January 15, 2021

Are the End Times Near?

A few years back my wife and I flew to Georgia where she was keynoting a panel discussion on feminism at Kennesaw State University. We were picked up at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta by the conference organizers, who naturally e...

January 5, 2021

The election will not stand

This election isn't going to stand. It will not stand up to the facts pouring in from every quarter that a fraud of unprecedented magnitude has been perpetrated on the American people — or, at any rate, on those who may still be consider...

December 20, 2020

Sticking with Trump to the Bitter (or Glorious) End

“To defeat Trump,” writes Victor Davis Hanson, “many of our institutions were deformed.” Indeed, we have witnessed a flagrant burlesque of electoral procedure, including the specter of foreign interference by China, Iran and R...

December 5, 2020

The Great Reset and Klaus Schwab

Klaus Schwab, the chief proponent of a global project called the “Great Reset,” may be the most influential “intellectual” in the world today. A former member of the UN Advisory Board on Sustainable Development, he is the foun...

November 30, 2020

The New New Normal

Crossing the rather grim Grenzübergangsstelle on my first visit to communist East Germany, two things struck me with uncommon force: the gun-emplacement towers every few kilometers along the Hanover-Berlin autobahn, and the comportment of East G...

November 28, 2020

Are the people ready to rise?

In many if not most households across the country, the election imbroglio is obviously the chief topic of discussion, splitting many families into warring camps, uniting others in solidarity with President Trump.  Fortunately, in our own ho...

November 27, 2020

What the Election Will Come Down To

We need to begin with what most people almost surely know, despite the predictable disclaimers and pro forma expressions of doubt emerging all over the infoscape, namely, the 2020 election is in process of being stolen in what amounts to an insidious...

November 23, 2020

The capitulation conservatives

One of the many disheartening aspects of the current electoral scandal, the greatest fraud ever perpetrated in the history of the United States, is the extent to which a significant number of conservatives and conservative news-and-opinion sites have...

November 22, 2020

Lockdowns Are Serial Killers. End them Now.

We are constantly told by our political leaders and the compliant media that a pandemic lockdown is absolutely necessary if we are ever to defeat the COVID virus. Mask mandates, quarantine camps, self-isolating, limited sociability, the stoking of pu...

November 15, 2020

Donald Trump is the only legitimate ‘President-Elect’

As the greatest electoral drama in American history continues to play itself out, the media syndicate, the mammoth platforms and the fictive fact-checkers keep assuring us that there is no evidence of voter fraud, and that all claims to the contrary ...

November 13, 2020

The 2020 Election: Fact or Fiction?

All too many people, on the right as well as the left, are acting as if Joe Biden has won the 2020 election, when they must know that, as of this moment, he has not. Given the accumulating evidence of illegal maneuvers and documented corruption am...

November 11, 2020

Does Anyone Care about the Truth Anymore?

Ferreting out political and historical truth from the welter of partisan voices and official disinformation, so far as this is possible, is no easy task. Not many of us are capable or desirous of doing so. This is perhaps the major debit in a prosper...

September 13, 2020

The Religion of Covid

On the signboard of our local church, all reference to Sunday Service and accompanying Bible texts have vanished. In their place we read the homily: Fewer Faces and Open Spaces, attributed not to the minister Gordon K. Brownmiller, but to British Col...

August 23, 2020

A Revolution in Sensibility -- and What to Do About It

For many Americans, the enemy is the conservative patrimony of individual agency, traditional marriage, competitive achievement, historical memory, freedom of thought, expression and peaceful assembly, and the morality of public reciprocity. The hand...

July 21, 2020

The Age of Conspiracy

I sometimes think that when future historians look back on our time, they will label it “The Age of Conspiracy.” And there would be some truth to that. One tends to see conspiracies, plots and secret plans galore, wherever one looks, whet...

July 16, 2020

Marxo-Capitalism at Work

It may well be that the hoary political distinction between left and right that has embedded itself in the language since the French Revolution of 1788-89, when the radical anti-monarchists and Jacobins sat on the left side of the chamber in the Nati...

July 12, 2020

Descending into Chaos

The medieval Christian conception of the great chain of being, so ably described and analyzed by Arthur Lovejoy and E. M. Tillyard, has been one of the most resonant concepts addressing mankind’s unique position in the cosmos. Situated between ...

July 5, 2020

The Devil’s Pitchfork: Seeking the Origin of Our Present Troubles

The progressivist campaign to destroy America is three-pronged, the tines of the devil’s pitchfork, namely: de-individuation, de-historicizing, and what I’m tempted to call pre-eminent domain (the power of the state to take more than one...

