Let’s get the following three disclaimers out of the way.
#1: Yours truly would have crawled over broken glass to vote for Donald Trump in November twenty-five times had the law permitted it. If the clock could be dialed back two months, I’d do it all over again, and the barrel of a gun on my temple couldn’t persuade me to vote for Joe Biden instead.
Continue readingThis much is clear: Progressives expecting a blue landslide on Tuesday have been proven utterly wrong. With the count still ongoing five days later, it’s looking like 48% of voters backed President Trump’s re-election bid.
Continue readingAn existential angst has taken hold of America. It’s come in the form of a realization that our constitutional republic may be slipping through our fingers. This anxiety seems to be the one point of bipartisan agreement in our otherwise hopelessly divided body politic. But when it comes to assigning blame for the erosion of our institutions, conservatives and progressives revert right back to pointing fingers at one another.
Continue readingJustice Ginsburg’s unfortunately timed death serves as another depressing reminder how despicably polarized our body politic has become. In a period of just four hours it became obvious that few, if any, are even concerned with the Justice’s legacy anymore. Instead, the focus was immediately shifted to the seat she left vacant on the Supreme Court, with Senate leaders Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer each digging in their heels over the question whether the nomination and confirmation of her replacement should take place before or after the election.
Continue readingIt is a boring platitude that history has produced its share of intellectual folly. Jean Jacques Rousseau, for example, believed that humans are born a “blank slate” and only corrupted as they grow up in modern society, an assertion he could have known to be insane merely by paying a few hours of attention to the handful of children he fathered and sent off to the orphanage right after their birth. Karl Marx falls neatly into the same category: Born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he spent most of his life staring at books and had little actual regard for the “proletariat” he purported to elevate. This showed in his writings, which betrayed a one-dimensional view of the capitalist economies in the West.
Continue readingYours truly finished reading two books last week, each of which rather instructive in its own way. The first is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s three-volume The Gulag Archipelago. In this world-famous, monumental work published in 1973, the author offers a horrifying look into life in the Soviet prison camps. Contrary to popular opinion at the time, Solzhenitsyn traced the gulags‘ origins all the way back to Lenin and argued that they were inherent to the Soviet political system. This came as a shock to gullible Western intellectuals who excused the existence of the camps as a mere deviation under Stalin.
Continue readingI lost business today from a person who was in fear of me having to enter her house. After all, she conveyed, she would need to let the entire place air out for 48 hours before she could set foot in it again herself, so I was told to come back sometime when the novel coronavirus has blown over. Even my promise of mask-wearing and diligent handwashing couldn’t allay her fears. And so another good chunk of revenue went out the door.
Continue readingIt is easy to dismiss the present state of our Republic as yet another momentary crisis which, though perhaps pivotal, will blow over by the end of the year or maybe next. After all, we are the country of the Salem Witch Trials, McCarthyism and the day care sex abuse frenzy of the 1980s. It’s quite possible that this moral panic, too, shall pass without eroding the Constitution.
Continue readingAlright, let’s just call the present iconoclasm what it is: a moral panic. Doing so obviously puts one at risk of being placed on the wrong side of history — or worse, being labeled a racist — but a moral panic it is nonetheless.
Those who have been predicting doom and gloom for our Western civilization (such as yours truly) can hardly be surprised by what is going on. As I’ve been saying for a while, our youth have been steeped in a pernicious moral relativism for a dangerously long period of time now. Nothing good could come of it. As Andrew Sullivan noted the other day, “we all live on campus now.”
Continue readingThe rapidness with which our once beloved country seems to be disintegrating before our eyes is truly astounding. Perhaps we’re all finally losing our heads due to the COVID-19 lockdowns. Why not go out and loot the local Target and burn small businesses to the ground in the name of racial justice?
Continue readingIf the present coronavirus pandemic has exposed one thing in its wake, it is the fragility of our economic interconnectedness and the whirlwind events across the globe can spawn in our own backyard. Whether this crisis will be brought to an end tomorrow or come next Christmas, historians 250 years from now may look back upon this moment as the dawn of a new era.
Continue readingIf the horrendous acts of terrorism in El Paso and Dayton this past weekend made me angry and sad, reading the empty-headed commentaries on social media within all but seven minutes of the respective events proved even more of a mental challenge. The usual culprits emanating from them are a) President Trump; b) the NRA; and c) the perpetrators (in that order). While the police are still in the dark about a motive on the part of Connor Betts, the Dayton shooter, posts on his social media accounts strongly suggest that he ought not to be lumped together with Patrick Crusius, the El Paso shooter who left a white supremacist ‘manifesto’ in support of his deeds.
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The Free Dutchman 