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Compulsory Feminism

For a long time, what Alexis de Tocqueville called the American “spirit of freedom” was balanced by settled norms that guided young men and women toward domestic life. These norms added up to a sexual constitution that rested on the foundational assumption that men and women had different and . . . . Continue Reading »

Letters

Liel Leibovitz’s article “Fight Together, Win Together” (December 2023) is a stirring encapsulation of the dark side, so to speak, of intersectionality’s ideological ascendancy within western academic institutions. Two questions stand out to me after reading the piece. Several groups of . . . . Continue Reading »

What Happened to the ACLU

When he was a young social worker in St. Louis, Roger Baldwin was briefly engaged to Anna Louise Strong, who later published more books in defense of the Russian Bolsheviks and Chinese Maoists than any other English-speaking author and ended up buried in a revolutionary martyrs’ cemetery in . . . . Continue Reading »

The Bottom Line

There are two facts of my life that my grandchildren used to tell their friends with pride. One is that in the year 2000, as part of my application to become a Canadian citizen, I secured a letter from the sheriff of Henrico County, Virginia, attesting that I did not have a criminal record. My . . . . Continue Reading »

Audacious Abe

Abraham Lincoln loved to tell stories. But many of them, as one political acquaintance tactfully admitted, “would not do exactly for the drawing room.” Lincoln had been raised in what he once called “the back side of this world,” and he had learned many a tale of how backsides worked. One of . . . . Continue Reading »

Clashing Rights

About halfway through his new book, ­Christopher Caldwell quotes John Stuart Mill on the relationship between diversity and democracy: “Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities.” This sentiment haunts The Age of Entitlement. Ostensibly about . . . . Continue Reading »

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