Reliance on polls may be leading pundits to overlook important features of the election I was in Washington DC this time four years ago — a week before the 2016 election. The mood was eerie, not in the least because of all the morbid Halloween decorations. With skeletons hanging from trees, carved pumpkins on porches […]
Rod Dreher’s new book, already a bestseller on Amazon, examines the erosion of religious freedom in the West and draws valuable lessons from the faithful who survived under Communist oppression. Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents by Rod Dreher, Sentinel, 2020 256pp Live Not By Lies is Rod Dreher’s widely-anticipated follow-up to The Benedict […]
Trump’s strong leadership so far has produced excellent economic results. Even weakened by the virus, he is still more robust than Biden. For Americans, the most surreal election cycle in a century just got even more surreal. We are attempting to conduct an election in which the entire direction of the country hangs in the […]
What we need is careful science, not scientism Eight months into this pandemic, we sometimes seem to be no nearer to knowing what’s going on than we were at the beginning. Lockdowns vs. no lockdowns; masks vs. no masks; hydroxychloroquine vs. remdesivir; opening schools vs. closing schools, etc., etc. Every day, top-level experts express significantly […]
Does Critical Race Theory promote racial harmony or does it “sow division” as the Trump administration claims? And what is its relation, if any, to Marxism? With the November election just around the corner, it’s only to be expected that President Trump would seek to rally conservative voters and drive his supporters to the polls. […]
With months of race riots continuing in the United States, identity politics is a phrase all too familiar to us in 2020. Often credited to French philosopher Michel Foucault, identity politics is a window on the world that sees all social relationships as a power struggle. Black versus white, male versus female, gay versus straight, and on […]
It is not too much of a stretch to suggest that 2020 has been an interesting year (in the sense of “May you live in interesting times”). Fires, plagues, floods, Presidential impeachment, global economic meltdown, lockdowns: this year has seen them all. And we’re only in September. Thank goodness there isn’t a major election coming […]
Why are the Yogyakarta Principles so influential? Russian feminist Anna Zobnina’s excellent summary of the Yogyakarta Principles at a recent seminar. The reasons for the rapid conquest by transgender activists of the media, universities, government departments and woke corporations are mysterious. Is it cultural? Psychological? Philosophical? Legal? Without being a complete explanation, one reason is […]
Families across the globe have been affected by the ever-changing and uncertain working environment wrought by government responses to Covid-19. For many families both jobs and childcare have become less certain. For families that finely balance time with their children, work, childcare and everything else, lockdown periods are highly stressful. My experience is that many […]
Have the benefits of marriage become a middle-class secret? Why should only the middle and upper classes enjoy the advantages of marriage as opposed to cohabitation? This is among questions posed by a recent Centre of Social Justice UK report called “Family Structure Still Matters.” With married parents twice as likely to stay together than cohabiting ones, […]
Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks, Sean Reed, George Floyd, Trayford Pellerin. The list of African-Americans killed by police in 2020 is long and dismal. And now Kenosha, Wisconsin, is burning after a police officer shot 29-year-old Jacob Blake in the back four times earlier this week. It seems that everything that the Black Lives […]
White majority Protestant Christians on the way to becoming a minority For decades now, one of the favourite talking points of America’s political analysts and pundits has been about the political and electoral transformation in the United States favouring the Democrats from an unstoppable diversification of the electorate due to immigration. Due to this trend, it is argued, the white […]
Facts once assumed true by everyone are quickly becoming controversial. This is a trend we have all become aware of. There is, for example, increasing pressure to suggest that pregnancy can happen to women and men. People who wish to express that “all lives matter” may now choose to self-censor for fear of reprisal. You […]
Hard-core true believers didn’t go away. Some of them became university lecturers. One of the advantages of aging is that you actually can witness history “rhyming,” see the same ideas and events recycle through culture and, sometimes, witness the same consequences. When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, there were two kinds […]
“False Alarm: How Climate Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet” is the new book by the Danish political scientist and author, Bjørn Lomborg. In it, Lomborg hones in on the subject which is rapidly becoming the most consequential area of political and social debate: climate change. […]