So Who Is John Galt, Anyway?

Announcement by , September 26, 2019

I’m pleased to announce that So Who Is John Galt, Anyway? A Reader’s Guide to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is now available at Amazon. You can buy it as a paperback or as an e-book. A lot of credit goes to my wife, Sherri, for spending a couple of weeks of her time making the […]

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President Trump’s Unpatriotic “Patriotic Education”

Feature Article by , September 23, 2020

Anti-American propaganda in schools, such as the blatantly inaccurate but widely lauded 1619 Project, is a real problem. So it is certainly welcome to hear someone prominent complain that it “rewrites American history to teach our children that we were founded on the principle of oppression, not freedom.” The problem is that this was said by […]

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The Causal Theory of Property

Feature Article by , September 18, 2020

In writing recently about the relationship between property and people, I was prompted to think more about the philosophical basis for property right. In that article, I quoted John Locke’s theory that the source of property rights is the individual’s ownership of his own body and labor, so that he acquires rights in land or […]

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The Campus Surveillance State

Feature Article by , September 17, 2020

That many college campuses have adopted a culture of intellectual intolerance has become something of a cliché, as well as a chess piece in the culture wars that are now consuming our politics. One side has turned the campus woke-scolds into an all-purpose bogeyman, a preview of an imminent totalitarianism the likes of which we […]

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The Most Important Election of My Lifetime

Feature Article by , September 15, 2020

2020 Election Preview Below, I’m including two items I have been working on for The Bulwark, one published this morning and the other probably going up in the next week, along with some additional commentary at the end about the relative importance of this election. And yes, you will find out that my main headline […]

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The Anti-Flight 93 Election

Feature Article by , September 15, 2020

I’ve recently noticed a miniature wave of former Never Trumpers (or at least those who claim they were Never Trump) recanting and saying they have to vote for Donald Trump now because the left is such a catastrophic threat, either because of the riots or because of “cancel culture” or for some combination of these […]

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“Signposts on the Road to Hell”

Commentary by , September 9, 2020

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. The Humanitarian with the Molotov Cocktail My article on looting and property rights is now up at The Bulwark, where it’s getting a fair bit of attention. I’m not the only one taking on this issue. At The Atlantic, Graeme Wood offers a scathing review of Vicky […]

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Property Is People

Feature Article by , September 8, 2020

When rioters began looting and burning businesses in cities across the country, their apologists assured us that this was “just property,” that it could not compare to the need to defend human lives, and anyway, it would all be covered by insurance. That argument was put forward in an instantly notorious NPR interview with Vicky Osterweil, who […]

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“The Very Heart and Soul of Conservatism”

Commentary by , September 1, 2020

Republican Convention Roundup, Part 2 The debate over what Democrats should do about the race riots is heating up. I happily took a break from Twitter for a while to avoid the unhinged responses to my own piece in The Bulwark urging the Democrats to get on top of the issue. Among the saner pundits, […]

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Our Civil War Pre-Enactment

Feature Article by , September 1, 2020

Living where I do, on the location of a minor skirmish in the Wilderness Campaign, I’ve been to my share of Civil War re-enactments. I’ve always found it a bit of an odd hobby, to want to play-act such a cataclysm of internecine hatred and killing. But perhaps the point was that we can play at it […]

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Biden Needs a Sister Souljah Month

Commentary by , August 28, 2020

I suggested a little while ago that Joe Biden needs a Sister Souljah moment, a reference to an incident in the 1992 presidential campaign when Bill Clinton criticized a race-baiting black rapper. Facing steep odds of winning the White House, Clinton took the chance of slightly alienating the radical wing of the Democratic party for the […]

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