As states and localities battle over issues from how or even whether to re-open schools, all the way to defining the circumstances under which small children will be required to wear masks, a devolution of decision-making is certainly welcome. Hybrid homeschools can provide many more families with a way to both get past virus-related [...]
Long have political theorists argued that people naturally congregate with the similarly-minded. We haven’t seen yet a large-scale, purposeful internal migration based primarily upon cultural and religious beliefs, but in our current polarized society, overwhelmed with growing social chaos, it appears that we are about to. As Americans, we are accustomed to a variety [...]
All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players —As You Like It, William Shakespeare In a sadly predictable development, Major League Baseball is going the way of the Woke, with players kneeling during, or before, the playing of the National Anthem, donning Black Lives Matter T-shirts and uniform patches, and [...]
Where was Joe Biden when President Trump was standing up for America on Independence Day? As his Party tweeted that Mr. Trump's trip to Mount Rushmore was aimed at "glorifying white supremacy," Mr. Biden was wailing about the need "to rip the roots of systemic racism" out of America. Speaking at Mount Rushmore on Friday, [...]
Much can be learned from the life of Fisher Ames. He displayed more promise than perhaps any of our other great statesmen, and he personified two of conservatism’s most indelible tenets: Life is fragile, and all is vanity. But he was also quick to see how American citizens embraced their “liberty,” and he did [...]
Consider what else the radicals and rioters have accomplished. They have made mass civil disobedience an acceptable and even praiseworthy form of protest, if you are justifiably outraged. They have won near-immunity for burning and looting stores. Blanket amnesties at the state and city level appear to be in the cards. The Seattle Commune is [...]
Defacing public monuments, streets, churches, and administrative buildings constitutes an act of secular iconoclasm that should be taken seriously—not because the things destroyed possess the sanctity of real icons, but because the spirit in which these places and things are being destroyed conveys a hatred on the part of the rioters towards their own [...]
The political situation in the United States offers an excellent and necessary opportunity to examine our ideas concerning toleration. We should turn to John Locke, who presents an argument for toleration worth pondering in a time when few are giving toleration, let alone free speech, freedom of association, or liberty, serious thought. John Locke’s [...]
We erect statues to remember, revere, and honor those whom we memorialize. And what is the motivation of the people who tear them down and desecrate them? In a word, it is hate. But hating history and denying history and tearing down the statues of the men who made that history does not change history. [...]
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Robert E. Lee were among the decisive figures of American history. If all are dishonored, with their statues pulled down and their names taken off cities, counties, towns, rivers, canals, bridges, buildings, highways, roads, streets and dams, then what is left? "Can we all just get along?" That was the [...]
The great thing about life is that any man can be good, and honest, and ethical, and moral, and can have character. We are not animals to be degraded at every moment. We know that we’re made for the stars, created for eternity, born for the everlasting, and we stand by it. We must improve [...]
I want the politicians, academics, corporate flacks, and journalists who are willing to celebrate somebody else’s bacon being fried in the name of flattened curves, new forestation, and utopian revolutionary dreams to stop and think about what they are doing. Don’t cry “burn it down” unless you are willing to stand in the ashes [...]
The fear of the coronavirus allows our governing bodies to keep us in isolation and the consequences of our permitting this act are more pernicious than we can imagine. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground” has never appeared less fictional. And why are you so firmly, so triumphantly, convinced that only the normal and the [...]
As it rises in prominence, the issue of defunding police will divide the Democratic Party more than the GOP. For while the hard left sees cops in ideological and class terms as racist and fascist, the right, by and large, sees the police as the last line of defense against the anarchy we saw erupt [...]