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1 month ago | 
lawliberty.org | Bradley J. Birzer |South Dakota |Richard Samuelson |Helen Dale
One of the most important but largely unsung heroes of the Reagan Era was movie-maker John Hughes. A close friend of P. J. O’Rourke, Hughes wrote, directed, and/or produced a whole slew of movies, including Sixteen Candles, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Pretty in Pink, to name a few. Born in Lansing, Michigan, and raised during his teenage years in a suburb of northern Chicago, Hughes’s career began with writing jokes for famous comedians as well as writing regularly for National Lampoon.
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1 month ago | 
lawliberty.org | Agnes Callard |Zena Hitz |Richard Samuelson |Helen Dale
The Elks, the Shriners, and the bowling leagues are too far gone to be mourned. Even our dining has become solitary if our cultural commentators are to be believed. Office communities breathe on life support, as do many churches. Face-to-face interaction of any kind, much less substantive conversation, is increasingly hard to come by. But who mourns the decline of philosophical conversation?
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1 month ago | 
lawliberty.org | Theodore Dalrymple |Richard Samuelson |Helen Dale |Thomas Powers
When I was young and naïve, the thought never occurred to me that what appeared in medical journals might be fraudulent. I knew that there had been scientific hoaxes, such as the Piltdown Man, and I knew that, man being fallible, mistakes were made. Papers in medical journals were often followed in the correspondence columns by lively debate over the interpretation of findings, which were seldom indisputable, especially when they involved complex statistics.
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1 month ago | 
lawliberty.org | JAMES CAPRETTA |Richard Samuelson |Helen Dale |Thomas Powers
If the 118th Congress is remembered at all, it will likely be for its ineffectiveness and dysfunction, which persisted until the merciful end. In its last days, as it rushed for the exits, it put off, once again, final decisions on federal agency budgets until at least mid-March (nearly six months into the current fiscal year). This delay included military spending, which has obvious security consequences.
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1 month ago | 
lawliberty.org | Mike Gonzalez |Richard Samuelson |Helen Dale |Thomas Powers
At the height of the fateful year of 2020, while Black Lives Matter activists roamed the streets of our cities, setting fire to buildings and shocking much of the country into weirdly accepting provable lies, I warned that America faced mass hysteria akin to the Salem witch trials.
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1 month ago | 
lawliberty.org | Robert Thornett |Richard Samuelson |Helen Dale
In his 1859 treatise On Liberty, John Stuart Mill observed that one reason for protecting free speech is that there is value in arguing with false opinions. It brings about “the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error,” he wrote. For example, arguing with “Flat Earthers” helps to bring about a better understanding of geodesy, the science of measuring and representing Earth’s shape.
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1 month ago | 
lawliberty.org | Mike Gonzalez |Robert Thornett |Richard Samuelson |Helen Dale
Five years ago, cities across America faced an upheaval inspired by an ideology now called “wokeism.” Combining progressive notions of social justice with critical race theory and calls for revolutionary political action, it rapidly became a major force in American life. Just as suddenly, though, it now seems that “wokeism” is fading away. In this symposium, two Law & Liberty contributors explore the origins and demise of this ideology.
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1 month ago | 
lawliberty.org | Frederick M. Hess |Richard Samuelson |Helen Dale |Thomas Powers
March 5, 2025 There’s no way to sugarcoat this. During the pandemic, America’s schools failed students and families. In early March 2020, I woke each morning to a flood of calls from reporters asking about school closures even as my wife and I anxiously speculated about whether our kindergartener’s school would be open that day. Every parent remembers that feeling of confusion and helplessness. It was a lost-at-sea moment.
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1 month ago | 
lawliberty.org | Richard Samuelson |Helen Dale |Thomas Powers |Scott Yenor
In his history of the New Deal, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called the events that precipitated the election of Franklin Roosevelt and the creation of the New Deal “The Crisis of the Old Order.” Building on the ideas of the earlier Progressive Movement, (FDR ‘s “Commonwealth Club Address” outlining the agenda for his presidency is officially a “Campaign Address On Progressive Government”), Roosevelt led a realignment, and helped to create a new political order under our Constitution.
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Jan 13, 2025 | 
americanmind.org | Richard Samuelson
In the 1920s, Joseph Stalin coined the term “American Exceptionalism.” He called it the “heresy of American exceptionalism.” In his Marxist religion, the class struggle outlined in the words of the prophet Marx were gospel. To suggest that the universal history described in Marx’s works somehow didn’t apply to America was therefore a heresy. This story comes to mind as leftists, in the wake of the election, take to re-evaluating the prudence of wokeness.
