Our Life-World, Its Enemies, and the Enduring Power of Common Sense

(A Statue of George Washington in Boston/Wikimedia Commons)

Similarly distinct from the regular life-world is the world of academic theory, in which, as in the fantasy world, theoretical constructs are often divorced from any dependency on practical outcomes.”

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Why Most Americans Didn’t Buy the Harris Campaign

“Hard as they tried to suck us through the black hole leading to their alternative-facts universe, inundating us in a steady stream of misinformation even as they, again ironically, accused us of peddling misinformation, we resisted.”

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On the Idea of National Decline

(Volubilis, Morocco)

It is, I believe, more than anything else, the undeniable reality of technological progress that lulls us into accepting the more general—and plainly false—proposition that things will just keep on improving in every respect.”

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When the Elites Declare War

(Reuters/Brendan McDermid)

Show trials, we had thought, were totalitarian relics, a blunt tool wielded by dictators like Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong in order to show people, quite literally, what would happen to those who dared to defy the regime. And here it was, happening in 2024, in America.”

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All University Protests Must Stop, Period

((Ted Eytan/Creative Commons))

Holding myself to this standard, I am comfortable in saying that in each and every one of those scenarios, my view would be unchanged: The protests, all the university protests, must be stopped.”

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“Systemic Racism” Is the Biggest Conspiracy Theory of Them All

(Clay Banks/Unsplash)

The reason, as we will shortly see, that it is fair to characterize systemic racism as a nutty and sweeping conspiracy theory is that racism is, again and again, simply assumed to be the universal, underlying, unitary cause of multifarious phenomena for which other, more parsimonious, accurate, and complex explanations are blithely ignored or dismissed.”

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Woke Kids Are Speaking; Weak Adults Are Listening

(Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

The university protest movement largely took shape at the same time when our society’s disproportionate valorization of youth and youthful opinion began in the 1960s, when our whole nation began to come apart at the seams, an unraveling that, despite brief periods of rollback, has continued apace to this day.”

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Blame Putin, Sure, But Also Blame Biden

(Photo by Mikhail Metzel/SPUTNIK/AFP)

The fact—one that should surprise no one—is that the same folks who gave us the grossly mismanaged withdrawal from Afghanistan have also taught a master class on how to bungle our crucial relationship with an already insecure nuclear superpower.”

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Bring Back “Bums”…and Then Kick the Bums Out

And we very much do need to start telling ourselves and these street people the hard (but ultimately more humanizing and compassionate) truth again: We need to call the bums by their rightful name.”

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A Culture War Worth the Fight

The predictable consequence is that instead of striving together toward the ethereal glow at the top of the highest peak, we are coming apart and stomping each other and ourselves further down into the abyss…”

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It’s Time for a Two-State Solution…for America

(AP/Mel Evans)

“If a nation is an ‘imagined community,’ to invoke Benedict Anderson’s metaphor, then how can we live together when the communities we imagine are, at every level, incompatible?”

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City of Thugs

(Giuseppe Milo)

If, on the other hand, we as a society make excuses for thugs and use pretextual claims of racism to emasculate law enforcement, we will promote the continuation of our rapid race to the bottom.”

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Unleashing the Hounds Upon America

(Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)

How did it happen that the Wolves came to wield such power here, infiltrating academia, journalism, and other segments of society that were supposed to be high-minded bastions of truth and light?”

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Cutting Through Identities: to Alter the Body or to Heal the Mind?

But this article is not actually about cutting. If one has not yet guessed what it is really about by now, it is time for me to pull back the curtain.”

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The Woke Mob vs. the Trump Mob: the Real Double Standard

(Jonathan Levinson/OPB)

There is a real double standard at work. It is a glaring one, not the one President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Harris claim exists but, rather, the one they want to gaslight us into accepting.”

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