators decided that because Western powers spawned colonialism—and they did—students in the West should learn nothing about the lineage of their civilization and should thereby be rendered cultural orphans. Activists decided persuasion is a myth and that life is a ruthless power competition between oppressors and oppressed groups. As a result of technological progress and humanistic decay, life has become objectively better but subjectively worse. We have widened personal freedom but utterly failed to help people answer the question of what that freedom is for.

 

The most grievous cultural wound has been the loss of a shared moral order. We told multiple generations to come up with their own individual values. This privatization of morality burdened people with a task they could not possibly do, leaving them morally inarticulate and unformed. It created a naked public square where there was no broad agreement about what was true, beautiful and good. Without shared standards of right and wrong, it’s impossible to settle disputes; it’s impossible to maintain social cohesion and trust. Every healthy society rests on some shared conception of the sacred—sacred heroes, sacred texts, sacred ideals—and when that goes away, anxiety, atomization and a slow descent toward barbarism are the natural results.

 

8. At Comment Magazine, Andrew P.W. Bennett sees a faith-yearning in the young. From the essay:

This revival is an explicit recognition of our alienation from the divine and by extension from the image of God that defines the human person. Our false pursuits have led us, as they always do, into that most inhuman, yet so common, passion of ours: fashioning idols. There is the idol of my body: I can own it; I can change it; I can rename it; I can destroy it at will. There is the idol of my mind: I can know all things; I can experience all things; I can control all things. And finally, there is the idol of my soul: I can save the world; I can save others; I can save myself. We are convinced that the ideologies we have fashioned—materialism, hedonism, consumerism, relativism, transgenderism, wokeism—are there to order our sense of meaning with their respective creeds, liturgies, sacred texts, and mantras and their heresies, which we must reject.

 

As with all idols, these ideologies fail to give us truth and the fullness of meaning we seek. Our desire to understand ourselves, to understand the world in which we live and how it came to be, remains unsatisfied. In the end, nihilism sets in and we are bereft and lonely. We then return to a cycle of self-gratification and further consumption to fill the lonely spaces. This hyper-individualism is not liberating but fundamentally isolating as it precludes community, founded on our shared humanity. Deprived of community, we cannot find meaning. The things we sought provide no great revelation of truth, no lasting joy.

 

9. At Crisis Magazine, Joseph Pearce urges that America be made beautiful again. From the reflection:

There is, however, an alternative. It is what the great Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called “self-limitation.” Echoing the wisdom of Edmund Burke that liberty must be limited in order to be possessed, Solzhenitsyn insisted that self-limitation was the only way of avoiding the twin evils of anarchy and tyranny.

 

This is obvious enough on the personal level. If we don’t discipline ourselves to do what is good for us, physically and spiritually, we will be harming ourselves and others, physically and spiritually. Properly understood, self-limitation is simply love, properly understood; it is not doing what we want but what we should. It is synonymous with virtue. It is the realization that being good is good for us and for our neighbors.

 

In terms of politics, Solzhenitsyn insisted that the need for self-limitation applied to nations and not merely to individuals. He considered each individual nation to be a unique cultural flower in the global garden. This is why he opposed globalism and all forms of internationalism which threatened the survival of these beautiful national flowers. He also opposed imperialism, which is the failure of one nation to practice self-limitation with respect to its neighbors; and he opposed realpolitik, the belief that politics was governed purely by pragmatism, by the practical “realism” which privileges power over virtue.

 

10. At Commentary Magazine, Sally Satel spotlights antisemitism’s encroachment into Psychology Inc. From the article:

In 2025, a young Jewish woman had her first appointment with a psychotherapist in Washington, D.C. During the session, she mentioned a recent months-long stay in Israel. The therapist, who was part of a group practice, smiled and said, “It’s lucky you were assigned to me. None of my colleagues will treat a Zionist.”

