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- (A) Education
- (B) Culture, Character and Ideology
- (A) Culture, Character and Ideology
- (B) Education
By Samuel J. Abrams - If our aim is to sustain a functioning, self-governing republic, then it is not only appropriate but essential that deep constitutional study be centered in ordinary institutions. We cannot confine this work to boutique seminars for the well-connected and already powerful. The work must also happen where most Americans – especially future teachers – actually train: regional public universities, teaching-focused colleges, and continuing education programs that are accessible and affordable. Read More
By Matthew Hennessey - In this twilight struggle the truth has an advantage: Socialism is incompatible with human nature. People are driven to build, to invest, to strive and be productive, to pursue their own families’ well-being above all. Socialism subverts these impulses. It requires coercion to achieve anything resembling success. It’s an intellectual lab leak. Misery follows wherever it’s tried. Yet each generation somehow produces naïfs who are certain that collectivism is the true longing of the human heart. ...The young voters who supported Mr. Mamdani were primed by their expensive educations to buy his line that capitalism is...
By Andy Kessler - Anything that interferes with markets and price discovery is dangerous. Unions distort prices. Student loans—and the policy of forgiving them—distort prices. So do quotas, subsidies, green policies and ethanol requirements. Even lockdowns and stimulus checks. Taxes, especially capital-gains taxes, distort the cost of capital. Redistribution is the ultimate market manipulation. And tariffs, which are taxes, distort prices, jobs and currencies. Read More
Mr. Kors lamented that socialism had yet to be held accountable for the scale of its crimes: “No cause, ever, in the history of all mankind, has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents and more orphans than socialism with power.” The failure to acknowledge and come to terms with this reality in the West, he believed, eventually would allow socialism to resuscitate itself, even with millions of skeletons hiding in plain view. Read the article Read More
By John Ellis - The Biden administration had quietly implemented policies throughout the federal government based on this theory, and it is being taught in colleges and schools throughout the country. It has overrun much of the corporate world, and it has even secured a place in the training of many professions. The accusations made in closed training sessions are astonishingly venomous: Arrogant white supremacy is ubiquitous; white rage results when that supremacy is challenged; whites hold money and power because they stole it from other races; systemic racism and capitalism keep the injustices going. Read More
By John Ellis - ... shutting down woke programs goes only so far; it limits what bad actors in academia can do, but it leaves those bad actors in place. Without broader staffing reforms, radical left-wing professors will still control higher education. Several states are trying to dictate what professors should and shouldn’t teach, but these efforts similarly don’t reach the core of academia’s sickness—the political monopoly that guarantees its continued malignancy. Read More
By David Mamet - The mythic hero is aided by the Word of God, contemporary Westerners by heroic example. Winston Churchill inspired in his country’s populace an awareness of their own greatness. So does Mr. Trump. Yet half of America not only abides but fervently supports a codependent decline to poverty, crime and a nascent police state. Why? The leftist politicians and their media courtiers and designated beneficiaries profited from the perks of power. But why did the everyday American endorse them and their fear mongering? The actual threat wasn’t global warming, Islamophobia, the Supreme Court, the police, Immigration and Customs Enforcement...
By Eric Schmidt - Henry had a simple model of geopolitical progress: You try to figure out what the other side wants, understand its motivations and pain points, and then find something that is possible and that it will see as an improvement. He was a fearsome negotiator with an impressive grasp of other countries’ history and an ability to assess their leaders realistically and to think three moves ahead. He viewed American culture as not strategic in this way: We tend to approach adversaries with a list of demands when we should have a conversation about a stable long-term...
By Roland Fryer - Probing the incentives and institutions that kept slavery alive can help us value what freedom means. Read More
By Paul Wolfowitz - April 14, 2025 - America’s greatest president had moral vision, strategic genius, and astounding eloquence. Read More
By Mike Pence - As the founder of the Heritage Foundation, Ed was a leading voice of conservatism for more than 50 years. Under his leadership, Heritage became both a center for scholarship and a powerhouse of strategic influence. What concerned him, as always, was the long-term health of the American Republic, and the strength of the institutions that would defend it for generations to come. Ed didn’t just build up institutions; he cultivated a movement that brought ivory tower ideas into the public square and never lost sight of the moral and spiritual foundations of liberty. Read More
By Walter Russell Meade - Kissinger understood something that too many Americans, on the left and right, find difficult to grasp: Power and morality aren’t opposites. Rather, power is the platform that makes moral action possible for a state. And morality isn’t a set of rules and laws that states are expected to obey. Rather, in international relations, morality involves creating an order that prevents the anarchy and slaughter of great-power warfare. Such an order gains legitimacy not by its perfect adherence to a religious or secular moral code, but by its ability to preserve values and conditions that allow...
