A Dozen-Plus Stimulants, Gathered for Your Edification and Inspiration
Dear Intelligent American,
It’s a tad exhausting, these articles (BREAKING NEWS! EXCLUSIVE!) that a peace deal is happening by noon, or that the crack team of negotiators is off to Timbuktu to broker the surrender that’s THIS CLOSE . . . and sure as the sun rises in the East the soufflé flops, only to be followed by the tirade that if X doesn’t happen by snack time tomorrow all hell is going to break loose, and then this certainty finds its own way of being dashed, and all the while that strait remains clogged and uranium gets enriched in some mountain sub-basement.
It reminds of the old head-fake promise: Yes, that is scheduled to be done on June 31st.
We’ve had a belly full of these sorts of on-the-cusp tomorrows. A few years ago, tomorrow was when kraken were to be released to send the forces of naughtiness a-scattered. Didn’t happen. (What are kraken anyway?)
Once upon a wooden spoon and dad’s belt, “I’m gonna count to three . . .” was a valid, experience-tested warning. But those days of threats made good are kaput—good for the heinies of toddlers, not so good for international tribulations. We shall accept nominations for the softer models for our times: Possibly Linus, clutching his blanket while eternally anticipating the Great Pumpkin, and the tag team of Didi and Gogo, perpetually awaiting Godot.
Hey: On June 18th something important is happening. Find out about it right here.
There Is No Waiting to Be Had Here: Feast Yourself Right Now
1. At National Review, Joseph Loconte finds ample evidence of antisemitism in Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. From the analysis:
In this, Gibbon reveals his own “jealous prejudices.” The self-styled “objective” historian dismisses the supernatural elements of Jewish belief as a “contradiction to every known principle of the human mind.” Here, on naked display, is the emotional outlook of the 18th-century European Enlightenment: Reason has displaced Revelation as the organizing principle of human life.
There are many causes for the outbreak of antisemitism in the United States, but the most important reason has nothing to do with politics. It has everything to do with religion: the rejection of biblical religion that has seized the unbelieving minds of both cultural elites and populist agitators.
Like Gibbon, many of today’s antisemites are animated by a militant secularism. Like Gibbon, their materialism blinds them to the fact that it was the Jewish people who introduced into the ancient world the ideas that made possible the most humane and prosperous civilization in world history.
2. More Antisemitism: At Tablet Magazine, Todd Pittinsky pens a profoundly informative essay on what motivates the hatred of Jews (it is . . . joy). From the essay:
Antisemitism has always marketed itself less as prejudice than as insight. The antisemite does not feel confused or powerless. He feels enlightened. He has “connected the dots.” From Martin Luther convinced he had finally exposed Jewish deceit, to 19th-century conspiracists tracing hidden financial influence, to contemporary internet sleuths explaining wildfires with diagrams and screenshots of Israel and Israelis, the emotional pattern is familiar. The pleasure of revelation is mistaken for thought.
The second pleasure is belonging. Antisemitism has always been good at building community. Medieval blood libels did not merely produce fear but processions, rituals, and shared outrage. Collective identity is often forged around a common enemy. Later nationalist movements discovered that antisemitism was remarkably efficient at turning strangers into comrades, citizens bound by common cause. Antisemitic movements understood spectacle: songs, banners, marches, jokes, coded language, insider references were all the warm pleasures of participation.
Cultures cohere around shared figures—heroes, traitors, martyrs, outsiders. The Jew became one of the most durable and portable of these, serving as a common reference point. That Jews occupy such a disproportionate place in Western thought and culture—in books, plays, theology, political theory, and art—is itself a clue. A people representing a tiny sliver of humanity has attracted an extraordinary volume of symbolic attention. Some of that reflects genuine contribution, but much of it reflects obsession. The Jew became a shared cultural figure: symbol, villain, scapegoat, enigma. A figure around whom collective emotions could easily gather because so many people already knew the character. People were united not only against Jews but through shared stories about them.
