A Dozen-Plus Stimulants, Gathered for Your Edification and Inspiration
Dear Intelligent American,
The scenes from Minneapolis show anti-ICE balaclava-clad street activists and coven members patrolling neighborhoods and barricading intersections and demanding identity proof of approaching cars, especially those big, black SUVs that have a federal-agent aura, whose drivers respond to the bull-horning bullies, No, I am not with ICE, I live around here and am a vegan just trying to get to the supermarket to buy soy milk and Brussels sprouts and tofu . . . locally sourced. . . gluten free!
And still, the frozen water bottle projectiles are hurled by the neo-CHOP and CHAZ-wannabes at vehicles because, well, because mobs gotta mob.
Inquiring minds want to know: Is mounting the ramparts for illegal immigrants while obstructing deemed-verboten cars and demanding proof of—citizenship?—from their drivers an irony? Oblivious?
Remember the good old days when the cranky neighbor stood on the porch shaking his cane and yelling that you get off the lawn and stop getting dust on his grass? He was run out of Minneapolis.
And on that note, you are wished a Happy Valentine’s Day.
And Awaaaaay We Go
1. At City Journal, John Hirschauer argues that football might be kaput. From the review:
In Football, Chuck Klosterman argues that despite its popularity, the sport is doomed. He claims that America, which today shells out billions for NFL tickets, will eventually consider the game an anachronism, like jazz or indoor smoking.
Most people who make this kind of argument hate football. Klosterman has conceded as much. But he loves the game; he played it, watches religiously, and—in the book’s best paragraph—admits to sitting in his kitchen late at night imagining coaches discussing how to block backside edge defenders. He sounds like a lunatic, but it makes him credible. It's a must-read for football obsessives who want to understand why they love the game and for outsiders who want to know what they're missing.
Klosterman constructed the book as a series of essays, only one of which is dedicated to football’s future. Other entries discuss the game’s greatest player (Jim Thorpe), the archetypal football coach (who understands that the “old ways . . . continue to work”), race (“How many NFL quarterbacks should be [b]lack?”), and more.
“Football,” he writes in an essay on the game’s appeal, “aspires to petroleum engineering.” No sport with those aspirations would seem to have any business being so popular. But football has become America’s most popular sport—consumed by diehards and casuals alike—partially because of its complexity.
2. At The Daily Signal, J. Budziszewski chronicles the pandemic of lunacies infecting America. From the article:
We are passing through a pandemic of lunacy, of dangerous and contagious detachment from reality.
It isn’t just young people with gender dysphoria who suffer the harmful delusion that we can be the sex other than what we are.
Now, schoolteachers often promote transgender ideology, even to children in the lower elementary grades, asking them, “What are your pronouns?”
At the university where I teach, if I were to use the male pronoun for a male student who “identified as” female, I would be roundly condemned. I don’t go out of my way to offend people, so in a case like that, I would avoid pronouns altogether. But for some people, even that isn’t enough. They won’t be satisfied unless I pretend to agree with them.
How far does this go?
3. At National Review, old amigo Charles C. W. Cooke, an elsewhere-born American, discusses what citizenship does and does not require. From the essay:
Perhaps this sounds a touch pedantic? It shouldn’t. After all, the fact that, as a practical matter, Americans are permitted to believe anything—and, indeed, that they are able to vote in accordance with those beliefs—is precisely why it is so important for us to be careful in the selection, education, and assimilation of our immigrants. As an existing polity, we ought not aim simply to create new Americans; we ought to aim to create good new Americans. As one might expect, I have no time whatsoever for those who claim that there is such a thing as a “heritage American”—a citizen who, because he has more American-born ancestors than another citizen has, is a superior or “more real” form of citizen. But to reject that idea, as we should, is ineluctably to accept an alternative set of obligations. If the United States is, indeed, a creedal nation—and if its creed is identifiable and particular—then we must emphatically insist that all newcomers be well versed in that creed. The alternative to this—which involves the rejection of blood-and-soil claims and an indifference toward the national doctrine—is civilizational nihilism.
4. At The Wall Street Journal, Tunku Varadarajan profiles the great writer, psychiatrist, and social critic Anthony Daniels. From the interview:
In another essay collection, “Our Culture, What’s Left of It” (2005), he writes that after leaving home and making his way in the world, he realized that “the only thing worse than having a family . . . is not having a family. My rejection of bourgeois virtues as mean-spirited and antithetical to real human development could not long survive contact with situations in which those virtues were entirely absent.”
