Friday, as the jury was being empaneled for the trial of fired police officer Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis City Council voted 13-0 to approve a record $27 million civil settlement with the family of George Floyd over his death in police custody. The jury will not likely miss this message sent by the city fathers: I.e.,
READ MOREThe other day I ran across a passage from That Hideous Strength which seems oddly applicable to our time. A dystopian novel written by C. S. Lewis at the close of World War II, That Hideous Strength finds one of its main characters, Mark Studdock, working for N.I.C.E., an organization which pulls the strings in
READ MOREThe Biden administration is studying slavery reparations for African Americans. One of the prominent justifications for reparations is the racial income gap, and some proponents of reparations argue that wealth redistribution would put blacks on equal footing with white Americans. This analysis is misguided. A major reason for the racial income gap is the individual achievement
READ MOREA Somalian feminist and well-known critic of Islamic patriarchy, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, expressed the following critique of Black Lives Matter in an interview with the Hoover Institution last summer: What we are seeing now is this mishmash of people who call themselves Black Lives Matter have found the hook. They found a way of going about the
READ MOREThe “woke” crazies never quit. In the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen Mr. Potato Head attacked for his gender-bias and the Muppets “put into context” by Disney. Meanwhile, as Intellectual Takeout’s Annie Holmquist reports, the cancel culture mob is busy banning or assaulting other films and books. I believe there is a way to halt this
READ MOREMany thought that the government-imposed lockdowns of 2020 might result in a temporary reprieve of the United States’ falling birth rates. Unfortunately, it appears that this will not be the silver lining of COVID-19 after all. Economists Melissa Kearney and Philip Levine believe that there will be 300,000 “missing births” due to the pandemic, based on
READ MOREOne of the most prominent children’s book authors of the 20th century, Dr. Seuss, suffered a double blow to his legacy this month. His estate said they would no longer publish six of his children’s books that contained depictions of Africans and Asians that are “hurtful and wrong.” The Biden administration followed by unceremoniously dumping all of
READ MOREToday, the four premier leaders of The Quad—the U.S., Australia, India, and Japan—conduct their first summit, by teleconference. The Quad, or Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, is an informal strategy forum of the major Indo-Pacific democracies that some wish to see evolve into an Asian NATO to contain China, as NATO contained the Soviet Union for 40
READ MOREBefore William Shakespeare there was Geoffrey Chaucer. The Bard borrowed at least one of his plots from his predecessor (“The Two Noble Kinsmen,” was based on the “Knight’s Tale”). Both English greats were, it could be said, refashioning Homer’s Shield of Achilles as they painted elaborate portraits of their entire societies, from the lowliest corners to
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