The Other McCain

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

Chad Allan & the Expressions

Chad Allan and his groovy band, circa 1964. My mind works in mysterious ways and I’ve forgotten why I started the research that led me down a rabbit hole into an obscure tale from Canadian musical history. In 1958, a singer named Allan Kowbel formed a band in Winnipeg originally called Allan and the Silvertones. […]

My Kind of People: Junior Johnson and the End of the American Way of Life

NASCAR legend Junior Johnson and his 1940 Ford. My wife has recently re-arranged my office and, in the process, moved some books that I hadn’t read in a while, so the other day I picked up Tom Wolfe’s The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965) and began re-reading it. The best journalism — and Tom Wolfe, […]

Decline and Fall

Marcus Aurelius. “I devoured Gibbon. I rode triumphantly through it from end to end and enjoyed it all. I scribbled all my opinions on the margins of the pages, and very soon found myself a vehement partisan of the author against the disparagements of his pompous-pious editor.” — Winston Churchill, My Early Life A six-volume […]

George H.W. Bush, R.I.P.

  The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones . . . Former President George Herbert Walker Bush will be universally praised in the wake of his death because it is always the policy of liberals to celebrate the dead Republicans they formerly defamed, as a means […]

The Banality of Liberalism

  This photo, showing SS men and female auxiliaries (Helferinnen, “helpers”) is from an album collected during World War II by Karl Hoecker, a top SS officer at the Auschwitz death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. The photo was taken in 1944 at Solahütte, “a little-known resort for the Nazi German guards, administrators, and auxiliary personnel” […]

Jim Jones, Harvey Milk and the Weird Cult of ‘Revolutionary Suicide’

Daniel J. Flynn and his new book, ‘Cult City.’ A strange and chilling saga: Thanksgiving, 1978 was bookended by two of the most bizarre and notorious events in American history. On November 18 in Guyana, hundreds of members of Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple committed mass suicide, or were murdered. Over the next few days, news […]

Reading Samizdat

  One of my habits — perhaps not a good habit, but valuable to my career as a journalist — is studying the radical fringe. This is part of what I learned from Hunter S. Thompson‘s career. If you want to know where society is heading in the future, pay attention to what is being […]

New Must-Read Book: ‘Cult City’

Daniel J. Flynn and his new book, ‘Cult City.’ Daniel J. Flynn is one of my favorite authors. His 2008 book, A Conservative History of the American Left, is a classic, and now he’s published an important new history, Cult City: Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco: I toiled over my […]

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