In the quarter-century since “Life at the Bottom” was first published, he says, the world hasn’t changed “all that much in its essentials.” The most important “and, I think, malign, change” has been the arrival of social media—or “antisocial media,” as he calls them. “These have reinforced the worst tendencies of an already debased culture. As the paralyzed are encouraged by faith-healers to lay down their crutches and walk, I would encourage people to lay down their phones and think.” But thinking can be painful. “‘Can’t you stop me thinking, doctor?’ patients would ask me. Not think about anything in particular, but about anything at all. The social media are a sovereign method of doing this.”
Dr. Daniels’s essays are based on a meticulous, intimate observation of members of the British underclass over several years, including at least 10,000 people who have attempted suicide. (“To be or not to be?” he has written. “Overdosers opt for something in between the two.”) His narratives are concrete demonstrations that what gives rise to an underclass is culture, not poverty. In any case, he says, “in modern welfare states, the struggle for subsistence has been abolished.” Material survival is “more or less assured.”
5. At Front Porch Republic, Dennis Uhlman explains the virtue and necessity of being neighborly. From the piece:
While community contributes more to one’s health than even regular doctor’s visits, I sometimes feel as though most Americans have given up on living in one. I was once one of those people, but the work of an aging theologian gave me a window into a vision of the good life and convinced me he was on to something. That person is Stanley Hauerwas, a longtime professor at Duke Divinity School who has done an extraordinary amount of thinking and writing about community formation. Hauerwas is difficult to pin down: he isn’t an evangelical, but many evangelicals admire him. He’s not a liberal, but he’s certainly not a conservative. Instead, Hauerwas has a formed an eclectic political theology that borrows from several streams of thought, including Anabaptist nonviolence theology and Catholic social thought.
One of the familiar targets of Hauerwas’s criticism has been liberalism, the enlightenment era political thinking that prioritized individual freedom. In liberalism, the individual is the center of the community. In fact, the most important task of any government is to protect the rights of that individual against unnecessary interference from the state or other individuals. Hauerwas is not alone in this criticism: Many thinkers, Christian and secular, have noted the breakdown that an individual rights-based society is prone to. Patrick Deneen, in his book Why Liberalism Failed, argues that this individualist societal thinking has, in effect, killed itself. Extreme individualism slowly erodes the very institutions that are necessary for society to function.
6. At Law & Liberty, Rachel Lu says she has dug in her Minnesota heels. From the piece:
Things were very different in January 2026. This might partly reflect geographical happenstance, but I don’t know. I don’t live all that far from neighborhoods with significant ICE-anti-ICE friction. The place where Alex Pretti died is roughly 15 minutes from my house, and other “flashpoint” neighborhoods are closer. Even so, there’s been very little disruption in our part of the city. Our family’s routine required a few adjustments, but no major upheavals. There was no smoke, no vandalism, no curfew. I drive regularly through downtown St. Paul, and things seemed normal there. (Maybe a little boring even? Maybe?) Clearly some parts of Minneapolis were very different, but these demonstrations seemed more disciplined and contained, never exuding that same fey, destructive mood that was so evident six years ago. I appreciate that.
Even without the smoke and shattered windows, these have certainly been Interesting Times, which naturally prompts reflection. It’s a very curious thing. I myself, throughout the month of January, was earnestly trying to grasp what was happening in my city, and finding it genuinely difficult. It seemed to me that local friends and neighbors were often in a similar place. But lo! The people who don’t live here seemed quite confident in their grasp of the situation. My more distant acquaintance found their footing rapidly, with the great majority lining up in predictable places, taking the stances one would expect. The public conversation was all too easy to follow. It was only events on the ground that were hard.
7. At The Eternally Radical Idea, Greg Lukianoff frets about the state of free speech in England. From the analysis:
At some point, it might be faster if the UK just incarcerated everybody and then selectively let people go free on good behavior. (Am I getting the dry British humor right, mum?)
The cultivated culture of silence in the UK has real costs, and the grooming-gang scandals are the proof. In places like Rotherham and Telford, inquiries found abuse on a staggering scale—girls being groomed, trafficked, and raped for years while institutions minimized complaints, blamed victims, or moved too slowly to stop it.
A recent government-commissioned review found that police and councils still too often avoid recording or analyzing ethnicity in organized child-abuse cases, in part because officials fear being accused of racism or inflaming “community cohesion.” And yes, that fear is tied to a fact that makes people tense: in several of the most notorious group-based cases, many identified offenders were of Pakistani or British Pakistani heritage.
These are deadly serious and ugly topics. But in a free society—where we’re supposed to be equal citizens and voters—you have to be able to discuss hard realities without treating questions as taboo. When you can’t, institutions learn to look away, predators learn they can keep going, and the people who pay the price are the innocents—in this case, many young girls—left hurt, unheard, and too often without recourse.
