Boris Johnson’s Most Fundamental Failure: Immigration The Right - “After all, one of the major reasons for the Conservatives’ 2019 election landslide victory was due to [Johnson’s] populist rhetoric regarding mass immigration, including the Conservatives’ promise that ‘overall numbers will come down.'” (3/10/2023)
Who Will Fix a Broken Internet Landscape Before It’s Too Late? The Right - “Despite the enormous improvements that technology has contributed to the human condition, if we do not choose to fix the way the Internet works, there remains the potential for a digital Pearl Harbor-type event.” (3/5/2023)
Marxism Has Been No Deliverer from Ethnic Strife The Right - “Any utopian project that tolerates humanity’s diverse values and identities only to the extent that they help advance a narrowly defined vision of progress can only end in indiscriminate violence.” (3/4/2023)
How a “National Divorce” Could Actually Unite Americans The Right - “Far from giving up on the American project, national divorce aims to renew and deepen our ability to live in harmony together.” (3/2/2023)
Review: Carl Trueman’s “Strange New World” The Right - “It bears repeating that this is a very good book. Trueman performs a thorough but concise excavation of the intellectual, philosophical, and metaphysical currents that he sees as moving below the crashing waves of our present cultural storm.” (2/21/2023)
From Tanks to Think Tanks The Right - “One can judge the winds of change in foreign policy by the sudden proliferation of think tanks piping up and stating the obvious. There are tanks and think tanks and, despite the commitment of the Leopards, it may be the think tanks that are gaining the upper hand.” (2/18/2023)
In Reply to Robert Jensen: The Folly of the Nazi Comparison The Right - “In fact, most Southerners did not own slaves; nor were Union soldiers, most of whom were drafted, fighting for the woke ideals of Jensen or the Southern Poverty Law Center.” (2/17/2023)
Republicans Should Stop Pandering about Charter Schools The Right - “I have no idea why Republicans and the GOP media fall over themselves rallying to the cause of those who hate them and who would never vote for them, no matter what.” (2/9/2023)
The Value in Reading Byung-Chul Han The Right - “Han occupies a somewhat unique position in today’s world that defies typical Right-Left categorization. This is partly because of Han’s bridging of multiple worlds: East and West; art and philosophy; theology and politics.” (1/22/2023)
Multiculturalism Is Madness The Right - “The fact is that, historically, Great Britain has had a remarkably stable demographic makeup for at least a thousand years, if not much longer. The idea that what we have experienced since 1997…is in any way comparable or equivalent to the past is nonsense, at best, and disingenuous, at worst.” (1/19/2023)
We Are All Socialists The Right - “Echoing this notion from on high, in 2016 the [World Economic Forum] announced the imminence of a post-historical future in the Marxist sense: ‘Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better.'” (12/21/2022)
The Boredom of War The Right - “Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s biggest enemy is not the West’s reticence to sending more drones, more weapons, and more fighter jets. President Zelenskyy’s biggest enemy is boredom.” (12/12/2022)
Mary Harrington: On a Philosophy of Limits The Right - “And my argument is that freedom and progress in the context of the cyborg era are actually inimical to women’s interests. They don’t make things better for any women, except [for] a very small, elite subset.” (12/7/2022)
Review: Maurice Glasman’s “Blue Labour: The Politics of the Common Good” The Right - “For Labour forgot that life involves loss and tragedy. It forgot that ‘human beings are not commodities, but creative and social beings longing for connection and meaning.'” (11/30/2022)
William Jacobson: What Happened to Campus? The Right - “I’m not optimistic at all that campuses can be reformed. They certainly cannot be reformed from within…Academia is gone. It is a monoculture. It is a hermetically sealed bubble.” (11/14/2022)
Jordan Peterson’s “A Conservative Manifesto” Is Not Conservative The Right - “It is instead Hayekian liberalism delivered with a Calvinist grimness.” (10/4/2022)
Review: Slavoj Žižek’s “Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide for the Non-Perplexed” The Right - “Combining inanity with compelling anecdote, idiocy with sensible instruction, Žižek addresses himself to the ‘mess we’re in.'” (10/3/2022)
