But this next topic is going to be not just part of the book club. It’s going to have its own section here on my site.

Before I get into that, the next book for the America book club topic has also been picked. As I mentioned before, given the size of the books I’m reading for the America theme, I will take some breaks in between. I had planned to get my other theme going, and now I’m burning for that other theme.

The next book for the America theme: A History of the American People by Paul Johnson.

This is a famous book, as Paul Johnson is a famous historian. It’s likely some of you have heard of or possibly even have read some of his known works:

• Modern Times

• Intellectuals

• Creators

• Heroes

• Humorists

A History of the American People is regarded more as literature than it is a history. Johnson is known for his flair, his telling of a story, and the philosophy underneath it.

When I start this book, I’m unsure. Likely it will be a bit, as I will explain below. Not many joined me on A Patriot’s History of the United States, but more of you seem to like my new read, riff, publish—where I read a book club book, riff on a passage, then publish it. One part is available to all members. The other is only available to paying members. I will continue that. I’m in the home stretch of A Patriot’s History with about 300 or so pages left. It was a doorstop book, so when finished, I’ll likely read a few easy reads, then jump into the next theme. I would normally ask who would like to join in for Johnson, but it’s a ways away for that. Still, if you plan to read it, or want to read it now and would like to discuss it with me, the chat is open to paying members to do that. I can bounce it off the two other books I’ve read for the America book club and what I know of American history.

The Next Pick: Thomas Aquinas

Thomas Aquinas is the next topic for the book club.

But this is not a one-off topic.

I’ve mentioned and hinted that I’ve returned to my Catholic faith. I have an article in the works that will meditate on that more. Yet as I return, and how my return was cerebral, I feel compelled to have a new section dedicated to this.

Now, I’m not going to start a podcast on Catholic faith. There are enough people who have either returned to their Catholic faith five minutes ago or became a Catholic one minute ago who now have a podcast. I’m not an expert on the Catholic faith. I seemed an expert at forgetting it all when I reflexively went atheist nearly 20 years ago.

My starting a Catholic faith secion on one end will be meditative, more of a memoir perhaps. I’ll write what comes to mind versus teach. I’m in no position to teach it. The other end, as you’ll see with the book club, will explore the rich and massive canon of Catholic works, Christian works, and theological works in general. The books will not be explicitly Catholic, as I will certainly look into:

• C. S. Lewis

• Stephen C. Meyer

• Carl Trueman

• Fyodor Dostoyevski

• Raymond Ibrahim

And more.

I’m not sure what I’ll name the section either. I thought “Confessions” after St. Augustine, but I’m not sold on that entirely. I thought something like “Summa Confessions,” but I thought that sounds too much like a shtick. But something will come to mind.

Now, onto Thomas Aquinas as the next pick for the book club.

Why Aquinas?

His name almost answers it, but the selfish reason: he’s my confirmation saint.

Right now I’m undergoing my adult confirmation. As part of getting confirmed, you pick a confirmation saint. A confirmation saint is a saint you wish to emulate, a saint you ask for help, a saint you seek for guidance. The latter two stuck with me.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been asking close friends, my wife, and Grok about a confirmation saint. My confirmation sponsor immediately went with Aquinas. But Augustine was up there since his return story has some similarities to mine. The others recommended and in the running were St. Joseph, St. Hyacinth (the patron saint of weightlifters), St. Jerome, and St. Sebastian. The latter is interesting because, if I recall correctly, I had picked him when I first started my confirmation process at St. Sebastian’s prep school. But I switched schools and never really thought about it again until now.

My conversation with Grok bordered on neurotic. I kept asking, and arguing, and when it hallucinated I called Grok names, and kept expanding the conversation. The conversation with Grok and with others kept coming back to either Aquinas or Augustine. A few good friends said to pray on it and to ask. After seeing a video of Father Chad Ripperger where he taught to be specific in your prayer, I asked specifically during my morning Lectio Divina.

That morning, when I checked my email, the first email I noticed was an article in the Claremont Digital Substack. That article was by one of my favorite political thinkers and philosophers, Daniel J. Mahoney. Mahoney also had a hand in my return to faith with his writings. The article was on Aquinas. Then, after reading it, I wondered if the fall issue of the Claremont Review of Books was out. I went to the site, and the first article I saw was by the famous Thomist, Edward Feser, whom I discovered while asking Grok and seeking answers for my confirmation. A Thomist, by the way, is a person who adheres to the grammar of Thomas Aquinas’s thinking. By agreeing with Aquinas, you’re not a Thomist per se, but if you adhere to or believe his grammar is correct, that, loosely, puts you into the Thomist camp.

Call it coincidence, but those two things cemented it for me. So, I chose Thomas Aquinas. And I want to learn the man and his theology.

Thomas Aquinas is arguably among the most consequential and famous philosophers to have ever lived, and one of the most famous theologians. He’s famous for having baptized Aristotle, taking Aristotle’s thought and seeing where it aligned with Christianity. His Summa Theologica is a masterpiece. In a quick summary, faith and reason are the hallmarks of Aquinas.

He’s a heavyweight of theology, philosophy, and Catholicism.

Now, I’m not going to read the entire Summa Theologica for Aquinas. Instead, I’ve curated a list of works.

Right now, as for how this topic will work, I imagine I will dive into a few, then dive out, likely dive into America again, and then back. But I know Aquinas is someone I will likely study for a lifetime.

The works curated are written by famous theologians, old and new:

1. G. K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox

2. Josef Pieper, Guide to Thomas Aquinas

3. Josef Pieper, The Human Wisdom of St. Thomas: A Breviary of Philosophy from the Works of St. Thomas Aquinas

4. Peter Kreeft, Summa of the Summa: The Essential Philosophical Passages of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica Edited and Explained for Beginners

5. Edward Feser, Aquinas: A Beginner’s Guide

6. Peter Kreeft, Practical Theology: Spiritual Direction from St. Thomas Aquinas

7. Josef Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love

From what I gather, that’s a good order to go in. The first few are relatively short. I would love takers. I would love to discuss these works, and I would love to discuss Aquinas. A lot of wisdom here is to be found, whether you want to deepen your faith or wish to discover the wisdom and thinking of a significant mind. Aquinas is a figure who has left, and will continue to leave, enormous influence and consequence in the world.

If you’d like to join in, go ahead and comment below. The Chesterton edition I’m reading is not as easy to find. I will find a few resources on where you can find it new or used. It’s on Amazon, but AbeBooks might also be another great resource. Cheap, terrible editions exist—the PDF-to-print formats that often miss text, or whole sections are changed or gone, I hope to help you avoid those.

If you wish to join in on any of them, let me know, and if you want to be a fly on the wall, go right ahead.

Leave a comment

I’m working on an article for the new section. I’ll come up with a name for that section soon, but for now the article is in the works.

Subscribe now

Note: This is a raw writing riff. I write these as a part of my bookclub. I read, I riff, I publish. It gets the briefest of passes editing wise. It will almost certainly have grammatical mistakes, spelling mistakes, and whatever else.

This one is long, and it’s rather scary publishing it as for something like this, I would prefer to flesh out my arguments and positions. But you’re getting what’s top of mind as I read A Patriot’s History of the United States.

The first part is to all subscribers, the second to my paid members, and it gets further into the nitty gritty. This one is long, I’m going to start on an article, so it may be a little bit before the next piece, but I’m available on the Substack chat for this bookclub.

And soon, I will be announcing the next bookclub topic, a topic that will be its own section. But I have a topic for that section.

I voted for Trump.

I voted for him three times.

On the first date with my wife, when I first sat her down at Leven’s Deli in Denver to find out more about her values, I said what I said to all my first dates post-2020: I voted for Trump. Saying those words to a woman in Denver, a progressive stronghold, I knew it was perverse. On another first date, I said the same thing, and the women at the table next to us got up and moved seats but made sure to complain about me to the manager. My wife’s reaction when I said it: she asked questions. “Tell me more about that” was the sentiment. When she told one of her friends, she got blowback, fierce blowback. One of her friends in her circle was a psychiatrist and told her that she was disappointed that she would even consider dating me, that Republicans are misogynists, racists, stupid, and illiterate, and that I’d likely beat her. Another called her on the phone and ranted about how awful I was (I had never met her), and that my wife couldn’t be serious in actually going out with me, that she was being stupid and reckless. It was an eye-opening experience for my wife.

Those reactions, the mix of self-regard, spite for Donald Trump, along with zero perspective, have been a feature of X lately among various right-wing personalities. Seeing it all, it’s been a mixture of exhaustion, comedy, and eye-rolling, along with plenty of muting and unfollows. Lately, for those of you not terminally online, a number of MAGA personalities (although these personalities always have a habit of defining themselves as above labels, not right-wing, not alt-right, not conservative, not independent, I guess they all exist on a higher metaphysical plane of political wisdom) are having theatrical complaints about Donald Trump and the Trump presidency. They’re “crashing out,” as the kids say. To me, I see it as a whole lot of personal theatrics and melodrama, comedic levels of self-regard, and a bizarre sense of entitlement.

The best-known one, arguably, might be Mike Cernovich. He was posting a ton (he still is), and it’s chaotic in nature, but an example:

From what I gather, leading up to this, he believes that he helped deliver the recent Trump win. It was put out there, during Trump’s first victory, that Cernovich had a hand. And granted, during the Biden administration, various people were attacked for being on the right. Pro-life protesters were arrested, Donald Trump was debanked, traditional Catholics were put on FBI watchlists, and so on.

Cernovich is a voice among the right, yet a sense of entitlement comes out: that he is the one delivering the elections. Or we find odd attacks:

Anyone who knows anything of Victor Davis Hanson knows Hanson is antithetical to the neocon faction of the right, speaks out against globalists, and decries forever wars, yet Cernovich takes this shot at him, and a shot that goes from VDH speaking about cartels to making it about forever wars in the Middle East. Hanson’s The Dying Citizen explicitly articulates the destruction caused by the neocons. Cernovich’s tweet betrays an utter lack of perspective and principle.

The rest of the tweets have had a doomer feel. He taunts that the midterms can’t be won by “New MAGA” and the rest.

Downstream of him, we have those parroting him, yet with more theatrics:

And why not include this anon’s truest fantasy:

Much can be analyzed here. I don’t believe in the cynical “they do this for clicks” to court attention, even if many political accounts do get money.

But to me, as I read through A Patriot’s History of the United States for the book club, I see a profound lack of perspective, laced with self-regard, self-importance, and a sense of entitlement when not a single reason for that entitlement should exist.

Why are various personalities complaining like this? To me, some of it is the war with Iran, some of it seems about Israel, but most of it seems to be a lack of perspective.

To address one part, Victor Davis Hanson recently discussed figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson. Both were close to Trump, then they were on the outs with Trump, and the about-face was wild. But he, I believe, correctly surmises that they had the president’s ear, felt entitled to it, that they could run the country, but then were placed further outside the president’s circle, for whatever reason, and they hated that. And they’re reacting like brats. It is the same with David French, Bill Kristol, and David Frum. When Trump was elected, they lost any say within the administration, and they acted like spurned teen girls.

But to come to the bigger point, these theatrical cries lack perspective.

Consider “getting everything we voted for.” I would love that. But that’s not how America’s civic system, a constitutional republic, works. The president does not rule by fiat. We have a Congress, a Senate, and an executive branch. Also, one must include the Supreme Court. That’s at the federal level. When you walk it down, each state, with the exception of Nebraska’s unicameral system, also has state senators, state representatives (an assembly), and its respective governor. Each also has its state supreme court, and each state has its own constitution.

The president cannot just rule by fiat. Even while executive power has expanded dramatically since America’s inception, most notably with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he still can’t make up laws or do things without checks and balances. Plus, the executive office’s biggest powers tend to regard foreign policy.

Despite Trump winning the popular vote, he’s deeply hated. Why Trump will go down as one of the most consequential figures in American history is just how his existence ripped the mask off people and institutions. Like my opening mention of my wife in Denver, mentioning Trump instantly revealed a person’s true colors. My like of Trump to my wife’s friends ripped the mask off. Certain “conservatives,” like New York Times writer David Brooks, when Trump gained power, immediately dropped any association with the right. What Trump did to the psyche of many is uncanny. And it revealed how much mainstream media, universities, Hollywood, and the Democrats (which Trump revealed for what they are, largely socialists) hated not only Trump but also anyone to the right of them.

It should go without saying, but it needs saying, I guess, that the Trump administration faces enormous resistance at every turn. At the state level, especially in blue states, they act as neo-Confederates, defying federal orders and laws, and working hard to resist anything Trump does and any conservative-leaning or flavored legislation, particularly when it comes to what Trump ran on: crime, immigration, and the economy.