8. At Public Discourse, David Lewis Schaefer accuses online gambling of being broadly corrupting. From the reflection:
But the Court made matters still worse through its 2021 decision in NCAA v. Alston, in which it upheld a district court ruling that the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA)’s rules limiting education-related compensation to student athletes violated the Sherman Antitrust Act. Soon after the decision, the NCAA voted to allow student athletes to receive commercial payment in exchange for use of their name, image, and likeness. The result has been a bonanza for college athletic stars, many of whom now enter a “transfer portal”—sometimes more than once during their college career—in pursuit of a better coach or more successful program so as to enhance their chances of earning higher name-image-likeness (NIL) compensation. (According to Fox Sports, during the 2025–26 season, the twenty-five highest-paid college athletes—all football players—were scheduled to receive amounts ranging from $2 million to $6.8 million.)
And in yet another judicial ruling, last June, U.S. district court judge Claudia Wilken approved a $2.8 billion settlement of a suit by college athletes allowing NCAA Division I schools to pay their athletes directly. The agreement includes provisions for revenue sharing, enabling schools to distribute funds—in addition to NIL earnings—directly to their players, with an initial cap of approximately $20.5 million per school starting in the 2025–26 academic year.
Of course, such practices raise a question: how can any college instructor reasonably expect athletes in his class to put much emphasis on homework or test preparation, considering the immediate financial rewards that come from his athletic endeavors? And how can students, in general, feel the sort of identification with their college’s team that they formerly did, when its members’ attachment to the college is based largely on money and may not last more than a year? Why not just hire a group of young pro athletes to “represent” the school, without any pretense that they are students?
9. At Verily Magazine, Meghan Murphy explains that casual sex has worsened the divide between men and women. From the assessment:
Today, we have no visible reason to gate-keep sex. We can prevent and end pregnancies should we wish, and we can also choose single motherhood if we wish. But what impact has all this “choice” and “freedom” had on relationships between men and women?
Things look rather bleak, honestly. The “situationship” thrives, porn consumption is through the roof, and apparently the younger generations aren’t even dating. People still crave connection and relationships, and women still crave love and commitment. What the sexual revolution really offered was the freedom for men to act without consequence or accountability. And it told women this was good for them too.
But the problem is that “casual sex” is a “freedom” that is really only desirable for men. Women, despite what we might tell ourselves or what we might like to believe, simply aren’t wired for endless one night stands. It’s not satisfying on a sexual or an emotion level. Men might feel nothing after sleeping with a woman and never seeing her again, but women tend to feel used, discarded, disrespected, and unfulfilled.
10. At Arena, Christian Keil wonders what he might tell a Founding Father about what has transpired in America’s technology these past 250 years. From the article:
I am writing this piece in the middle of winter, in a fully lit, 72-degree room at 8:38pm. Earlier today, I drove my electric car on a paved road to pick up a week's worth of groceries. We ate fresh vegetables for dinner (in winter!), cooked indoors using filtered, on-demand water on a natural gas flame, prepared by my mother-in-law who is visiting from her home 2,000 miles away in Georgia. My two children, born safely at clean hospitals, are sleeping comfortably in soft beds and warm clothing. My wife is talking to her friend who lives in Tennessee. I am watching a basketball game happening in Seattle on the right half of my screen, while typing this on the left. I'm wearing a shirt gifted to me by my employer, one of perhaps a dozen t-shirts I own. The room smells like vanilla thanks to a $5.43 candle. The candle is made of scented wax, not spermaceti.
America in 2026 is not perfect, but we have achieved an incredibly high standard of living. Of course, we still face profound challenges, but we have shown that material progress is eminently possible. That’s why I work to build and fund technology companies that promote the national interest: I am a proactive optimist who believes in the American Dream. I do not believe things automatically will get better, but I know that things can get better if we make them so.
If you brought a Founding Father to modern-day America, it would take a while to explain to them how far technology has come over the past 250 years. (Or slightly less time, if you show them my report, More Perfect.) But once he understood the everyday miracles of our technologically-infused lives, it may be even harder for him to understand the pessimism of the national conversation.
11. At National Affairs, Daniel Buck urges teachers to reject their newfound role of deconstructing and dismantling and instead embrace a duty of transmitting the best ideals of Western civilization. From the essay:
One of the most famous works of pedagogy, the 1969 book Teaching as a Subversive Activity by Neil Postman and his co-author Charles Weingartner, is a self-contradictory mess, but its title is revealing nonetheless—encapsulating how many teachers-turned-activists view their role in the classroom. Postman believed that "the essential function of the schools in today's world" is to develop in students a "crap detector." The ideal education leads young minds to question everything; whether such questioning leads to answers is unimportant. That we make skeptics—not wise, virtuous men and women—is the goal.
