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“There is no proletarian,” wrote Oswald Spengler, “not even a Communist movement, that has not operated in the interests of money, and for the time being permitted by money – and that without the idealists among its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact.” What the German prophet of pessimism meant was that revolutions
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Gun rights activist Dana Loesch recently complained that she had been denied the right to respond to her critics on Twitter, according to a story reported in the New York Post. Unlike her adversaries, who are free to swing away at her, Loesch is not allowed to use Twitter’s fact-checking platform to correct their misstatements.
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“There’s a sucker born every minute,” said P. T. Barnum, expressing, without intending it, the soul of modernist movements in the arts. Donald Trump recently outraged what has been called, without any sense of irony or hyperbole, “the architectural community,” with a directive preferring the federal style for new public buildings in Washington, D.C. That
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Humans tend to romanticize the past. In many ways it helps us see the good in what has been and what is now, but in other ways it disguises the truth. The history of American public schooling is a notable example of viewing history through rose-colored glasses. In my college and graduate school education classes,
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Tax season is a good time to remind us that the history of taxes tells the story of whole civilizations. What is taxed, and how much is it taxed, tells us what the rulers valued. What was exempt tells us who had the political pull to be excluded. It is no different today. If you’re
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Sixty-five years ago Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of espionage for passing secrets to the Soviets before and after the Second World War. They were executed two years later. It sounds like ancient history, and I’m sure many younger people today have trouble understanding why this particular case took on such great historical significance.
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