Trump surfaced the power and stronghold of particular ideologies. One need not look further than education, and how standards have lowered, private schools and colleges have essentially become left-wing think tanks, and anti-Western curricula are decrying America’s principles.

Some of these elements, many, in fact, are frightening. The education element frightens me the most. Consider education in my next home state. Nebraska is the home of Warren Buffett. Nebraska is a deep red state, and Omaha is a mixture of red and blue, and most deep red states have school choice and are open to or already have a robust charter school system. Yet Warren Buffett, through his Sherwood Foundation, has poured over a billion dollars into keeping school choice out of Nebraska. From movies that play statewide everywhere to various organizations, Buffett has kept school choice out, and has done, sadly, a remarkable job of painting it as an evil.

It should almost go without saying that resistance to Trump and his administration is enormous. Tie in that progressivism has become a religion to many on the left, and the resistance is even greater.

But go on X, and it looks like it does need saying that Trump can’t rule by fiat. Nor can he give someone with a big X following the exact ideological vision and the results to enact that vision perfectly, and in the manner desired by the personality.

Trump has, however, done a good job on his promises: immigration, crime, and the economy. The latter is still tough. The war with Iran has made things a little chaotic. But inflation has slowed, gas prices have gotten better, and the economy has performed. And furthermore, 2020 and the COVID era, when Biden and his administration enacted its policies, have consequences. Big consequences. And for many in the big cities, the resistance to Trump is more important, so they will double down on this. Denver, for instance, seems hell-bent on keeping the illegal aliens. They seem hell-bent on doubling down on the regulation policies that have contributed to soaring house costs and living costs. Rent costs are coming down, and while that is a good thing, in a sense, they’re coming down because people are leaving Denver in droves. Denver is still building a ton of apartments from when Denver was the fastest-growing city in the United States. Now Denver is the 10th most moved-out-of city, and rising. This is incredible since less than a decade ago it was number one as far as people moving in. And house sales here are slowing way, way down. Despite people complaining of expensive homes in other areas, like New York City, those houses are still selling, and people are still buying them: the demand is still there. In Denver, the demand is not there.

The last bit of perspective: some of those personalities are big, like Cernovich, but most are nowhere near the stature or impact of, say, Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk ran a massive operation. He was everywhere. He went into the public and debated his ideas. It was said that he would likely, at some point, be a presidential candidate. Nor are they of the stature of, say, Victor Davis Hanson. Hanson will leave a legacy of rigorous scholarship, best-selling books, and books that will likely be studied long after he’s gone, like his book on World War II or his work on ancient military history. Once many personalities stop tweeting, that will be it for them. It’s in the American spirit that they all speak up and opine, and that’s a wonderful thing. Yet the theatrics, the drama, and the lack of perspective, is at one end exhaustive nonsense fomenting shallow beliefs and at the other end telling certain people to not vote.

As for me, if you must know, I still support Trump. I’m white-knuckling right now with the whole Iran situation. I hope Trump sticks to his Jacksonian-style foreign policy here. But with the ideology of Iran’s leadership, Trump might have to go to the mat with them. I’m not pushing for that. I don’t want troops on the ground. But to break the back of an ideology, the examples in history: Sherman’s march, Patton’s march, Epaminondas’s march, and the dropping of the atom bombs. Regardless, I still remain a strong supporter of Trump.

Leave a comment

Now, let’s address another element. Many like to claim America, right now, is like Weimar Germany. I’ve seen a few claim that a civil war is going to happen, and make a few comparisons to America pre–Civil War. And I’ve noticed a ton of claims that we’re like the Roman Empire, or something is like one tiny specific factor like something in the water lowering the testosterone of men that caused the Roman Empire to fall.

Which one of those is true?

Note: These articles are a raw riff. They will likely have grammatical errors. But I read, riff, and publish. The first part is for everyone, the second part is for paid members.

A quick announcement:

I’ve selected my next book club topic. This topic will likely be ongoing. In fact, I’m going to make it its own section. I will have articles in it that are both free and for paid members and that are a mix.

The next topic: Catholicism.

I’ve returned to my Catholic faith. I’ve spoken of my journey back to God, and a little of returning to my Catholic faith. The Catholic canon is rich and deep. The number of classic works is endless. I hope to scratch the surface of a few. Also, the works will not be explicitly Catholic per se. Many will be on faith or belief. For instance, C. S. Lewis was not a Catholic, and I will read Lewis. The works on intelligent design by Stephen C. Meyer are not explicitly Catholic either, and I will read him. The same goes for fiction. Dostoevsky is often an author read who brings people into the Catholic faith. He was Russian Orthodox. But his works bring people to the Catholic faith. I will read him.

I’m not a Catholic expert, nor am I a theological expert. But the journey back and my journey going forward, I want to write about it, and I hope to discuss some great books with those interested.

I will start this alongside the America topic. Articles are likely to come out first. One is in the works. I’m not going to read two books simultaneously. I read one at a time (though my adult confirmation class requires me to read more than one book right now). But I will jump into it. When I start a book for you to join in with, I will pick a book and announce it the closer I get to finishing A Patriot’s History of the United States. And when I get to Tocqueville and reading Pierre Manent as a primer, that might be a blend of both.

More on this in time.

“How do you engage with a work?”

“How do you converse with a work?”

These are common questions I get when people want to get into more substantial works of nonfiction.

The simplest guidepost for your conversation with a work is the author’s thesis. Often the thesis is a single sentence stating the author’s core position, aim, or goal of the work. But it’s not always a single sentence. Sometimes it’s a paragraph, sometimes it’s an entire introduction or chapter. Or in the case of some authors, like Andrew Roberts’s The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III, you get most of the thesis in the title.

I’ve found with most works of nonfiction written from around 1950 on, the introduction features the thesis. Yet I’ve seen it in prefaces, new introductions to a new edition of the book, and still sometimes in the first chapter.

Some authors are explicit: in this work I argue that ____. Others will flow out their ideas, their conceptions, and it’s not as neat. One version is not better than the other, despite what the writing “experts” on social media claim. They always prefer the short, Hemingway-prosed, explicit call-out. Some writers lay out a super clear thesis and then walk the reader into a morass of ambiguous and shoddy arguments. Some lay out pages of a thesis, what comes across as conceptual rambling, to then have an airtight, concise, and crystal-clear exposition.

As the reader, you read a work out of your own curiosity, enjoyment, and perhaps to take on the intellectual challenge of a certain work. But to engage with it, to have that deeper convo, look for that thesis. Mark it, or if it’s a longer one, see if you can encapsulate the argument or goal of the author. From there, as you read, take note of how or whether the author articulates, expands, or strengthens his case. Also, use it as a signpost. Some works, especially doorstop books, easily fire up a reader’s insecurity that they’re not remembering enough, or reading fast enough, or engaging with it enough. That’s natural. Just keep reading, and look for the thesis expanded on or themes of it in the work. This works like a set of highway signs on a long stretch of highway. You see the mile marker or the exit or what’s up ahead. Seeing the themes or the thesis expanded, you have an idea where you are going. You might not have a counterargument. Your marginalia might be just repeating a passage. That’s OK. Just look for that thesis, and if you can, reflect on it a bit. You can just see the highway sign, know where you’re at, and consider some of the scenery. This helps to keep you going, and helps to keep you engaged.

The thesis of A Patriot’s History of the United States, the current book being read for the American Book Club, is the key principles of what makes America exceptional:

1. Common Law

2. Christian Tradition

3. Property Rights

4. Capitalism

Each chapter weaves in how these principles play out, are strengthened or weakened, are protected or attacked. It gives perspective to the arguments and historical analysis. It also gives light to difficult arguments in American history, such as property rights during the Civil War and leading up to the war, where Southern Democrats, particularly the aristocratic elite, viewed blacks as property and inferior and incapable of laying claim to rights. And the Republican Party saw the institution of slavery as an evil, yet they kept getting hit with states’ rights as a way to argue for property rights. The debates that ensued are, when just looked at debate-wise, fascinating.

Any questions or comments on this, reply below.

With that, members, let’s take a look at the consequences of kicking the can down the road.

Note: These articles are a raw riff. They will have grammatical and spelling mistakes. How it works, I read the book for my bookclub. I sit down, riff, then publish. I’m also trying something new, the first part is for everyone, free and paid subscribers. The second part is only for my paid subscribers, the bookclub is for paying members. Also, no video again, the situation with my family back in Boston makes my phone ring off the hook at random, so until that settles down, no video riff.

Papists are idolaters. They worship Mary, the mother of Jesus, and they have this whole weird thing with saints and angels. They believe in miracles, and the worst are the miracles they believe in after the Bible was written. The Catholic Mass is not worship, the Rosary is not prayer, and the Catholics need random people on social media to finally make that one post that totally destroys the Catholic Church and destroys all the Catholics.

I’ve returned to my Catholic faith. I’m a cradle Catholic. I went to St. Sebastian’s School, a private Catholic school in Needham, Massachusetts, from seventh grade to tenth grade. I transferred to The Governor’s Academy. I won’t share why I transferred. I was a good student, I love my parents, I was a well-behaved kid (I had zero detentions), and I liked St. Seb’s a lot. But it was important for me to get out of the house, and it was a tough decision to leave. I grew up Catholic, and being Irish in the Boston area, I considered myself an Irish Catholic, like all my other Boston-Irish Catholic brethren. Nana, my grandmother on my dad’s side, was hands down the most devout Catholic in my family. She went to Mass almost every day. She was super involved in the Church, she frequented a few churches, and she tithed a considerable amount of money. She visited the Vatican a number of times, along with visiting Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and a variety of famous holy sites all over the world.

My wife grew up in Douglas County, Nebraska, which is Omaha proper and the immediate surrounding area. She’s Catholic and grew up in a deep Catholic community in Omaha. She went to Catholic schools. She didn’t meet her first non-Catholic until she went to college.

I haven’t run into anti-Catholic sentiment since I moved away from Boston back in 2010. Boston had, and I believe still has, various Protestant neighborhoods and institutions that outright disdained the Catholics. If St. Sebastian’s came up, or if someone could easily spot that I was Irish (my dad and Nana were real easy to spot as Irish), the old Anglo disdain would come out. I noticed it most in country clubs. My family, particularly my dad’s family, belonged to a few different country clubs in the Boston area, Charles River Country Club being one such club. And Charles River Country Club was for the wealthy Irish Catholics. The Country Club, America’s oldest, didn’t allow Catholics. And part of the reason it was built was to be an enclave free of those lowly Italian and Irish Catholics. At some of these clubs, if they spotted your Irish face or if I said, “I go to St. Sebastian’s,” instantly that good old-fashioned Yankee Protestant snobbery would come out (it also came out when they heard my last name. We were considered new money).

The opening paragraph of this musing and my family background have a point. America’s earliest colonists were Protestants, Protestants who detested Catholicism. Where I’m from had the New England Brahmins, the New England WASPs, the Peabodys, the Saltonstalls, the Cabots, the Adamses, and so on. Names and families still ingrained in the Boston area. Mostly they were Congregationalists, Unitarians, and Episcopalians. Each faction had its own flavor. And these New England factions were far different from the southern Protestant colonists. The southern Protestants were never Puritan in nature. They were far more agrarian in style, and various factions had different flavors. And some were tolerant of Jews yet were vehemently anti-Catholic.

Maryland was the only Catholic colony, and was an experiment in Catholic tolerance, but the number of Catholics there was minuscule compared to the rest of the population in Maryland and in the rest of the colonies. At the time of the American Revolution, something like 13 priests, total, were in America. Catholics were banned in the colonies for the most part, and various American Founders, or big influences, were staunchly anti-Catholic and tried to enforce it.

A Patriot’s History of the United States is what I’m currently reading for my book club, the topic of that book club being America. Authors Schweikart and Allen show just how anti-Catholic the early colonists were. It struck me. I knew a bit from the culture I grew up in, that the Catholics were seen as lowlifes, as trashy, and maybe the best painting of the sentiment is portrayed at various points in the iconic comedy Caddyshack. The character Danny, his Irish family being large to the point that Danny’s father has no clue that his nephew is eating breakfast with him. Or the bishop he’s caddying for asking if he’s Roman Catholic, and then turning him away. Most of the caddies are Italian and Irish, and most Catholic, as you can see the crosses. Even the concept of them coming from large families is taken as sexually lewd (also portrayed in the famous Life of Brian movie by Monty Python).