June 28, 2020

Then They Came for Jesus

In the Theater of the Absurd that passes today for Western culture, the issue of complexion is paramount. It now appears that “white” is bad, pale skin a sign of endemic bigotry, race hatred and colonial violence. Iconoclasm has become all the rage, ...

June 21, 2020

An Uncivil War

Left-wing thinking effectively blanks out the real distinctions between representative government and totalitarian dictatorship. -       Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands There is a growing consensus amon...

June 9, 2020

We Have Entered a Looking-Glass World

Why, sometimes, I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. Lewis Carroll, Alice Through the Looking-Glass I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness Allen Ginsberg, Howl We live in ...

May 5, 2020

The Challenge of Decoupling from China

I would re-name the malaise from which we suffer CHINA-19. The acronym might stand for something like China’s Highly Infectious National Arsenal -- readers can supply their own candidates -- though the 19 is only a very specific temporal design...

April 19, 2020

Swans of a Different Color

The advent of COVID-19 and the subsequent nation-wide lockdown amounts to a wake-up call of historical proportions. It has alerted us to the possibility of “black swans” swimming into our lives, or in the words of Nassim Nicholas Taleb in...

March 20, 2020

Justin Trudeau's Canada Is Obama's Dream for America

To adapt a phrase from Matt Margolis, Justin Trudeau is the worst prime minister in Canadian history.  Like his American counterpart Barack Obama, he is both a know-nothing and a do-nothing leader and an unmitigated disaster to the wel...

March 6, 2020

It's All in the Stars

As I have previously argued at some length, moral ignominy does not fall within the purview of legal jurisprudence, and personal allegations do not constitute evidentiary certitude. Because a man is a scoundrel with predatory inclinations does not me...

February 25, 2020

House Hunters: A Window on a Derelict Culture

Like many people, I’ve been watching House Hunters and its cousin House Hunters International on HGTV with considerable interest, though perhaps not for the usual reasons. I understand the charm the program has for its viewers: the pleasure of ...

February 17, 2020

Canada: A Totalitarian State-in-Progress

To describe Canada as a totalitarian state-in-progress sounds like a gross and indeed absurd exaggeration. Yet many premonitory signs are present. In the words of political philosopher William Gairdner, author of The Book of Absolutes, The ...

December 29, 2019

Common Sense and Common Folk

Having recently moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, my wife and I decided, as part of our intention to integrate into the community, to attend a Vancouver Canucks hockey game. It was something of a special occasion as the game featured the only mee...

December 7, 2019

The Transrealism of the Left

In the ongoing and infinitely tedious sex wars of our time, pitting women against men, women against women, men against women, men against men, and whatever seventy or so gender claimants lurk in between, it looks like the transgender brigade is winn...

August 21, 2019

Short-Circuiting the Natural Love of Learning in Young People

There can be little doubt that the majority of today’s students are largely incapable of literate performance. They are also collectively devoid of humility before the majesty of the Great Tradition and the lessons of experience that would allo...

July 27, 2019

Computer-based Teaching of Remedial English Skills Just Doesn’t Work

College administrators and pedagogues, confronted with the incontrovertible signs of intellectual miasma among their students and perhaps unconsciously aware that they have raised a generation of toffee-nosed misfits and incompetents, have responded ...

July 19, 2019

Prison Death: A Sign of the Times

My friend is dead. His ordeal began several years ago when his teenage daughter accused him of sexual molestation -- the legal terms for his supposed crime were “sexual interference and sexual exploitation,” which allow for a wide latitud...

July 8, 2019

Why Big Tech Should Not Be Viewed as a Private Business

Should First Amendment rights be extended to Big Tech corporations to publish and censor as they please?  This is a question that has agitated the discussion on whether antitrust legislation should be applied to infogiants such as Google, YouTub...

July 3, 2019

On Moving to the Wacky, Wacky West

Now that my wife and I are moving to Vancouver on the west coast of Canada, I’ve begun thinking about the prospects, literary and political, that await us. We had no option in the matter, family obligations having trumped prior intentions. Life...

June 16, 2019

Law, Justice, and God: An Awkward Fit

The major purpose of common law and constitutional provisions, descending from the articles of the Magna Carta, is to protect the individual from the arbitrary incursions of the State and to ensure the enactment of justice. That is the ideal. But as ...

June 7, 2019

Triggering the Academic Lynch Mob

In his indispensable volume of essays The Captive Mind, Polish-American poet and intellectual Czeslaw Milosz developed the concept of “ketman,” borrowed from Arthur de Gobineau, which he defined as the false stance adopted by a person ...