Postman's understanding of skepticism overlooks the simple fact that genuine critical examination requires formal education and knowledge. For example, teenagers do not need much encouragement to question their parents' religion. Indeed, rebelliousness is natural to the adolescent mind. But a genuine criticism necessitates deep knowledge of the Abrahamic faiths, their creeds and scriptures, proofs for and against the existence of God, debates around the problem of evil, and plenty more. Without knowledge, such criticism is mere cynicism.
Postman's book reflected a canon of educational thought that came to be known as "critical pedagogy." The intellectual primogenitor of the broader theory was a Brazilian Marxist by the name of Paulo Freire, whom David Corey has written about in these pages. His influence has been monumental: His 1968 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed is one of the most assigned books to prospective teachers in university schools of education and the third-most cited work in all of the social sciences.
12. At Commentary Magazine, Seth Mandel tells of a UK criminal case that should leave all wondering about the future of England. From the article:
On August 6, 2024, a group of Palestine Action activists broke into an Israeli defense contractor’s factory in Bristol, England, smashing equipment and injuring police with sledgehammers.
During the trial, five of the six defendants, according to the Guardian, “[told] jurors they had entered the factory without permission and damaged Elbit’s equipment including computers and drones.”
Today, the defendants were found not guilty of aggravated burglary. . . .
The violence was unplanned, you see. They came with sledgehammers and they used the sledgehammers, but they didn’t expect to have to use the sledgehammers; they were just surprised by the appearance of the police.
Not guilty.
Because this was a jury trial, there really is no disputing the implications: Britain is cooked.
Lucky 13. At the Leelanau Ticker in Traverse City, Craig Manning reports on some Michigan elementary-school kids raising a bundle for the local VFW. From the story:
St. Mary Catholic School in Lake Leelanau will be delivering five figures worth of funds to a local Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) post, thanks to a spaghetti dinner fundraiser held last week.
As the Leelanau Ticker reported on Wednesday, Lake Leelanau St. Mary hosts an annual open house fundraiser to generate funds for either local families in need or causes in the community. This year’s cause was the VFW Little Finger Post 7731, which is in the midst of a $1 million renovation project that will make the facility more accessible for those with mobility challenges.
Bonus. At Pirate Wires, Mike Solana reports on the forthcoming wealth flight from California over a tax-the-billionaires referendum. From the article:
Over the last week, I spoke with 21 billionaires about the looming prospect of a wealth tax. We discussed whether they left or are planning to leave California (most of them are), what a wealth tax means for the technology industry, and finally how, if at all, they plan to fight back. The men I spoke with include founders of companies working on a diverse range of technologies including artificial intelligence, defense, cryptography, security, biotechnology, finance, and general software development, as well as prominent venture capitalists at several of the most famous firms in the world. In total, these men are responsible for something like 50,000 employees, running companies in California worth a combined ~ $1.3 trillion. . . .
I’ve spoken with around ten percent of billionaires in the state myself. Of the 21 men I interviewed, 20 would have been impacted by the ballot measure. All 20 of them, including the Democrats, as well as several of the most committed diehard proponents of revitalizing San Francisco, are now developing an exit plan. (Three have already left.) Almost all of them have either purchased property out of state or are in the process of buying property out of state now; almost all of them have engaged lawyers to help them navigate what they see as a potentially years-long legal battle; and, among the men I spoke with who are presently running companies, almost all have deployed business ops leaders to focus on opening offices out of California.
For the Good of the Cause
Uno. At Philanthropy Daily, Steve Phelan draws attention to the need for there being the first-person plural in “We” who make up “the people.” Read it here.
Due. More PD: Nepo-writer Andrew Fowler tells of NFL players using their footwear to promote causes. Read it here.
Department of Bad Jokes
Q: What did the giant use to eat the highway?
A: The fork in the road.
A Dios
From Isaiah 58 we heard at services this past Sunday “if you bestow your bread on the hungry and satisfy the afflicted; then light shall rise for you in the darkness.” Charity obviously matters to salvation. Lent approaches for Christians—this coming Wednesday for us papists and most of our reformist friends, a week later for our Orthodox brethren. It is a good opportunity to do many spiritual things—among them almsgiving. Let the bread-bestowing begin.
May He Who Feeds the Sparrows Count on Us,
Jack Fowler, who feeds the sparrows, even if it means sometimes feeding squirrels, at jfowler@amphil.com.