Yet the American colonists truly despised the Catholics. Certain writings of various laws excluded Catholics from having rights. The American Founders and most of their circles disliked the Catholics. The First Great Religious Awakening occurred when the colonies had established themselves. American ideals, the dynamism of the American economy, that dynamism’s flavor of either urban or agrarian, influenced American Protestantism and its various factions. New factions arose, and the classic fire-and-brimstone sermon emerged. The sermons discarded piety, and we see the nondenominational church theatrics common today in this first awakening. Some sermons were plays intended to frighten the audience. The audience bursting with random emotional outbursts, which is still common today among various Protestant sects, first surfaced. The Second Great Religious Awakening occurred around the time of Andrew Jackson. This awakening is fascinating in that we see its influence, and not even influence but outright following of its formula, not just in religion but even in hustle culture, or the self-development world. This awakening fomented a belief that a person could attain or should seek perfection on earth, and that perfection was attainable. Groups like Christian Scientists first emerged, and they had the belief, and still do, that spiritual health was all mindset. The self-development world most are familiar with today, the Tony Robbins, the James Clear, the habits, biohacking, much of it has its influence and outright modeling on groups in this era. Diet tricks, lifestyle hacks, all with the aim of living sin-free and becoming a perfect being.

Turning back to religion, the second awakening, we see more of a cementing of what is found today with evangelical churches, nondenominational, Baptist, Methodist, and other Protestant denominations. The songs, the popular fashion with how they’re sung, traveling preachers, the entertainment-style sermons, and sermons that adhere more to popular fashions, politics, and current trends than to tradition or traditional religious observances.

With all of these new sects, a distinct element held. Even those stodgy old New Englanders, while they scoffed at the theatrical aspect, and while many sects differed in their biblical views, they were all tolerant of each other. That tolerance was not found in the rest of the world. But as tolerant as they were, and as novel as this tolerance was, one group was excluded from this tolerance: the Catholics. Not the Jews, not the atheists — the Catholics. Catholics do not evangelize like nondenominational churches. Catholics are much more reserved. But Catholics expanded in their own way. They built churches in areas. And they conducted missionary activity with the Native Americans.

What fascinates me is that if you go online, Jews get blamed for everything. And on X, someone will write a self-referential pseudo-essay, or “take” as it’s called, about how a group of Jews controlled banks or something else, long before anyone, and it’s why we have cultural rot or Bonnie Blue or why a city has fallen or how that event led to the killing of Charlie Kirk. It’s all nonsense. Yet to me, it’s wild to see in A Patriot’s History and also detailed in The Last King of America, which I’ll cover below, that Catholics were the center of conspiracy. Insert most of the crazy conspiracies you know of Jews, and in America’s early days, Catholics were accused of it.

On X, Catholic bashing exists. Personalities seem to make it their identity to reply-guy or troll certain posts under a belief that they will own the Catholics and perhaps make the entire Catholic Church fall. That’s about the only Catholic bashing I sense. In my neighborhood’s men’s Bible study, which I love, it’s obvious at times I’m the lone Catholic. When I returned to my faith, I tried different churches. Mainly nondenominational churches. As I said, I was shocked at the pop music and the motivational element. But learning about American Protestantism in A Patriot’s History has deepened my understanding of my faith and my Catholic faith. And it’s especially made me see more colors in the American fabric.

Enough of this ramble. Let’s look a little more inside A Patriot’s History.

The good chaos has been watching my daughter grow. She’s now 9 months old as of this writing, and I’m having a blast. I love visiting Omaha, where my wife is from, and but now watching my daughter with her in-laws and cousins is a joy. I love Omaha, as I said, and I put a deposit on land there. Colorado is hell-bent on committing suicide, and now, having a family, an innate itch to move closer to family won’t go away. I recently got back from seeing my family in Maine. Again, seeing my daughter with her second cousins on my side of the family, and my aunt and uncle somewhat becoming grandparents to her, is touching to say the least. My dad passed away in 2008, and my mom is pretty sick. For a while I believed my children would not quite get the grandparent experience from my side of the family. But having my aunt and uncle emerge as those figures is a blessing.

Chaos can make finding time to read challenging. Lately, flying is where I get in the most reading. Chaos also makes it tricky with focus and easy to forget what you’ve read. I looked at my last recap article and forgot I read those books. I remember the stories and topics, but life threw a lot onto my lap. Savoring those books in any manner went out the window.

It’s easy to get discouraged when life throws curveballs and interrupts reading. It’s natural. No one says you can’t start a book over. It’s not a law to finish a book by a specific timeline. If you know some chaos is happening or about to happen, and you’re looking for what to read next, you can pick easy beach reads if you want. And it’s ok to read in small sips. It might take a long time, but who cares? Do what works for you, and if it’s small sips or guilty-pleasure reads or maybe a small break, there’s nothing wrong with it.

Currently, the topic for my book club is America. I curated big books for it:

• The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of King George III, Andrew Roberts

• A Patriot’s History of the United States: From Columbus’s Great Discovery to America’s Age of Entitlement + The Patriot’s History Reader: Essential Documents for Every American, Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen

• A History of the American People, Paul Johnson

• Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville (And I’ll read Pierre Manent’s book on Tocqueville, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy, as a primer)

• Ethnic America, Thomas Sowell

I finished The Last King of America, and that was a behemoth of a book. I’ll give a brief recap below, but after finishing I needed a break and some easier reads before jumping into the next book, A Patriot’s History of the United States, which I’m currently reading. The next one I’ll read for the America topic will be the iconic A History of the American People by Paul Johnson. I have no idea yet when I’ll start it, as I know I’ll need a breather after A Patriot’s History. But I’ll keep you informed.

The next book club topic might be a dive into Catholicism. I’m floating that around in my head. As I mentioned before, it’s likely I’ll start it alongside the America topic since the America topic has some big books and will require some breaks.

If you’re reading books for a topic, sometimes you feel motivated to carry on, and other times you feel a break is needed. For the latter, an easy tell is if you love the book, but toward the latter half you’re getting that “I need to finish this” sensation. And that somehow manifests, for me anyway, as either rushing or putting off reading it a bit. And it’s not because the book is boring me, that does happen, but in this case, it’s the weight of everything thrown at me. When I noticed that sensation toward the latter half of The Last King of America I knew I would need a quick and easy break to feel fresh for the next book curated for the topic. Sometimes a break is not needed. Why? A multitude of reasons, from motivation to the nature of the next book.

Regardless, it’s ok to take that break.

This recap is what I read on that break, plus Last King and something different as you’ll see below.

The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III, Andrew Roberts

King George III is thought of by most with a passing knowledge of America’s founding as a tyrant, and from the English viewpoint that he was inept and stupid.

Both sentiments are untrue. Deeply untrue. Flat out wrong, in fact.

Andrew Roberts is a Hoover Fellow historian, noted for his famous biographies of Winston Churchill and Napoleon. He’s exhaustive with evidence. And with King George III, Roberts was one of the first to see the unreleased archives of George III by Queen Elizabeth. Those archives contain over 300,000 pages of letters, diary entries, George’s grades, his inner circle’s correspondence with him or about him from that time, and more. The massive archive validates George III. He was not tyrannical. He was not dumb.

George III was an admirable monarch. His Achilles’ heel with America was a mixture of his idealism and his stubbornness. George wished to be above political parties, and took it as his duty to rule in that manner. Yet this overlooked human nature, and his idealism and stubborn adherence to this view didn’t pan out with America. He wouldn’t let his prime minister resign when that prime minister knew he was in over his head with America. And seeing how George faced slander from his grandfather as soon as he was born, slander that fomented most of the tropes we know of George today, he stubbornly stuck with certain people and rejected those who were associated in any manner to that slander. This didn’t work policy-wise with America. But those qualities that failed in America yielded the opposite when Napoleon came along. George seemed the lone world leader capable enough to handle Napoleon.

Roberts paints a detailed picture of George, the period he lived in, and the stresses of a world changing so rapidly. And that George suffered from bouts of mental illness and was plagued by the behaviors of progeny and nieces and nephews who acted terribly: a profligate son, a lascivious niece, among others. It all added enormous stress on him, as it would to anybody.

The best-known part of the biography, however, isn’t George III. It’s Roberts’s step-by-step analytical walkthrough of the Declaration of Independence. What made this section notorious and debated among historians is Roberts’s counter to the claims made in the Declaration. The counter reveals the power behind the Declaration, how and why it was written in the way it was written, the spirit of America, and why George and Britons were so confused by it. The latter, simply: Jefferson was a fabulist with some claims. He rhetorically used hyperbole and fabulism for a specific purpose: Americans liked the King. The real issue was with Parliament, yet for independence to happen Jefferson and the authors knew they had to cast off the King. And Jefferson aimed his rhetoric to whip up a frenzy and to get those sitting on the fence about American independence to come into the fold. When British Parliament and the King saw the document, they were flabbergasted at the claims. It’s common today to hear that those signing it could have been hanged for treason. Well, that’s part of the hyperbole. Neither the King nor Parliament would have sought that action. They were both working hard to keep America and were not seeking to punish. And the claims were so outlandish that they were trying to figure out what it meant. It’s a fascinating section of the book. It’s worth buying the book just to check that out alone.

The Last King of America is weighty, weighty in its biography of George III, and weighty in its history of George’s era. It requires a motivated reader. George III is not as sexy as Winston Churchill or Napoleon Bonaparte or World War II, all of which Roberts has covered. But the period of George III — American Revolution and Napoleon — is fascinating. And Roberts has a knack for showing the timely comparisons or historical rhymes we see today. Even just the stress of being a world leader, Roberts depicts. Books like this require a motivated reader for the topic, but if you find yourself motivated on America’s founding, Napoleon, and everything surrounding that period, The Last King of America is an excellent choice.

Shanghai Lottery,

Shawn is a good friend of mine, and this is his debut novel. Shawn is a psychologist and thought leader on masculinity and relationships. He’s written a few books on dating such as The Tactical Guide to Women, The Practical Guide to Men, and Gatekeeper (I can’t speak to the one on women, but every man should read Practical Guide to Men, and Gatekeeper.)

Debut novels are tough. Even for the big-name authors you know, a debut novel can struggle. I’ve been given some debut novels and they’re unreadable. The ones I was given followed a story coach or a story formula. As either sells the magical promise of how to write a successful novel. But those formulas and coaches have the habit of making the story abysmal and trite. Add in poor writing, and it’s unreadable.

Shawn’s novel proved a page-turner. He finds his confidence a few pages in, and the story takes off. What makes the story, aside from memorable characters and a story where you want to know what happens next, is Shawn’s depth of psychological wisdom. It’s a pragmatic depth and from experience. Here and there in the novel, Shawn will drop a nugget of psychological wisdom.

• A normal life has inconveniences. An alcoholic’s life has extremely urgent urgencies that spill into other people’s affairs.

• Tammy always hides her troubles as long as possible, and she picks men who lack the curiosity to notice them.

• On social media, accusations carry more weight than a federal conviction.

And many more exist in the pages. But what adds enjoyment to the nuggets is that they work with the story. They’re painted into the details. And the story is of a young man lacking self-confidence, yet he’s conscientious. He has a famous anon social media account, and this double life — more wisdom again — the choices he makes with it play out with consequences and trade-offs. He must step into a ring, into a Roman gladiator mob mentality of wanting sacrifice, and defend his and his woman’s honor. Alongside that narrative, a love story evolves.

The love story is refreshing. Refreshing in that it’s real. It’s not some sappy romance. Nor is it plagued with the jaded sophomoric pseudo-theories deluged online. Instead we get something real. We get a real version of a woman seeing a man’s potential, and that potential is not linked to becoming the richest or hottest man on the planet. And we see man waiting to see if the shoe will drop yet also noticing a bit of her fear with conflict.

I found myself wanting to get to the next page faster because, like any good story, I wanted to know what happened next. It’s a fun read with lots of wisdom buried in it. It’s a great debut novel.

Love and Logic Magic for Early Childhood: Practical Parenting from Birth to Six Years, Jim Fay & Charles Fay, Ph.D.

As of this writing my daughter is 9 months old. We’re not yet at the discipline stage, yet it’s around the corner. I discovered Love and Logic from a good friend. That friend is the author mentioned above, and another friend of mine was raised by it, and a good friend of my wife raised her daughters with it. I’m learning that parenting is intuitive most of the time, but moments arise when it’s “ok, what am I gonna do here?” and some guidance and wisdom helps.

I’ll be judgmental, it’s my kid, and I see a lot of what I don’t want to do when I see other parents. I resonate and observe the parents that have the great kids at all ages. I discard parents who say the “terrible twos” are real or will just happen, or who have kids who fold at any stress or hold the parents hostage by needing entertainment every second, or what drives me nuts the most, the modern therapy-culture helicopter-style parents.

