Monthly Archive: September 2016

Whither Canada?

(Originally published at American Thinker in October 2015) Picture a first-class leftist self-promoter: riding an incoherent wave of anti-establishment fever to the highest seat in the land through sheer chutzpah and “newness”; easily exposed as a Marxist-influenced, neo-Maoist rabble-rouser, but somehow able to persuade the general populace that he is a pragmatic uniter; sweeping the media and the academics off their feet with...

Allan Bloom: Remembering the Teacher

Allan Bloom was a great teacher. A great teacher is a man whose manner of framing the important questions continues to inform his students’ thoughts long after they have left the teacher behind. A great teacher’s lasting impression is not his “personality,” that collection of idiosyncrasies which make him memorable in the way of a good vacation, but his mind—the way his reasoning...

Are We Solving the Mystery of Atlantis?

Ancient Greek literature is replete with intimations of lost civilizations, great floods, and slow renewals of human knowledge beginning at some unspecified point in a misty past. The most famous of these intimations is Plato’s legend of Atlantis, a great naval power which was supposedly repelled by an equally great Athens more than nine thousand years before Plato wrote of it, and which...

Mann vs. Steyn: Heresy Shall be Crushed

(Originally published in July 2013) Remember when scientists and other truth-seekers used to get all riled up about the way the Catholic Church treated Galileo? The outcry was not over the fact that Galileo was a “peer-reviewed” researcher, and therefore beyond question. Quite the contrary: the argument was that, from the point of view of the quest for truth, no one, including the...

Thought Terminated, or Kafka at Kansas University

A Kansas University professor who used the n-word during a class discussion about race is on leave while the university investigates a discrimination complaint against her. Thus begins an article about one Andrea Quenette, a thirty-three year old assistant professor of communications, whose career has just been permanently blemished, if not ended, because a small group of KU graduate students decided to “expose”...

Benghazi Reveals the Heart of Progressivism

(Originally published in May 2013) In the first months after the Benghazi attack, the most urgent question, and one only rarely asked, was “What were Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton doing during the seven and a half hours between the initial emergency communications from Benghazi and the final American deaths?” A negative answer was provided in February by Leon Panetta: they were not...

Benghazi and the Banality of Evil

(Originally published in August 2013) Is it just me, or is the string of distractions that seem to pop up right on cue every time new light is about to be shed on the Benghazi story getting a little old? Months late, CNN has gotten around to “breaking” a story that might help to complete the disturbing puzzle for the mainstream public, namely...

Drudge in the Dregs Again

(Originally published in February 2012) Republican establishment media alert: On the eve of the Michigan and Arizona primaries, the establishment’s new favorite enforcer, Matt Drudge, was at it again. As I have chronicled so many of The Drudge Report‘s clever, and cleverly timed, manipulations over the course of this primary season, I trust no one will have the gall to suggest that this...

Obama’s Fake Twitter Followers Explained

(Originally published in September 2013) Barack Obama has 36.9 million Twitter followers, 19.5 million of whom, it turns out, are fake. This is a very disturbing sign for Obama’s opponents, as it demonstrates just how much appeal the president still has with his key support base, namely those who identify most closely with him on a personal level — fake people. The Daily...

When Anger Trumps All, Freedom Loses

(Originally Published in February 2016) One of the most dangerous effects of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is the venomous anger his demagoguery has cultivated among his more engaged supporters, to be spewed at anyone who dares to express concern about any of their idol’s (yes, idol’s) soft spots. Just click on any article, on any website, critical of anything about Trump, and navigate...