1,524 words

As the United States and its Western allies beat a hasty and shambolic retreat from Afghanistan, it is clear the wheels of history have turned again. (more…)

Edgar Fernhout, Schädel, 1935.

1,937 words

The lexicon of mendacious government platitudes has gained another ignominious entry. “Just three weeks to flatten the curve!” they implored one long year ago. Yet after twelve months of authoritarianism and state-enforced solitude, SWAT teams are swooping in to arrest Miami spring break revelers, and lockdown protests from Amsterdam to Kassel are intensifying across Europe. (more…)

Joseph Feely, Forgotten Warrior, 2020.

1,524 words

We live in indisputably dark times. Everywhere we look, the foreboding shadows of authoritarianism, globalism, and the imprisonment of the human spirit seem abundantly evident. 2020 demonstrated more than ever the naked and brazen power of the elites that misrule us, whether they were banning a sitting US president from social media or governing our lives entirely by technocratic diktats under the pretense of Covid-19. (more…)

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Dream of Ossian, 1813.

1,437 words

The first rocket in over a decade has blasted off from US soil, bound for stars, aiming to dock with the International Space Station. Yet the country it leaves behind is set aflame, riven by racial strife in some of the most widespread unrest in recent memory. The world emerges from months of stasis and pseudo-imprisonment, facing an uncertain political and economic future in the wake of the coronavirus. In 1992, Francis Fukuyama predicted the end of history (more…)

2,342 words

We are living in an age of dissolution. Every institution of government and society is in a state of seemingly terminal decline. At the individual level the notions of honor, personal responsibility, and self-sacrifice have largely vanished from public life. The cause of this malaise is not material inequality, but the collapse of faith. (more…)

929 words

Since its inception the internet has always been a guarantor of human freedom. It is the lone unmolested, unmediated and free channel in which the endless flow of ideas and associations can take place. It is undoubtedly the greatest technological and intellectual achievement of modern times. Yet it is modernity itself that now imperils the internet and the freedom it offers. (more…)

1,136 words

All across America a great iconoclasm is happening. What started with murmurs of disapproval and the banishing of suspect symbols has become an out and out torrent of rage against collective memory. In towns and cities across the South, Confederate monuments that have stood in their silent watch for a century or more are being dismantled and removed in the dead of night by cowardly municipal councils hoping to appease the howling mob.  (more…)