The style of parenting I resonate with is authoritative, not disciplinarian, not gentle parenting, or not kid-led. Authoritative here, to define it so people don’t leap to “authoritarian,” means loving and firm; a consultant versus a drill sergeant or some therapy-culture nanny-state dad.

As I witness the parenting style that speaks to me, and what comes naturally to me, and much along the lines of how my dad fathered, Love and Logic complements it. I don’t see it as a script or a formula I must follow, but I see the guidelines. And the big thing is, as a parent you don’t want to see your kid struggle. Also, sometimes, since you’re an adult, you know how to solve a problem and want to solve it for them. But that impulse needs checking, as you have to let kids figure things out and even make mistakes. Love and Logic provides a great guideline for that, and a guideline to lead with true empathy: “That stinks, kid.” but then follow that with guidance on how to let them figure out their issue, and offer some help if they ask, “How do you think you’re gonna handle it?” If need be “Would you like some ideas / Here’s how some do it.” And sometimes you pull the rip chord and take the lead to let them know a boundary or standard exists.

If you’re a parent and want some excellent wisdom on parenting that is pragmatic and easy, and makes sense when you read it, Love and Logic is a good place to check out.

The Interior Castle, St. Teresa of Avila

I began a recap here and I wrote over 3,000 words. I’m going to turn it into an essay. But I will leave you with this: it’s a famous work of the Catholic canon. It’s beautiful and inspiring. Make sure to get the version translated and prepared by Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D. Interior Castle is repetitive, incredibly repetitive at times, but the Study Edition by Kavanaugh makes it much easier to go through, and when it gets too repetitive, you can follow his guidance to get to the point.

The Mirabai Starr version, the version you’re most likely to come across in a bookstore or on Amazon, is a Bowdlerized translation. The back jacket states, “Free of religious dogma,” and Starr turns it more or less into how Starr would envision the work for a New Age audience. Avoid this version.

The essay on this piece is coming soon.

Miami Vice: Seasons 1 & 2

Yes, the iconic 1980s television show. Not a book.

I slowly rewatched the first two seasons of the series. I’ve seen all seasons, but it had been a long time since I watched it. I intentionally wanted to rewatch seasons 1 and 2 after taking my wife through The Sopranos for her first time. The rewatch began over a year ago.

A trope surrounds Miami Vice, and this trope perpetuates a myth recycled by people who have never ever watched the show: Miami Vice was simply “MTV Cops.” A few people see it as cheesy fashion, cheesy stories, and so forth. Again, people claiming this view have never ever seen it, but to sound sophisticated and original recycle what they’ve heard.

Miami Vice is an iconic show. It was revolutionary with its soundtrack and scoring, and it helped revitalize Miami. And the show holds up in time. Sure, some of the storylines and effects are on-the-nose 1980s television. Yet one must keep in mind, shows on HBO, which had more leeway to go into grittier topics and themes, like The Sopranos or Game of Thrones, were not a thing in the 1980s. Miami Vice first aired in September of 1984. Network television still had strict rules. Most cop shows of the time had basic plots of good guy always catches bad guy. When Miami Vice aired, the show was wild. The popular music coinciding with Jan Hammer composing scores was unlike anything done before in television, and in many ways, even movies.

The flash of the show, the fashion, the aesthetic, broke boundaries and remain timeless. But while the fashion and the music are well-remembered, what’s often overlooked are the excellent storylines, the performances, and the accurate portrayal of a masculine bond.

Raymond Chandler took the hard-boiled detective story to sonic heights. His novels and his screenwriting fomented the Hollywood noir genre. Miami Vice is distinctly Miami noir and stands on its own. It’s original. It’s groundbreaking. It’s iconic. The pastels mixed with dark themes, and the brilliance of Michael Mann’s filming, what he captures, is noir on a sonic level.

Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas are the main stars of the show. Yet what I noticed on this rewatch was the masculine bond. Most Hollywood depictions of men lack the masculine bond. Even iconic movies, you don’t sense an accurate bond. A masculine bond is a kind of ideal between two men. They know each other’s weaknesses and strengths, and can almost read the other. They have each other’s backs, but never do a kind of “lecture” or inspirational speech to each other. That’s more reserved for mentor and mentee. They bust each other’s balls, and the disposition of each balances out the other. For instance, Don Johnson’s character, Sonny, can get neurotically obsessed with something, whether a woman or a bad guy, and his stubbornness can put the blinders on. Philip Michael Thomas’s character, Ricardo Tubbs, recognizes this and recognizes how to handle it. He handles it subtly, in a way that maintains Sonny’s respect, and in fact puts more trust into that respect. Tubbs is a more sensitive man, a man of passion. His sensitivity is a double-edged sword. He gets drawn in. It brings out his sense of justice and determination, yet he can get himself too deep. Sonny provides the blunt aggression to get Tubbs out of a mess. And aside from the action, the general conversation of the two, it’s an excellent example of masculinity and the masculine bond.

The show is a cop show, but the good guys don’t always win. Not every episode offers a clean and neat ending. It has messy endings, as real life has messy endings. Each character has to face the reality of criminals and their consequences, and their struggle to not get overly cynical due to what they face on a daily basis. The themes of suicide, murder, incest, rape, cons, the dark side of excess, and more all play out in the show.

Miami Vice holds up. Seasons 3–5, Miami Vice takes a different turn. Michael Mann leaves after season 2, and with him goes that Miami feel of the show, and it feels more like a standard cop show. The big thing you notice, the pastels are gone and it’s all earth tones aside from the iconic white Ferrari Testarossa. (For me, the black Daytona, which was a fake Daytona, it was a body kit they used to make it look like the real thing, looked cooler.) The writing is still good in those seasons, yet some episodes jump the shark, like the weird Cows of October episode or the amnesia storyline of Sonny. In my opinion, seasons 1 and 2 are the best.

Note: This is a raw riff. It’s barely edited and I’m sure grammatical and spelling errors exist. These pieces are part of my bookclub, featuring an experimental aspect. The first bit is available to everyone, then, as you’ll see, the rest is for paying members. I’m hoping to get these out weekly, but a family situation back in Boston has made that tricky.

Paid members, there is no video. That may be on hold since my phone can blow up off the hook at any time like it did the last two days.

Go down the rabbit hole.

If you pick up a work of fiction and the author connects, then buy another one of his works and read it next. In fact, buy a bunch of them and read them in a row if you’d like.

If you’re curious about a topic, say the Roman Empire, order a few books and read them. Read them in a row, but if you find yourself a bit burned out, perhaps you read a massive doorstop of a book, take a break with an easy book or two, then jump back in. Or come back to it after maybe a few books.

I’m not sure if there is already a cool name for this concept of curating books on a topic and reading them, or riding the wave of an author, fiction or nonfiction, for a few books. But it’s simple: go with an author or go with a topic for a while.

I’ll focus on looking a topic for this riff and at some point will discuss reading one author for a while.

Right now I’m reading A Patriot’s History of the United States: From Columbus’s Great Discovery to America’s Age of Entitlement, by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen, for my book club. It’s the second work I’m reading for this topic. The first was The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III by Andrew Roberts. Mortimer Adler said that the Great Books of the Western Canon have a way of talking with each other. I’d add that other great books have a way of talking to each other. Sometimes the style changes, like how the fashions change with music. At other times, it’s ideas fleshed out and then other ideas conceptualize it further or counter it for various reasons. Regardless, one can see a discussion or an influence. And if you curate books for a topic, a conversation between each book often surfaces.

Walking it down to a less abstract level, another good reason to read a few books on a topic is that it helps you remember things better. Dates, names, battles, all that fun stuff that maybe overwhelmed you while reading the first book begins to look more familiar in the second book.

I’ve currently read the introduction and am now a few pages into chapter 4 of A Patriot’s History. Already I’m seeing it converse with The Last King of America and I’m getting more familiar with a few names, dates, and goings-on.

Andrew Roberts throws an exhaustive amount of events at you, and expands on them, but it’s naturally tricky to remember it all. As I go through A Patriot’s History I recognize events, names, and so forth. I’m gaining familiarity with America’s beginnings. Now the goal isn’t remembering everything you read, but getting familiarity on a topic is satisfying. Satisfying on a simple end of, “Hey! I recognize this.” And on the other deeper end, “Oh I remember this now, and this is why or around when it happened.” It’s fun when you feel you start to have a handle on a topic. It offers some enjoyment and it makes the topic a little easier to navigate.

On the more abstract end, I’ve spotted a place where Roberts counters a claim regarding King George III and the king’s intelligence. And, while reading The Last King I kept remarking about Britain and the king not grasping the American spirit. In A Patriot’s History the authors explicitly lay out the driver of that spirit: American Exceptionalism. Furthermore, the authors name four components of American Exceptionalism:

1. Christian Tradition

2. Common Law

3. Property Rights

4. Capitalism

Britain and King George misunderstood the Americans and what had developed in the colonies for about a hundred years. Seeing each book address certain sides adds understanding and depth.

That abstract end, where maybe it’s more philosophical or making a connection, shows stronger familiarity on topic. It shows getting nuance and perspective. Will it make you an expert on it, no. But getting that nuance, that depth, means when you come across the topic elsewhere, say a book or podcast or documentary or movie, you can converse with it better and you can cultivate convictions on it. Or perhaps one view you held, new evidence comes to light or an argument, and your position changes. Regardless, it has some depth. And maybe best of all, when you hear or read a true expert on it, you can better understand and navigate what he says or writes.

Let’s take a look at the Introduction up to chapter 4 of A Patriot’s History.

The last month or so I’ve been daily on the phone with a family situation that surfaced in Boston (where I’m from). It’s a wild and tricky situation that’s required full attention. On top of that I went on two big family trips, one to spend time with my wife’s family in Omaha (where we may be moving to at some point) and with my family in Maine. And between those trips, I’ve spent time in Boston dealing with this situation.

It disrupted the bookclub riffs. Those are the new pieces since the chat is a little tough to get going. It looks like for chat to work on Substack you need thousands of paid members and it takes on a life of its own. I’m nowhere near that. The bookclub riffs are me writing a riff from what I’m reading, it’s unedited, I send it out to paid members and converse with them from there. I also am trying something new where I might riff something general on reading or another topic to all subscribers, and then bookclub riffs and notes are behind a paywall. The crazy situation also disrupted an article I’m cooking up on masculinity which was inspired by my reading of The Iliad around a year ago.

Each day something new surfaces with this situation. I’m going to do my best to sneak in writing and get things published. The video riffs accompanying bookclub pieces I hope will continue, but my phone rings off the hook most days. The light at the end of this tunnel is yet to be seen.

The chat is always open to paid members and you can scroll and find the American thread if you want to join in.

Onwards to the Bookclub.

America Bookclub

I’ve finished the first book in the series of books curated for this topic. That book The Last King: The Misunderstood Reign of George III by Andrew Roberts. It was exhaustive, detailed, and wonderful. Andrew Roberts is a force.

The biggest takeaways from that book:

• George III was in no shape or form tyrannical or anything near it

• George III, British Parliament, and Britons all misunderstood America and Americans

• The American spirit is real, tangible, alive, and still misunderstood abroad

• George III faced an uphill battle with his legacy due to slander beginning when he was born and slander continuing to this day — he was in fact an admirable King

• George III and Britons were confused as to why America wanted to split and its ambivalence towards Americans and not wishing to punish them through force or even use force gave the Americans a massive advantage in the Revolutionary War

• The stresses of being a world leader are unimaginable

• His mental illness and how it surfaced were sad and at times abhorrent considering his era’s methods to deal with mental illness

• He did his best to live an upstanding and moral life

• He loved his country (he loved America and Americans) and worked hard to do what was best

• His idealism and stubbornness at times proved terrible, like with America, and at times astute, like his dealings with Napoleon

• Roberts’s 28-point walkthrough of the Declaration of Independence is fantastic; Thomas Jefferson used fabulist rhetoric to instill more want of total independence and to ride with American spirit

The biggest American themed takeaway is the American spirit. To me, it looks like once the heavy yoke of puritanism was lifted, American dynamism thrived. But, puritanism is still imbued into the American fabric. Its latest iterations are found with the Progressive Left or most of the modern Left in reality, and on the very online fringe Right. Another fascinating place to see it is with the Manosphere, with their pseudo-theoretical straitjackets.

With that, I’ve just begun the next book: A Patriot’s History of the United States: From Columbus’s Great Discovery to America’s Age of Entitlement - 15th Edition by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen. Along with it, I’m reading its companion volume: The Patriot’s History Reader: Essential Documents for Every American by Larry Schweikart, Dave Dougherty, and Michael Allen.

