We Got Here Because of Cowardice. We Get Out With Courage by Bari Weiss

 We Got Here Because of Cowardice. We Get Out With Courage by Bari Weiss 

George Orwell said that “the further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.” In an age of lies, telling the truth is high risk. It comes with a cost. But it is our moral obligation.

It is our duty to resist the crowd in this age of mob thinking. It is our duty to think freely in an age of conformity. It is our duty to speak truth in an age of lies. 

This bravery isn’t the last or only step in opposing this revolution—it’s just the first. After that must come honest assessments of why America was vulnerable to start with, and an aggressive commitment to rebuilding the economy and society in ways that once again offer life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to the greatest number of Americans.

But let’s start with a little courage.

Courage means, first off, the unqualified rejection of lies. Do not speak untruths, either about yourself or anyone else, no matter the comfort offered by the mob. And do not genially accept the lies told to you. If possible, be vocal in rejecting claims you know to be false. Courage can be contagious, and your example may serve as a means of transmission.

This woman is absolutely right. It's time to stop living in fear and promulgating lies.

The Fickle ‘Science’ of Lockdowns by Phillip W. Magness and Peter C. Earle

 The Fickle ‘Science’ of Lockdowns by Phillip W. Magness and Peter C. Earle 

So why did public-health authorities abandon their opposition to lockdowns? Why did they rush to embrace the untested claims of flawed epidemiological modeling? One answer appears in the Johns Hopkins study from 2019: “Some NPIs, such as travel restrictions and quarantine, might be pursued for social or political purposes by political leaders, rather than pursued because of public health evidence.”

Our "experts" panicked. They did what is best for them. Effectiveness against Covid was never a concern.

The CDC’s Flawed Case for Wearing Masks in School Science by David Zweig

 The CDC’s Flawed Case for Wearing Masks in School Science by David Zweig 

With Biden in the White House, the CDC has promised to “follow the science” in its COVID policies. Yet the circumstances around the Arizona study seem to show the opposite. Dubious research has been cited after the fact, without transparency, in support of existing agency guidance. “Research requires trust and the ability to verify work,” Ketcham, the ASU public-health economist, told me. “That’s the heart of science. The saddest part of this is the erosion of trust.”

More evidence that the CDC is operating according to CYA not actually concern for stopping the spread of Covid.

The Moral Foundations of the Market Order by Richard M. Reinsch II

 The Moral Foundations of the Market Order by Richard M. Reinsch II 

The Christians build on the ancients. Their faith was “necessary to wrest man, as a child of God, from the grasp of the State and to undertake (in the words of Guglielmo Ferrero) the destruction of the ‘Pharaonic spirit’ of the State of antiquity.” Such freedom issues from an understanding of the person as possessing a transcendent destiny that no state could define or foreclose without acting unjustly. The key text separating the ancients from Christianity, Röpke maintained, is Christ’s statement “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s but to God the things which are God’s.” This phrase “expresses, after all, what is in our minds when we speak of liberalism in its widest sense.”

Beautiful, moral defense of free markets.

What We Have to Lose by Theodore Dalrymple

 What We Have to Lose by Theodore Dalrymple 

No one asked, "What are these concerts for?" or "What is the point of playing Mozart when the world is ablaze?" No one thought, "How many divisions has Myra Hess?" or "What is the firepower of a Mozart rondo?" Everyone understood that these concerts, of no account in the material or military sense, were a defiant gesture of humanity and culture in the face of unprecedented brutality. They were what the war was about. They were a statement of the belief that nothing could or ever can vitiate the value of civilization; and no historical revisionism, however cynical, will ever subvert this noble message.

One of my favorite authors reminding us why we must preserve civilization at all costs.

Why (Not) Masking Matters: A Dissent by J. Chase Davis

 Why (Not) Masking Matters: A Dissent by J. Chase Davis

It is the public health officials playing theater now. It tells us that the general public knows that this pandemic does not justify the mandates themselves and only comply when mandated. It then comes back to what kind of people we want to be. As Christians, do we want to lead the way in showing the importance of virtue and civil resistance? We cannot settle for catering to mandates simply to ‘go along to get along.’ We need to model the theological convictions we have regarding the importance of human dignity and the limited power of the civil magistrate.

