This Is the Day the Lord Hath Made

Dear Intelligent American,

Happy Independence Day to all as we mark the semiquincentennial of this great and grand Republic, this last best hope of earth, as Mr. Lincoln so rightly described the project that commenced in 1776.

This missive is mailed on a Friday—which is July 3^rd. Like the Fourth, it is an important day in our history: On a field in Pennsylvania on this day in 1863 the fortunes of America hung in the balance. But Pickett’s Charge failed, and come nightfall General Lee’s whipped forces were in retreat—Appomattox would come soon enough. The next morning, the South’s under-siege troops in their last Mississippi River stronghold, Vicksburg, surrendered to General Grant—the doomed Confederacy was now cut in two. (An old friend who grew up there shared that into her teenage years, Independence Day was not celebrated given the troubling coincidence.)

But celebrate we will and must. John Adams advised that our Independence would be “solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.” Will do. But given the moment, before you head to Civil Thoughts’ main course, it might not be a bad idea—as antisemitism continues to tighten its embrace on leftists and all brands of misfits—to light your firecrackers after learning how George Washington, writing to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, made the most profound case for America. If such interests you, consider reading this article.

 

Oh Beautiful for Spacious Excerpts

 

1. At Commentary Magazine, Michael Woronoff sounds the alarm that America seems to be ceding its biotech to Red China. From the article:

While Washington undermines the American biotech ecosystem, Beijing has been busy building its own. The “Made in China 2025” plan designated biotechnology as a strategic sector; state-backed funds, science parks, talent recruitment, and regulatory reforms have been woven into a coordinated system designed to attract capital, scientists, and clinical development.

The results are sobering. In the early 2000s, China was a rounding error in commercial biotech. By 2025, it represented around a quarter of the world’s innovative drug pipeline. State media announced that in 2025, Chinese drugmakers signed 157 out-licensing deals with foreign entities, worth a record $136 billion. This is almost triple the $51.9 billion logged in 2024 and 10 times the $13.9 billion figure in 2021. China has evolved beyond manufacturing to become a major source of the intellectual property that Western companies shell out significant amounts to acquire.

Around a third of in-licensed molecules at major U.S. companies now originate from China. Some predict that the share could soon rise to 40–50 percent. Lower operating costs and faster clinical trials have transformed China into a magnet for R&D that once would have defaulted to Boston or San Diego.

 

2. At Modern Age, Matthew Spalding reflects on the Declaration of Independence. From the piece:

 

In its opening, the Declaration speaks of the course of human events.

The founders understood history as the story of these events, and, by telling of great feats and accomplishments as well as tragic mistakes and failures, it illuminates the eternal verities of the human condition. The Declaration is not part of some overarching process of human development sent down History’s inevitable course. The “historicist” view—dominant on many college campuses today and popular in our culture—had no influence on the Declaration or the American founding.

Nor is the Declaration a statement of subjectivism. The Declaration says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” Notice how it doesn’t say, “We have some personal values we hope you will affirm.” The dominant view today is that truth is an illusion, and everything is relative. The founders’ position is that the human mind is metaphysically free and capable of understanding truths which the mind embraces as knowledge.

 

3. At The American Mind, fan favorite Daniel J. Mahoney argues that the Social Sciences are hungering for soul food. From the article:

Yet for all its formidable achievements, the contemporary Western world has lost touch with both indispensable imperatives, not least because our dominant currents of thought have attempted to explain away the soul. These currents are determined to reduce the human being to a sophisticated animal bereft of meaningful self-consciousness, moral agency, mutual accountability, and the rich interiority that is nothing less than the “image of God.”

Even as modern man rejects a noble and humanizing appreciation of “sacred limits and restraints,” as Leo Strauss called them, and any real appreciation of the “greatness and misery of man” (in Pascal’s inimitable words) that defines the human condition, we proudly proclaim ourselves lords and masters of nature. At the same time, we jettison the true grounds of liberty and human dignity and increasingly deny that there is any soul or self for us to know or care for.

Moreover, as Alexis de Tocqueville and Walker Percy pointed out, modern intellectuals, philosophers, scientists, and scribblers of all sorts delight in affirming that man is nothing but a brute, a preprogrammed automaton, a soulless product of subhuman determinants, a plaything of the historical process—anything but a human being with consciousness, free will, and moral responsibility. Both Tocqueville and Percy pungently observed the damning paradox that our “demi-savants” proudly delight in: proclaiming themselves to be beyond freedom and dignity, thus revealing themselves to have souls, even if profoundly distorted ones. Human beings can never completely escape the “grandeur and misery” that defines our condition. Today’s ideological perversions unintentionally confirm this point, and abundantly so.