This is a behemoth of a book. Though I know of one taker who already began reading it. No one joined me in reading of The Last King, but I did have a few flies on the wall.

For Those New or Needing A Recap of How the Bookclub Works (If Not New Skip To The Next Section)

It’s simple.

I pick a book or a topic. You can read along or can be a fly on the wall. You can comment, ask questions, and join on livestreams if I host them.

The current topic is America.

I curated the following books for this topic (and maybe will add in some others, we’ll see):

• The Last King of America, Andrew Roberts

• A Patriot’s History of the United States, Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen

• A History of the American People, Paul Johnson

• Democracy in America Alexis de Tocqueville (and will prime it by reading Pierre Manent’s Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy)

• Ethnic America, Thomas Sowell

These are big books. And the reader will need to be motivated. I’m not reading all the books in a row. I want to avoid reading burnout. So I’ll read one, see how I feel towards the end, and then likely indulge in a few easy reads before picking up the next big book. Also, given the length of the books, it’s quite possible I start another bookclub topic that I will jump into as a break from America. I’ll keep you posted on that.

To join along, whether reading or wishing to be a fly on the wall, you must be a paid member.

Subscribe now

A Patriot’s History: Why This Book And When To Start

You can start reading it now.

I’m reading the 15th edition. Various editions exist, and the one I have has updated past positions once held or since sharpened due to new resources made available to the authors.

Why this book?

I was a history major in college, and I’m still a history nerd. I tend to lean towards history when I read. I loved it as a little kid and I still love it now. After historical field trips, I would bug, nag, and beg my parents to take me to where school took us and to go there as soon as possible. My cousins in Virginia groaned when I visited because they knew I would ask to go to Mt. Vernon, and other sites, and my aunt and uncle were more than happy to oblige.

In college I had to pick European or American history as my lane. I had taken too many history classes, and I was about neck and neck with American and European. Given the choice fresh after a trip from Ireland, I chose European. When I started my thesis, I regretted my choice. Nothing against European history, but in my heart of hearts I wanted to do American history. My thesis was terrible by the way, a total snooze fest.

A second reason, in college I read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. I also read it post-college. My conviction having read it twice, historically it’s abysmal; agenda-wise Zinn gets his point across. Zinn pushed the modernist Marxist historical lens and outright sought to dismantle American values and ideals via his ideological lens. From what I gather, Patriot’s History began as a counter to him, and after reading the introduction, has expanded into a more robust history.

The coolest class I took in college was about historical lenses and perceptions. You had to be a top student to get into it. Which I’m proud I got in, arguably my best academic achievement. It was for students looking for careers in history or were likely headed to good law schools. Those careers not necessarily meaning professors, but careers in museums, for companies that do those historical plaques you see at various historical sites, and historical production studios.

It was a fascinating class, and one that stuck with me. Perhaps the most useful academic class in my life. I learned to pick up ideology or lenses right away.

Well, in that class, we looked at Zinn. He was a rockstar of the 1960s New Left educational movement which sought, explicitly, to dismantle traditional educational norms. The New Left wanted its philosophical underpinnings — relativism, postmodernism, Marxism, Critical theory (what fueled the most famous Critical Race Theory) — to be the educational foundation for the West. It sought to exploit the sins of each Western country and define that country through those sins, fomenting an Oppressor and Victim narrative, and that the only way to escape Western evils was a deconstruction of its history and create a Progressive agenda. Historians like Zinn, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Richard J. Evans, and countless others are of this ilk. Some explicitly so, others less so on the nose.

Even in college, with a super Left-leaning professor, we studied this lens. We studied the other side of the lens, though, if I recall, less so. And we looked into how to spot the lens, the philosophies influencing it, and why.

In short, I’ve read Zinn. I’ve long had Patriot’s History on my list. I want to see the other side here, the side of my side. I’m curious how it’s presented, and more so, I’m curious for the history of America told by authors who aren’t out to dismantle America.

It’s a big book and reading its companion reader alongside it will also take time.

If you want to read along, don’t worry about your speed or catching up to me. Read at your pace, whatever that is, slow, medium, or fast. I’m available to those who take part, even if it is after I start. If you just want some wisdom on American history, or to see how I work through a book like this, want to ask questions, yet have no intention of reading the book, no worries. Feel free to join and ask questions.

I’ve started the book. It will take time.

With my family situation, I might not be able to contribute weekly as I had planned with the last book. But I will work to get content up and out. I want to be up front and not set false expectations.

You can join below.

Subscribe now

Note: I apologize for the long delay. An unfortunate situation has occurred to my family. It has required trips to Boston, and most of my day spent on the phone dealing with it when I’m not in Boston.

Note note: These pieces are quick riffs and off the top of my head. They will likely have grammatical and spelling errors as I write this and then publish. And the video, as always, is a riff.

Note note note: I’ve finished the Last King. This article is a time capsule before the family situation erupted in Boston. I started it, situation erupted, and it went left unfinished. I’ve decided to finish it, no video will accompany it. As of this writing, I’m beginning A Patriot’s History of the United States by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen. I’ll make a formal announcement soon. And below I’m trying something new, all subscribers will see something and paid subscribers their bookclub notes.

Names.

Dates.

Battles.

Policies.

Towns.

Cities.

Events.

The Last King of America hurls all of the above at you and more. Many readers are under the notion that they comprehended and got the lessons from a history only if they remember the Jeopardy gameshow facts. That you best know the book if you can not only recite the dates and events, you can then divulge the particulars of those dates and events.

Readers with that mindset, the mindset of needing to remember the names and dates of events, go into a work like The Last King and soon find themselves guilty, anxious, and frustrated. They see some names, then a few pages later some new names, but wonder if those names were mentioned before. Then, an event happens, and maybe 100 pages later that event is mentioned again, and what happened with that event again exactly?

Reading a history via the perfect recall and perfect comprehension mindset is well-intentioned but misguided.

On one end, this mindset comes from the Self-Development world plus the “prep for the test” mix of reading, which the self-development world pushes despite self-developments claims of school teaching them nothing. On the other, it comes from a notion that good readers read a book and turn into an expert on the topic. That they could go on a podcast, or often, speak to someone at a social event, and impress people with their profound knowledge on a subject.

If you want to be an expert on a topic reading one book, even a big one, will not cut it. To have a good level of knowledge you need to immerse in that topic. You need to read a ton of different books on the topic, whether it’s a bunch in a row similar to this American book club, or spread out over time. To be an expert on it, you need to be trained on it, such as Victor Davis Hanson or Barry Strauss or Andrew Roberts. Those top notch experts have devoted their lives to their craft.

Keep in mind, those historians you admire on a topic, or perhaps a fan of a topic who riffs on a podcast with depth, they have spent enormous time with a topic. They didn’t just read one or two books, and suddenly they turn into Will Hunting with polymath knowledge on the topic.

Another overlooked aspect, you will remember some books better than others. A glib saying goes that if you don’t understand what you’re reading or you walk away not an expert, that’s on the author. Sure, that can be the case in many instances of academic writing of the tone-deaf intellegentsia or jargon LinkedIn writing. But on the whole, some books and some authors will offer you a challenge. Thomas Sowell’s Conflict of Visions is written simply, it uses simple Anglo words, but the philosophical topics are a challenge. The Last King by Andrew Roberts is written with incredible style. He’s not as Hemingway-esque as Sowell, but he uses repetition in two ways, to keep you abreast and to then show the historical consequences playing out. Readable, but it takes cognitive capacity to grasp what’s going on. Other times, you will read a work, really enjoy it, and then months later forget it. That’s natural. That’s nothing on you. In some way it did not resonate deeply with you. For instance, I read James Madison by Jay Cost around three years ago, and I can’t remember a thing from it. Is that on my not reading it well? Or is it on the author, Jay Cost? Sometimes, perhaps more often than we’d like to admit, we forget some books. The answer is distinct to each reader. I remember other histories I read around that time far better than I do James Madison. But I’m not worried I didn’t remember it, it’s the nature of reading. Some books will stick with you for a lifetime, others you’ll forget after a few weeks.

What should you focus on?

First, the enjoyment. If you’re trying to read as a means to some end, you’ll wear yourself out, especially with a book like The Last King. You don’t need to walk away from a book like it to impress anyone or recite stats. You can just enjoy it and move on. That’s the most important part.

Second, when curiosity strikes, go with it. Spend time with a passage. Look up some things if you want. See where your thoughts go.

If you want to engage more…

Third, ask questions. Any question. It doesn’t have to be intelligent, just ask question. This starts the process of engaging with a book.

Fourth, see if you recognize themes or a position the author is taking. Note them in some marginalia, and see if those positions are expanded upon, repeated, or added to.

Fifth, if you have some previous wisdom on the topic, or remember something on it whether in passing or in depth, and you see it pop up, note those sections mentally or in marginalia. See how the author handles that information. You might have a myth busted, a previous conception validated, or something else.

Note, these pieces are a raw riff. They’re unedited and will likely have grammar errors.

Andrew Robert’s continues impressing. He’s engaging, scholarly, rigorous, and an exemplar of how to handle first hand sources. To the latter, as I’ve mentioned, I was a history major in college. My proudest academic achievement in college was getting into a class, which you needed the grades for, that began training you how to be a historian versus studying history. Much of it was learning how to dissect viewpoints, how to take first hand sources, aka, sources from the period, and extract history from it. Spot hyperbole, factions, political sides, the cultural fashions and notions of the time, and how to extract history from it. We also learned how to present a museum or how to tell the viewpoint of the museum and its goal of the curation. In addition, we learned how to dissect second hand, third hand, and other sources. Like, is it a Progressive revisionism, or is it more from a Conservative standpoint? The New Left of the 1960s radically changed how history was presented.

Roberts is a conservative historian, but he keeps partisan stances out. He, like most conservative historians in reality, are rigorous on evidence, and evidence from various angles. He isn’t pushing a narrative. But, he’s able to inject into the passages where we see history rhyming today, or gain perspective. Like how George III concern over moral rot and a lowering of a decorum, thinking it might end England. This sentiment of moral rot we see today. Or the conspiratorial nature of certain theories of what’s truly happening, it happened in America then, and that nature is widespread on X today. Robert’s ability to do this without getting partisan or without breaking a 4th wall, is remarkable.

Ok, I’m thinking of doing a livestream discussing America. It will be history focused. If that interests you, reply here or in the chat, if we get a few, I’m game.

Onwards.

Read more

The Cavalier Treatment of America

My marginalia repeatedly remarks of the cavalier treatment of America. Roberts clearly shows that King George is not nor was not tyrannical in any degree. The argument and evidence will continue to show up in pages I’m sure, but it’s clear King George III was not tyrannical in any degree or manner. Yet George and countless others in Parliament viewed America cavalierly. Another way of putting it, George and others in his political circle and those in Parliament, were stuck in an echo chamber of local British politics and viewed America in a kind of conceptual abstract. That it was mere chess pieces to move.

The cavalier treatment however wasn’t in disdain, most in Britain had mutual respect for the colonies, but it wasn’t treated as pressing. Also, the small handful who did see the potential of America, like William Pitt, didn’t …

Read more

The title of the book encapsulates the thesis: The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III.

“Misunderstood” is, after one pages or so in, is an understatement. Queen Elizabeth granted Roberts access to 200,000, yes, two-hundred thousand, pages, never before released on King George. The collection includes nearly everything written by George III going back to when he was a boy, and letters of those in his circle. They are now public domain, but they were kept under lock and key since the 1700s.

George III was misunderstood, rather, slandered, before he was even born. His grandfather, King George II hated George’s father, Frederick. And hate is an understatement. The progeny, despite George III being the blood of George II, received disdain for being a product of Frederick. This contributed …

Read more

That is why it is important to choose some easier or shorter reads after a demanding book. The follow-up can still offer depth, but I suggest a book that can be tackled easily. If you want easy, pick some easy beach reads. They may not be great literature, but you can roll through a few decent stories and give the mind a break. Most of the books listed below were selected to avoid burnout after a heady topic. Each was easily tackled yet still offered depth.

I’ll close with this: if you are feeling a bit burned out on what you are reading, pick a book—whether fiction or nonfiction—that you sense you can tackle easily. Maybe you read a ton of literature; grab a modern and accessible history book or cultural analysis. Step out of story for a bit and read something with a different intellectual feel. Or maybe you are coming out of a piece of heady philosophy or a deep dive into theology; pick some easily tackled fiction. It can have depth, but it need not be intense. Maybe it is simply a guilty-pleasure read. Either way, jump into something fun that you can get engrossed in.

