Tony Woodlief | Author

civilization’s end

And another thing

Some of you may enjoy my radical suggestion in today’s Wall Street Journal that the First Amendment doesn’t authorize teachers to indoctrinate children. It’s getting pushback from free-speech absolutists and folks who have faith The Market will sort everything out in the long run. My fear is that if we wait for the end of …

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Some more things

Well, it’s been a hell of a summer. Pestilence, economic destruction, bitter partisanship, and now, the politicians descend from their lairs to commence the quadrennial feeding season. It puts me in mind of Merle Haggard’s old standard: “If we can make it through December/ Everything’s gonna be alright.” I’ve been reading a lot, which means …

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A few things

I’ve published a few things over the past few days that perhaps you’ll like: This is about a largely forgotten Oklahoma curmudgeon who foretold both cancel culture and our modern propensity for riots. This is about what letting my twin toddlers help me install doorstops around our house taught me about civilizational collapse. And for …

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Set them on fire

The game works like this: Set your sights on someone whose politics you hate. This is the easy part. Everything is politics now, and everything that is not your thing deserves to be hated. It’s what sets you above the others, how stupid and wrong and hateable they are. Got a target? Good. Now the …

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On the barricade

I’m not accustomed to being called a Nazi, at least not before 7 a.m. on a Monday. I was standing in front of the Supreme Court when it happened, holding a sign. My interlocutor was an administrator from the City University of New York. He held a different sign, along with the conviction that people …

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Cheaper by the dozen

There is a difference between being anti-intellectual and being anti-intellect, and this is where Russell Jacoby foundered, in his essay last year about the lack of intellectualism among conservatives. As Peter Lawler notes, it’s shoddily done for want of defining terms, which is a frequent flaw in Chronicle of Higher Ed essays about conservatism. There …

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Modern madness

A quote from my patron saint, were I to have one, which maybe I do and simply don’t realize it: “A time is coming when people will go mad and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying: ‘You are mad, you are not like us.’” — St. Anthony the …

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On Christian Fiction, Part I: Bad Readers Make Bad Writers

There’s a debate in Christian writing circles arising out of the perceived difficulty of getting publishers under the Christian Booksellers Association (CBA) umbrella to carry more “literary” work. The underlying conflict between literary and mass-market fiction has existed in one form or another long before the CBA took root, of course. The first time a …

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On Willful Ignorance

I’m 30,000 feet above vast stretches of empty American land, thinking about how our legislators want to protect us from Mexicans willing to do the work we’re too fat and lazy to do for ourselves, and I’m wishing we could make a swap: one Mexican family for every elected U.S. official. Only then might I …

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