By John Ellis - Our corrupt, radical universities feed every scourge from censorship and crime to antisemitism. America faces a formidable range of calamities: crime out of control, borders in chaos by design, children poorly educated while sexualized and politicized against parental opposition, unconstitutional censorship, a press that does government PR rather than oversight, our institutions and corporations debased in the name of “diversity, equity and inclusion”—and more. To these has been added an outbreak of virulent antisemitism. Every one of these degradations can be traced wholly or in large part to a single source: the corruption of higher education...
By Paul A. Gigot - The relevant questions are: How did we get here? And what to do about it? The answer to the first question is that we forgot the lesson of history. One of my military mentors was Andy Marshall, the legendary Pentagon strategist, who liked to say that peace is best understood as an interlude between wars. Robert Gates issued a similar warning as he retired as defense secretary in 2011 when he said that, when wars end, the U.S. always makes the mistake of drawing down defenses and leaving ourselves vulnerable. We ignored him. So what...
By Gary Saul Morson - Cruelty often thrives among the sophisticated. Dostoevsky recalls the French terror, when people were humiliated and murdered in the name of the highest principle.... during the Stalinist terrors millions were routinely tortured ... and that during the collectivization of agriculture, millions more were deliberately starved to death, with young Bolshevik idealists brought in to enforce the famine.... In the West, intellectuals justified such behavior because it was done in the name of socialism ...Dostoevsky adds that there is no need to resort to examples from the past because the same dynamic can occur in any...
By Christopher Caldwell - ...In this view, the civil rights movement wasn’t just a reform but a refounding....The real political legacy of the 1960s comes from the Civil Rights Act of 1964....…The new law cut constitutional corners, constraining freedom of association, ... drawing the federal government into the running of local elections. It opened the door to new kinds of lawsuits: The U.S. attorney general, for instance, could now file discrimination suits against local school districts. It imposed a degree of federal management on all institutions that received federal money. And it created a vast investigative infrastructure through the Equal...
By John Walters – By and large, we do not believe that there are individuals with great ruling talent who “thirst and burn” to shatter the existing order for the sake of dominating others ... a fundamentally different type of human being: animals of prey, a profoundly different human type from the rest of us. ...Is Lincoln's warning grounded in a timeless truth?... We need only think of Stalin, Mao, and, of course, Hitler. Can we learn from this terrible history?...Specifically, are Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping just such individuals?....they now largely control the levers of power and use that power in a brutal...
By David Satter - The Bolshevik coup had two consequences. In countries where communism came to hold sway, it hollowed out society’s moral core, degrading the individual and turning him into a cog in the machinery of the state. Communists committed murder on such a scale as to all but eliminate the value of life and to destroy the individual conscience in survivors....The Bolshevik plague that began in Russia was the greatest catastrophe in human history… it …would kill millions and inflict a near-fatal wound on Western civilization… In the West, communism inverted society’s understanding of the source of its...
By Gary Saul Morson - How was such evil possible? ... but those who commit the greatest harm think of themselves as good. Before interrogators could torture prisoners they knew were innocent, they had to discover a justification for their actions. Shakespeare’s villains ...had no ideology,” nothing to compare with Marxism-Leninism’s “scientific” and infallible explanations of life and ethics. “Ideology—that is what . . . gives the evil-doer the necessary steadfastness and determination . . . the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good . . . in his own and others’ eyes.” Read More
By Orrin Hatch - …Somewhere between the rise of cable news and social media, our shared sense of reality splintered. We live in an era of endless political narratives, in which the phrase “my truth” is supposed to be taken seriously. .. Americans today cannot agree on the existence of facts, let alone what the facts are…. This article is included to draw attention to the grave problem of the left’s domination of higher education and its profound influence on our culture, our politics, and our society in ways that threaten our future… Read More
By Tunku Varadarajan and Ilya Shipiro - … The threat to ‘dismantle existing structures’ is an idle one in English class. But in legal education it targets individual rights and equal treatment under the Constitution.… If you read critical legal studies, of which critical race theory is a subset, you’ll read about the need to ‘fundamentally dismantle existing structures,’ to ‘change the way social hierarchies operate.’ . . . The goal is to fundamentally change the way that American society operates”…. Read More
