The way the world ends, T.S. Eliot reminds us, is “Not with a bang but a whimper.” But our country’s seeming slide into the abyss is starting to feel like a roller coaster ride, if not one where the passengers end up safely back at the loading station.
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The Anti-Antifa Handbook (Review of Andy Ngo’s “Unmasked”)
Reading about Antifa, its modi operandi, its motives, and its insidious influences on our Western societies has been a long-time pre-occupation of yours truly. Growing up in Western Europe there was never any shortage of developments surrounding this topic. But, notwithstanding its dangers back there and then, Antifa’s European activities at the time couldn’t hold a candle to what happened in the United States in 2020.
Continue readingNo, Trump Won’t Bring About Authoritarianism — But Biden Might
An 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 readingA Return To Normalcy Requires the Re-election of President Trump
Justice 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 readingIn Defense of Liberalism (Review Of “Cynical Theories”)
It 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 readingA Tale of Two Narratives: Review of “White Fragility”
Yours 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 readingStampede Of the Brainless Smartphone Addicts
Alright, 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 Logical End Result of Postmodernism Is Here
The 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?
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The Free Dutchman 