Author: Diogenes

Political candidates who prey on anxieties have succeeded in exploiting the ignorance of all too many Americans. It is frightening that such candidates could rise to prominence in this country. We need better education to prevent the appeal of such demagogues. This is the sort of stuff we hear every day from leftist pundits who are convinced that their side has a monopoly on intelligence and education. Anyone who has been to even a halfway respectable college will become a leftist Democrat. The connection between education and leftism is something like the law of gravity. Just as we know that an...

Both sides of the Washington duopoly firmly believe in the existence of moderate Islam.   I am not referring to the everyday Islam of most Indonesian or Indian Muslims talked up by Islamophiles, but to an Islam that is supposedly a moderate political force.  This theoretical Islam is nonviolent and “peace-loving”. Its adherents supposedly yearn for self-determination, elections, a “free press,” and the protection of minority rights. According to Fox News, this Islam is absolutely necessary as an “ally” against the extremists, which is why  Donald Trump’s Muslim ban is such a terrible idea. There are two problems with this moderate...

The European ruling class likes to tell its subjects that the massive influx of migrants from the Middle East is harmless.  These are people just Europeans, they say, but unlike the privileged people of the West, the migrants have have had the bd luck to be living in a war zone.  We are morally obliged to accept as many of them as would like to come, because we can never say no to a refugee from anywhere, lest we be like the cold-hearted Christians who turned a blind eye to the Holocaust. The narrative is wrong on many levels.  Perhaps...

America’s well-endowed public museums are  classrooms where visitors learn lessons in American political ideology. These institutions are centers of political indoctrination where the political class uses the displays and descriptions to teach their leftist storylines. All of the information is cobbled together to reinforce the lessons of public education and to tilt all political conversation.  Seeing buses of children come in to these venues on school trips to be brainwashed can be a disconcerting experience, In recent months, I have gone to the U.S. Constitution Center in Philadelphia and to the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC.  Of the two,  the more immediately relevant to contemporary...

    The outrage over Donald Trump’s remarks in recent weeks  has not only been hysterical and pitiful; it has, on a very fundamental level, exposed one of the most pernicious pillars of post-Christian psychobabble in the modern West: namely, the extolling and promotion of “empathy” as a moral guidepost. The response to Trump may have been the most clear example to date of how this very clever trick from the evil one has created a nasty cultural infection in America and Europe. It is a form of Christian heresy, perhaps not as overt as Luther’s challenge to the Church in...

Dear Reader, I would like to announce today that I whole-heartedly agree with the Republican establishment and the American media establishment that Donald Trump owes an apology to all of us for his recent comments on Islamic immigration, but with one caveat: I think Trump should apologize not for what he said about Muslims but for what he did not say. Donald Trump should apologize to the American people for failing to even broach the topic of the Council On American-Islamic Relations’ track record. CAIR is the most visible Islamic organization in the United States, quoted quite liberally by the major media...

Fox News commentators do not often make an intelligent criticism of President Obama’s foreign policy.  They are usually content to point out the obvious—that Obama is misguided—while offering alternatives that would hardly work any better. Nonetheless, the neoconservative establishment was right to express outrage in February,  when then-State Department spokesperson Marie Harf declared on Chris Matthews’ MSNBC program that defeating ISIS in the long-term will require addressing the “root causes” of terrorism, such as lack of jobs and poverty. This statement was palpably absurd, but it also reflected the consensus of the American and European ruling classes, a consensus that...

Answer these questions honestly.  If you score zero, you are rightwing; 5-10 makes you a conservative liberal, while a score of 15 tells you that you have reached the highest plateau of political correctness. 1. I have a nice Muslim friend; therefore ISIS is not Islamic. 2. The vast majority of the world’s “1.6 billion Muslims” are not part of ISIS or al-Qaeda; therefore ISIS and al-Qaeda have nothing to do with Islam. 3. The presence of large Islamic populations in Europe and North America is culturally enriching and intellectually invigorating. 4. Christianity and the Catholic Church have historically suppressed...