 

4. More Mahoney: At Claremont Review of Books, the great scholar reports on Frank Dikötter’s important history of communism’s victory in China. From the review:

The reader of Red Dawn Over China discovers that, for all its impact on the history of the 20th century, Chinese Communism remained a niche ideology well into the 1930s. Membership in the party was comparatively small. “Communism was never popular in China,” writes Dikötter. It had to be “brought to the population at the barrel of a gun.” China’s last imperial dynasty, the Qing, had nominally given way to a republic at the beginning of the century. But its Beiyang government was effectively run by a gang of competing warlords. Starting in 1926, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek and his Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party, made a bid for control. Mao and his supporters initially represented a minority faction within Chiang’s Army; at the bidding of Joseph Stalin, they were folded into Chiang’s alliance. But the Communists were so determined to wreak havoc throughout the country that Chiang made a costly decision to break with them. . . .

But in his rich and eye-opening 2008 monograph, The Age of Openness, Dikötter picks apart the biased historical narrative that portrays republican China as a place of “endemic corruption, inept policies, political dissension, continued warfare and economic depression.” In truth, the republic was also characterized by dynamism, openness, and vitality. Chinese citizens traveled widely and gained access to the best insights the West had to offer. Shanghai became known as “the jazz Mecca of Asia,” producing and accumulating tens of thousands of jazz records that were destroyed or damaged beyond repair after the Communist takeover. Under Nationalist rule, what Alexis de Tocqueville called “the art of association”—chambers of commerce, intellectual associations, civic and religious bodies, and even beggar unions—flourished. Schools improved dramatically. And in 1948, on the eve of the Communist takeover, “upwards of 1400 deputies from all parts of China . . . adopted a constitution which contained an elaborate bill of rights: it was one of the largest representative bodies ever to meet in any country and it exercised its freedom of speech with gusto, voicing all kinds of discontents.” All this in a time of civil war.

 

5. More CRB: Chris Flannery finds Ben Franklin to be the happiest Founding Father. From the reflection:

George Washington with all his gravitas affirmed the classical Aristotelian idea in his First Inaugural Address in the often-quoted line: “there exists in the economy and course of nature, an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness.” For a half-century already, Franklin had been living according to that maxim, and preaching it eloquently, though he seldom said anything with Washingtonian gravitas. Franklin was explicit and emphatic about seeking the good for himself and for others in life. The primacy of the good could be said to be his governing motto. A life of mere acquisition of wealth would have seemed to him not worth living. Starting from scratch, Franklin created a thriving printing business while arranging to clean and light the streets of Philadelphia, conceive a fire department, a police force, and a lending library, found the American Philosophical Society, and explain lightning. He retired at the age of 42, literally halfway through his life, and lived the remaining 42 years of his life using his freedom, in both senses of the word, to serve his country and mankind, and to pursue the truth with friends all over the world. He took lively pleasure in all of this.

 

6. At Coolidge Review, Janice Rogers Brown hails two presidents who saved the Declaration. From the piece:

Long before Lincoln warned that “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” politically astute observers recognized the looming crisis. In 1816, Supreme Court justice Joseph Story expressed his well-founded fears in a powerful metaphor. Story wrote, “I have long inclined to the belief that the centrifugal force was greater than the centripetal” in our government.

Thus, the danger was not that we would “fall into the sun, but that we may fly off in eccentric orbits, and never return to our perihelion.”

Throughout his career, Lincoln sought to restore public allegiance to the constitutional order. To do so, he explicitly linked the Declaration and the Constitution.

In 1861, in an impromptu speech at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, President-elect Lincoln confessed, “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.”

 

7. At Worth Your Time on Substack, Ericka Andersen explains that boozing hurts women more than men. From the piece:

For women, especially, that cost is steep. Female bodies are not scaled-down male bodies, and alcohol has a different, deeper impact on our systems.

• • It disrupts hormonal systems that regulate mood, fertility, sleep, and emotional resilience.
    
    
  • It raises cortisol, fragments rest, blunts libido, worsens anxiety, and destabilizes the menstrual cycles.

These are not minor side effects, and they strike at the core of women’s embodied functioning in the world each day.

And yet women are often encouraged to drink without these concerns at bay: wine as self-care, cocktails as empowerment, intoxication as sophistication.

The message appears to be: If life feels difficult, the problem is not the structure of that life, but its sedation. The last thing we need as women, in a world that for the vast majority of history has relegated us to second-class citizens, is sedation.