3. More National Review: Old amigo Nat Brown has the back of Pope Leo and sees his new encyclical as a smack upside the head of LinkedIn. From the beginning of the piece:
The first contribution we can make toward a more humane civilization,” Pope Leo XIV writes in his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, “is to be mindful of our words.” The power of words and language is one of the unifying threads of the papal document, which explores the growth of artificial intelligence and its implications for life, work, war, and what it means to be human. It’s a theme very much connected to the Tower of Babel, one of the biblical images Leo chooses to frame the volume.
Babel, he warns, “was a project conceived without reference to God, supported by a uniformity that eliminated diversity and that chose homogenization over communion” [emphasis mine]. Reading these words, I couldn’t help but think about the homogenizing effect AI has had on words themselves for a large sector of the working world. Corporate jargon has long been with us, but if there’s one example of the kind of language that millions of Americans who work in tech associate with the age of AI, it’s the LinkedIn Slop Post.
What exactly is the LinkedIn Slop Post, or LSP? As with artificial intelligence itself, it’s impossible to offer a comprehensive definition. Still, one can identify two common elements of everything that falls into the category: (1) It’s an excessively long chunk of text posted on LinkedIn (but also more and more on X) about how helpful AI technology supposedly is to the person posting, and (2) the text itself is completely generated by AI.
4. At Community College Daily, edu-guru Bruno Manno explains that local schools can help students find their way to opportunities. From the article:
These institutions sit at the intersection of education, work and local economic life. They serve high school students and graduates, working adults, parents, veterans, displaced workers and people trying to move from a low-wage job to something better. They work with employers, workforce boards, high schools, universities and community organizations.
At their best, they help people chart their local opportunity map by showing where local opportunities are, the skills required and how to take the next step. . . .
Community colleges should be at the center of the effort to improve local opportunity conditions. They educate people across credit and noncredit programs, preparing people for work in fields such as manufacturing, health care, information technology, cybersecurity, bioscience and other regional industries. They’re local institutions that help people advance and help communities meet their workforce needs.
5. More Manno: At Merion West, the esteemed expert spotlights a study that explains the sources of alienation for young men sans degrees. From the article:
A man leaves high school without a clear next step. Daily routines vanish and friends scatter. As work becomes unstable, he finds no mentors to offer support and no community institutions to which he can turn. The young man who was once merely uncertain slowly becomes an adult man without connections.
The authors interviewed thirty men without college degrees, ranging in age from their mid-twenties to their mid-forties, asking about friendship, community, role models, and purpose. The report includes case studies and interview transcripts.
These interviewees do not pretend to speak for every man without a degree. But they give voice to men often discussed in policy debates but rarely heard in their own words.
The report's central insight is that this is not simply a “male loneliness” crisis. It is a crisis of men without degrees being left to their own devices. As college has become a sorting mechanism for work, marriage, civic life, friendship, and neighborhood belonging, those without degrees, especially men, are more likely to be sorted out of economic and social life.
6. At Front Porch Republic, a reminiscing Colin Gillette reflects on a youthful summer of heat, drought, and life lessons. From the article:
The year the corn survived, I did too. During the summer of the drought, my uncle and aunt encouraged me to raise a heifer for the county fair. They never framed it as a life lesson, just the kind of opportunity farm kids were given to test their grit and endurance. When the heifer did well, my grandfather bought me a steer calf, and that meant I’d stepped into something bigger than a project, making me part of the work. I fed the steer with the grain that grew from the drought—the same 90-day corn the caterpillars had predicted. Looking back, it feels like a parable: scarcity turned into muscle, and hunger turned into growth. The steer was my first real responsibility and my first real grief.
Every day, we tied the steer to the fencepost near the machine shed, and I learned to walk beside an animal over twice my size. At times, the animal displayed a nervousness resulting in broken fences, busted knuckles and gravel ground beneath my adolescent skin. The muscle from the steer’s hindquarters started showing up in my own arms, hips, and chest. When I walked it to the trailer to transport it to the Winnebago County Fair, a rabbit, of all things, startled it, and I was yanked through a cattle pen like a rag.
