One Nation, Under Woke
By Richard M. Reinsch II | Through the sweeping and indiscriminate indictment of oppression that it makes against the American republic, wokeism poses the first serious challenge to our constitutional democracy since Communism. Wokeism aims to remake American constitutionalism root and branch, to transform economics, politics, education, and other institutions and practices. The free and equal individual under the rule of law will be replaced with monolithic voices, united by perceived oppression, who demand a mutating law and politics…
Morbid Safetyism
By Catherine Ruth Pakaluk | In the spring of 2003, I was in my third year of graduate school and expecting my third baby. One day, I ran into a fellow student whom I had not seen in some months. Seeing my baby bump, she exclaimed: “Your third? Do you really think that’s healthy?” The baby is now a handsome, 6’1’’ high school senior, a scratch golfer hoping to play college golf; he lights up my world with cheerful…
Turning People Into Products
By Daniel Frost and Hal Boyd | Thanks to a new technology in development called in vitro gametogenesis (IVG), in the near future any combination of donor parents—one woman, or two men, or three women and three men—may be able to have a child. IVG would allow scientists to take the genetic matter of one or more humans and use it to create gametes in a lab. One man, two women, four men, you name it…
Fake Fact Checking
By John Stossel | Recently, I released a video that called California’s fires “government fueled.” A few days later, Facebook inserted a warning on my video: “Missing Context. Independent fact-checkers say this information could mislead.” Some of my viewers now feel betrayed. One wrote: “Shameful, John … what happened to you!!? Your reporting was always fair … [but] your … fires story was so … unfair, even Facebook…
Solzhenitsyn’s ‘Forgotten God’
By Paul Kengor | “In 1949, some friends and I came upon a noteworthy news item in Nature, a magazine of the Academy of Sciences.” So opens Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s majestic The Gulag Archipelago, a seemingly odd start for a classic on the Soviet gulag, the nation’s forced labor camps. Readers initially wonder where the author is headed with a sort of ho-hum report from…
We Need Institutions More Than Ever
By Joshua Mitchell | It’s not good for man to be alone, yet modern life conspires to produce just such a condition. “Social distancing” is more than just a response to a pandemic; it is the centrifugal force in modern life. Americans play their part in this maddening development by forever being on the go. Nothing, and no one, sits still. We measure our friendships not in the present tense…
Centrally Planning the Family
By Clara E. Jace | Soviet misunderstandings of the market were replicated as misunderstandings of the family—with damaging and dehumanizing consequences. Though Soviet family policy has mercifully ended, it is still worthwhile to examine its central ideas, because they live on today in Western family policy. “The state does not need the family…
The Slavery of Radical Freedom
By Margaret McCarthy | Central to the evil of slavery was its attempt to exterminate the black family. Slave traders took children from their parents. Slave-owners deprived men and women of the right to wed and then even used them as studs and breeders to fuel the slave trade. This thoroughgoing attack on childhood, marriage, and childbearing was the most radical…
Lessons from Another World
By Anthony Esolen | “My experience,” wrote Booker T. Washington in Up From Slavery, “is that there is something in human nature which always makes an individual recognize and reward merit, no matter under what color of skin merit is found. I have found, too, that it is the visible, the tangible, that goes a long ways in softening prejudices. The actual sight…