I CAN neither sleep at night nor concentrate on my work by day for the sound of right-thinking people stamping their feet and shouting their protests: ‘This has to stop!’ or ‘Something must be done about that!’
But it won’t be.
It’s not as if we live in fear of a revolution. The revolution has happened, and the old order is vanquished; all our institutions are permeated by the neo-Marxist ideology. The new dogmas are set in stone.
This year, at the height of what used to be called the Christmas season, a Pew Research Center poll on religion revealed that only slightly more Americans described themselves as Roman Catholics (21 percent) than as believers in “nothing in particular” (20 percent). The millennial generation, which includes most adult Americans under 40, is the first one in which Christians are a minority.
Many Americans have a sense that their country is less religious than it used to be. But is it really? The interplay among institutions, behaviors and beliefs is notoriously hard to chart. Even if we could determine that religious sentiment was in flux, it would be hard to say whether we were talking about this year’s fad or this century’s trend.
Or perhaps we are dealing with an even deeper process. That is the argument of a much-discussed book published in Paris this fall. In it, the French political theorist Chantal Delsol contends that we are living through the end of Christian civilization — a civilization that began (roughly) with the Roman rout of pagan holdouts in the late fourth century and ended (roughly) with Pope John XXIII’s embrace of religious pluralism and the West’s legalization of abortion.
… Is it a coincidence, by the way, that four officers of the Federal Reserve have been outed for trading stocks and bonds in a pattern that looks an awful lot like front-running the Fed’s own “guidance?” Robert S. Kaplan, head of the Dallas Fed, and Eric Rosengren, head of the Boston Fed announced their “early retirements” last week over stock-trading ethics issues. Fed Vice-chair Richard Clarida’s financial disclosure statement indicated that he dumped millions of dollars in a Pimco bond fund and jammed them into a Pimco stock fund the day before Fed Chair Jerome Powell announced emergency interventions to battle the Covid-19 epidemic in early 2020. Mr. Clarida was involved in deliberations leading to the change in fed policy. And Richmond Fed president Thomas Barkin is under scrutiny for voting to bail out the corporate bond market while sitting on a portfolio of corporate bonds. In his past role as CFO of McKinsey & Co, a global consulting firm, Barkin advised Purdue Pharma L.P. on maximizing sales of its painkiller OxyContin, the infamous scourge of the US opioid epidemic.
h/t Mauser
The less moored our identities become, the louder we shout about them
There has never been a perfect human culture, and any attempt to create one has reliably led to tyranny: to the gulag or the gas chamber, the guillotine or the mass grave. Humans are fallen, or just flawed, and the world is nailed together from our crooked timber. From revolutionary France to 21st century Afghanistan, those who thought they could draw up a rational paradise once the slate was wiped clean have always been violently disabused.
The United States has been dominant in the mathematical sciences since the mass exodus of European scientists in the 1930s. Because mathematics is the basis of science—as well as virtually all major technological advances, including scientific computing, climate modelling, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and robotics—US leadership in math has supplied our country with an enormous strategic advantage. But for various reasons, three of which we set out below, the United States is now at risk of losing that dominant position.
The nation’s attention these past two weeks has focused nearly exclusively on Kabul, and rightly so given that the city has become the scene of the largest hostage situation in American history and a vivid image of the decline of Pax Americana abroad.
But Americans don’t need to travel 7,500 miles to get a first-hand glimpse of the end of American order. In many of our own country’s major cities, gangs of masked thugs and criminals do what they please — and our far-better-armed police aren’t allowed to stop them and protect the rest of us.
Monday on FNC’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” host Tucker Carlson opened his program from Budapest with a dire warning about the direction the response to the pandemic was taking the United States and several of its key allies around the globe.
Sweeping social transformations occur during times of crisis. We are in such a predicament now, and transformative change may be coming to America whether we want it or not. It could define who we are as a nation for the remainder of the 21st Century. Whether America reaffirms itself as a beacon for freedom for the world or whether we become just another plot of ground in the new world order remains to be seen. The consequences for all Americans could be enormous, and especially so for Millennials.
“It can’t happen here” is a political cliche in the United States. Regardless of your personal viewpoint, there is a vast swath of the American population who simply do not believe in the possibility of any totalitarianism in the United States.
It’s worth noting that throughout history, in virtually every place that totalitarian regimes have arisen, the residents of these countries felt the same way. Russia was seen as too traditional and backward, the power of the Czar too entrenched to be defeated. Throughout most of the modern period, Germany had been viewed as the home of Goethe, Schiller, and Mozart, a place where the local Jewish population had largely assimilated.
Because totalitarianism emerges differently throughout history in different countries, it’s crucial to take a broader view of how totalitarian regimes arise. For example, when discussing the rise of communism or the rise of fascism, we see different trends in Russia than we do in China, different trends in Italy than we do in Germany. When we examine multiple, somewhat lesser-known examples of the rise of socialism throughout the world, we paint a picture of the different ways in which socialism originated and its possible resurgence.
Canada’s Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) says the federal stimulus plan may have been “miscalibrated” and will have less of an impact than the Liberals’ claim.
No one could have imagined that we would so quickly squander the West’s mighty strategic victory in the Cold War.
In an apparently predestined and inevitable manner, as occurs when there is weak international leadership, the United States and China are drifting into a state of prickly antagonism.
During the election, Joe Biden said the Chinese were not a threat to the United States and he has still only half-heartedly acknowledged a serious rivalry between the two countries. There is plenty of evidence that the new administration has made such a poor impression in Beijing that President Xi Jinping has concluded now is the time for China to humiliate and displace the United States—a conclusion he was certainly deterred from adopting during the Trump years.
Is civilizational decline reversible?
In a recent monologue on HBO’s Real Time, host Bill Maher called Americans a “silly people” for allowing themselves to be mired in culture war struggles, such as the politically correct cancelling of children’s books, while our superpower competition China is laser-focused on political, economic, and military dominance.
When the Biden administration undertook its first known act of war a few weeks ago, it provided an illuminating snapshot of conflict in the 21st century. The aerial strike on Iranian-backed Iraqi Shia militias in eastern Syria, facing territory held by American-backed Syrian proxy forces, in response to the shelling of American positions in Iraq by Iranian-backed Iraqi militias which led to the death of an American private contractor, encapsulates the central role of surrogate warfare in modern conflict.
The left-wing postmodern idea of “truth” as a mere pick-and-choose official narrative is now normal.
Many politicians at one point or another live by lies—if they can get away with them.
Our supposed sentinels, the media—self-defined as independent, cynical, and skeptical journalists—are supposed to separate political fictions from truth.
A shocking discovery out of a Baltimore City high school, where Project Baltimore has found hundreds of students are failing. It’s a school where a student who passed three classes in four years, ranks near the top half of his class with a 0.13 grade point average.