I remember standing up, furious, and calmly talking the animal into the trailer. At the fair, I would rest on straw bales and a sleeping bag. Some childhood friends and I would play cards into the night by lantern and flashlight. In the morning, I would wash the animal, and its startle reflex would send me chasing the steer through the fairgrounds, walking him back to the beef barn to wash him all over again. Each time, I learned something new about the surroundings, and about how patience develops.
7. At Catholic World Report, Dawn Beutner writes of rediscovering Joan of Arc. From the article:
Over the centuries, Joan has been a powerful symbol of patriotism in France. Some French authors have described her accomplishments in glowing terms, and some are entranced by stories that appear to be mere legends that have evolved over the centuries. Other Frenchmen have written disparagingly and critically about Joan and her legacy.
English speakers continue to write biographies about Joan as well. Some books have been written for people who delight in the intricate details of military campaigns, fifteenth-century history, and the personalities of European nobility. Other books read less like history and more like imaginative fiction.
Put bluntly, the story of Joan’s life seems to act like a Rorschach inkblot test. Our contemporaries interpret the particulars of her life based on the axe they want to grind. For feminists, Joan was a strong leader who was held back by the oppressive patriarchy (translation: she was a feminist). Atheists claim that her reputed visions were really signs of neurosis or that she was merely experiencing adolescent “flights of fancy” when she said God told her to lead an army. Others have implied that Joan possessed some unspecified intersex condition and was actually a male who had the exterior signs of being a female. That implication is, of course, deeply insulting to women because it implies that the only way Joan could have been a successful military leader was that she was, underneath it all, a man.
8. At Law & Liberty, Itxu Díaz is alarmed by the division wrought by the Digital Revolution. From the essay:
This feels like the end of a long road. The idea that the press was a fundamental counterweight in a democracy vanished the day the journalistic side of the scale ceased to carry weight, because it no longer significantly influenced public opinion. The story of how we got here, while depressing, is also fascinating because it helps us understand many things about our time and how our freedoms have been partially stolen before our very eyes.
The Golden Age of Journalism, often identified with Watergate, New Journalism, and the investigative reporting of the ‘80s and ‘90s, has not been followed by a descent into a Bronze Age of journalism, but rather by an Age of Smoke. In a way, Balzac’s prophecy in Lost Illusions (1843) has come true, although for reasons different from those he could have foreseen: “Give any newspaper time enough, and it will be base, hypocritical, shameless, and treacherous; the periodical press will be the death of ideas, systems, and individuals; nay, it will flourish upon their decay. It will take the credit of all creations of the brain; the harm that it does is done anonymously.” We can identify four critical moments in this decline.
First, the rise of the Internet and digital media led to a decline in print readership. Now, any new free digital outlet could capture attention with a major exclusive, often delivered faster, more accessible, more up-to-date, and in a richer multimedia format than legacy outlets.
9. At World Magazine, Nathanael Blake investigates a county education apparatus that prioritizes ideology. From the article:
Parents in Loudoun and elsewhere should note that woke school officials do not care about the well-being of the children entrusted to them—or at least, something else matters more to them. Their cover-ups are not, at least at first, about protecting officials or even their institutions, but about ideology. Predators who can claim to be oppressed get protection. Those identified with the rainbow flag, or the flag of a foreign nation, get special privileges, and the rules don’t apply to them the same way they do to everyone else.
Here in Northern Virginia, pushing ideology outweighs protecting children from sexual predation. And this reveals the malevolence of wokeness. It has become common to describe the woke phenomenon as consumed by empathy run amok that has become toxic or suicidal. Sometimes that may be true, though there are also many instances where people follow the dictates of wokeness out of fear. But wokeness is not just about empathy and intimidation. We should not overlook the role of malice.
