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After lecturing on Plato’s Symposium at my august university in the early 2000s (that is, when student safe zones, trigger warnings, and cancel culture were still in their infancy; though they persist in maintaining students in a state of infantilism), I received an email from the English Department’s interim Chairman who hired me to answer an accusation from a student that I was “homophobic.”  My first reply, intentionally sarcastic, was that I suffered from no irrational fear of homosexuals or homosexuality.  I say “intentionally” because at the beginning of the year, the incumbent Chair—I use the gender-neutral language here only because as a lecturer he was regularly described by his students as “wooden”—had the patronizing temerity to warn us new hires that students (and we’re talking about English majors here!) “wouldn’t get irony.”  Thus I felt impelled to see if one of their professors could himself detect it. He didn’t.  My second, non-ironic response was that I ventured no moral judgment on the subject except to read the passages in Plato in which he condemned it, thereby, apparently, “triggering” my accuser.

Continue reading “The Olympic “Last Supper”: A “New Gay Testament”” →

What follows was recently published in The Wanderer, a traditional Catholic newspaper that comes out (in print!) every week–the oldest continuously published Catholic journal in the United States, in fact, to which I contribute a column once a month.  Readers will, I hope, forgive me if they recognize this as a severely abridged, slightly amended, (and possibly even improved) version of an essay posted on Priceton some time ago.

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In the last few decades, it seems, everyone has discovered a recipe for happiness, from Hugh Hefner to Madonna to Deepak Chopra, to the cannabis retailers one now sees on every street corner; from the self-righteous torchers of cities to the anatomical male rapists who self-identify as females in order to get sent to women’s prisons.  Oh the joys of the examined life!  But it doesn’t take much thought to recognize that it is only ideological snake oil that they are trying to sell.  Given the popularity of these and other ethical and religious quacks and charlatans, it is almost impossible to persuade people, especially today’s enrollees in Self-Esteem University, that the ancients, the deadest of the dead white males, had something rather valuable to say on the question of how to live rewarding and meaningful lives. Continue reading “Happiness Among the Ruins (II)” →

Tradition has it that in 406 B.C., when the great Greek tragedian Sophocles was 90 years old, his son and executor Iophon, in a brazen attempt to get his hands on the estate before his father had died, took him to court on the charge of being senile and therefore incapable of managing the family finances.  By way of defending himself, the nonagenarian dramatist simply recited—from memory, without cue cards or teleprompter— several passages from his Oedipus at Colonus, which he had just completed but not yet published.  Struck by the magnificence of what they had heard, the judges peremptorily dismissed the suit against him and chastised his avaricious accuser.

Continue reading “From the Debate to the Coronation: Four Weeks of Non-stop Leftist Mendacity” →

The four main cultural achievements of our progressive rulers over the past two decades have been to rehabilitate abortion as something to be proud of, to make child genital mutilation fashionable again (two thousand years after the demise of the cult of Cybele), to repeal the ancient and innate rights of freedom of speech and religion, and to revive the political show trial.  We have since then lived in a society whose citizens risk professional de-certification, job dismissal, fines, or incarceration for observing that there are two genders, for failing to affirm their sons’ treatable mental disorders and transient desires to follow in the footsteps of Attis, for dissenting from the canonical COVID narrative, or—a legal first, courtesy of Trump’s prosecutors—for paying off their creditors on time and in full.  In their enforcement of woke ideological orthodoxy, the supposedly independent judicial branch (the DOJ, FBI, CIA, and police), has reduced itself to the palace guard of the Democrat Party.  All of which, as it happens, is transcendently beyond the demented and criminal imaginations of Robespierre, Lenin, or Mao. Continue reading “Judicial Double Standards and Leftist Malignancy in General” →

The following incorporates passages from a previous post on Priceton, “The Progressive Lexicon Explained” — sooner or later, one begins to repeat oneself, and self-plagiarism is the most efficient way to do so — , but some attempt to explain the inexplicable, i.e., the collective psychosis of transgenderism, seemed called for.  Hence the length of this essay…

Rather like having an abortion or “coming out”, being misgendered, and then getting transgendered, is the latest accomplishment for which progressives are entitled to bask in the glow of worldwide adulation, moral righteousness, and political victimization, all at the same time.  Do not probe too deeply into why a preference for seeking titillation with a member of the same, rather than the opposite, sex should be an occasion for “pride”, any more than, say, a culinary preference for fish over fowl (and especially considering that, according to the LGBT theorists, homosexuality isn’t really a choice anyway).  Be content to know only that all the Orwellian inversions and euphemisms in which the progressive lexicon abounds are designed to make what has always struck sane people as repellent and grotesque seem and sound normal, wholesome, and uplifting, and therefore something of which to be “proud”.

Continue reading “The Transgendered God” →

AN URGENT ANNOUNCEMENT FROM THE UNITED NATIONS ACADEMY OF SCIENCES, AND THE EUROPEAN, BRITISH, AND AMERICAN COLLEGES OF MATHEMATICIANS AND GEOMETERS,

TO THEIR MEMBER PROFESSIONALS, TEACHERS, AND RESEARCHERS:

After much study and reflection, the aforenamed bodies hereby declare that 1 plus 1 does not equal 2, but, rather, add up to any other self-identified sum, as preferred by the adder.  This is a long-belated conclusion that has already been ratified by the WEF, European Parliament, U.S. Department of Education, Kindergarten Teachers Internationale, European Sorority of Day-Care Professionals, Education Faculty of Harvard, and the Bill and Belinda Gates Foundation, along with other world-renowned experts and followers of the mathematical and arithmetical sciences which have been under attack of late by right-wing extremists.  (It is also widely acknowledged in indigenous wisdom, including that of the matriarchal Wakee Wakee tribe of Polynesia, in whose ancient oral counting system the numeral 2 has always been optional and is regularly skipped.)

