Law & Liberty
Rachel Lomasky ventures a thoughtful exploration of the future of artificial intelligence. Writing in Law & Liberty, Lomasky suggests AI’s trajectory is promising, with many benefits for creativity and productivity. Despite AI’s complicated and numerous social implications, Lomasky proposes that we would be mistaken to extrapolate that ominous trajectory too far.
Law & Liberty
Rachel Lomasky ventures a thoughtful exploration of the future of artificial intelligence. Writing in Law & Liberty, Lomasky suggests AI’s trajectory is promising, with many benefits for creativity and productivity. Despite AI’s complicated and numerous social implications, Lomasky proposes that we would be mistaken to extrapolate that ominous trajectory too far.
First Things
George Weigel in First Things reflects somewhat floridly on the war in Ukraine, which two days ago marked its grim two-year anniversary. The suffering they’ve endured, Weigel says, has united Ukrainians in determination to resist Russian forces. Currently dubious Americans, he suggests, should take a lesson from Second World War-era Senator Arthur Vandenberg, who dropped his penny-pinching when it really counted.
Philanthropy Daily
In 1790 George Washington assured the “Children of the Stock of Abraham” that the newly founded United States of America would be a safe home where “there shall be none to make him afraid.” Drawing on recent statistics indicating an eruption of thousands of anti-Semitic incidents, Jack Fowler in Philanthropy Daily wonders whether American Jews can still feel safe and whether the Founding Fathers’ stirring promise has lapsed.
The New Criterion
In The New Criterion, Wilfred M. McClay suggests that a genuine commitment to freedom of speech requires choosing a “regime” (i.e., legal and social framework) of constant trial, one marked by two-way dialogue rather than a self-referential repetition of one’s own views, and one oriented to attaining a social end rather than merely making noise for its own sake.
National Review
In National Review, Stanley Kurtz looks at a Utah State Legislature bill – S.B. 226 – that aims to restore a mandatory “Great Books” curriculum to university education, covering Western history from Homer to the Holocaust, and provide the legislative muscle needed to organize and fund the required faculty. Woke/DEI-oriented “studies” courses and radical faculty, it is hoped, will wither proportionately. Kurtz optimistically suggests this approach could be extended to universities across the U.S.
The American Mind
Inez Feltscher-Stepman offers a bleak view of youth in The American Mind. Kids are on a mission to “decolonize” the West and undermine their country, are increasingly anti-Semitic and rationalize violence as “vengeance of the oppressed”. Millions of them will soon begin moving into positions of leadership, and having to pay income tax, Stepman predicts, will not make them more conservative.
The European Conservative
The “red pill” sphere of influence on young, spiritually malnourished men is epically mistaken and misdirected, writes Harrison Pitt in The European Conservative. The movement’s rhetoric of (often limitlessly promiscuous) self-actualization is founded on thinkers like Nietzsche, Machiavelli and Darwin and is not, Pitt warns, grounded in traditional (and conservative) virtues like duty, self-sacrifice, piety and service.
City Journal
What most Americans would describe as a border crisis is being touted as a success by President Joe Biden, writes Jeffrey H. Anderson in City Journal. As a point of reference, the Biden Administration is releasing nearly 200,000 asylum-seeking aliens into the U.S. per month – 11,244 for every one released under Donald Trump. Anderson reveals what hinders Biden from standing up for Americans on their home soil.
The New Criterion
UK voters will go to the polls in the next 12 months. Conservatives have held office since 2010, but Simon Heffer doubts they’ll convince voters one more time. Writing in The New Criterion, Heffer asserts that a decade-plus of incompetence and mostly self-inflicted wounds have disgusted Brits of all stripes. And now come the engineers of Brexit – Nigel Farage and the Reform Party – to nail the lid on the Conservative coffin.
First Things
Peter J. Leithart in First Things reflects on a recent work of political metaphysics, God and the City. Leithart examines one key idea from the book – that a failed relationship between church and civilized society – the “city” – is akin to sundering an individual human being’s body and soul. The two must be in harmony for the whole to be healthy.
Spiked
Germany’s farmers are rising in protest akin to the populist truckers’ movement, writes Tom Slater in Spiked. Provoked by government plans to increase farm-related taxes and mire farming in even more green-driven red tape, 30,000 people with 5,000 tractors have camped out peacefully in Berlin. Amidst deeper concerns that government policy is pushing farming itself towards extinction, people are saying, “We’ve had enough!”
AMAC journal
In the AMAC journal, David Lewis Schaefer evaluates testimony by Anthony Fauci before a U.S. Congressional subcommittee investigating pandemic policy. House Republicans’ dogged work got through Fauci’s reflexive prevarications to uncover juicy details on the virus’s lab-based origins, how social distancing landed randomly at six feet and the damaging impacts of closing schools and mandating vaccines and masks.
The Spectator
Kate Andrews in The Spectator writes about the refreshing heterodoxy Argentinian President Milei offered in his speech at last week’s World Economic Forum in Switzerland. Andrews highlights Milei’s key messages – like challenging the ever-expanding state, taxes and red tape – each of which undermines the misguided assumptions of the conference-going “Davoisie”.
Spiked
Jennie Bristow in Spiked laments plunging post-pandemic school attendance, which recently prompted the UK government to launch…an ad campaign. The social contract among schools, parents and teachers was not, however, broken by the Covid-19 lockdowns, Bristow argues. As damaging as the school closures were – resulting in 100,000 chronically truant “ghost children” – the overall problem is even larger and longer-term.
Politico
In Politico, Michael Schaffer analyzes media coverage of the U.S. Democratic Party’s Presidential primary and finds a cloistered news ecosystem. Candidate Dean Phillips, for example, complains he’s been sidelined by mainstream media who’ve been pressured by President Joe Biden’s campaign. Schaffer compares this with the media free-for-all concerning Republican rivals to Donald Trump.
