Am. History & Culture
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America’s Religious Future
No wonder the newly ascendant American ideologies, having to fill the vacuum where religion once was, are so divisive. They are meant to be divisive. On the left, the “woke” take religious notions such as original sin, atonement, ritual, and excommunication and repurpose them for secular ends. Adherents of wokeism see themselves as challenging the
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Quick Thoughts on the Impeachment
As I said in my post last week, this was political theater at a time when we're sick of it, but it was more compelling than I expected. Nevertheless, it's good that they got it over with in a week. Fifty-six percent of the country wanted him convicted, and 57% of the senators voted
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Miscellaneous Thoughts on Impeachment, Culture, and the Surveillance State
It's important that the U.S. have a post-Trump reckoning about how much damage has been done, not just by him but by his enablers. Will the impeachment play some role in that? I doubt it, since the whole point of it is simply to focus on what is already known about what Trump did before
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The Failure of Democracy is the Failure of Elites
For all our talk of democracy, it's pretty obvious that the country is run by elites in business, media, and politics. The rest of us get to ratify the general leftish or rightish direction they seem to be going, but the actual power of the people is pretty crude and is in effect plebiscitary. Elite
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Have you know sense, sir?
This is a text I received from a prominent conservative Christian minutes after President Biden’s Inaugural Address: “I broke down sobbing. It’s been a long five-and-a-half years.” Shortly after that, Scott Dudley, senior pastor at Bellevue Presbyterian Church in Bellevue, Wash., emailed me a note that said, “I never thought I would be moved to
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Proud Boys See the Trump Truth
After the presidential election last year, the Proud Boys, a far-right group, declared its undying loyalty to President Trump. In a Nov. 8 post in a private channel of the messaging app Telegram, the group urged its followers to attend protests against an election that it said had been fraudulently stolen from Mr. Trump. “Hail
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Why Trump?
Why? Why has Trump, of all people, evoked such devotion from so many Americans who should know better? Why do so many decent Americans identify with a man who is so blatantly indecent? What's at stake for them? What part of their souls have they surrendered to him? Why is the prospect of a Biden
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Four Years Too Late
Mr. Trump is set to depart office on Wednesday with an approval rating of 29 percent, the lowest of his presidency, according to a new poll from the Pew Research Center. About 75 percent of the public said Mr. Trump bore some responsibility for the violence and destruction of Jan. 6, which put the lives