We teachers have been hearing for years how online learning will soon sweep our worlds away. That’s possible, but my concern is more immediate: that in the rush to put our classes online, we are tempted to create a world of Total School. I am—genuinely—one of the luckiest people in the whole coronavirus pandemic. With [...]
We need to see beyond the myopia of the current crisis to its long-term consequences. What awaits us when the pestilence passes? What sort of world will we be living in? Will the lessons learned lead to the restoration of lost liberties, or will we find that the freedoms we relinquished in this time of [...]
Democrats may proclaim that they are eager to see the pandemic come to a swift end and the economy return to a robust state. But the cold political interests of the Democratic Party today are what they were in Herbert Hoover's time: to pray that the president fails, and fails badly, so that they inherit [...]
Our current system of higher education has reached a tipping point. My prediction is that within 20 years’ time, we will be living in a very different reality as far as university education is concerned. Higher education is about to implode. The issues with higher education in America have been mounting for some time now. [...]
As time goes on and the peak of the crisis seems to ebb, the patience of Americans wears thin. Economic and mental health concerns begin to weigh in more strongly. The second phase of the pandemic, at least in the United States, will prompt many questions about the tension between the duties of citizenship and [...]
Now, standing patiently in line for their bailouts, are the states—and America's cities and counties. The one certain victor in the coronavirus pandemic war will likely be Big Government. "War is the health of the state," wrote the progressive Randolph Bourne during the First World War, after which he succumbed to the Spanish flu. America's [...]
No book shows how little we care to find out the truth, how little we know ourselves, how even less we know others, how rumor, prejudice, and illusion, rule our world as Alessandro Manzoni’s "The Betrothed." Set in Lombardy in the 17th century, it covers the whole horror of a plague in whose deadly grip [...]
As we all deal with the latest pandemic, it’s good to know that we can call on experts to help us through—and eventually out—of it. But it’s also good to know that we can also call on non-experts to help us as well. Included among them might even be a non-expert who had his suspicions [...]
Why do so many Americans doubt the coronavirus? I think there are both admirable and repugnant traits within the American character that help to explain the phenomenon. I don’t believe I am wrong in my observation that many of my fellow conservatives come across as “coronavirus doubters.” Someone has coined a clumsy phrase, “Coronavirus Truthers,” [...]
Will this pandemic prove the decisive factor in America's retreat from global hegemony? For declaring in March that the U.S. economy might be reopened by Easter, President Donald Trump was roundly mocked. Yet, it appears his political instincts were correct. He was more in tune with his country than were his critics. By early Easter [...]
A few weeks ago, the word was temporary. Now we are hearing indefinite. America’s recently unemployed subjects under house arrest can be forgiven for starting to wonder from behind their bootlegged face-masks: If politicians and the media continue to clamor for increasingly draconian measures (including, in the case of EWTN White House correspondent Owen Jensen, [...]
What does this deliberate decision to shut down the country and carpet-bomb our own economy, upon which we all depend, tell us about what we Americans value? For each American lost to the pandemic, 1,000 Americans have lost their jobs because of conscious and deliberate decisions of the president and 50 governors. Some 60,000 citizens, [...]
My initial skepticism about the way in which we have dealt with this real but exaggerated threat has only grown. In fact, the lockdowns and the shuttering of our medical and economic system have now become a greater threat than the disease itself. After my essay on conservative skepticism about both the severity of the [...]
So what do I believe? What do I really believe? I presently believe that I feel the sun warming my skin, that I see light streaming through my windows, that I am sitting at my desk, that I am holding a pen in my hand. I believe that it is Wednesday and that I am [...]