Law & Liberty
James M. Patterson in Law & Liberty surveys the economics of universities. Conservatives, he notes, typically think about university economics in terms of money. Patterson suggests there’s another currency of higher education: prestige. The woke-left gets this, Patterson notes, before exploring whether a prestigious conservative university is even possible.
Law & Liberty
Amidst the raging Claudine Gay anti-Semitism/plagiarism scandal, Helen Dale in Law & Liberty wonders what will happen to woke-infested universities. Despite their gargantuan financial endowments, nested administrations and elite prestige, Dale suggests their future is not guaranteed. After all, she notes, Catholic monasteries that had existed in England for nearly a millennium were extinguished in the space of four years.
Robert Bryce Substack
Illustrating the widening phenomenon of rural populations rebelling against “green” power projects, Robert Bryce writes about a recent U.S. court ruling demanding the dismantling of 84 420-foot-high wind turbines. Oklahoma’s Osage Nation had used issues of sovereignty to go after the project – but the tribe’s substantive concerns will be familiar to farmers and lovers of open spaces everywhere.
The Washington Free Beacon
In The Washington Free Beacon, Matthew Continetti notes that, for the first time since 1892, this year’s U.S. Presidential election will be a two-incumbent affair. The last time, Continetti pointedly notes, voters elected a President to a non-consecutive second term. That sounds eerily familiar. Could history repeat itself?
Law & Liberty
Colleen Sheehan reflects in Law & Liberty on the ever-relevant central theme in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Originally entitled First Impressions, the novel conveys the weightiness of truly understanding someone before judging them. Great advice amidst the mass neurosis stoked by our digital age’s social media addiction.
American Mind
Andrew Carico in the American Mind charts the rise of labels “leader” and “leadership,” terms embraced by the likes of Mussolini and Hitler. Today, leadership positions are often handed out based on minority status, creating a contemporary “artificial aristocracy.” Carico suggests this dangerous path can be sidestepped through two – admittedly difficult – initial steps.
Tablet
In Tablet, Lee Smith provides a sombre view of the metastasizing global empire of Palestine. Though founded upon strong support in the West Bank and Gaza, the empire has a much broader scope than negotiating two non-contiguous plots of land. Smith explains how a performative cult of death that should be self-extinguishing is sustained by cynical and/or nihilist forces the world over.
Tom Klingenstein
Thomas D. Klingenstein bemoans modern architecture’s physical expression of the woke regime. Classical architecture utilizes and displays good order, reason and natural law. Starkly contrasting this, modernist and current architecture suffocates, generates self-loathing and is as welcoming as a jail. And, like wokism, we plebs are not permitted to offer constructive criticism. Bonus read: check out Vancouver architect Oberto Oberti’s C2C critique of modernist and current architecture.
New York Post
Glenn H. Reynolds in the New York Post suggests a new way of countering misinformation: instead of elites “protecting” the rest of society through censorship against ideas they deem dangerous, why not reduce the powers held by big businesses, big universities and big governments. That is because, writes Reynolds, their influence is all-too easily bought and they absorb – and circulate – the opposite of the truth.
Spiked
In Spiked, Fraser Myers covers the “trial” of former UK prime minister Boris Johnson. The venue is supposed to be an unbiased evaluation of the country’s handling of Covid-19, to better prepare for the next pandemic. Myers shows how the process is instead attempting to solidify a pro-lockdown narrative by twisting statistics and ignoring key facts such as non-lockdown Sweden’s low rate of excess deaths.
Daily Caller
Does the idea of an e-bike battery spontaneously bursting into flames between your legs worry you? It should! In the Daily Caller, Steve Goreham shows how world leaders are overlooking the growing safety hazards from “green” energy. Electric vehicles, grid-scale batteries and similar e-technologies are bursting into flames left and right, making them far more dangerous than internal combustion engines. Even more dangerous hydrogen applications are coming next.
The Spectator
In The Spectator, Andrew Roberts remembers the late, towering Henry Kissinger (who passed away at 100 on November 29), most famous for his role as Secretary of State to U.S. President Richard Nixon. Roberts succinctly describes how Kissinger shaped international relations in Israel, Iraq, Iran, Chile, Cambodia, East Timor, China and elsewhere in ways that often lasted to this day.
National Review
John Fund and Wendell Cox in National Review show turning political tides Down Under, where progressives often optimistically point. The referendum defeat of Australia’s race-based “Voice” scheme and the demise of Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Party in New Zealand suggest that, perhaps, those countries have reached “peak woke.”
CATO Institute
He refers to leftists as “shit” – often and with gusto. He’s a trained economist – a self-described libertarian and “anarcho-capitalist” – who wants to reduce government, slash regulations and curb inflation by ditching his country’s central bank for the U.S. dollar and crypto. And he just persuaded 56 percent of a dejected, poverty-racked country’s voters to put him in charge. Meet Javier Milei, Argentina’s new president. Bonus feature: see here what Milei really thinks of leftists.
Tablet Mag
In Tablet Mag, Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff classify us all into six broad response categories regarding the pandemic’s aftermath. From zero-Covid zealots to regime agents to all-in antagonists (plus several more nuanced categories), the prominent dissident scientists’ central point is that the interplay of popular and elite attitudes will determine whether there is a thoughtful, meaningful reckoning with what happened – so we can avoid the same mistakes next time.
Real Clear Politics
Peter Berkowitz in Real Clear Politics suggests anti-Semitism is only a partial reason for why American universities are siding with jihadist barbarism. At least equally powerful is multiculturalism, which has fomented a divide between Western civilization and the “post-West” that is, in turn, propagating an intolerant and anti-pluralist creed under the guise of tolerance and equity.