By John Ellis - Only a few years ago, several well-established features of the current political landscape were too absurd to be taken seriously. Defunding the police was a ridiculous idea; critical race theory would be a giant step backward in in race relations; leftist radicalism was a fringe element of the Democratic Party. Suddenly all have gone mainstream....Only a short while ago most Americans would have been appalled to find that almost half of voters were foolish enough to want a lawless society, accept the teaching of racial hatred to children, and embrace radical leftist ideology. Read More
By Sadanand Dhume - China leads the U.S. in research on 37 of 44 critical technologies, ,,.Given this challenge, you might imagine that America would re-emphasize the principles of objectivity and merit that made it the world’s leading scientific innovator. You would be mistaken. .... Ironically, scientists in communist China need to care less about ideology than their American counterparts. In the U.S., the National Institutes of Health requires some prospective researchers to demonstrate “a strong commitment to promoting diversity and inclusive excellence” in order to receive funding". Read More
By Steven Malanga - As a New Yorker, Siegel had witnessed the city’s rapid deterioration under … a vast expansion of crime and social disorder. Siegel and other conservative intellectuals at the Manhattan Institute argued that the sharp rise in urban chaos wasn’t inevitable or irreversible…In fact, disorder was a choice. By cutting police and sanitation budgets to boost welfare spending, …The worse things got, the more the city invested in addressing the supposed underlying causes of crime rather than re-establishing order. Siegel … called this “rewarding failure.”...The “riot ideology” that Fred Siegel described in his 1997 book, “The Future...
By Gerard Baker - Jul 6, 2020- At the end of the 20th century, the U.S. had won World War II and the Cold War, liberated half the planet from history’s most dehumanizing ideologies, advanced a free-market capitalism that had led more humans out of poverty than any economic system ever devised, and given the world the richest bounty of… This article warns of how the effort to distort our history and the domination of the left in higher education.... Read More
By Kimberly A, Strassel - May 11, 2021- Would the IRS violate your privacy to further Democratic policy objectives?....The lesson is that Republicans must realize that Democrats are no longer their only political foe. They face an equally potent and dangerous federal bureaucracy—committed to destroying GOP officials and propelling a liberal agenda. Read More
By Heather McDonald - The real issue on campuses isn’t antisemitism but the anti-Western ethos that has colonized large swaths of the curriculum. Elite schools once disdained Jews because they were seen as outsiders to Western civilization. Now they are reviled as that civilization’s very embodiment. Students explain that their hatreds come from what they learn in class—that the West is built on white supremacism and oppression. Israel is cast as the Western settler-colonialist oppressor par excellence. Read More
By Philip Hamburger - Today’s problem is the suppression of dissent. ...Most worrisome is federal and state encouragement for private entities to discriminate against Americans with dissenting views. ...The funding justification for regulation increasingly reaches not only subsidized programs but entire institutions. And almost every major institution receives federal funding. So the potential for privatized government discrimination is nearly unlimited. In education, conditions on funding interfere with academic speech and the freedom of private institutions....The first step in a constitutionally more modest approach would be to recognize that government power shouldn’t be exercised in ways that discriminate. On this basis,...
By Matthew Spalding - Wherever this agenda is allowed to take root, free expression and academic integrity are doomed…The first object of government, Madison tells us,…is the protection of diversity in … different opinions, to be encouraged to preserve liberty. Equity is an ancient legal concept of justice …, developed over centuries of English common-law practice. …. Yet in true Orwellian fashion, they have been redefined.…Diversity is no longer a term to describe the breadth of our differences but a demand to grant privileges to purportedly oppressed identity groups. Equity assigns desirable positions based on race, sex and sexual orientation rather than...
By Jerry A. Coyne and Anna I. Krylov - The crux of our argument is simple: Science that doesn’t prioritize merit doesn’t work, and substituting ideological dogma for quality is a shortcut to disaster. In some ways this new species of Lysenkoism is more pernicious than the old, because it affects all science—chemistry, physics, life sciences, medicine and math—not merely biology and agriculture. The government isn’t the only entity pushing it, either. “Progressive” scientists promote it, too, along with professional societies, funding agencies like the National Institutes of Health and Energy Department, scientific journals and university administrators. When applying for openings as a university scientist today, job...