This is vividly illustrated by the transgender movement, which is built on lies about the human person. And these falsehoods induce hatred toward those who will not pretend to believe them. Gender ideology is not about compassion, but about domination, trying to reshape reality and society around private fantasy. Thus, trans activists constantly demand social validation for the lies they tell themselves and eagerly seek to punish those who dissent. Thus, the transgender revolt against God’s creation order goes hand in hand with revolt against the justice of the moral order, for rebels against God perceive reality as an oppressive infringement.
10. At City Journal, Jason Riley explains some unsettling (for ideologues) truths about slavery in America. From the piece:
Slavery in the Ottoman Empire likewise predated slavery in America and endured for more than 500 years. Historian Robert C. Davis writes in Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters that, between 1530 and 1780, “there were almost certainly a million and quite possibly a million and a quarter white, European Christians enslaved by the Muslims of the Barbary Coast.” These estimates, he adds, “make it clear that for most of the first two centuries of the modern era, nearly as many Europeans were taken forcibly to Barbary and worked or sold as slaves as were West Africans hauled off to labor on plantations in the Americas.” A treaty between the United Kingdom and Egypt finally banned the sale of white slaves in 1885, more than two decades after Abraham Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
Though the transatlantic slave trade operated by Europeans receives greater attention, the trans-Saharan slave trade—run largely by Arab traders and sending captives from sub-Saharan Africa to the southern Mediterranean, Egypt, and other parts of the Islamic world—involved an even larger volume of slaves and persisted for much longer. The transatlantic trade lasted about 400 years, while slave trading across the Sahara endured for nearly 13 centuries and was no less deadly than the Middle Passage. “It has been estimated that, for every slave to reach Cairo alive, ten died on the way,” writes Thomas Sowell in Conquests and Cultures, citing a definitive study of the subject. “Nor was Cairo exceptional. Missionary explorer David Livingstone, among others, estimated that several slaves were captured for every one that reached the Mediterranean alive.”
11. At The Free Press, Mitchell Robson explains the power of the spelling bee. From the article:
Most people would not consider Webster’s Third New International Dictionary a page-turner. I found studying it exhilarating.
Spelling bees originated in the United States, specifically for the English language, for a reason. English is incredibly orthographically complex. Spelling words correctly based solely on pronunciation is often maddeningly difficult. Just look at how many ways the ough letter sequence can be pronounced: though, through, rough, cough, ought, bough, and chough all make different sounds.
English also borrows relentlessly from other languages. Linguist David Crystal once called it a “vacuum cleaner of a language,” because words from Greek, German, Arabic, Nahuatl, Tagalog, Scottish, and countless other languages all coexist within English, often carrying their original spellings with them. The deeper I ventured into English’s strange corners, the more fascinated I became by its sprawling internal logic.
12. At The European Conservative, Hélène de Lauzun laments the fate of a French silk manufacturer and worries that beauty may not be worthy of investment. From the article:
Trim-making is not a trivial craft. It is the discreet ornament of refined civilisations. The tiebacks, braids, fringes, and twisted cords crafted by Declercq adorn the armchairs of palaces, the draperies of embassies, the interiors of historic theatres, and the apartments of listed heritage buildings. Where the untrained eye sees only a decorative detail, curators recognise the signature of an irreplaceable craft.
For seven generations, the Declercq family has passed on this heritage with almost monastic devotion. The company has never sought media attention. It belongs to that France of quiet workshops, family traditions and highly skilled craftsmen who understand the value of a gesture repeated a thousand times until it reaches perfection. At Declercq, we do not mass-produce; we restore memories. We do not produce accessories; we keep alive a French idea of luxury, elegance and historical continuity.
