Reflections on God … Man … Life
As I ponder the current crisis in Ukraine, instigated by a Russian despot, I think back to what I wrote in a book I published in 2015. The aim of The Witness and the President was to analyze the lives and beliefs of Ronald Reagan and Whittaker Chambers and try to figure out which man was more correct about the future of freedom. Reagan was the supreme optimist. That doesn’t mean he didn’t see threats clearly, but he had faith… Read more »
Russian oppression of Ukraine is nothing new. Back in the days of Stalin, there was an attempt to wipe out all Ukrainian resistance to his policy via the genocide route. A book that documents this attempt, The Harvest of Sorrow by historian Robert Conquest and published in the 1980s, spells out clearly what Stalin sought to do and what he actually accomplished with respect to widespread death and destruction in Ukraine, especially in the state-sponsored famine of 1932-1933, known as… Read more »
Give thanks today for an organization known as the Federalist Society, which vets potential federal court nominees for President Trump. The latest Supreme Court pick, Brett Kavanaugh, even with a few question marks in the eyes of some conservatives, seems to be a solid choice. Of course, Democrats were poised to oppose whomever Trump nominated; it didn’t matter who it was. This political cartoon makes the point rather well: Pray for Kavanaugh—he is about to go through one of the… Read more »
Ronald Reagan, with invaluable help from Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II, brought the Evil Empire to its knees by the end of the 1980s. He was ridiculed by many when he said that communism and the Soviet version of it would soon be on the ash heap of history. But he was correct. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. The USSR ceased to be officially on January 1, 1992. For a while, it looked as if it might… Read more »
Watching the cultural/political Left go crazy the past few weeks should be instructive to many Americans. Although there’s nothing really surprising about the “progressive” reaction to Trump’s presidency, their out-of-control rage, whining, and actual destruction of property offers a valuable lesson about the dangers of Totalitarian Leftism. The University of California Berkeley retains an iconic status in the minds of those on the Left. They believe it is the place where free speech was born in the 1960s. That image… Read more »
Everyone is now decrying “fake news.” As if it’s a new phenomenon. I’m a historian; I can testify that fake news is nothing new. Three decades ago, while working on my doctorate, I was immersed in fake news—from the 1790s. Newspapers of the era were sponsored by either Federalists or the Democrat-Republicans. The “news” in some of those papers was sometimes pure speculation, often made up just to undermine the political opposition. My subject of study was Noah Webster, who… Read more »
The new Congress is now seated and ready for business. Already the Republicans have moved forward with repealing Obamacare. They put that provision inside a budget bill that doesn’t allow a filibuster. Maybe they are finally learning how to govern. The Democrats find themselves in an unusual situation after this past election: Democrat leadership is at a historic low, and prospects for the future are not the greatest: With electoral devastation all around him, President Obama seems oblivious to the… Read more »