By Arthur Milikh - Summer 2021 Issue, National Affairs - From the birth of the modern conservative movement, dissidents concerned with civic and liberal education have tried almost everything to reshape America’s universities: … This article outlines the many grave problems of American higher education (with suggestions about how to correct them) and explains how its domination by the left is changing our culture, our politics, and our society in ways that threaten our future… Read More
By Michael B. Poliakoff - What these books have in common is an intense commitment to the liberal democracy that gives us the right to participate in it, indeed to criticize it. And, with that, the absolute obligation to instill the values and principles of our free society. Dr. Haass and President Daniels call not only for better K-12 civic education, but, like past president of Harvard University Derek Bok, for a required college course on American history and government....Those in our nation who do not understand the blessing of freedom and the price past generations paid for it are likely...
By Wilfred M. McClay and Kathleen O'Toole - Parents are appalled by the reduction of American history to an endless exercise in identity politics and moral accusation. They fear that the study of the American past — rather than providing the young with a sense of something larger than themselves — has become something deeply negative: a way of separating us from our past and a weapon used to sow shame and resentment, and even hatred and despair, in the hearts of tomorrow’s citizens. This is a recipe for disaster. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Good, honest...
By Gerard Baker - The larger truth is that the people who control America’s leading cultural institutions and now its government have been eagerly manufacturing ideological rope for the Chinese hangman….The intellectual movement to which they subscribe has been the force behind the planned destruction—of the principal pillars of America’s authority in the world: the idea that the greatest nation on the planet was founded on universal ideals of human freedom and dignity. …How can a nation prevail in a global ideological struggle when its leaders believe its values are intrinsically evil? … Read More
By Andrew Michta - Czesław Miłosz wrote, “The Captive Mind… in 1953, to warn the West of what happens to the human mind and soul in a totalitarian system. Miłosz knew from experience, … how totalitarianism strips men and women of their liberty, transforming them into “affirmative cogs” in service of the state… Read More
By Andrew A. Michta - … ‘Death to America!” is a common refrain from antifa rioters …. Extremism becomes more entrenched in American politics with each passing day. These acts of violence encapsulate five decades of neo-Marxist indoctrination in American schools,… Neo-Marxists on the street and in institutions want to erase their opponents and deconstruct the country… Read More
By John M. Ellis - Colleges need to be accredited; state universities answer to governing boards. Accrediting agencies and governing boards are created through a political process. What if voters were to insist that those agencies demand answers to some elementary questions? …How can a department of political science that excludes half the spectrum of viable political ideas be competent to offer degrees in the field? How can a history curriculum be taught competently when only one extremist attitude to social and political questions is present in a department? …How can these extraordinary deficiencies deserve either accreditation, or support by...
By Christopher F. Rufo - Critical race theory is the latest battleground in the culture war. … key concepts, including “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” … have become ubiquitous in America’s elite institutions. Progressive politicians have sought to implement “antiracist” policies to reduce racial disparities, such as minorities-only income… Read More
By Christopher F. Rufo - Longer article - Critical race theory is fast becoming America’s new institutional orthodoxy. Yet most Americans have never heard of it—and of those who have, many don’t understand it. It’s time for this to change. We need to know what it is so we can know how to fight it. Read More
By Irving Kristol - WSJ - A great mind exposes ideological illusions, while thinking through better alternatives. The following are excerpts from essays that appeared in The Wall Street Journal by Irving Kristol, who died yesterday at age 89. An editorial on his legacy appears nearby. Read More
By Robert Pondiscio - Students’ personal choices matter. And so do the choices made by the education reform movement, which is steadfastly unwilling to address or even acknowledge the role that family structure and stability plays in students’ life outcomes. If a child in poverty graduates from high school, finds full-time employment, gets married, and has children, in that order, Rowe tirelessly pointed out—the chance they will remain in poverty as an adult drops to a mere 2 percent. “There is no public policy that comes even close to those kinds of results,” ... Read More
Over the past two centuries, global life quality has dramatically improved, to a large extent because of an incredible increase in energy, mostly from the harnessing of fossil fuels. That has made agriculture, industry and transportation vastly more productive. Average life spans have more than doubled, hunger has dramatically declined, and real income has increased tenfold. We risk all that progress if we just stop using fossil fuels. The world still gets four-fifths of its energy from fossil fuels, because renewable sources rarely provide good alternatives. Half the world’s population entirely depends on food grown with synthetic fertilizer produced almost entirely by...
By Michael Novak – Longer article - This essay is adapted from an address presented by Mr. Novak at Westminster Abbey on May 5, 1994. He is the twenty-fourth recipient of The Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. As we draw near the close of the twentieth century, we owe ourselves a reckoning. This century was history’s bloodiest. From this revered and mortally threatened Abbey some fifty years ago, one could hear the screech of falling bombs. At a time they didn’t choose, and in a way they didn’t foresee, more than a hundred million persons in Europe found their...