May 21, 2019

Confessions of a Recovering White Supremacist

My name is David Solway and I am a recovering white supremacist. For many years I had no doubt that my supremacy and attendant privileges were morally and historically deserved. But of late I have begun to doubt these assumptions, owing to the tornad...

March 2, 2019

Politics and Music

“Politics is for old men.” Thus a Serbian friend informed me when I visited Belgrade shortly before everything fell apart. He wanted me to send him Beatles albums not easily obtainable at the time so he could listen to “happy music,...

January 26, 2019

Honoring Country (Music)

Country music has almost always been counter-counter-culture.  Country music honors ancestors and traditions, while hardcore rocker bands like Stick To Your Guns glorify felons Eric Garner, Mike Brown and Trayvon Martin, the ludicrously named Pr...

September 27, 2018

Surviving Our 'Survivors'

According to the feminist mantra, a veritable epidemic of male violence against women is sweeping the country.  Women in every walk of life are apparently prey to a wave of male sexual harassment, assault, and rape; they are victims of a ne...

September 26, 2018

Feminism in the Schools

In a devastating put-down of the "academic racket," Roger Kimball aptly quotes economist Herb Stein: what cannot go on forever won't.  But forever is a long time, a commodity we are fast running out of.  The question...

September 14, 2018

Toxic Feminism

The damage that radical feminism has done to our education system is incalculable.  Yet the movement continues to grow exponentially, and gender studies faculties, which promote female empowerment at the expense of what is called "toxi...

September 9, 2018

The Unbearable Whiteness of Being

There can be little doubt that the modern university, in its obsession with race, gender, and sexual orientation under the rubric of "social justice," has violated its core mandate, which, in the words of Matthew Arnold from Culture an...

August 24, 2018

A is for Activist?

It is dispiriting to note that those to whom we have entrusted the education of our children in the primary and public schools are woefully under-educated practitioners of the discipline.  In an article titled "Educational Rot,...

August 17, 2018

Marxism and Marriage

In its centuries-long efforts to dismantle the load-bearing structures of traditional and classical liberal society, Marxist dogma in its various forms – communism, socialism, neo-Marxism, Cultural Marxism – has embarked on a sustained ca...

August 11, 2018

The Problem with Gay Marriage

Lately I've been thinking of a former close friend and colleague who happens to be one of the most brilliant and insightful political writers of our time.  I had referenced his work in my own books long before I got to know him and was ...

August 4, 2018

Socialism and Equality

Observing the media hijinks and economic moronity of Democrat hopeful Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is prepared to increase taxation to unsustainable levels to pay for the socialist dream – "universal health care, tuition free higher educa...

July 31, 2018

Is There a Cure for the Modern University?

So much has gone wrong with the modern university that one scarcely knows where to begin.  Innumerable books have been written on the subject, from Hilda Neatby's 1953 So Little for the Mind to Michael Rectenwald's 2018 Springtime f...

July 17, 2018

Thank the Lord Donald Trump Is Not an 'Intellectual'

I recently participated in an email chain with conservative writers and thinkers on the inexhaustible subject of Donald Trump.  Some of my correspondents, while supporting Trump as a political champion, regretted his "coarseness."...

July 5, 2018

Guilt by Inadvertent Association

The propensity to condemn others, usually writers, for what we might call guilt by inadvertent association is a method of abuse or disparagement often used by those who are incapable of intelligent rebuttal.  It is a technique favored by th...

June 26, 2018

A Double Injustice Throws a Scare into the Nation's Judges

The June 5 voter recall of Judge Aaron Persky once again brings the Brock Turner 2015 rape case fiasco into the news.  Turner, a student-athlete at Stanford, was prosecuted and sentenced for sexually assaulting a young woman at a ...

June 8, 2018

The End of Merit

Everywhere we look, the principle of merit is compromised or regarded as the worst form of unfairness.  Sanctioned mediocrity is now the order of the day.  Standards of achievement are diluted, hard work goes unacknowledged, and t...

May 28, 2018

The Feminist Endgame

Remember the wave of light bulb jokes popular some years ago?  One in particular captured the essence of feminism: How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb? THAT'S NOT FUNNY! Modern feminism is characterized by a ...

May 18, 2018

The Plague of 'Theory' in Educational Discourse

There is an old pedagogical joke that has been making the rounds for years: those who can do.  Those who can't teach.  The joke has been supplemented by a tailgater: those who can't teach teach teachers.  One mig...

