August 23, 2024

Is Trump a liar?

All liberals agree that Donald Trump is a liar, but there is some disagreement among them as to precisely what kind of liar he is.  Many say he is a pathological liar.  Many others disagree; they hold that he is a congenital liar....

June 14, 2024

A Poor Reason to Be a Trump-Hater

People who emphatically disapprove of Donald Trump — in short, Trump-haters — are likely to be college graduates, whereas people who are quite devoted to him — Trump-lovers — are likely to lack a college degree. This differ...

June 12, 2024

The Resurrection of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

It was, I suppose, Jean-Jacques Rousseau who introduced the modern world to the idea that persons from the lower ranks of society generally outrank persons from the higher and more privileged ranks in moral goodness. Rousseau had in mind a contras...

April 23, 2024

A Century of Moral Anarchy?

In the golden age of the ancient Greek city-state (polis), moral clarity was easy.  It was easy for a citizen of one of these many city-states to know the difference between right and wrong.  Your action was right if in accordance...

April 3, 2024

Ideas govern the world

How do you get tens of millions of Americans, maybe even hundreds of millions, to believe ideas that at first glance seem to be nothing less than crazy? When I speak of “crazy ideas,” I have in mind things like the following. The...

March 27, 2024

Temporary Insanity

A young woman makes a foolish marriage to an inappropriate man.  Six months later, the marriage collapses.  You ask her why she did this.  She replies: “Temporary insanity.” Many of us, especially when young, make foolis...

March 22, 2024

The Alarm Bell Is Clanging

We are all aware that democracy is not a modern invention.  It was characteristic of many city-states in the ancient world.  Athens, for instance, had a flourishing democracy in the 5th and 4th centuries B.C., until the independen...

March 20, 2024

The World’s Longest War

Iceland at the moment is experiencing tremendous volcanic eruptions.  Iceland is prone to this kind of thing because it is situated at a one of those spots on the Earth where two tectonic plates collide.  They rub against one anot...

March 13, 2024

The Plight of the Socially Superior

Imagine, if you will, that you are living in the Old South, prior to the Civil War.  Imagine too that you are a slave, living and working on a medium-size plantation whose cash crop is cotton.  And imagine that from time to time, ...

February 22, 2024

The mystery of Trump-hate

I can understand why millions of people don’t like Donald Trump.  After all, he has many traits of personality and moral character that are easy to dislike.  I too dislike him — even though I voted for him in 2020 and will v...

December 13, 2023

The New Democrat ‘Wall of Separation’

In the 1930s and ’40s, American leftism was spread out on a spectrum.  At the far left end of the spectrum were the most radical of the leftists, communists, almost all of them members of the Communist Party (the CPUSA).  At...

September 29, 2021

The Democrat party no longer shares values with Catholics

In March of 1937, Pope Pius XI issued two encyclical letters, one of them condemning Nazism (Mit Brennender Sorge), the other condemning Communism (Divini Redemptoris) — two political movements whose ideology was utterly at odds with the teachi...