The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

It’s Classical Allusions Day

Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra? Quam diu etiam furor iste tuus nos eludet? Quem ad finem sese effrenata iactabit audacia? Nihilne te nocturnum praesidium Palati, nihil urbis vigiliae, nihil timor populi, nihil concursus bonorum omnium, nihil hic munitissimus habendi senatus locus, nihil horum ora voltusque moverunt? Patere tua consilia non sentis, constrictam iam […]

Sports, Politics and War: Morale Matters

The benefits of having a readership full of nerds is that sometimes they can teach you things, as in this comment on yesterday’s post: Obscure wargaming reference here. In the old Avalon Hill Game called Kingmaker — a simulation of the Wars of the Roses — one of the most annoying random event cards is […]

‘Return America to a Dark Past’

One of the things every liberal must believe is Progress, a quasi-religious faith which G.K. Chesterton mocked as “people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.” The apostles of Progress would have us believe that 1959 — the year I was born — was a nightmare dystopia, despite those snazy new Chevy station […]

Thinking of Christmas in July

Does it occur to you that, instead of celebrating the Fourth of July, when the Declaration of Independence was published, that instead we should celebrate our independence on the Nineteenth of October? It was on October 19, 1781, that Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, the victory that finally secured America’s independence, but the Nineteenth of October […]

AOC, ‘ADOS,’ and the Strange New Contours of ‘White Supremacy’

One of the basic problems of young extremists — this is equally true of Nick Fuentes and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — is that they don’t know history, and cannot be made to understand why history matters. A few years ago, Michelle Malkin tried to get Fuentes to abandon his Jew-hating (thus to make his “Groypers” a […]

Why Memory Matters

“People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.” — Edmund Burke Our Army son posted the photo above, showing his baby girl manning the machine gun, with the caption, “These gun teams get younger every day,” and I thought it was an appropriate illustration for this Memorial Day. As […]

‘Selma Envy’ and the Left’s Increasing Embrace of ‘Eliminationist Rhetoric’

For at least 30 years, going back to when I was covering local schools for the Rome (Ga.) News-Tribune, I’ve been worried about how history is taught in America’s education system. This problem was apparent to me by the time our oldest child was in kindergarten, and I didn’t at first fully understand until, working […]

How Trump Derangement Syndrome, #MeToo and Tumblrinas Ruined Disney

You probably never saw Raya and the Last Dragon, which was not exactly a box-office blockbuster — it barely broke even — and is certainly not destined to be remembered as a classic Disney cartoon. Nevertheless, Raya and the Last Dragon is historically important because the 2021 film marks the decisive turning point in the […]

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