If even the devil needs an invitation to cross the threshold, why do we allow Jimmy Kimmel or Stephen Colbert or Bill O’Reilly into our lives? Why should it be impossible to choose the cultural influences that will determine what sort of people most Americans are?
A 27 minute podcast: putting the American suicide in an historical context.
Thomas Fleming begins a podcast series in which the main themes of his first book are explored in a more conversational tone. In this 29 minute podcast he and Rex take up the origin of the book and the great fallacy that underlies almost all modern isms and ologies.
When over a year ago now I wrote on: “A Nest of Swamp Rats,” I treated the leading actors in the pursuit of the Democrats’ Russian hoax as exemplars of institutional or bureaucratic mediocrity, of opportunism, arrogance, and stupidity. Apart from a mention of John Brennan’s youthful Communism, I credited none of them with anything as risky as thinking.
The family is not the only natural social institution that is being undermined by the modern state. Men are by nature competitive, and they created war and games, politics and the marketplace, to satisfy their need to contend for status, wealth and power. One of leftism’s greatest successes has been to adopt the social language of Christianity and to transfer it from enclosed households (which are naturally communal and socialist) to the open fields where men do battle with each other. This is a point I made briefly in The Morality of Everyday Life and which has been expanded...
My second law of presidential elections is that the best liar wins (usually). This law goes a long way toward explaining why it took so long for the result of the 2000 election to be declared: Both parties were working round the clock, not only in the lower courts but also in the ultimate TV court of appeal, to spin flax into flannel. In this never-ending period of what everyone seems to be calling a political crisis, no one is willing to talk about the underlying problems which have nothing to do with the electoral college or voting machines but with the basic legitimacy–or rather the lack thereof–of the American regime.
Tulsi Gabbard lets the cat out of the old bag: “Now we know — it was always you, through your proxies and … powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose. It’s now clear that this primary is between you and me. Don’t cowardly hide behind your proxies. Join the race directly.”
In striking out on our own, we did not intend to surrender the wisdom painfully acquired by earlier generations of classical liberals, libertarians, and small-government conservatives. If government interference in private life was a major source of social and moral dissolution, then it made no sense to call upon governments to save the family, restore community, or promote great art.
Alfred Kinsey was an important link in the drive to transform common law into code law, law that simply expressed and relied upon the will and authority of the state.