This dedication, however, comes at a price. The arts and crafts sector operates in a fragile economy, exposed to industrial competition, cheap imports, and the gradual disappearance of ambitious public commissions. Yet, when a craft becomes too rare, it paradoxically ceases to be profitable even before it has ceased to be indispensable. At Declercq, the order books are full—that is not the issue: they are virtually the only ones in their niche. But when cash flow is lacking, and the investments essential to continuing operations cannot be made, having customers is no longer enough.
Lucky 13. At Modern Age, Nicholas Mosvick takes exception to Justice Neil Gorsuch’s strict defining of America as a “creedal nation.” From the piece:
Gorsuch’s view of history leaves little room for nuance or complexity. In his interview with Reason, he states axiomatically: “Our nation is not founded on a religion. It’s not based on a common culture even, or heritage. It’s based on those ideas. We’re a creedal nation. And I hope we take a moment to reflect on that and to recommit ourselves to that.”
Gorsuch sounds more in line with midcentury liberal historians like Arthur Schlesinger than with the conservative scholars who wrestled with the particular and complex American tradition drawn, as Russell Kirk put it, from “Hebrew and classical and Christian teaching, and tested by the personal and national experience of their British ancestors and their own colonial life.”
In his masterpiece Novus Ordo Seclorum, the great Southern historian of the founding Forrest McDonald notes the “vastly complex intellectual mélange” of the founders’ world, which included natural law and rights theories, multiple strands of republican ideology, Montesquieu’s taxonomy of political power in The Spirit of the Laws, English legal tradition, and the Scottish Enlightenment. The founders rejected “doctrine as formula,” believing that for government to be viable it must be “made to conform to human nature and to the genius of the people—to their customs, morals, habits, institutions, aspirations.” Yet, McDonald presciently reminds us, those two ideas introduced in 1776—natural-rights philosophy and republicanism—“ensnared the Americans in ideological thickets that were alien to their very being and contrary to their heritage, their experience, and their understanding of the nature of man.”
Bonus. At Public Discourse, Beatrice Scudeler checks out trending topics and wonders what “manhood” has come to mean. From the beginning of the essay:
The internet is abuzz with talk of male yearning. Of course, there’s no reason the phrase should mean anything to you unless you’re chronically online. But as a woman born in 1997—right on the cusp of the Millennial/Zoomer generational divide—who writes about culture for a living, I’ve not been able to overlook the latest cultural trend: men who yearn.
I started noticing this increasingly often in the last couple of years. According to Google Trends analytics, I’m not the only one. In 2023, a post on X by an account with very few followers garnered 3.5 million views. It read: “What makes a man attractive is not his stupid face but his stupendous yearning and agonizing longing for one woman and one woman alone.” Searches for “male yearning” and similar terms first spiked at the end of 2024 and have been growing consistently since. Last year, many mainstream magazines with a predominantly female readership put out articles on the topic. On TikTok, the most popular social media platform among Gen Z and younger millennials, videos about #menwhoyearn consistently get hundreds of thousands of likes.
For a generation that is marked by a noticeable gender split on political beliefs as well as by ever declining marriage rates, it would seem that young women still retain a desire for a specific vision of manhood. But what exactly is that vision?
For the Good of the Cause
Uno. At Philanthropy Daily, Chivaun Wolter explains how trash day provided an education. Read it here.
Due. More PD: Jordan Smith discusses an important SCOTUS win for pro-lifers. Read it here.
Tre. And Still More PD: Karl Hahn explains how to write genuinely persuasive donor messaging. Pay heed, fundraisers! Read it here.
Quattro. On the new “Givers, Doers, & Thinkers” podcast episode, Jeremy Beer and Nathan Bond, co-founder of Rifle Paper Company, explore entrepreneurship, education, and philanthropy. Listen here.
Department of Bad Jokes
Q: Who was Grandpa T. Rex’s favorite singer?
A: Dinah Shore.
A Dios
Yes, we have “Yes! We Have No Bananas.” But no, we are out of kraken.
May the Enemies of Civilization Be Confounded,
Jack Fowler, who prepares for summer at jfowler@amphil.com.