 

8. At The European Conservative, Sabine Beppler-Spahl explains that Germany has a blind spot for radical Islam. From the article:

It’s certainly concerning that the public hasn’t been given the chance to scrutinise the Verfassungsschutz’s report or the scale of the problem it describes. Quoting Sinan Selen, the agency’s head, Bild reported that Islamists—the Muslim Brotherhood in particular, though not exclusively—were attempting to “gradually transform social and political decision-making processes,” focused not on short-term action but on long-term strategy, with the aim of reaching deep into state institutions, including political parties and state-sponsored NGOs.

Whatever the report’s evidentiary basis, the claim itself is not new. For years, critical voices like Susanne Schröter—professor of ethnology and one of Germany’s best-known researchers on Islamism—have issued similar warnings. Schröter has also tirelessly pointed to the naivety of large sections of the German establishment, which for years treated jihadism as the only problem worth watching, while ignoring political Islam altogether.

 

9. Get It Write: At Memoria Press, Leigh Lowe explains the beauty of cursive. From the article:

But let’s think for a moment about why the beauty of cursive counts.

The answer is because we have a natural affinity for beauty. Thomas Aquinas teaches us that all beauty is in imitation of the divine goodness of God. Just like we are drawn to glorious natural landscapes, or masterworks of art or music, or shining architectural achievements, elegant script appeals to our souls. Beauty for beauty’s sake is good. No other explanation is necessary.

Isn’t this why the arts have such a prominent place in a classical curriculum? We hope to develop in our students the natural responses to beauty, which are wonder, gratitude, and affection. We want students to learn to appreciate the musical and artistic gifts of others, but we also want them to exercise their own creativity, to emulate beauty in however small or large a capacity they are able. Isn’t it true that from the time children are old enough to pick up a crayon or paintbrush we encourage them to draw, color, and paint? We don’t question the “usefulness” of this. We celebrate creativity and we exalt the pursuit of beauty—even when the results aren’t yet objectively beautiful. We tape our students’ pictures to the refrigerator, no consideration of practicality or “usefulness” whatsoever. The activity makes our children smile. The results make us smile. Pleasure is granted to both the gifter and the gifted.

 

10. At Community College Daily, edu-guru Bruno Manno offers a quintet of priorities for your local college. From the piece:

1. Audit every program now against the metrics that are coming—completion, placement and earnings against the high school benchmark—and strengthen or sunset the programs that won’t clear them before Washington does it for you.

2. Build your relationship with your governor’s office and state workforce board today. They are about to become the gatekeepers of Workforce Pell, and the institutions at the table early will shape the approval criteria.

3. Fix your transfer pipelines before the disclosure rules force the issue. Publish course-by-course transfer guides and treat lost credits as the equity failure they are.

4. Get your data house in order. Under the new regime, the institutions that can measure their own value will be the ones that keep proving it.

5. Tell your value story publicly and push for closing the Pell loophole. The era when access alone justified federal investment is ending. The era in which community colleges can demonstrate, with data, that their rungs hold weight is just beginning.

 

11. At Public Discourse, Mark Bauerlein considers the disability epidemic at elite colleges. From the beginning of the essay:

If you’re a student at the University of Michigan and you suffer from a disability, the school has two centers where you can take a test that accommodates your needs. There’s a problem, though. Lately, the centers have been flooded by qualified students and other venues have had to be found.

That’s just one example of a trend in higher education that was reported a few months ago and picked up by outlets everywhere (see, for example, here and here). More and more kids at elite institutions have been popping up on disability rolls. A story in The Atlantic from December calls the growth “breathtaking” At the University of Chicago, it says, the number has tripled in eight years; at UC-Berkeley it has quadrupled in fifteen years, mostly from diagnoses of ADHD, anxiety, and depression. Now, at Amherst College, fully one-third of the undergrads are marked as disabled.

A few years ago, a friend who runs field trips for students at a tier one institution told me that the number of attendees on meds these days is shocking (chaperones are always told of existing prescriptions in case of an emergency). When I visited an elite campus in 2024, my host mentioned that in one small class he was prohibited from making too-direct eye contact with one enrollee because of the student’s social anxiety disorder.

