I watched on Fox News some of the Saturday pro-Palestinian protest in Washington, D.C. It reminded me of the left-wing demonstrations I reported on 40 years ago when I was a journalist there. Most marches then were against Reagan’s nuclear arms buildup. One of the marcher groups was Women Strike for Peace, founded by far-left Rep. Bella Abzug, remembered for wearing colorful hats.
America used to be a country with a bland national uniformity of culture and attitude that was belied whenever you entered the bizarre world of isolated small towns. In its own way, Superior is as strange a place as Charleston or New Orleans (the way it used to be) or the celebrated villages in the valley of the Miskatonic River
We are going to launch the New Year by taking nominations for the New Index of classic books to ban. To be eligible the book and writer must be either included in some Great Books series or, at least, be a staple of the postmodern curriculum, e.g., The Diary of Ann Frank or The Handmaid’s Tale or The Awakening.
In this land of bogus holidays, I hereby assume the authority to declare this day the OFFICIAL BAN A BOOK DAY!
I woke up today with this happy thought. Born in April 1945, I am a 8 months too old to be a Boomer. That means I enjoy the rare privilege of not belonging to some stereotyped identity created by sociologists and exploited by marketing geniuses to enslave the minds of anyone dumb enough to call himself a Boomer, Gen Xer, Millennial, etc. Don’t Trust Anyone Under 78!
Several commenters have been kind enough to say they liked our recent pieces on the Middle East. I am grateful for the kind words. I am no expert on Middle Eastern affairs, though I flatter myself I know a few things about the history of the region. If my way of thinking has any distinctive merit, it is because I have followed a line of thought you can find in such diverse political thinkers as Thucydides, Machiavelli, the Marquis of Halifax, Gaetano Mosca, Roberto Michels, and Sam Francis
I am afraid to go to sleep at night. What if Hamas decided to stage an attack on my house in Rockford. My cynical friend Jeremy Chiaroscuro tried to reassure me.
So-called conservatives have been orchestrated into indignant self-righteous action again, this time by a low budget action film about child sex trafficking, ‘Sound of Freedom’ (SoF). The usual pop celebrity mainstream voices on the left all panned the film thereby baiting the attention of many normies and affecting their predictable knee-jerk reactions.
I visited war-torn Syria in 2016. A country where in some regions there are no longer 3/4 young men between the ages of 18-45 thanks to the conflict. What makes it even worse is that this conflict was planned in advance. The opposition has been armed and trained by the US and its allies since 2006. “Democratic freedom fighters” who would bring Syria into the Western liberal world, so was the propaganda that was fueled here at the beginning of the Arab Spring. For me, this was also a far from my bed show at the beginning. Until those democratic...