Heather Mac Donald: Medicine Under Fire The Right - “Scientific conferences are being determined based on sex and race. It’s going to slow down medical progress, and it is also going to put physicians in the ER and the operating room who are not the top qualified.” (9/27/2022)
The Joy of the Knife: On Autoimmune Responses in Politics The Right - “If we look at culture as a superorganism with its own immunological mechanisms, we can recognize modern societies as being profoundly dysregulated, and this gets worse the more modern they get.” (9/24/2022)
Canada and the Many Problems with Euthanasia The Right - “The story goes on to detail another Canadian citizen who was repeatedly and continuously offered euthanasia, to such an extent that he began recording these occasions.” (9/19/2022)
The Queen: 1926-2022 The Right - “It is too much to say that the world will not see her like again; there is within all of us the potential to aim for the higher moral life that the Queen embodied, if we engage in the striving that she did that is necessary to attain this.” (9/11/2022)
Review: “People Love Dead Jews” by Dara Horn The Right - “All of this is captured in twelve essays in novelist Dara Horn’s powerful and coruscating book on why people still love dead Jews over living Jews. It is a book that shreds modern piety and sophistry in equal measure.” (9/7/2022)
Interview: Brad Lips, CEO of Atlas Network The Right - “Any coherent system of morality begins with an appreciation of human dignity and wanting people to have as many choices to take control of their lives as possible.” (8/11/2022)
British Conservatism Is Doomed The Right - “To put it simply, if one cannot accumulate capital, he will not support capitalism; and if one has no solid basis for conserving one’s family and community, which property provides, then he will not become a conservative.” (8/7/2022)
Yoram Hazony: National Conservatism in a Midterm Year The Right - “Conservatives are certainly not socialists. Conservatives do not believe, as the Marxists do, that you can open up some central office with really bright people and dictate the course of the entire economy of the nation. We don’t believe anything like that. On the other hand…” (7/29/2022)
Review: Matthew Continetti’s “The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism” The Right - “It is to Continetti’s credit that he develops his narrative after this with fair-minded even-handedness for the most part, even if he lets his own views bleed through in the chapters concerning President Trump’s rise and fall, as well as the mix of grift and genuine intellectual ferment that he dragged in his orange wake.” (7/27/2022)
Review: China Miéville’s “A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto” The Right - “Sentimental and sycophantic in turns, it may be hard to dispel the impression that Miéville is merely a hysteric. All the same, A Spectre, Haunting is a post-Nietzschean book, which leans into the charge of ressentiment. Spurning subterfuge, Miéville quite openly asserts that justice and revenge amount, more or less, to the same thing.” (7/25/2022)
Being Critical of Enlightenment Triumphalism Isn’t Always Wrong The Right - “Having considered the evidence, it seems more accurate to say that the Enlightenment project presented itself as a savior from ignorance and poverty but was really a movement to dethrone the old social order rooted in hierarchies and aristocracies.” (7/11/2022)
The Quarrel within American Conservatism The Right - “The current politics of California, which more than any other American state has been shaped by mass immigration from Mexico, should likewise shake the confidence of conservatives who scoff at the alleged illiberalism of immigration hawks.” (6/30/2022)
Limits in a World That Erases Them The Right - “There is a paradox to life that an acceptance of limits, borders, and boundaries can be the most liberating thing of all.” (6/27/2022)
Young Americans for Liberty: An Interview with CEO Lauren Daugherty The Right - “Ron Paul is so beloved because he is so principled. That is what we are focused on here. We will work with other people who share our interests, but we’re not going to sacrifice our principles to do it.” (6/24/2022)
Review: “Conservatism: A Rediscovery” by Yoram Hazony The Right - “In my own life, being disabled and living with an acute example of life’s predicament means that the worldview Hazony describes and prescribes has made far more sense and has offered far more consolation than liberalism ever could.” (6/20/2022)
