Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. In Defense of “Safe Spaces” For a movement obsessed with “safe spaces,” the left sure doesn’t want anybody to have one. I posted a little while ago about a bizarre leftist campaign to purge political wrongthinkers from the realm of knitting, of all places. Now the website […]
Tag Archives | Communism
The God That Failed First
On Friday, I sent out an overview of Sohrab Ahmari’s attack on conservative “liberalism”–a word he is using in its correct sense, unfortunately. That piece is now up at The Bulwark. But there is another aspect of that story that I wanted to delve into a little more deeply, which is the brief but dramatic […]
Salon of the Refused, Episode 7
Episode 7 of my video and podcast series, Salon of the Refused, is now available. I talk with an old friend, Bob Garmong, who spent most of the past decade as a lecturer at Dongbei University of Finance and Economics in Dalian, China, about his experiences there and the prospects for the country’s future. The […]
World News Roundup
American politics is more of a circus than usual these days, and aside from distracting us from the really important domestic issues–the growing economy, but also this administration’s total failure to rein in government spending and debt–it also distracts us from what is going on in the rest of the world. So I decided it […]
Finally, There’s Just One Side in Charlottesville
So the mainstream pundits are finally right. They said that there was only one side behind the violence in Charlottesville last year, despite extensive reports of black-clad, far-left “Antifa” eagerly brawling with the white nationalists. This has since been cemented as an article of dogma among mainstream “liberals,” who seem determined to run interference for […]
The Enlightenment Is Not the Enemy
Jonah Goldberg has a new book out defending the “liberal”—i.e., pro-freedom—legacy of the Enlightenment, the philosophical awakening of the 18th Century. Such a defense is certainly needed in light of the Enlightenment’s wholesale rejection by today’s mainstream intellectuals. Yet this has required many others on the right to come to terms with their views of […]
A Giant Effigy of Marx
Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. Jaw-Jaw Is Better Than War-War I recently responded to a claim, reflecting the conventional wisdom of the Trump-era right, that “ideas and persuasion are insufficient” for the pitched culture war we are currently in. This is often expressed in the conviction that scribblers like me are useless […]
Communism Is Idealist
I’ve been puzzling for some time over the continuing hold of Communism on the minds of America’s intellectuals. How could a system fail so completely for so long, in so many different variations, leaving a trail of death and suffering in its wake—and still be regarded as “idealistic”? The answer is that Communism is “idealist” […]
Five Things You Need to Read Today
Here’s your weekly update, for subscribers only, drawing your attention to five stories that are worth catching. Today, the main theme is the continuing war on facts and reason. 1. Making Fake News Great Again I just sent you an article on reason versus emotion in the gun control debate. (I would also recommend that […]
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A Reader’s Guide to Atlas Shrugged
- What If the World Isn’t Ending? December 9, 2019
- The Call Is Coming from Inside the House December 4, 2019
- Ayn Rand Is for Adolescents November 30, 2019
- The Triumph of the Will November 26, 2019
- Holiday Sale November 26, 2019
- The Parasite That Kills Its Hostess November 18, 2012
- Radical New York City Democrats December 31, 2013
- Confessions of a Reluctant Culture Warrior December 20, 2014
- Pathological Altruism July 3, 2013
- The 25 Craziest Things Said at the Democratic Debate October 14, 2015
Fascism with Communist Slogans
Ayn Rand once predicted that we were going to end up with “a fascist system with communist slogans.” This has been going through my mind as I’ve been watching the Democratic Party primary contest. No, it’s not quite fascism, not yet, nor is it quite communism (except maybe for Bernie). Yet most of the Democratic […]