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- (A) Education
- (B) Culture and Ideology
- (A) Culture and Ideology
- (B) Education
By Gerard Baker - The new moral order our secularist elites have been busy constructing since the end of the Cold War is collapsing around them. Over the past 30 years, the values of Judeo-Christian belief that had inspired and sustained Western civilization and culture for centuries have been steadily replaced in a moral, cultural and political revolution of the postmodern ascendancy. But the contradictions and implausibilities inherent in this successor creed have been increasingly exposed, .... This new edifice has been built around three principal pillars: First, the ethical primacy of global obligation over national self-interest, in economic and...
By William P. Barr - Progressives can’t solve the problem because they won’t abandon the practices that cause it. The violent crime surge was preventable. It was caused by progressive politicians reverting to the same reckless revolving-door policies that during the 1960s and ’70s produced the greatest tsunami of violent crime in American history. We reversed that earlier crime wave with the tough anticrime measures adopted during the Reagan-Bush era. We can stop this one as well. Studies have repeatedly shown that most predatory crime is committed by a small, hard-core group of habitual offenders. They are a tiny fraction...
By Jason L. Riley - A 2021 paper published by the University of Chicago’s Journal of Law and Economics put annual spending on policing and corrections at about $250 billion. Meanwhile, a study released the same year by the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation “conservatively estimated” that the yearly cost of personal and property crimes in the U.S. is $2.6 trillion. By that comparison, it’s hard to conclude that we spend too much money on law enforcement. What’s even harder is putting a price on the psychic burden of crime—the constant fear that you or a loved one will...
By Jason L. Riley - George Gilder wrote about the importance of the nuclear family in “Sexual Suicide” (1973) and “Men and Marriage” (1986). Charles Murray, who had touched on it in his landmark study, “Losing Ground” (1984), made similar arguments in “Coming Apart” (2012). In 1994 David Blankenhorn published “Fatherless America,” and 1996 brought David Popenoe’s “Life Without Father: Compelling New Evidence That Fatherhood and Marriage Are Indispensable for the Good of Children and Society.” Other books that cover the same ground as Ms. Kearney include Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher’s “The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier and Better Off Financially”; James Q. Wilson’s...
By Ed Meese and Kelly Shackelford - The left was able for decades to get through the courts, including the Supreme Court, what it couldn’t get through Congress. Today, however, liberals are trying to subvert the legitimacy of the Supreme Court because it contains a majority of justices committed to the Constitution and the rule of law. Suddenly, instead of repeatedly approving the left’s agenda, the federal judiciary has become one of its greatest impediments. Believing they can no longer win at the court, progressives now want to change the rules of the game. Rather than improving their legal arguments and strategy,...
By Gerard Baker -… But the scales of virtue must balance, and it isn’t simply a case of administrative incompetence but an act of abject moral failure by a government to fail to secure its borders….There is no higher obligation for a sovereign power to its own people. The reckless toleration of the entry of …millions, of illegal immigrants threatens a nation’s security, undermines its cohesion, interferes with its orderly economic and social functions. It … actively undermines respect for the rule of law…. Read More
By Robert Stacy McCain - It is expected in politics, as a matter of human nature, that citizens will seek to advance and protect the interests of their own particular social class, ethnic group, or religious community. Attachment to our own “little platoon” — mankind’s tribal instinct, adapted to the forms of civilized society — is not irrational, nor is it harmful to the overall project of national unity. Indeed, scholars of statesmanship have long praised Burke for the insight of seeing this kind of group loyalty as “the first principle … of public affections.” How, then, has this principle...
By Lance Morrow - Mr. Trump and his followers…are essentially antifascists: They want the state … to impose the least possible interference and allow market forces and entrepreneurial energies to work. Freedom isn’t fascism. Mr. Biden and his vast tribe are essentially enemies of freedom…. They desire maximum—that is, total—state or party control of all aspects of American life, including what people say and think. …The left yearns for power and authoritarian order. It is Faust’s bargain; freedom is forfeit…. Read More
By Lamar Alexander, Arne Duncan, John King, Rod Paige, Richard Riley and Margaret Spellings - …the world’s oldest constitutional democracy is in grave danger. We stand at a crossroads, called to protect this democracy. …A key part of our task is to reinvigorate teaching and learning of American history and civics in our nation’s schools. A constitutional democracy requires a citizenry that has a desire to participate, and an understanding of how to do so constructively… Read More
By Christopher DeMuth - A near perfect aspirational agenda to conserve the American nation. - *** Re-establish national borders, reduce our million plus annual illegal entries to zero, and calibrate lawful immigration to the needs of cultural assimilation, social harmony and economic growth; abolish all official racial and other group preferences; liberate the energy sector; return to a balanced federal budget outside of wars and other emergencies; redirect federal spending from personal entitlements and income transfers to public goods such as national defense, basic research and infrastructure; withdraw the collective-bargaining privileges of public-employee unions; institute stable currency; universal school choice;...