 

12. At Front Porch Republic, T.M. Moore discovers time. From the article:

I found a few of the phrases utterly delightful to say aloud: “poor power to add or detract”; “thus far so nobly advanced”; “we here highly resolve.” With each reading a scene—not just of the speech but of the battle—was taking shape in my brain, entirely self-generated. It never occurred to me to look up either the Civil War or the Battle of Gettysburg in our Encyclopedia Americana at home. I’m not even sure I told my parents about this assignment. Memorizing the Gettysburg Address wasn’t a learning experience; it was an assignment, a challenge, one of the very first challenges that interrupted my goofing-off lifestyle. I was focused on the challenge, not the history in which the Address was enfolded.

I must have read the Gettysburg Address 40, 50, 100 times that spring, each time turning my eyes away at the part I had not learned and forcing the words into my brain. Then I would recite the whole thing up to that point again. Then again, until I had it. Some of the words I didn’t fully understand, but I wasn’t being graded on understanding, just reciting.

Somewhere toward the end of the challenge, just about the time I finally memorized every word in order, my mind was arrested by the opening phrase: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation . . .” I’d read this over and over. It was the first sentence I memorized. But I wasn’t clear what it meant: Fourscore and seven years? It was very cryptic. Folks in Granite City, Illinois didn’t talk that way. Maybe they did in Springfield? I had no idea what Lincoln was saying.

 

Lucky 13. At Freedom Frequency, Victor Davis Hanson reflects on fellow farmer Thomas Jefferson. From the article:

Jefferson’s earlier life is often at odds with many of his later views, well beyond agriculture. As he aged, his youthful idealism and exuberance faded into a more circumspect pragmatism. He no longer publicly called for the immediate abolition of slavery because of his growing fear of a looming civil war. In his post-presidency retirement, he questioned the president’s vast executive powers, which he had often employed while in office, as he focused even more strongly on restoring power to the individual states. In that slow metamorphosis from radical to pragmatist, Jefferson also began to see agrarianism more as a needed balance to urban life and industry, and no longer romanticized America as an idyllic rural Arcadia.

It is difficult to know what Jefferson would make of today’s America, where farmers represent somewhere between only 1 and 2 percent of the current population of 340 million and agriculture has become predominantly corporate in nature.

But the early Jefferson’s romance with agrarianism still resonates with the American people—whether typified superficially by Super Bowl commercials portraying noble farmers at work, by the propensity of politicians to wear flannel and Caterpillar hats when visiting rural voters, or by collective national pride that America is not only self-sufficient in food production but remains the greatest exporter of agricultural commodities in the history of civilization.

 

Bonus. At National Review, Armond White smacks Steven Spielberg over his latest film, Disclosure Day. From the beginning of the review:

Even a disappointing Steven Spielberg film is more compelling than the recent slop hits Obsession and Backrooms because it’s fascinating to watch a great, popular artist work through his and our confusions in real time. Responses to Spielberg’s Disclosure Day illustrate contrasting perceptions of how cinema works and what it means for befuddled moviegoers, shill reviewers, and Spielberg himself. This latest project perverts his responsibilities to the popular audience—it’s a showcase for the condescension and manipulation now standard in contemporary politics and mainstream media.

Not everyone agrees on whether Disclosure Day fails or succeeds, or whether it’s simply sci-fi entertainment or a religious or political allegory. The fact that conservatives were interested in Disclosure Day even though it’s the work of a famous liberal—in fact, a Hollywood potentate who flaunts his liberal bona fides—is cause for consternation as much as hope. Could a film this bewildering be a great unifier in a period of hostile division, managing what so many entertainers have given up on and that politicians could not achieve? What anticipation did opposing pundits Glenn Beck and Manohla Dargis share that both could feel satisfied by in film this treacherously dishonest?

 

For the Good of the Cause

Uno. At Philanthropy Daily, Mitchell Bahnsen appreciates the quiet work of generosity. Read it here.

Due. More PD: Rachael Waechter advises small schools on the better ways to raise funds. Read it here.

 

Point of Personal Privilege

Uno. At National Review, Yours Truly pens a remembrance to Daniel Oliver, who once served as the magazine’s board chairman. Read it here.

Due. At Philanthropy Daily, the good news of the Heritage Foundation’s Innovation Prize is told. Read it here.

 

Department of Bad Jokes

Q: Why wouldn’t the grasshopper play soccer?

A: He preferred cricket.

 

A Dios

God was good: He reminded me of that powerful Frank Sinatra short, The House I Live In, which many people remember as “What Is America to Me?” It won an honorary Academy Award and only takes about ten minutes. Catch it here.

May We Sit in Safety Under Our Own Vine and Fig Tree,

Jack Fowler, who loves communications from all Yankee Doodle Dandies, sent to jfowler@amphil.com.

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