Enjoying the view from Limbo
Donald Trump continues to insist that the stumbling block to a peace deal in Ukraine is President Zelensky. (Why do I refer to Trump as “Donald” while at the same time referring to the leader of Ukraine as “President Zelensky”? Because I am a Platonist who believes that truth consists primarily in proper definitions. Zelensky is the president of Ukraine. Trump has ceased...
Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published April 22, 2025
Back in 2013, when Barack Obama was well into his second term of running roughshod over American principles and destroying the last remnants of the constitutional guardrails against excessive executive power, I wrote an essay for American Thinker in which I attempted to outline the wide array of forces that had been gradually corralled into a generational shift away from the moral premises...
Purely by accident, as I sit down to eat my breakfast this morning in Korea, I have stumbled upon the live broadcast of Trump’s latest White House clown show, this time with special guest Giorgia Meloni. And as usual with all the world leaders who dare to humiliate themselves this way — with the possible exception of Keir Starmer — I have to...
Remember how, back in the formative days of the so-called Tea Party conservative movement, the Republican grassroots mocked and ridiculed a woman who infamously gushed about how, if Barack Obama were elected president, he would pay her mortgage and put gas in her car? Today, these same Tea Partiers are listening to Donald Trump’s spokescheerleader answering a reporter’s question about whether the White...
In order to become the American president, a man must not merely win an election but must ultimately swear an oath to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” In order to swear an oath in a morally or legally binding way, a man must have the capacity, both intellectual and linguistic, to understand the terms entailed by that oath....
Douglas Murray, one of those “trending” fake intellectuals du jour who manifestly calculates his every angle and word with his fame-dazzled eyes focused on the many and the money, has garnered some headlines this week for (sarcasm alert) daring, while a guest on Joe Rogan’s podcast, to criticize the host’s approach to choosing guests, which sometimes causes him to lend his enormous platform...
America Descending / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published April 10, 2025 · Last modified April 18, 2025
Surprisingly, Donald Trump’s latest sociopathic fantasy lunge at becoming the most influential and beloved human who ever lived — namely his utterly illegal, immoral, and anti-American attempt to assume single-handed control over the entire world’s economy by way of a near-universal and whimsical imposition of wealth-killing tariffs — has had one, and only one, unequivocally positive effect. It has blessed us all with...
Sleep tight.– All this, so that seventy million frightened children may dream unto their graves, and finally unto their own private parcel of hell, in the warm cocoon of the most shameful mass delusion in world history. If their idol dies first, what will they do? I almost typed “frightened American children,” but decided not to sully the memory of a great country...
Liberty's Labors Lost / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published March 20, 2025 · Last modified March 27, 2025
Since my website has essentially become a repository of judgments and reflections that almost no one currently alive on this planet will ever read, let alone care about, why not open it up today for the words of another man in a similar situation, though one whose voice speaks with considerably more practical urgency than mine? His pleas will fall on ears at...
Elon Musk, the richest man ever to owe most of his fortune to government handouts and regulatory favors awarded to him to perform services utterly unjustified by the principles of limited government he now pretends to espouse, is trying to justify his random none-of-this-will-ever-affect-anyone-I-know torching of the federal bureaucracy in exactly the Trumpian way one would expect from an unprincipled businessman without a...
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