 

The intolerance is not confined to isolated examples. It’s roiling the American Psychological Association (APA), the nation’s foremost accreditor for psychological training and continuing education programs. Tensions reached a new level last winter when more than 3,500 mental health professionals calling themselves Psychologists Against Antisemitism sent a letter to the APA’s president and board. The signers called upon the association to “address the serious and systemic problem of antisemitism/anti-Jewish hate.” The letter told of APA-hosted conferences for educational credits in which speakers made “official statements and presentations [including] rationalizations of violence against Jews and Israelis; antisemitic tropes; Holocaust distortion; minimization of Jewish victimization, fear, and grief.”

 

Singled out by name was the former president of the APA Society of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology from 2023 to 2025, Lara Sheehi. In addition to diagnosing Zionism as a “settler psychosis,” Sheehi had posted expletive-laced messages on social media, including one stating “destroy Zionism” and another describing Israelis as “genocidal f—ks.” Her sentiments infiltrated the annual meeting of the APA in Denver last summer, where, according to psychologist Dean McKay of Fordham University, professional Listserv postings urged attendees to wear keffiyehs at the convention and read a “land and genocide statement” before giving their presentations, some of which contained Hamas propaganda. McKay has also documented cases of therapists urging their clients to go to anti-Israel protests as part of what they see as their role in promoting activism.

 

11. At National Review, Daniel J. Flynn remembers the late Brent Bozell Jr. on his centennial. From the article:

In 1959, Bozell ghostwrote a book as slim as Barry Goldwater’s bolo tie with an influence wider than the brim of his cowboy hat: 1960’s The Conscience of a Conservative. By 1961, in a recently unearthed letter to fellow National Review senior editor Frank Meyer, he dubbed the ostensible author of that political bestseller “our Frankenstein.”

 

Bozell biographer Daniel Kelly offered reasons for that alienation. They mainly concern Bozell’s sudden shift from a William F. Buckley–Frank Meyer–Barry Goldwater outlook to the Catholic integralism that his 1960 move to El Escorial, Spain, catalyzed. As Kelly points out, none of Bozell’s bylined articles in National Review prior to the trek abroad exhibit a religious theme; afterwards, most did.

 

Kelly noted of his subject: “His most widely read book was the one that pleased him the least.” Indeed, Bozell even rebuffed Goldwater’s efforts to recruit him to ghostwrite a sequel of sorts.

 

12. More Bozell: At Modern Age, Nicholas Mosvick considers the conservative champion’s move to Catholic activist. From the piece:

That same year, having already left NR, Bozell founded his own magazine for the defense of Christendom—Triumph. Bozell’s managing editor was his wife, Trish. Triumph’s senior editors included his good friend Frederick Wilhelmson, with contributors ranging from Christopher Dawson to Russell Kirk. The function of the magazine, Bozell told Kirk, was to act as a “cutting edge into the great heresies of our age,” with the enemy being the “technocratic, materialist, self-seeking, thoroughly un-Christian culture of the West.”

 

With Triumph, Bozell brought forth a proto-integralist vision that rejected Americanism and the political primacy of the Constitution in favor of a politics which put the faith first. It marked a split with Buckley and NR’s brand of conservatism: Bozell in his fundraising efforts for the magazine told supporters that Triumph would not just advance a conservative Catholic view but would indict modern, secular society and envision the “configurations of a religiously conceived and motivated social order, including proposals for its achievement.”

 

Warren Carroll, who worked for Triumph and later founded Christendom College with Bozell’s help, reflected in 2001 that Bozell had created Triumph in order to take the position that “every nation is shaped by its religion (or lack thereof); that a religion that has nothing to say in the public arena is not worthy of the name; and that what it has to say must be, first of all, religious; that since America was abandoning the Christian Faith, then religious truth and moral principle could be preserved only by that Faith, not by America.”