You can get a sense of how a book will read if you skim a few pages. No one says you must read only the old classics all the time or else you are a failure. Advice like “read only books one hundred years or older” is a bit of a generality. It is not bad advice per se, but plenty of good writers exist today, writing on interesting topics or telling interesting stories. No one says you must read nothing newer than Immanuel Kant for the rest of your life, or that you must read only beach reads for the rest of your life.

Books Read (in order)

The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli

Machiavelli was the topic for my first book club. I had read Pierre Manent before and had no idea he was an expert on Machiavelli as well as on the theories of Machiavelli and the massive consequences of those theories. One can read The Prince and grasp Machiavelli. He was not a political scientist; he was a theorist. Much of his theory reflects the “do something” impulse people have when it comes to politics. The impulse to dramatically supplant the current status quo with one’s preferred ideology is also Machiavellian. Yet he remains important to read. His core belief was that man cannot be trusted to act as a moral animal; in fact, it is all but impossible. Focus on what man is, not on what man ought to do, since man always fails that ought. It is a bleak view with moral consequences. To understand modern politics, however, Machiavelli is critical reading.

The Discourses, Niccolò Machiavelli

Book I of The Discourses is worth it. It expands on the theories expounded in The Prince, though more through repetition, theoretical examples, and exegesis of history than through further articulation or definition. Books II and III of The Discourses are redundant, repetitive, rambling, and tiresome. Much of the material repeats Book I, and all of it repeats The Prince, but in a much more rambling manner. You do get, however, Machiavelli’s seething hatred of the Catholic Church. The Discourses further hammers Machiavelli’s belief that one is justified in using whatever means necessary, even if immoral, to obtain an end. We saw this with the relentless prosecution of Donald Trump from 2020 to 2024. We see it with the trans-progressive ideology that aggressively declares anything short of obsequious fealty to the cause to be political and bigoted. We saw it with how the Democratic machine made an unelected (and unelectable) candidate, Kamala Harris, its presidential nominee. We also see it with the wishes of the very online Right that a leader will come along to install their favorite podcast personalities’ clickbait conspiratorial theories as the new political system for America. But to finish: one can read The Prince and grasp Machiavelli. You can skip The Discourses.

By the way, I am covering America for my next book club. You can get some details HERE. Or if you would like to join, subscribe below.

Subscribe now

Scoop, Evelyn Waugh

I learned of Evelyn Waugh through Starting Strength Boise, or perhaps it was on the Charles C. W. Cooke podcast, where Charlie Cooke interviewed Christopher Scalia (son of Antonin Scalia). Scalia wrote a book called 13 Books Every Conservative Should Read. In Boise, a fellow lifter who had worked at—and I believe is still associated with—conservative think tanks mentioned Waugh. Wherever I heard it, I was curious about Waugh and had no clue what to expect.

Waugh is brilliant. His satire comprises dry wit and funny names yet is full of depth. Scoop is a timeless piece. While it focuses on English media between the world wars, the themes remain visible today. One theme is the creation of a story to sell papers when no story exists—a.k.a. pure fabulism—while hoping the story will hit on a prediction by luck or advance a political ideology. We see this today, exacerbated on X by various personalities and particular podcasters. They throw out conspiratorial craziness or repeat talking points, hoping something will hit or generate clicks and views.

What makes Waugh special is his depiction, beneath those themes, of England struggling with its empire on the precipice of possible decline and of the behavior of the elites during this struggle—their decadence and, in reality, a kind of aimlessness. It is a fascinating look at England’s state before it entered World War II.

Three Uses of the Knife: On the Purpose and Nature of Drama, David Mamet

Mamet is easily among the best playwrights and screenwriters alive. Three Uses of the Knife teaches, critiques, and details various forms of story. Mamet will irk many. If you like feel-good movies, like me—such as Karate Kid—Mamet may have you questioning your taste. Still, you will learn how stories like those in Karate Kid work and how it all fits together. More than his analysis of movies, stories, and plays, Mamet’s strength lies in his view and explanations of human nature, particularly the actions people take and how they choose those actions willingly.

We live in a world of therapy-speak, and Mamet cuts through that noise, including the noise of Freudian, Jungian, and progressive thought (a.k.a. the partisans of heteronomy). What I also love about Mamet is his astute criticism of modern storytelling’s constant reliance on “backstory.” The claim is that you must know the psychological details, filtered through a psychological or political school of thought, to explain why someone does what they do. Yet when you look at the great stories and characters, emotional background or backstory is largely absent. We get to know characters through the dialogue masters, such as Tom Wolfe, or through the atmosphere masters, such as Raymond Chandler. Mamet says we know them by the actions they take in the moment, and we meet them in the moment. In Mamet’s iconic Glengarry Glen Ross, we do not get the backgrounds of the characters, but we do get who they are by their choices and actions—which makes for great storytelling.

Looking outside Mamet, we never learn any of Rocky Balboa’s childhood background, yet he is an iconic character. We know nothing of his childhood or his teen years, and we get no montages of his youth to explain why he yells at Mick or keeps wanting to fight. We get his choices and actions, which tell us everything about him.

Why We’re Catholic: Our Reasons for Faith, Hope, and Love, Trent Horn

I returned home recently to my spiritual home, Catholicism. I am a cradle Catholic. I rejected my Catholicism and God after my dad passed and went full-blown atheist. I read most of the famous atheists, particularly Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and A. C. Grayling. But I have returned. The return to my Catholic faith was fueled by Erasmus, David Mamet, my old non-denominational church in Denver, St. John’s Cathedral in Boise, my wife, and other influences. I approach things cerebrally. I ordered a number of books on Catholic theology. I read this one because it looked easy, and it was.

It is a decent overview. It does not go into much depth on certain topics, or on topics I would have liked explored further. Its section on sex, particularly the “used car” example used to explain a woman’s past, reads too much like a take from the Whatever Podcast. It comes across as insecure, as if seeking validation that if a woman has sex before marriage she must have some kind of self-loathing and that no one wants a used car. In other words, it feels sophomoric, insecure, and lacking depth. Regardless, it is a decent, readable book on the Catholic faith. It certainly will not do any harm to read it, and the strongest sections are those on apologetics.

A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh

Another wonderful satire full of depth, it offers another sharp look at England’s upper crust between the world wars. This tale begins with the consequences of a vapid wife starting an affair and her oblivious husband, hyper-focused on his family’s plush country estate, leading to a trail of consequences. We see the aimlessness of upper-crust types barely hanging on to the threads of family wealth, a cold, shallow woman who does not see the havoc she is wreaking, and the fact that she is an abhorrent person. Yet again, it is also a look at an aimless England as it struggles with its decline as the premier world power. It is hilarious, fun, and at times sad.

Deliverance, James Dickey

The movie is iconic. One scene is unforgettable. The movie stays close enough to the book. The book itself is fantastic. James Dickey masterfully captures the primal and the physical movement in nature as characters try to survive. The primal element Dickey captures is almost strange at first; he often uses sexuality to depict it. Yet he captures a classic and ugly element of human nature that we all possess. If you study classic wars, particularly the writings we have of battles from the Roman Empire, the brutal nature of those battles unleashed man’s darkest primal elements—elements innate to all of us. Reading about some of those battles is eye-opening as to what man is capable of, and even eager to do. It is an important aspect of human nature to understand.

The combination of fear and the drive for survival, particularly when fighting for life, taps into something ugly at times. Dickey captures that. He does not glorify it or condemn it, but he certainly lets it play out. The novel is hard to put down. Most people have seen the movie and are familiar with the ending. With the novel, Dickey leaves the reader wondering what happened to the characters after.

Share

I finished James Dickey’s Deliverance this weekend and debated whether to read one more book or begin The Last King of America by Andrew Roberts. Since the last two announcements of this book club, most readers seem interested in A History of the American People by Paul Johnson or A Patriot’s History of the United States by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen (along with its companion reader). That’s no surprise. Paul Johnson’s book is iconic, and while Andrew Roberts is no less so, his most popular (and sexier) works are his biographies of Churchill and Napoleon. Given that I would be the lone reader of The Last King of America, I decided to get started. A few people have raised their hands to be flies on the wall.

Yet I wanted to see if anyone else is on the fence, so here’s the breakdown.

Book Club Basics

The Book Club is a new feature on my site. It’s available only to paying members.

I pick themes, topics, and authors. The last one was Machiavelli. I post videos that break down what I’m reading or how to tackle sections. I host livestreams where you can chat with me and other members. The chat also has a dedicated America thread. After getting feedback from members, I will also write some quick article riffs. The chat is great, but it doesn’t notify members, and with the number of members I have right now, it hasn’t yet come to life, with people checking in frequently.

You do not need to be reading any of the books. You can be a fly on the wall, ask questions, and engage however you like. This is for a few simple reasons. First, it would be silly to tell paying members they can’t ask questions when they see all the content they paid for. Second, and perhaps the biggest reason, I believe the book club will promote better reading. You’ll see how I or others dissect a book, whether easy or difficult. A goal of my site is to encourage better reading.

Naturally, I hope a few people will read along. For this “‘Merica” topic, I curated some big books. The first, The Last King of America by Andrew Roberts, is a behemoth.

The others:

• A History of the American People, Paul Johnson

• A Patriot’s History of the United States: From Columbus’s Great Discovery to America’s Age of Entitlement + The Patriot’s History Companion Reader: Essential Documents for Every American, Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen

• Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville (I’ll also read Pierre Manent’s book on Tocqueville, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy, as a primer)

And I’m almost certainly going to include:

• Ethnic America, Thomas Sowell

A few other books might be added as well.

All of the books listed above, except the Sowell volume I’m almost certain to include, are big books.

With the book club, while I hope you read along, you can set your own pace and reading schedule. We all have our own schedules and reading rhythms. The topic is open-ended for now. You can pick up The Last King of America in six months, and I’ll still be happy to discuss it if you raise your hand.

Again, you can be a fly on the wall or read along. The more activity from you on the site, the more activity from me.

Subscribe now

The Pace of America Book Club

Given the length of these books, I will likely not read them back to back. Experience tells me that would cause reading burnout. I want to stay fresh with each book. I will read one, finish it, then likely pick a few easier books to read in between. Some may even be Book Club picks on a different topic. Then I will jump back into the America theme. The time between books will be a feel thing for me. My guess is one to three weeks.

The Last King of America

Since it looks like I’m the lone reader for now, I will still post plenty of videos and some article riffs on this book. If people ask questions or get involved, I’m happy to do some livestreams.

A chat thread has been dedicated to America. It will cover all things America and the curated books. Since the Substack chat hasn’t yet come to life for me, I will also write some riffing articles to discuss the book.

I’m close to 70 pages into The Last King of America, and it’s excellent so far. Andrew Roberts makes even exhaustive detail exciting. He does so by showing the consequences of events and explaining why some seemingly random British tax or royal marriage mattered. He’s a special talent.

If you’d like to join in, become a paid member.

I’m looking forward to this topic. I love America. I’m a history dork, and I can’t wait to read these books. I hope some of you will join along or, if you’re curious but not planning to read, will be flies on the wall to learn a bit about the greatest country on earth.

Subscribe now

As mentioned in a previous article, the first book to read is The Last King of America by Andrew Roberts.

It’s a beast of a book. A whopping 675 pages in my hardbound edition. The knocks against the book pertain to its exhaustive detail. Andrew Roberts is a modern iconic historian by reputable accounts. I’ve read a number of his articles and have listened to him on interviews yet have not read one of his books. His biographies of Napoleon and Churchill are famous. The King George biography received wide praise and acclaim, yet George is not as sexy as Churchill and Napoleon, hence the less “fame” of this biography, if you could call it that.

This book will take time. After the last message, it was a bit crickets. Yet I know of one heavy hitter joining in on this topic. Keep in mind, you do not need to be reading any of the books to be a part of this book club. As long as you are a paying member, you can partake.

Subscribe now

The certain-to-read books of this curation are big books and will require patience to read:

• A History of the American People, Paul Johnson — 976 pages & smaller font

• A Patriot’s History of the United States: From Columbus’s Great Discovery to the Age of Entitlement + its companion volume The Patriot’s History Reader: Essential Documents for Every American, Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen — 867 pages + 427 pages for the companion reader

• Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville — 822 pages. Also, as a primer, I’m going to read Pierre Manent’s Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy; people can join me if they wish on that.

I’m not here to scare you off. Breaks will exist between these books. I will not read one after the other. Given the size and depth of each, that, I surmise, would cause reading burnout. I will take breaks. How long a break lasts will be determined by how I’m feeling. It might be a week, it might be two weeks. I want to be fresh and ready for each book. I know that will get the best out of me for you.