Great article on the limits to the Christian's duty to "honor the emperor."

The ‘General Skills’ Your Kids Are Learning Don’t Exist by Cameron Hilditch

The ‘General Skills’ Your Kids Are Learning Don’t Exist by Cameron Hilditch 

The only way to fix American education is to replace the retrograde and falsified vision of human nature that first fired the cylinders of the progressive imagination in the 19th and early 20th century. Undoubtedly, progressive ideas and impulses have much to recommend themselves and have made many historic contributions to America’s national life, but in the case of education, the progressive legacy is thoroughly ignominious and scientifically out of date. Already, there are promising rearguard actions being fought against Differentiated Instruction and its shortcomings. The Core Knowledge Curriculum and the content-intensive grammar stage of Classical Christian Education are good examples of better approaches. In the long run, however, the tide of educational decline in America won’t turn until we abandon our doomed attempt to make skills the locus of unity in our schools. We can’t afford any longer to shirk the question that has been answered by adults in every civilization before us: What are the things that our children must know in order to rise to the full height of their humanity?

We have been lured by the siren song of teaching "skills." Content is king.

Much to Forgive by John Tierney

 Much to Forgive by John Tierney

The mask mandates are especially cruel to young children. Adults are supposed to ease their fears, to reassure them that monsters aren’t hiding under the bed. Instead, we’re frightening them into believing they’re being stalked by invisible menaces lurking in the air. A year of mask-wearing will scar some of them psychologically...

Adults have made it clear that the world exists for adult. We have let our panic and our fears impact children.

The Church Amongst the Counter-Institutions by Brad Edwards

 The Church Amongst the Counter-Institutions by Brad Edwards

The church is long past-due for an Institutional Renaissance every bit as humanizing as Counterfeit Institutions have been dehumanizing. We are at the very front end of realizing that ministry in a “Post-Christian Society” means far more than standing firm against secularism, and the church has far more painstaking work to do in understanding the implications of (and our complicity in) an Individualism increasingly unanchored by mediating institutions. But that endeavor’s trajectory and texture is essentially biblical, and one Jesus has already guaranteed to be unfazed by the gates of Hell. Counterfeits simply can’t compete with Covenant.

The church needs to be serious about understanding her mission and the best way to accomplish that.

Do We Need Mask Mandates? by Connor Harris

 Do We Need Mask Mandates? by Connor Harris

It would be an overstatement to say that cloth and surgical masks are unambiguously ineffective or harmful. But neither is there a firm case that they provide any meaningful benefit.

Follow the science!

The Warped Vision of “Anti-Racism” by Batya Ungar-Sargon

 The Warped Vision of “Anti-Racism” by  Batya Ungar-Sargon

It’s a classic postmodernist reversal: It can’t be that America was founded on values like equality and liberty and democracy that it imperfectly embodied and has subsequently strived to correct. It must be that the true founding was slavery, its true nature revealed by this failure. This is why the social-justice movement cannot recognize the huge gains that have been made in this nation on the question of race; if there is even one instance of racism left in America, it is proof again of this true nature.

In other words, critical race theory is the perfect ideology for affluent progressive whites who want nothing to change—but who still want to feel like the heroes of a story about social justice.

The Neoracists by John McWhorter

The Neoracists by John McWhorter

Third Wave Antiracism exploits modern Americans’ fear of being thought racist, using this to promulgate an obsessive, self-involved, totalitarian and unnecessary kind of cultural reprogramming. One could be excused for thinking this glowering kabuki is a continuation of the Civil Rights efforts of yore, the only kind of new antiracism there could be. Its adherents preach with such contemptuous indignation, and are now situated in the most prestigious and influential institutions in the land—on their good days they can seem awfully “correct.”

Racism, dressed up in "anti-racist" garb, is still racism.