Continue reading “Follow the Science” →

Whatever you think of them, you have to admire the ability of progressives to, well, lie.  If brazen, bald-faced, through-your-teeth lying were an unrenewable resource, the progressive Left would have long ago exhausted the Earth’s supply of it, and there would be nothing left over for email scammers, dinner-hour telemarketers, or the evangelists of wind and solar energy.

I don’t mean merely the ability to tell untruths.  It’s one thing for a leftist politician to declare, with earnest indignation, straight face, and lower lip all a-quiver, that “I didn’t have sex with that woman”; or, “You can keep your doctor and you can keep your plan”; or, “The border is secure”; or, “Vaccines are safe and effective”; or, “What emails?” (Hillary, the Bidens, choose your liar); or, “I’m a Catholic” (Pelosi, Trudeau, Biden, choose your liar); or, “______ is Russian disinformation” (fill in the blank); or, every single word, syllable, and letter, including “the”, “a”, and “uh”, that Justin Trudeau has ever uttered about the Truckers.  Those are the kind of stretchers that leftist politicians master in the cradle, long before, that is, they learn to coo “Birthing Person”, or to sing the lyrics of that old progressive nursery rhyme, “LGBT, EFG, Now I know my ABC’s”.  (Which leads me to remind the LGBTQIA2S+ community that, unlike lying, the alphabet is an unrenewable resource.  Save the Alphabet!)

Continue reading “The Progressive Lexicon Explained” →

To Priceton’s Loyal Readers:

What follows belongs under the category of shameless self-promotion.  But then, Priceton is a website, and shameless self-promotion is surely the original raison d’être of that genre. 

I write to announce the publication of my new book, Give Speech a Chance:  Heretical Essays on What You Can’t Say, or Even Think (326 pages; FGF Books, 2022), available from amazon.ca, amazon.com, and directly from the publisher, at fgfbooks.com.   Give Speech a Chance is a collection of 46 essays published in various journals over the past dozen years or so.  You may well have read some of them already, since many of the essays published in Give Speech a Chance were first posted here at Priceton.  Never mind.  Give Speech a Chance is a book:  i.e., an object of palpable, physical reality, as opposed to a collection of pixels.  While reading in general is now beyond the abilities of most university graduates, books in particular represent an endangered species.  You should buy mine for that reason alone.  Indeed, you should buy as many copies as you can afford.  Keep one for yourself, of course.  But give others as gifts to your conservative friends; or confer a copy upon a progressive acquaintance — I say “acquaintance” in the knowledge that progressives can’t abide being friends with conservatives — , just to test his commitment to “tolerance, diversity, and inclusion”, or merely to piss him off.

Continue reading “Buy My Book: I.e., Give Speech a Chance” →

What follows is the text of a talk I gave on September 23 in Tysons Corner, Virginia, at an event organized by the publisher to promote my new book, Give Speech a Chance:  Heretical Essays on What You Can’t Say, or Even Think (FGF Books, 2022).  More on the book in subsequent posts…

It is a great pleasure, and a deeply-felt honour, to be here today–though I must confess that it is also somewhat intimidating to address so distinguished an audience.  Alas, I haven’t had much experience of late speaking to people who are educated, literate, rational, or even demonstrably animate:  I have been teaching, you see, at an elite university for the past two decades.  But then, I’m probably not qualified to differentiate between the animate and the inanimate; I’m not a biologist, after all.

I know that there are many people to thank for my being here, and since it is related to my theme this afternoon, I also know that gratitude, like mercy, should be undiscriminating.  So, let me begin by thanking Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, for not consigning me to prison even though I supported Canada’s Trucker Convoy and am guilty of other thought-crimes and insurrectionist velleities, besides; while I’m at it, let me thank Justin for permitting me to leave my country, which is a privilege that totalitarian dictators have rarely bestowed upon their ungrateful subjects since October 1917.

Continue reading “Appreciating Joe Sobran, and the Virtue of Gratitude in General” →

In the mid 1980s, two of the enduring magna opera of conservative thought, Jean-Francois Revel’s How Democracies Perish (1984) and James Burnham’s The Suicide of the West (1985) appeared in quick succession to spelunk amongst the unconscious psychopathologies of what Malcolm Muggeridge had earlier called “the great liberal death wish”.  At the same time (1984), the Conservative Book Club’s alternate selection was R. Emmett Tyrell’s optimistically titled The Liberal Crack-Up.  (Reagan was in power; it was the dawning of the age of “irrational exuberance”.)

That in the West democracy and civilization as we knew them are now roadkill putrefying on the shoulder of the Highway of Progress will get no argument from the present writer.   But that liberalism as a political philosophy is moribund or suicidal — if that was the authors’ implication—appears to have been a consoling illusion.  The Left, in its current “progressive” modality, is very much alive, and can be seen everywhere—forgive the indelicacy, but the image is all too apposite—urinating on the graves of its erstwhile undertakers.

Continue reading “The Great Conservative Death Wish” →