By Tunku Varadarajan, Vivek Ramaswamy - Interview with Vivek Ramaswamy - How and why corporate America discovered and embraced "Wokeism" and suggested remedies - selected passages, underlines added Read More
By Michael B. Poliakoff - A day does not go by without news of … the fierce ongoing battle to determine whether colleges and universities will hold fast to academic freedom and intellectual diversity as the catalysts of progress. Will our centers of higher learning be home to diverse theories and strategies, or will they take the illiberal path of deciding for faculty and students what they should believe?...A civil and unprejudiced campus is a priority for any academic community that is true to its purpose. But when a community of scholars and teachers… trades time-honored principles of free inquiry...
By Rod Dreher - Longer article - In 1951, six years after the end of World War II, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism, in an attempt to understand how such radical ideologies of both left and right had seized the minds of so many in the 20th century. Arendt’s book used to be a staple in college history and political theory courses. With the end of the Cold War 30 years behind us, who today talks about totalitarianism? Almost no one—and if they do, it’s about Nazism, not communism. Unsurprisingly, young Americans suffer from profound ignorance...
By The Editorial Board - WSJ - Some numbers tell a story about comparative governance. Comparative governance is a useful course of study, not least because bad governance is so costly to people and prosperity. We often write about the migration from the Northeast to Florida and other states, but sometimes the contrast is best illuminated with some data. Read More
By George Soros - At the heart of this conflict is the reality that the two nations represent systems of governance that are diametrically opposed. The U.S. stands for a democratic, open society in which the role of the government is to protect the freedom of the individual. Mr. Xi believes Mao Zedong invented a superior form of organization, which he is carrying on: a totalitarian closed society in which the individual is subordinated to the one-party state. It is superior, in this view, because it is more disciplined, stronger and therefore bound to prevail in a contest. Read More
By William A, Galston - But one thing is clear: Because the Declaration of Independence—the founding document of the American liberal order—is a product of Enlightenment rationalism, a doctrine that rejects the Enlightenment tacitly requires deconstructing the American order and rebuilding it on an entirely different foundation. Read More
By Ian Rowe - There is a third way: a view of human opportunity simultaneously more practical and more optimistic than our current alternatives. I call it agency.… agency goes beyond one’s capacity simply to do or achieve …Agency is not free will alone, it is the force of your free will, guided by moral discernment. Agency is the character-based strength that young people can tap into as a source of morally directed power, and our children do not achieve this by themselves. … they need social support from vibrant, well-functioning, families, schools, houses of worship, nonprofit organizations, and community groups. Read...
By Andrew Gutmann and Paul Rossi - After watching 100 hours of leaked video, we now fully grasp the danger of this ideology in schools. Last spring we exposed how two elite independent schools in New York had become corrupted by a divisive obsession with race, helping start the national movement against critical race theory. Schools apply this theory under the guise of diversity, equity and… Read More
By John Sailer - NAS - We find in these plans nothing short of a blueprint for an institutional overhaul—the anatomy of a diversity, equity, and inclusion takeover. Such a takeover will have obvious implications for education at the University of Tennessee. True education will erode. Indoctrination will flourish. These plans, moreover, reveal in extensive detail what an exhaustive diversity, equity, and inclusion program looks like. Thus, our report provides a case study in the rolling revolution under way in academia. Read More
By C. S. Lewis - Longer article - What I want to fix your attention on is the vast, overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence – moral, cultural, social, or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how “democracy” (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient Dictatorships, and by the same methods? You remember how one of the Greek Dictators (they called them “tyrants” then) sent an envoy to another Dictator to ask his advice about the principles of...
By Charles Murray - …progressive intellectuals were passionate advocates of rule by disinterested experts led by a strong unifying leader. They were in favor of using the state to mold social institutions in the interests of the collective. They thought that individualism and the Constitution were both outmoded.…are …enthusiastic about an unrestrained regulatory state…think it’s just fine to subordinate the interests of individuals to … cheer the president’s abuse of executive power and ... have no problem rationalizing the stifling of dissent…. Read More