My philosophy: I want you to read and enjoy them at your pace and in your own time. You do not need to read along. Though, I hope you do. And I want and hope to engage with you.

The Last King

An impulse arose, a strong one, to write a section to stoke curiosity to read The Last King. I announced this topic and the feedback was quiet. Like I said, I know of one heavy hitter joining. But that’s it. I’m still navigating and tinkering with the shape of the book club.

But I’m not going to try to bring out ye olde copywriting chops to sell you on reading this book.

A topic like this, with books like this, requires not just a motivated reader but a reader who would enjoy this topic, a reader with curiosity on this topic, and a reader who likes the challenge of a big book.

King George will not be an easy book. It’s a big book. It’s a book written by a historian of substance and depth. Yet it will not be beach-read history such as The History of Salt. It’s a doorstop book. Roberts is regarded as a great and compelling writer by many. In other words, he’s largely readable to smart people. Yet it’s a big book with a lot of detail. As any big book like this, it wil require someone deeply motivated to read it, and the idea of “getting through all of it” isn’t a worry to them.

Some of you will be interested but will not have the time to read it or simply might be too intimidated to pick it up. If that is you, you can still join in, watch the videos, ask questions in the chat, comment on the articles or riffs on the book, and join or offer up questions for the livestreams.

I’m excited to read this book. I have been for some time. Given the response to the last article, and it still being the nascent stages of my book club, it might just be me talking to the heavy hitter who said he was in and to a few flies on the wall. We’ll see what sticks. And it might be good practice since I’m thinking of adding in quick riffs or quick videos exclusive to members to discuss what I’m reading, book club topic or not.

In sum, this book is a serious one. It’s a big one. The takers will be few. But if you are a taker, whether reading or a fly on the wall, I plan to start next week.

I’m reading Deliverance by James Dickey currently. You may know it by the iconic movie. The book, so far, is superb. I can’t put it down. I will finish it in the next few days. I might read another fast-paced and short fiction before I begin The Last King.

If you are with me, first, you must be a member. Second, let me know if you’re reading this book or planning to. You can do that by commenting below. If you want to be a fly on the wall for this book and the topic, simply like the post.

I will write another announcement the closer I get to starting The Last King.

Subscribe now

Dating is often a tortuous endeavor for men and women. Tortured, here, not always meaning broken, crazy damaged people blowing up relationships and leaving a trail of trauma, regret, and anger in their wake. Those people exist. But tortured here means the sense that a man or woman, despite best intentions, personal self-esteem levels, well-adjusted or maladjusted, seems to have a habit of the relationship they desire constantly eluding them. A few long-term relationships fail, for various nuanced and general reasons: fear of commitment, always picking ill-suited matches, hanging on too long, abrogating responsibility in their choices, or refusal to deal with fears of being alone. Tied to that, a lot of short-term situations that appear to start off great to the love-starved guy or gal, only to implode, leaving one or both wondering, “How did I ever get into a thing with this person?” Or choosing flings for fun but repressing the fact that they’re wanting to hook up with new people, telling themselves they’re doing this to not settle, and that repression having the habit of stoking internal and external disorder. In other words, dating can be fraught with confusion, fear of never finding that great match, chaos, anxiety, the consequences of repressing accountability, self-doubt, and regret.

I’m going to speak from my dating experience, which derives largely from the urban dating scene in Denver, Colorado. I’ll speak from personal experience and observation. Denver, like any area, packs men and women following their own ingrained patterns of behavior, following a consistent set of choices leading to a consistent set of outcomes, which keeps them in a cycle of enduring tortured romantic relationships.

I endured a cycle of tortured relationships. I used to undervalue myself. Not in a self-defeating manner, but in the manner of being oblivious to the value I brought to the table. I swung pendulums between dating the bad girl to then “hitting the reset button” to then dating the prig. I was choosy, but had a bad habit of ignoring the girls pursuing me and going after women offering a challenge. I didn’t want to “fix” her—you can’t, nor can you save her—rather, it was women who offered a kind of challenge, whether it be their emotional disposition or an endless amount of hurdles. That all fed an internal scoreboard of me competing against self-created and always moving goalposts. It all made for a faulty vetting process. I’d pick a poor match, not a slight mismatch, but an outright poor match. A relationship with a poorly matched person has the habit of manifesting the features of self-doubt that keep us stuck to those poor matches. For me, if she was ice cold, or unbearably overwhelming, or outright behaved poorly, I would castigate myself for not being the Ubermensch Alpha male months ago, and take my not being the Ubermensch months ago as the root cause to explain her behavior in the moment. Fortunately, when I found myself venting to the steering wheel of my car or buying Stop Walking on Eggshells and reading it in secret, I knew I had to end it.

I had had enough of the cycle by early 2020. I broke the cycle through self-analysis, getting wisdom from a rare pro-masculine psychologist (I know how lucky I am to find one like him), and deep personal realizations. It caused a late personal blooming in June of 2020. I went on to vet and enjoy great matches and found the best match with the woman who became my wife (shockingly, I came close to meeting her a number of times going back to late December of 2004, and so many times throughout the years, and in such a fashion, that it makes me wonder about the Invisible String Theory, as irrational as that may be). I, like many, endured a cycle not wanting to endure that cycle, and am grateful I freed myself from it.

Share

The cycle is hard to generalize, yet a common flavor prevails, regardless of how nuanced and different the ingredients are comprising that flavor. Many in the urban dating scene, after a failed relationship, after a string of flings which failed to yield, yet again, the satisfaction promised, now claim to have changed and are eager for the fresh start only to find themselves right back in the spot they swore they wouldn’t be in any longer.

Finding themselves in this place again, well-intended people say it’s time for a “reset.” They might beat themselves up a little, maybe ruminate if they’re broken or somehow something—the past, trauma, not being the Ubermensch—got them into this place of frustration again. Yet, they decide not to play victim, “refuse to settle this time,” and tell themselves that they’re deserving of something great. They “hit reset” and jump right back into the same cycle, eagerly and willingly making the same pattern of choices as before, and then wrangling to repress those choices as they get the same outcomes as before.

A common first part of the pattern—imbued with dispositional and psychological intricacies particular to a person—is the “reset.” The motivated want to figure out their love life this time. They may read The Love Languages, Way of the Superior Man, Attached, The Four Agreements, or other popular bumf. Whatever it is, they turn to some expert or school of promises to find the secret.1

They journal a list of meaningless wants:

• Is a good person

• Loves to travel

• Likes adventures

• Is spontaneous

• Is healthy

That’s general to both sexes.

Women tend to list:

• Gets along with his mom (it’s telling that “gets along with his father” is never listed)

• Is successful

• Anticipates her needs (aka, mind reading)

• Owns power tools (or some other token symbol of pop masculinity)

• Isn’t intimidated by her career

• Has a job (the shallower go with, makes 6+ figures, has abs, and is 6’2”+)

• Listens/communicates/can talk about anything, even the hard stuff

The last point always misses that she herself struggles or outright refuses to open up and articulate her past relationships and hookups with radical honesty. Instead, many women hope any inquiry of her past never gets past deflections of, “It was so long ago; I was a different person then”—which camouflages and acts as a palliative for the repression haunting her subconscious. Ask a woman who claims she wants someone she can talk about anything with, even the hard stuff, how many men she’s slept with. One in ten will give it to you straight without pretensions. The nine out of ten will get offended, lie, reflexively counter with feminist bromides, offer rationalizations disguised under being a different person then, or deflect by presenting a self-image of how she wishes to perceive herself. I have some sympathy for the nine out of ten. Because nine out of ten men manifest various insecurities when learning about a girl’s past. They’ll project their sexual insecurities or hold her past over her head to hide his feeling inferior to the men she had sex with previously. Still, regardless of her claims of being changed, she in each of those past moments chose willingly and eagerly to hook up or get into a relationship with a guy.

Men make a list as if they’re looking for a buddy:

• Likes sports

• Drinks beer

• Drama free

• Isn’t a gold-digger

The last point is almost always uttered by men well outside the top one percent of wealth or wealthier. It’s more or less a red flag when it’s uttered. It’s usually uttered by insecure men, the kind of guy who buys into manosphere ideologies of women being agency-less beings but having an innate Machiavellian nature seeking to screw men over. These men are petrified of being cheated on, so much so it’s a complex. And they’ve absolutized a woman’s body count into a moral law to such a degree that they seek their mirror: someone as self-loathing and as insecure as themselves.

Each sex, armed with that list of clichés, dogma, and therapy culture claptrap, believes this time they’ve changed. That they’re a different person now. They’ve done “the work.” They’ve “elevated to a new level” and are ready.

Days or a short few weeks after the last failed romance, they’re back in the dating market, oblivious that they’re using the same superficialities to vet people and adhering to the same dating patterns and making the same choices as before—a pattern of romantic decision making likely no different than they used when they were teenagers.

But this time is different!

They told themselves it’s different this time.

They did the work!

They journaled that they’re deserving and will not settle for average. They’ve studied some game or romance advice and told themselves that they’re better armed to win someone over. Despite dating apps being a massive source of chaotic and dispirited dating for them before, they’re right back on the apps: Hinge, Bumble, Tinder, Coffee Meets Bagel, and Raya. They’re out on the social scene (almost always revolving around drinking). And they’re “saying yes to life” and signing up for activities they wouldn’t otherwise do, like men signing up for Sunrise Yoga at Red Rocks and women signing up for kickball at Sloan’s Lake.2

Each sex gets dates. They date around. They may date multiple people at the same time. Here or there someone seemingly “checks all the boxes” on that superficial list. This time, since a person “checks all the boxes,” a romantic vision of the perfect match is hoisted onto that person, and the hoister tells themselves it’s love or at least maybe heading that way, all while ignoring gut feelings, overlooking red flags, missing that the person is a mismatch at a basic level (one wants kids, the other doesn’t), and the hoister, once again, ends up confused and conflicted when the person who had checked all the boxes turns out to be an awful match, a total knob, a chore to be with, or whatever else. The next time, this person takes a “new approach” and decides to just go with the flow, see where things head, and like before, ends up in a situationship with a mismatch, both people never quite communicating with each other directly about intentions. For both scenarios the relationship ends with each having distaste for the other.

After a few times of this repeated outcome, the fashionable thing for women is an obligatory post on social media telling the world what she’s no longer accepting in her life, that she’s a different person, and she’s finally ready for the next stage. On top of that post, in a more intimate setting, whether journaling to herself or telling a close friend, she’ll proffer fashionable therapy tropes like her past, trauma, or the guy not being what she thought as a reason for her last outcome. Then she may sprinkle in therapy culture claptrap: blame the parents, blame what men did to her, blame the patriarchy, blame religion, and blame the men in her city. She blames anything other than herself for an outcome that is a result of the choices she eagerly, excitedly, willingly, and knowingly made.

The public post women deliver—written by a spectrum of women from the unhealthy and undateable to the healthy and dateable but metaphysically drifting for some reason—reveals insight into a pattern of choices leading to consistent outcomes. The post is self-aggrandizement, not always out of narcissism, but for want of a palliative. To cut through it all, it’s an act of repression. And repression has a way of fueling the crazier parts of our irrationality and keeping us in the same cycles, for both men and women. The woman does not admit she is in the same pattern. She does not take accountability for her choices because her choices determine her outcome. She feels she’s being rational and not irrational.

Men have their version.

For the mob of immature, insecure, or men of lower value—or a combination of all three—their pacification methods look like this. If it’s a longer-term relationship, the crazier the breakup, the more insecure the man: he publicly proclaims this breakup has truly taught him how to love and what love is and that his now ex-girlfriend gave him a gift to be a better man. Some write a clichéd post of how they’re ready to take charge of what’s next in life. The Peter Pan types, ubiquitous in Denver, will try to make themselves look like a hip and chill badass in hopes of making his newly minted ex see what she’s missing out on. For the shorter-term fling, the cad will likely not post something but will tell his friends that she was a crazy drama queen, brag of sexual acts she did to him, and then try to get as many dates as possible on a dating app. Also widespread among this mob, they will just stop talking to the girl. They’re scared of conflict, too cowardly to take responsibility and end it like a man. At best and common in Denver, the genera-bro texts saying they’re not ready to commit right now because they’re “heads down” at work and life is crazy, and it wouldn’t be fair to her or himself to date, given how crazy life is right now and she’s a great gal who deserves a guy’s full attention… followed up with ploys for future hook-ups.3

Whereas the more high-value men tend to ruminate and get overtly self-critical, thinking they need to overhaul some aspect of their character, get too internal, and miss that it was simply a mismatch.