Review: “Obedience is Freedom” by Jacob Phillips The Right - “Denial, as Jacob Phillips deftly shows in his fascinating and staggeringly original new book Obedience is Freedom, is precisely what the liberal-left excels in, substituting for a world of limits and constraints a schizoid universe where subjectivity is all that counts.” (6/16/2022)
Cancel Culture and the Tolerance of the Natural Aristocracy The Right - “To really thrive in our own communities, we need more than just Law and Order; a strong social fabric is required that encourages virtuous behavior as much as it punishes delinquency.” (6/15/2022)
Review: “Don’t Burn This Country” by Dave Rubin The Right - “This book undoubtedly represents an evolution in Rubin’s thinking, and contrary to those who accuse him of changing to suit others, changing one’s mind on philosophical beliefs is not automatically a disqualification.” (5/12/2022)
The Term Woke Is Losing Its Punch The Right - “It was a linguistic indication that revolutionary consciousness had made ‘the long march through the institutions.'” (4/30/2022)
The Pandemic and the Scientific Gnostics The Right - “As Deneen says, Voegelin ‘argued that modern Gnosticism was an effort to ‘redivinize’ the political world—not now by bringing the gods in to the service of the city, but by making the city into a heaven on earth.'” (4/1/2022)
Neither Putin Nor Russia Are “Based” The Right - “For a start, American conservatives are either unaware of or ignore that Russia has the highest abortion rate in the world and the third highest divorce rate.” (3/20/2022)
Children of Men: Are Birth Rates Declining Due to Anti-natalism or Economics? The Right - “For the first time ever, more than half of women aged 30 in England and Wales are childless. This is not a normative condemnation but a descriptive statement.” (3/8/2022)
Ukraine: Reality Bites The Right - “Now, we face a second reminder of reality. First plague, now war has come to Europe, the biggest since 1945.” (2/28/2022)
Right-Liberalism Won’t Cut It The Right - “Given the potential for a more populist conservatism that appeals to those seeking to reweave America’s weakened bonds of social and economic mutual loyalty, the right-liberalism of Murray and others is exactly the opposite of what is needed and wanted.” (2/11/2022)
Pat McCrory: How to Get a Handle on the Crime Surge The Right - “My wife and I used to go vacation in San Francisco. We don’t anymore…This is what’s headed toward the rest of the nation.” (1/24/2022)
Against David Brooksism The Right - “The only thing Brooks’s ‘true conservatism’ is ‘responsible’ for, however, is progressivism’s thoroughgoing dominance of our culture. For Brooks, a ‘responsible’ conservatism must concede the moral legitimacy of every progressive ‘advance.'” (1/5/2022)
The Material Roots of Wokeness The Right - “So, the fact that what is now called wokeness is a minority persuasion, believed by a small group of elite left-liberals and pursued through the instruments of the managerial state and corporate oligarchies, should not be surprising.” (12/12/2021)
Sean Spicer: The Steele Dossier and “Radical Nation” The Right - “I got the call on January 10th [2017] from CNN and then BuzzFeed about them running with this hoax. I pointed out at the time that it was wrong. I could demonstrably prove it was wrong. And yet, they stuck by it…” (11/26/2021)
From Libertarianism to National Conservatism The Right - “National Conservatism, one strand of a broader emergent post-Cold War fusionist conservative movement, has the potential for both capturing youthful energy and enthusiasm while grounding and directing it with prudence and realism.” (11/24/2021)
What Motivates Retail Cryptocurrency Investors? The Right - “Contrary to the Bitcoin apostles I met at the conference all those years ago, contemporary owners of cryptocurrency seem to be more interested in its speculative properties than its potential as an alternate currency or stable store of value.” (9/3/2021)
Afghanistan and the West’s Failure The Right - “Whether America likes it or not, the unipolar moment, Pax Americana, is over.” (8/31/2021)
Hiding the Ball on Critical Race Theory The Right - “Marcuse and Bell might not be on the reading lists at elementary schools, but CRT’s cynical mentality and Marxist tenets are still present in the pedagogical exercises being exposed by Christopher Rufo’s investigative journalism.” (8/11/2021)
Ranked-Choice Voting: Technocracy Run Amok The Right - “20 years of RCV in San Francisco has neither moderated the city’s politics nor produced any novel outcomes worth replicating.” (7/31/2021)