Revisiting the Classics

One of the more curious books of 2018 is Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age by Donna Zuckerberg. She is the sister of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who is America’s leading fan of the Emperor Augustus, founder of the Roman Empire. Dr. Donna, who has a Ph.D. in ...

2013: A Race Odyssey

With the spectacular failure of clinical psychologist Dr. Prof. Christine Blasey Ford’s vague charges against Brett Kavanaugh to elicit any corroborating evidence, moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s new book about the apparent epidemic of politics-related mental illness that began around 2013, ...

The Success of Israeli Nationalism

Israel is one of the intellectually freer nations, which helps explain how an Israeli political philosopher, Yoram Hazony, has suddenly established himself as perhaps the most interesting thinker of the post–Merkel’s Mistake era with his spectacular new book, The Virtue of Nationalism. With ...

Royce Hall, UCLA

Delusion on Campus

In her new book The Diversity Delusion, Heather Mac Donald takes on identity politics far more forthrightly than Francis Fukuyama dared to in his new book Identity, which I reviewed last week. Just compare their subtitles: Mac Donald chose How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University ...

Diversity vs. Dignity

Do identity politics truly represent “the demand for dignity,” as centrist political philosopher Francis Fukuyama asserts in the subtitle of his new book, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment? Personally, “dignity” would strike me as an odd characterization of ...

The Wisdom of Dan Quayle

The most overlooked cause of the economic crash of ten years ago this Saturday is modern America’s most sacred value, diversity. As far as I can tell, the now-sacred cliché that “Diversity is our strength” traces back to a spring 1992 speech made by Vice President Dan Quayle about a trip ...

Adolf Eichmann

Bland ‘Finale’

Operation Finale is a decently crafted, reasonably accurate retelling of the kidnapping from Argentina of Adolf Eichmann (played by Sir Ben Kingsley), the most notorious supervisor of the Holocaust still on the loose in 1960, by Israeli Mossad operatives (led by a secret agent portrayed by Oscar ...

Singapore City

Crazy Conspicuous Consumption

Crazy Rich Asians, Hollywood’s new romantic comedy about a Chinese-American young lady and her aristocratic Singaporean boyfriend attending a lavish high-society wedding, is widely praised for being “inclusive” and “diverse” because—follow me closely here—the cast is comprised almost ...

Spike Lee and Tonya Lewis Lee

Spike Lee’s KkKrazyGlue

Spike Lee’s new movie BlacKkKlansman has received 100 percent thumbs up from 46 professional film critics aggregated by Rotten Tomatoes. This disgraceful unanimity is more craven than even last winter’s unhinged hosannas for Black Panther. That at least was a fair to middling film, while ...

Tawana Brawley

The Emmett Till Effect

I’ve figured out a way to quantify how Establishment news organizations manipulate the contents of our minds: just track the use of tendentious phrases over the years. Since 2016, there has been much talk of “fake news.” For example, The New York Times used the phrase “fake news” 901 ...