“Rufo’s ‘New Right Activism’ is not the prescription of one who, following Socrates, seeks to be virtuous, but rather one who, following Faust, sacrifices his soul to achieve victory.”
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Jonathan Church
Jonathan Church is a contributing editor at Merion West. He is a government economist with a background in energy economics and inflation measurement. In addition to authoring several essays, he has published two books: Reinventing Racism: Why “White Fragility” Is the Wrong Way to Think about Racial Inequality and Virtue in an Age of Identity Politics: A Stoic Approach to Social Justice. He holds an undergraduate degree in economics and philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s degree in economics from Cornell University. Contact Jonathan at jonathan@merionwest.com.
Author: Jonathan Church
Jonathan Church is a contributing editor at Merion West. He is a government economist with a background in energy economics and inflation measurement. In addition to authoring several essays, he has published two books: Reinventing Racism: Why “White Fragility” Is the Wrong Way to Think about Racial Inequality and Virtue in an Age of Identity Politics: A Stoic Approach to Social Justice. He holds an undergraduate degree in economics and philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s degree in economics from Cornell University. Contact Jonathan at jonathan@merionwest.com.
The Sophistry of the New Right Activism
Mihai Nadin: Disrupter of Science
“[My book seeks to] disrupt science in the sense that it gets us away from the myth that doing more physics and chemistry will be the answer to understanding the living and, in particular, the human being.”
“Neoliberalism” Is a Delusion of Marxists
“I have written previously that much of this ‘neoliberal’ nightmare is a myth, not because the world is without problems, but because the problems of the world are much too multifaceted, internally complex, and situationally unique for each problem to regarded as just another mutation of an invincible neoliberal virus replicating across the globe.”
Yes, January 6th Was an Insurrection
“The attempted insurrection by President Trump and his supporters had failed. But make no mistake: The violent events of January 6th were the direct result of a deliberate months-long campaign by President Trump to overturn illegally an election that he did not win.”
Richard Kemp: Israel’s Existential Campaign to Destroy Hamas
“Hamas wants to maximize the death of its civilian population. The purpose is to get the international community, the United Nations, the United States, other governments around the world, to condemn Israel, to vilify Israel, to delegitimize Israel, and undermine the Jewish state in that way.”
Phyllis Chesler: Modern Feminism’s Failure to Condemn Hamas
“The feminists have deserted Jewish women. And it wasn’t just Jewish women. There were Arab Muslim women, and there were Thai Buddhist women. No doubt many Christian women or some Christian women who were also raped, murdered, and kidnapped.”
How Scholars and Activists Have Reinvented Our Understanding of Racism
“In short, we have dogma, and from dogma, cognitive errors in reasoning inevitably ensue.”
The Problems with Diversity Training
“This is an admirable aim, but there is just one big problem: Diversity training is not working.”
Harvard Needs to Be Consistent on the Virtue of Free Speech
“As my co-author Kai Whiting and I argue in an upcoming book…free speech debates have become not simply a matter of whether or to what extent certain ideas should be banished from the public domain, but why, how, and for whom they should be restricted.”
Would Socrates Be Anti-Woke? A Stoic Critique of Identity Politics
“For the Stoic, however, personal identity is not a fragmented life of intersecting cultural identities but rather a holistic and unified embodiment of rationality endowed by nature.”
The Greatness of Ronald Reagan
“With bloated bureaucracies and top marginal tax rates at 70% when he entered office, President Reagan also carried in his mind a basic script about overreach of the federal government that resonated with Americans after a decade of stagflation and presidential scandals.”
Karl Marx’s Theory of Primitive Accumulation Is Wrong
“It is a win-win situation—not the zero-sum world of Marx’s gloomy dystopia. Institutions that reduce transaction costs and enforce well-defined property rights provide an environment in which incentives to economic initiative can thrive.”
The Many Problems with Race Reparations in the United States (Part Two)
“The analyses attempting to quantify reparations, cited above, will likely encounter strong and ongoing resistance, if only based on the price tag alone.”
The Many Problems with Race Reparations in the United States
“What accounts for the gap between scholars and activists who advocate reparations and broad public resistance to the idea?”
The Failed Attempt to Rescue Marx’s Labor Theory of Value
“Without the notion of socially necessary labor time, nothing in Marx’s value form or overall theory of exploitation makes sense.”
