Emerson, Lake & Palmer viewed their vocation as creating things of beauty. Such a motivation is a rare gift; to have it shared by three such brilliant musicians was a once in a generation gift for us all. The show has ended. In 2016 we lost two-thirds of the most important musical group of the [...]
If Roe v. Wade should fall, this will only be the beginning of a veritable war by the abortionists on the courts, legislatures, and public. A friend of mine, who enjoys irritating me, recently handed me a book review from the American Historical Review, written by Professor Simone M. Caron, of Johanna Schoen’s Abortion After [...]
Attacks on the Electoral College itself are not new. What is new is the demand being made by many progressives, including prominent constitutional scholars, that Electors themselves abandon their constitutional duties in the name of “fairness”… As most readers probably are aware, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein launched a campaign to “recount” electoral results [...]
Given the hysteria of so many, it may seem surprising to note that what Donald Trump promised was a return to political sanity. If not a full-scale conservative program, Mr. Trump’s is a crucial program for the preservation and possible renewal of the American way of life… Now that Donald Trump is President-elect, there is [...]
What would Edmund Burke do? What would he say should be done to save our Constitution and help us recover our republic? This past week I spent some time at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal. The incomparable Annette Kirk was hosting a group of students, scholars, and men and women of letters. We [...]
In many countries, politicians have very good reason to hold onto power as if their lives depended on it. Sometimes, as with various brutal dictators, this is literally true; being deposed may well mean being decapitated. Other times, well, even elected leaders may have reasons to want to avoid an early return to civilian life. [...]
It is possible that Hillary Clinton will be the next President of the United States. My intention in saying this is not to discourage supporters of and potential voters for Donald Trump. These people know from experience that it is best to dismiss or fight to prove wrong the self-interested doomsday predictions of the mainstream [...]
It seems that more people than usual are thinking of sitting out Election Day this year. This is hardly surprising—nor is the sentiment entirely new. Americans are much less likely to vote, as a percentage of the population, than most democratic peoples. This tendency is not without its logic—indeed, an at times compelling logic. But [...]
The Politics of Prudence, by Russell Kirk (Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1993) Dr. Russell Kirk observes in this book that “the greatest works of politics are poetic.” The rationalistic formulae set forth by most contemporary philosophers will not endure because they are not poetic; they divorce politics from religion, from imaginative literature, and from tradition, and [...]
The message is loud and clear. Your actions have no more significance than those of a cockroach. Furthermore, like a cockroach, you are in no position to make moral choices of your own free will. When you commit some hideous brutality, it is not that you decided to do so. No, on the contrary, external [...]
I have signed onto a friend of the court brief urging the Washington Supreme Court to reverse a lower court decision in the case of State of Washington v. Arlene’s Flowers.* In this case, the court found Mrs. Baronelle Stutzman guilty of unlawful discrimination for declining to design custom floral arrangements for a same-sex wedding. [...]
A recent essay in another online journal tells a heartwarming story from Kansas City that involves tiny houses. For those of you who do not know what a “tiny house” is, it is simply a house that is very small (obvious enough?) meaning 400 square feet or less. I have written, here, about the “tiny [...]
I have now sat through my mandatory Title IX training, which is to say I spent ninety minutes in an Orwellian swamp of doublespeak, barely hidden bigotry, and will to power, decreed by the Obama Administration and enthusiastically carried out by a combination of mid-level administrators and high-paid legal “experts.” For those of you blissfully unaware [...]
Never has anyone ruled on this earth by basing his rule on any other thing than public opinion. In these words, Jose Ortega y Gassett, most famous for a book entitled Revolt of the Masses, affirmed the eternal truth and problem of rule by consent. Ortega y Gassett, a classical liberal theorist from Spain, spent [...]