Category: Culture Wars/Current Controversies

A Sanctuary City for Crime

I have no problem with the idea of New York City being a sanctuary city for crime. By all means, turn NYC into a Stirnerite homeland where theft is just another economic activity. By Charles Fain Lehman, Wall Street Journal Manhattan’s new district attorney undercuts Mayor Adams’s initiative […]

Is a Civil War Ahead?

By David Remnick New Yorker A year after the attack on the Capitol, America is suspended between democracy and autocracy. The edifice of American exceptionalism has always wobbled on a shoddy foundation of self-delusion, and yet most Americans have readily accepted the commonplace that the United States is […]

A Tale of Two Authoritarians

By Matt Taibbi The appearance of Dick Cheney in the House of Representatives on the anniversary of January 6th helped identify the true villain on the scene. Former Vice President Dick Cheney visited the House of Representatives yesterday. He and his daughter Liz were the only two Republicans […]

The First Privilege Walk

By Christian Parenti, Nonsite.Org How Herbert Marcuse’s widow used a Scientology-linked cult’s methodology to gamify Identity Politics and thus helped steer the U.S. Left down the dead-end path of identitarian psychobabble. In the summer of 2021, a social justice training exercise called the Privilege Walk made headlines when […]

The Travails of Trumpification

by Timothy W. Luke, Telos Also available in Kindle ebook format at Amazon.com. In this series of critical essays written over the course of Donald J. Trump’s presidency, from its chaotic early days to its calamitous end, Timothy W. Luke explores how the recent twists and turns in […]

Why Progressives Defend Drug Dealers

This article inadvertently or indirectly points out the limitations of “criminal justice reform” within the context of the current state-centric system. The problems that this writer is describing are not rooted in the claim that drug decriminalization has gone “too far.” The problem is that drug decriminalization has […]

Why Progressives Got Crime So Wrong

It is interesting that the serious discourse on issues pertaining to crime has largely shifted from “law and order conservatives” vs “soft on crime liberals” to moderates vs leftists. By Michael Shellenberger And why we can fight crime without mass incarceration. Over the last two decades, progressives came […]

Class and Caste

Quite a bit could be learned about Western politics by examining electoral patterns in India. The Democrats are an alliance between the Brahmins and Dalits and the Republicans are an alliance between the Vaishyas and Shudras, while the Kshatriyas are divided between the Democrats and Republicans, depending on […]

America’s Asymmetric Civil War

Michael  Lind, Tablet It’s within metro areas, not between the states. America’s states seem increasingly disunited. Divisions over controversies related to COVID— lockdowns, vaccine mandates, school closures—have accentuated existing splits among blue Democratic and red Republican states with respect to partisanship and attitudes toward crime and public policy. […]