The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones, But George Will’s Column Raped Me’

Peter Paul Rubens, Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus (1618) “Feminism is, among other things, a totalitarian attempt to tell us what to think by controlling what we are allowed to say.” — Robert Stacy McCain, May 4 Who is turning rape into a joke? Feminists, by their counterfactual insistence that American university campuses are […]

Toward Anarchy and Oblivion

“It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles, and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. . . . I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look […]

Obama: Dream and Reality

“Obama: Anatomy of a World Leader,” by Alex Gray (detail) The aspirational presidency and its predictable failure: When they found him, he was a rare breed: a genuine African American (his father was Kenyan) who thought and talked like the academics on both sides of his family, a product of the faculty lounge who dabbled […]

Dinesh D’Souza Pleads Guilty

The conservative intellectual committed a particularly clumsy crime — an ill-disguised straw-donor scheme that violated federal campaign finance law — in an inexplicable attempt to aid a Republican candidate who never had a real chance to win. Whether or not Dinesh D’Souza was a target of selective prosecution, he was nonetheless guilty, and has now […]

The Brutality of Kurt Schlichter

Of course, I mean brutality as a compliment, expressing my admiration of his skillful demolition of a liberal “argument”: Mock them. Accuse them of adhering to a transphobic cisnormative paradigm and start shrieking “Hate crime!” Don’t worry about not making sense. They’re college students. They are used to not understanding what people smarter than they […]

Way to Blow It, Ta-Nehisi Coates

The headline on the Atlantic column is intriguing: Black Pathology and the Closing of the Progressive Mind It’s one of those intra-liberal feuds about something “controversial” Paul Ryan said 10 days ago, which of course was controversial only because Paul Ryan is a prominent Republican. But the feud among liberals is actually rather interesting in […]

Get ‘Empowered,’ Duke-Style!

The expression on the face of Duke University freshman Women’s Studies major Miriam Weeks (“Belle Knox”) represents . . . A. Her disappointment that the #4-ranked Blue Devils lost to Wake Forest by 10 points on Wednesday; B. Her disgust over recent claims that Thomas Bagby, her fellow Duke freshman who told everybody on campus […]

How to Hate Your Parents

Too many people go through life in a search for scapegoats, seeking someone to blame for their unhappiness, so as to avoid having to confront the fact that they are responsible for their own problems. Whatever their problem is, someone must be blamed, and that someone cannot be themselves, because if they ever were to […]

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