April 4, 2018

The Divine Frenzy of Feminism

If the spirit of the classical Greek playwright Euripides could be summoned from the grave and observe our feminist age, he would not be surprised. In The Bacchae (premiered circa 405 B.C.), he told the story of Pentheus, the unfortunate ruler of The...

March 19, 2018

The People's Republic of Canada

Despite a partially rigged popular vote and thanks to the Electoral College, America backed off a Hillary administration.  Canada would have given her a heftier majority than it awarded the androgynous Justin Trudeau.  We are head...

March 11, 2018

'Believe All Women' at Your Peril

We've heard it all before: "start by believing."  "Believe  survivors."  At a recent panel discussion at the Ottawa City Hall, where my wife, Janice Fiamengo, was one of three featured participant...

March 5, 2018

What Is #MeToo Good For?

What is #MeToo good for?  It is good for some women and bad for most men – and devastating for social civility.  It has yielded a bonanza of public sympathy, legitimized anti-male aggression, and created an atmosphere of pro...

February 24, 2018

Joe McCarthy and Lillian Hellman: The Hated Patriot vs. the Beloved Commie

Over half a century after the "Red Scare," playwright and memoirist Lillian Hellman, whose name is often coupled with her adversary Senator Joe McCarthy, seems to have emerged relatively unscathed in the court of elite progressivist opinion...

January 31, 2018

A Brief History of the Fake News Media

For far too long, I was convinced that the media were, on the whole, reliable purveyors of the news. For nearly three years I freelanced happily at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Music and Public Affairs, never suspecting that the Mothercor...

January 22, 2018

Disabilities R Us

Over the last decade, programs to accommodate students with disabilities have been installed at most institutions of higher education, spurred largely by government mandate.  Like George W. Bush's failed No Child Left Behind Act, with T...

January 17, 2018

The Left Will Always Be with Us

In a January 3, 2018 article for American Thinker, "The Left's 1942," J.R. Dunn argues that leftism may be approaching its last days, at least in the U.S.  Its losses, failures, and absurdities have ensured its gradual demise....

January 1, 2018

The Death of Academic Rigor

The notion of academic rigor has fallen on evil times.  In a typical instance of continuing epistemic degradation, Donna Riley, of Purdue University's School of Engineering Education, insists that rigor must be eliminated since rigor is a ...

December 18, 2017

Why I Quit Teaching

Some years back, I decided I had to quit the teaching profession to which I had dedicated half my life.  The modern academy, I felt, was so far gone that restoration was no longer possible.  Indeed, I now believe that complete collapse is t...

November 5, 2017

Is Islamic Reform Possible?

In “Reform Islam or Live the ‘New Normal’ Forever,” Roger Simon argues that Donald Trump’s often frustrated travel ban on problematic countries, though not illegal, is insufficient. “It's only a meager beginnin...

May 14, 2017

Review Course: The Birds and the Bees

The birds and the bees have got it right.  There's a male, there's a female, there's progeny.  And the social organism thrives.  In our heavily (and increasingly) sexualized culture, this appears to be less and less the cas...

May 4, 2017

Obama, the Anti-President

The Western Schism of the 13th and 14th centuries saw five antipopes contest the legitimate succession to the pontifical throne. The schism was officially put to rest by the Ecumenical Council of Constance in 1417, although three of the five papal ch...

April 24, 2017

Who Is Obama?

Ex-President Barack Obama is the mystery man of American politics. Given the absence of a viable paper trail, nobody can say for sure who he is. He manifests for us as a figure of multiple identities: a Christian, a Muslim, a secularist, a socialist,...

April 9, 2017

The War against Reality

Reality is a formidable opponent.  It never loses.  Sometimes the victory is immediate; in the political, cultural, and economic domains, it may take a while longer.  In any human confrontation with the intractable facts of life, physi...

March 28, 2017

A Plan to Reform Our Failing Universities

How can we save our universities from the rot that has invaded their precincts, eroding the traditional core of Western literary, cultural, scientific, technological, and professional instruction? What would such a makeover involve? To begin with,...

March 14, 2017

The German Dilemma

As one of Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood’s characters said in Surfacing, “The trouble some people have being German, I have being human.” True enough. But these days the trouble many Germans have being Germans has little to do wi...

January 20, 2017

A Plan for Draining the Swamp

Donald Trump has said that he intends to “drain the swamp,” a laudable if formidable challenge given the resistance he is bound to meet. The DNC is preparing a “war room” to fight Trump on a variety of political and domestic f...

January 18, 2017

United We Fall

Donald Trump has gone on record as wishing to unite the nation. In fact, he has declared it one of his urgent priorities in numerous post-election comments.  I hope this is mere presidential rhetoric, for America has long passed the point when u...

