Yet More Observations about the Way We Are Now

What did Nancy Reagan ever do to deserve a commemorative postage stamp?

Isn’t it a bit strange that so many Protestant clergy are slavishly devoted to a foreign country that is neither American nor Christian?

Why does every single European new television series always have a favourably portrayed black person in the first five minutes? And an interracial love affair, often rather implausible, by the second episode?

According to official U.S. policy, Confederates were fighting to preserve slavery. Therefore everything representing memory of the Confederacy has to be exorcised. This is a childish lie. In order to establish that the Confederacy was fighting to preserve slavery you have to postulate that the North was fighting to abolish slavery. Confederates were fighting against a vicious invasion that threatened to abolish the self-government that their forefathers had won just a generation or two before. Northerners were fighting for conquest of people and resources. A couple of phone booths could contain all the Northern soldiers who thought they were risking their lives for the good of black people. In fact, slavery was not the foremost consideration in the mind of either side.

A regime that is expunging many of the noblest parts of its history on the basis of a lie is not a good regime. The assumption that slavery is the explanation for the bloodiest and most destructive war in our history comes from the same impulse that creates the 1619 Project atrocity.

The lie puts black people at the center of American history, and that is not true. The story of America is much bigger and more positive. American history is the story of the conquest of a continental wilderness, establishment of free institutions, and a prosperity that was once (although no longer) the envy of the world. African American history is a sidebar to that great story which could have happened without them.

The rule of Joe Biden is starting to look like a character in a comic farce, although a dangerous one.

​I have been trying for years to think what Hillary Clinton reminds me of. It has finally come to me. She is a snobbish sorority sister who likes to boss people around. That is all she has ever been.