The Blogs

As a young man, I was invited to dinner at the home of a senior professor at a respected liberal arts college. A man of conservative views and polished manners, he was cordial and witty. After dinner, he took me into his well-appointed library filled with the volumes [...]

This is the concluding part of Unmasking Trump Derangement Syndrome. Part 1, which ran last week,  focused on defining and describing TDS, and then debunking the core claim of TDS.  If you missed reading Part 1, click here.  This concluding part identifies the central socio-political drivers of TDS [...]

Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) both exemplifies and exacerbates the cultural maladies that drive our deeply divided public discourse. Too often, these divisions result in a loss of friends and damaging relationships with family members and colleagues. As significantly, the targeting of individuals for cancellation in the workplace and [...]

Elsewhere I have demonstrated precisely why anti-Zionism is antisemitism. In doing so I encountered the arguments of journalist Mehdi Hasan, formerly of MSNBC but now perhaps more at home with Al Jazeera.  Credibility concerns aside, he is well known and influential, and his arguments for the negative answer [...]

Can Western civilization survive?  One wonders.  It is mostly the small things that fuel the disquiet.  An illegal immigrant sets a woman on the F train in Brooklyn on fire, and all that the fellow passengers can think to do is to record her immolation on their cell [...]

America’s military power is consistently regarded as the strongest on the planet. Considered together with its leading allies, the American alliance system includes five of the world’s top ten militaries, plus eight more from among the top thirty. In stark contrast, the opposing alliance system led by Russia [...]

On the night of November 7, curiously only two days shy of the 86th anniversary of Kristallnacht, Europe was the scene of a fresh pogrom in which hundreds of antisemites targeted Jews for pre-meditated, coordinated violence in the streets of Amsterdam.  Groups of attackers – many of them [...]

The year 2024 marks the twenty-third anniversary of 9/11, a terrorist attack on American soil that took the lives of 2,997 people. The attacks were committed by nineteen terrorists who shouted “Allahu Akbar” moments before committing the murders. The words “Allahu Akbar,” God is great, in Arabic, were [...]

Throughout the Western world the academy is imperiled. It faces threats of several kinds, but the principal threat is from its own turn against the civilization that gave rise to it.    This threat takes the form of a summary judgment that all of Western history is a tale [...]

If there is one common factor that binds all the people who protest Israel’s war campaign it is compassion for the suffering of innocent Palestinian civilians who are caught in the middle of the Israeli war to destroy Hamas. And unquestionably, the Palestinians suffer, terribly. For Westerners, growing [...]