January 13, 2017

Getting It Right

I like to joke that I am never wrong, then correct myself: oops, yes I was wrong once, that was on March 25, 2008, around ten in the morning. Nonsense, of course. But I do want to say, however arrogant it may appear, that I have been generally right ...

December 12, 2016

The End of the University?

Anyone with a clear mind who has taught or studied at a university or whose children are currently enrolled in its troubled precincts knows that the academy has fallen on evil days. Preoccupied with “diversity,” “inclusiveness,...

November 13, 2016

The Shaping of Our Destiny

I am not a believing man – or certainly not in the traditional sense of attending religious services, observing the holy days, studying theological texts (except for research purposes – I have a decent knowledge of the Bible, the Talmud, ...

November 2, 2016

How the Left Muzzles Opposition

The engines of anti-democratic subversion have been grinding away for decades. The signs and portents all around us. The emergence of the scourge of political correctness and the lockstep leftist agitprop of the mainstream media, for example, are sur...

September 13, 2016

Why Socialism Will Always Be with Us

Socialism depends on three all-too-human factors: ignorance, naiveté and duplicity. The first is common if not disastrously ubiquitous, affecting large strata of any given population. The latter two pertain, in extreme measure and without the ...

August 27, 2016

Reconsidering the Female Franchise

  Almost precisely a century after women were granted the right to vote, it is perhaps time to assess the wisdom of this epoch-making decision.  Has female suffrage strengthened or weakened Western nations?  A disinterested survey o...

August 16, 2016

The Left Refuses to Learn

Much has been said and written about the deleterious effects of political correctness, which makes it next to impossible to speak truth without meeting volleys of censorship and defamation. Another cognitive tendency, however, is now reaching mass...

July 30, 2016

Feminism Attacks at All Levels

I recently came across a mewling article in one of Canada’s “progressive” mags, The Walrus, in which theatre critic Erika Thorkelson bemoans “the insidious sexism of the Canadian theatre world” and the comparative paucit...

July 5, 2016

Shooting the Feminist Sheriff

Sometimes one is tempted to shoot the sheriff. When we take note of what is going on in the town -- the moral degeneracy of its affairs, the raging puritanism that has installed itself as a twisted form of prurience, cruel punishment for perceived se...

April 22, 2016

Distrust Yourself before You Distrust the Candidate

Trust can be a double-edged sword when it is not founded on insight. In politics as in personal relations, one can trust the wrong person or distrust the right one -- with unfortunate consequences. Political candidates almost universally craft their ...

March 5, 2016

The Ideal of Perfection in Faith and Politics

The quest for the ideal is a human predisposition that shapes every social movement, political program, and religious communion. As we survey a world mired in war and social upheaval, we note seminal and competing conceptions of the ideal in human af...

February 15, 2016

A Message to Republicans

On the similarities between Canada’s Conservative party and the GOP, I have previously argued that the latter must not repeat the mistakes of the former if it wishes to succeed in November 2016. As I explained, the Conservatives lost the recent...

January 30, 2016

The Canadian Temper: A Warning to America

Canadians have long thought of themselves as morally superior to the supposedly vulgar and abrasive Americans. According to the self-justifying Canadian mythos, we embody a more enlightened and humane outlook on the world. In addition to oil, maple s...

January 18, 2016

Canada, the U.S., and the Donald

Canada’s most attention-grabbing personality is the new Liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau, whom a swooning electorate has just elevated to the highest office in the land. Possessing no relevant business or political experience and no demons...

November 1, 2015

M-Day: The Invasion of the West

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, wrote in his 2007 volume Europe: Today and Tomorrow: “There is a self-hatred in the West that can be considered only as something pathological. The West attempts in a praiseworthy manner ...

February 15, 2014

Remembering Barry Rubin

There is a Roman adage that determines how we are to relate to good men who have passed away: De mortuis nil nisi bonum (Of the dead, say nothing but good). This is the principle that governs every in memoriam, elegy or epitaph, following the convent...

January 18, 2014

The Reign of Collective Stupidity

An acquaintance of mine tells the story of finding himself in the midst of a public demonstration against Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. The chant being raised, so reminiscent of the 1960s, was: Hey, Hey, Ho Ho! Stephen Harper Has Got To Go....

October 8, 2011

A Point in Time

David Horowitz's writing career spans more than forty years and at least as many books. The major portion of his work deals with political and education subjects from a conservative vantage, establishing Horowitz's reputation as one of the most notab...