“The core of science is not controlled experiment or mathematical modeling; it is intellectual honesty.” Sam Harris Public intellectuals should be humble, open, erudite, and perhaps even witty, but more important than all of these, they should be intellectually honest. That might strike one as banal. Of course they shouldn’t…

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” — -William Faulkner A good political ideology must be concordant with human nature. Ideologies that are not, however inspiring they might sound, will inevitably lead to frustration and ultimately to disillusionment. I believe that conservatism is the…

The philosopher Kate Manne forwarded the concept “himpathy,” or the “the inappropriate and disproportionate sympathy powerful men often enjoy in cases of sexual assault, intimate partner violence, homicide and other misogynistic behavior.” In this short essay, I wish to examine this concept critically, unsympathetically, but fair-mindedly. There are…

“It’s not unusual to be a conservative. But it is unusual to be an intellectual conservative.” — Roger Scruton I am a conservative. And although there is nothing unusual about being conservative, I hope there is something unusual enough about my particular path to conservatism that it will prove edifying…

“In the past, upper-class Americans used to display their social status with luxury goods. Today, they do it with luxury beliefs.” —Rob Henderson A number of thinkers in recent years have applied signaling theory to explain the often bizarre beliefs of educated elites in the West. In this short piece…

“All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.” Ralph Waldo Emerson Since at least the Enlightenment, when religious skepticism became widespread among the educated, philosophers have tried to provide an answer for why people believe. Many such theories have been simplistic and…

“And I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice. I don’t want just any greatness for it, particularly a greatness born of blood and falsehood. I want to keep it alive by keeping justice alive.” Albert Camus. Many liberals, progressives, and other cosmopolitans view…

Many thinkers have profitably compared wokism to a religion. Here, I want to drill into this comparison by looking at the way wokism resembles a certain strand of apocalyptic thinking and then examine now Nietzsche’s analysis of the triumph of Christianity in “The Genealogy of Morals” might explain the popularity…

In a recent op-ed for the New York Times, the conservative columnist Ross Douthat argued that part of white America’s turn against meritocracy is caused by what social theorist Peter Turchin called “elite overproduction.” America is creating more elites than it can accommodate, and those who are not accommodated become…