 

Lucky 13. More Modern Age: Mason Stallings argues that Liberty needs postliberalism. From the essay:

Critics often contend that postliberalism is a rejection of “the rule of law” or is somehow authoritarian and arbitrary. These critics say more about themselves than they say about postliberalism, as they are implicitly assuming that the West, prior to philosophical liberalism, lacked the rule of law and was both authoritarian and arbitrary. These assertions would have surprised anyone in the highly litigious and highly decentralized premodern West, who would likely find our bureaucratic and sclerotic nanny states to be far more intrusive and stifling than the supposed despotisms of ages past.

 

As postliberalism is (at its core) a rejection of philosophical liberalism, there are many postliberalisms, some good and some bad, some right and some left, some healthy and some unhealthy. While American postliberalism shares many commonalities with Kirkian conservatism or paleoconservatism—as exemplified by Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, or M. E. Bradford—and the two are not mutually exclusive, there is a different emphasis within each movement. While the paleoconservatives (in the tradition of Burke) largely focused on the preservation of inherited traditions, postliberals place a greater emphasis on premodern political thought, especially on Christian political theology, as the basis for their beliefs.

 

It is reasonable to assume that the different, though ideally complementary, emphases between these two movements derive from the deterioration of American culture in the time between each movement. Many of the inherited traditions or parts of American culture that Kirk or Weaver sought to defend no longer exist. While it is important to recover these traditions, conservatism becomes impossible when there is nothing to conserve. Yet Kirkian conservatism and a postliberal ressourcement can and should be seen as complementary strategies that can operate in tandem.

 

Bonus. At First Things, Scott Yenor profiles the rise and fall of gay activism. From the essay:

Embracing raunch was central to first-wave gay activism. If gays were intransigent and loud, Americans would be forced to accept their bathhouses and orgies and learn to live with them. The mainstream would become much, much queerer and politically radical. As a gay activist writes in Kramer’s Faggots, “we shall make our presence known!, felt!, seen!, respected!, admired!, loved!” Queer Nation, founded in 1990, was the last great raunchy gay group in the first wave. It promoted the slogans “We’re here. We’re queer. Get used to it,” and “Out of the closets and into the Streets.” Queer Nation compared itself to an army, and its manifesto was a model of anti-bourgeois contempt: “Every time we fuck, we win.”

 

As a strategy, however, raunch contained ­serious ambiguities. On one hand, raunchy gays refused to lie about their lifestyles. They contrasted their deviance with a supposedly stultifying mainstream. They saw themselves as subversive shock troops, agents of revolution. On the other hand, they wanted, somehow, respect from a new, queerer American mainstream. Their complaints about discrimination and demands for acceptance sat uneasily with their self-image as bold subversives. Their existence as “the Other” presupposed the continued dominance of the mainstream, and yet they wanted a mainstream that welcomed drag queens, pedophiles, bull dykes, and every other weirdo, not as “normal” people who happened to have gay sex, but as weirdos.

 

First-wave gay liberation failed. America did not become queerer. Gay activists were compelled to shift their strategy. They began to portray homosexuality as a slight deviation from bourgeois life. Thus was born second-wave gay liberation, which downplayed queerness.

 

For the Good of the Cause

Uno. At Philanthropy Daily, Alice Nye wonders if grant-making could benefit from coin-tossing. Read it here.

Due. More PD: Therese Biegel advises that fundraising gurus look into a handful of reliable ways to get smarter about their fundraising goals in 2026. Read it here.

 

Department of Bad Jokes

Q: What happened to the man after he ate the Scrabble tiles?

A: He had a vowel movement.

 

A Dios

Fair Lorna, masterful editor of this missive and of so much else in the precincts of Philanthropy Daily, is a Seattle Seahawks fan—of the die-hard variety—who even attends the games at “CenturyLink” field, known for its eardrum-bullying decibel levels. This, among other things, makes her a tough cookie. May her Super Bowl viewing bring a joy and witness an end to the city’s championship drought.

May We Live Mindful of Plentiful Redemption,

Jack Fowler, who remains puzzled about the Belichick vote at jfowler@amphil.com.

---