After this period of “doing the work,” both sexes re-enter the dating market (women tend to re-enter the dating market instantly whether it’s after a breakup from a long-term relationship or after a fling with someone has ended). They date around, or even date multiple people at the same time. And for some guys and gals, either out of a pattern of behavior, a sense of pleasure (guilty or not), following more urban dating styles, or a combination of some or all, the term dating here is more or less a euphemism for either sleeping with multiple people at the same time or sleeping with new people in quick succession.

Share

For women, in this urban instance, the word “dating,” or the New Age jargon phrase like “Empowered Dating,” attempts a linguistic rationalization to make it sound like their dating life is not just about sex. They believe, and know from experience, if dating or hook-up prospects knew they were sleeping with multiple people at the same time, or if not at the same time, new guys in quick succession, it makes it harder to obtain their goal of monogamy or may scare off desired prospects, regardless if that prospect, to her, is a potential long-term relationship or potential for a hook-up. She also wishes to uphold the image she created for herself that she’s a sophisticated dater. And for this group of women, many told themselves they were going to stop hooking up with guys as they look for a relationship and get serious, only to hook up with different guys in quick succession while looking for a guy who “ticks all the boxes” like before. The patterns repeat, the choices and outcomes are the same as before, and from the outside, we see her cycle, we see her consistent dating pattern. Internally, women, like the character in Hunger, tell themselves this time is different, they believe they’re being rational, and once again, irrationality glues them to a pattern they claim to have done work to free themselves. Less talked about, but known to those partaking in this style of urban dating, is that it’s fairly common knowledge that casual hook-ups are less sexually satisfying and instill regret and guilt later. And it’s common knowledge that dating apps are for hooking up; they’re just a few shades off from OnlyFans. Most women in this cycle know that, yet tell themselves they’re doing something differently, and go right back to their patterns willingly and eagerly.

Playing the field is full of spiritual pitfalls but it isn’t always the worst thing. A river of distilled water yields no fish. Courtship is part of the human experience and entails colorful parts of the human experience. Even the devoutly religious can play the field without getting sexual, if they wish to remain celibate before marriage. Speaking pragmatically, it is what it is that some men and women wish to have fun, and that can entail sex. Yet one spiritual pitfall is when a sexually charged dating life is intellectualized and rationalized into something that it’s not. Calling it anything other than what it is builds mental and emotional binds. It will bear heavier consequences of guilt and make heavier the impulse to tell self-lies and deflections to hide the truth from a potential match. Which of course is a recipe for guilt. Another issue, when it relates to vetting for monogamy, vetting for that great match, the titillation, the fun, the sexual validation, the thrill of a new partner distracts from what’s needed—the needed pragmatic discernment of values. The fun also works terribly as a band-aid for the guilt and feeling unfulfilled. As Louise Perry and Mary Harrington poignantly detail in each of their books, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution and Feminism Against Progress, the sexual intimacy that makes the earth shake is rarely found in this style of dating. That style of dating more often than not dulls the pleasure and the disconnect foments frustration.

Yet repressing the truth of what one is doing builds the bind, it stokes the irrationality. No one wants to admit to themselves or the other what they’re doing. And to attract desirable prospects they feel they need to sell the right kind of image, which makes them forego vetting values and instead focus on winning in the sexual marketplace. That has the habit of attracting a match doing the same thing.

Thus the commitment talk on dates, whether on an early date or, and often, well after having sex, is Kamala Harris–like babble. It blends ambiguous proclamations of commitment “if the right person comes along” mixed with ambiguous proclamations of wanting to enjoy life—aka not wanting to commit but wanting to have no-strings-attached sex.

While that Kamala Harris babble occurs between them, if one or both is dating around, each will dance around the fact that they’re dating around with more Harris-like babble. The deeper bind isn’t dating around, it’s personally repressing the reality that they’re currently sleeping with other people, talking to new people on the dating apps, and setting up new dates, sleeping with old dates, and, possibly unbeknownst to them currently, will hook up with someone on that upcoming trip with friends. Yet here they are, in front of each other, dangling to the other that they’re “open” to commitment. Said another way, each serves the other a heap of bullshit with the hopes it betters their chances of getting laid with someone they find hot. With such focus on selling the right image, both parties absolve their capacity to observe the values of the other and to see if those values complement their values. Thus keeping the main goal of finding a great match to build a great relationship with elusive.

If either person is dating in that particular manner, actively dating a few people or actively sexual with new people in fast succession, it’s admirable, yet unfortunately rare, where on a first date, or inside three dates at least, they tell the other they’re dating multiple people and, if they are, having sex with those people. Or if not multiple people, is open to or is having sex with someone else, or at the very least actively going on dates with others or is open to going on dates with new people and that sex is on the table. In other words, radical honesty (this honesty is best served from someone with conversational tact, conscientiousness, emotional IQ, and confidence). For instance, if the girl or guy can answer “how was that trip?” with the truth that they slept with someone. But this honesty is seen as irrational. The person fearing rejection, men fearing the loss of sexual opportunity, women fearing the promiscuous label, will never tell the other they slept with someone on that trip they went on with their friends. It’s also deemed irrational for bringing up God and politics on the first date. It’s called irrational because, to most people, if we’re honest, as mentioned above, they’re worried that if they bring these topics up early it reduces the chance of having sex with the other person.

In the end, as is part of the human condition, the fear of rejection is too great for most. They choose to deflect, hide, or avoid the topic. They call it irrational to be that open because they believe it would sap their game. They miss how the lack of authenticity, to themselves and to the other, hitches them to the patterns they proclaimed to have escaped. This rationalized “rational approach” minimizes chances of finding what they truly want while maximizing chances of staying in that tortured cycle.

It’s not that this style of dating can’t yield a good result, but it makes yielding a good result difficult. All of those patterns create an internal chaos. Women complain of guys making it all about sex despite indulging in a sexually charged lifestyle. Unserious men complain of women wanting to commit despite themselves dangling commitment as a way to hook up. An innate truth for all of us, when we’re bound up with self-lies, contradictions, palliatives—aka repression—we remain blind to our cycle, doing the exact same things we’ve been doing for years and years, yet fully believe that we’re rational and that others are irrational. At the end of Hunger we’re not sure what’s going to happen to the main character. The only thing we know is that he’ll never escape his irrationality.

Subscribe now

Why America

Why not America?

A secret reason might be personal.

I was a history major in college. I love history. I’m a history nerd, As long time subscribers can probably tell, I read a fair amount of history. Back in college, I got in a bit of hot water for taking too many history classes. I had to scramble to find a minor, had missed some core classes I was supposed to take, which all made for a scrambled last quarter of college. But in that mess, I had to pick either American History or European History as my focus. I had equal credits and needed to choose one over the other. I’m of Irish descent, and had recently gotten back from Ireland when the history department told me this. Reflexively, I picked European. I wanted to write on Ireland, feeling it unrepresented in my studies. I picked, for a thesis paper, Ireland’s Troubles Represented In American Media Compared To English Media. A yawn fest. A bore fest. I was passionate in my history classes. I excelled at the exams and thought them fun. Yes, a bit weird, I know. I even liked writing papers. But I hated my thesis. I dragged through it. I knew a week going into it I should have switched. Yet I forged on, wrote a bore fest, and wished I picked American history.

It’s not that I dislike European history, I love it in fact. But my long love affair with history began via field trips as a kid to historical sites. For my birthday, I’d ask if we could do a Freedom Trail tour, yet again. My cousins in Virginia groaned when I visited because I’d want to go to Mt. Vernon, again. Without too much of a ramble, I’ve always loved American history. Each time my wife and I drive from Denver to Omaha, I wonder about that abandoned barn on the side of I-80. At rest areas, if a historical marker exists, I read it, and wonder.

Another reason, I want to do America as a background for future topics I have on the horizon:

• World War II (more overview, I have other topics around this as well like the Third Reich, Hitler, Stalin, etc.)

• The Vietnam War, particularly Mark Moyar’s works on it

• The Civil War, particularly Shelby Foote’s, The Civil War

• American Presidents

Maybe it’s a bit of an unscratched itch, but I’d like to dig into America. The American experiment is unlike any other in world history. America has become the dominant world power in a short period of time. The American Spirit is distinct, while Western, it is distinct in what it represents. I want to look into it, and I believe it's worthwhile. And for the 250th anniversary of the greatest country on earth, why not?

A Caveat Before Getting Into It

Other topics, themes, and authors will be discussed. Here’s what I mean. I’m not picking this topic and going to read all of it until finished.

Why?

I have some big books curated. I know I will need some easier reads in between to keep fresh. I also know that you of those who wish to join reading along with any of the bigger books will need some heads up and some time to plan to read any of these books. I want to afford both of us the space and time needed.

Also, I have a few other themes, authors, and topics burning in my reading pocket that I know I want to dive into. I will likely dip into those here or there. Especially after tackling a big book or two. For instance, I’ve recently returned to my spiritual home, my Catholic Faith. I’m intrigued to dig into a few authors, like G.K. Chesterton, or Raymond Ibrahim’s trilogy on the Crusades.

The topic of America will be ongoing, may have some breaks, but we can view it as a kind of semester. We dig in, take a vacation, then return back.

The Map of Curated Books

I only have a few books set in stone, I’m still curating the others, and am pondering and wondering what fiction to include, if I include it.

Here are the certain to be included:

• Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville (I will read Pierre Manent’s book, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy as a primer).

• A History of the American People, Paul Johnson

• A Patriot’s History of the United States, Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen, And I’ll read it’s companion The Patriot’s History Reader alongside it which includes the essential American documents detailed.

Democracy in America and A History of the American people are the most famous. Each is written by a non-American, which also drives the pick for the first work chosen for this topic. And each of those is a thick book. Each will take time.

Good Chance of Inclusion:

• Ethnic America, Thomas Sowell

• Dismantling America, Thomas Sowell

• The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest, Jon K. Lauck

• National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America, Michael Auslin

The Great American Novel

I’m eyeing fiction for this topic as well. We’ve all heard of the Great American novel. But it’s tough to pick here, because Melville’s Moby Dick is certainly great, but it’s big, and may take months, and is worthwhile of his own deep dive. But here are a few I’m eyeing:

• Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

• The Scarlet Letters, Nathanial Hawthorne

• The Bostonians, Henry James

We shall see here. The Great American Novel in itself could be its own topic.

The First Book…

The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III, Andrew Roberts

Paul Johnson, Alexander de Tocqueville, and Andrew Roberts are all non-Americans. This is at one end coincidence and the other end specific. Coincidence because each is a heavyweight in its own way and I’ve long wanted to read them. Specific at the other because I want a bird’s-eye view of America. And sometimes the best bird’s-eye view comes from outsiders.

The Last King of America could be an odd place to start. But a recent 250th American anniversary themed article by Roberts graced the pages of The Claremont Review of Books. In it, he writes a compelling apologist article about George III. Roberts dissects the slander and myths Thomas Jefferson and others fabricated about King George. I had not really ever come across that angle. It made me insatiably curious. Recently, on a Victor Davis Hanson In His Own Words podcast, Hanson remarked how Roberts dissected the claims in Declaration of Independence regarding the King, and how great this book is. That naturally perked my interest more.

That unscratched itch since college of picking European History over American History, the topic of King George, are a kind of bridge. I know enough to be dangerous of our country’s founding, but sadly little on King George III. And he is the last King of America. Also, I’m embarrassed to admit I’ve never read an Andrew Roberts book. He’s a modern master. I’ve read a few of his articles and each has been superb. I’ve heard him on interviews and podcasts, and each time, he resonates.

It’s long overdue to read him.

This is a big book. I want to get going on it fairly soon, but want to give you a heads up. I’d like to get going on it by mid June. I have a family vacation coming up in June, and I hope to either start it right after or right before. That gives about 3 or 4 weeks of heads up.

If you are interested in reading along with me with this book comment below this article. Note you must be a paid member to join in on the discussion.

Subscribe now

A possible reading order, likely to change:

1. The Last King, Andrew Roberts

   1. A small break

2. National Treasure

3. A History of the American People

   1. A break

4. Ethnic America

5. A Patriot’s History

   1. A break

6. Democracy in America

That is subject to change and almost certainly will change.

How The Bookclub Works

The bookclub here is still in its early phases. I’m learning more each time I try it.

First, you do not have to be reading any of the books, it’s preferred, but it’s open to all paying members.

Any member can ask questions in the chat, which will feature a dedicated thread. And any member can join in on the livestreams.

Those reading along, the chat, comments, and videos, so far, get the most engagement. You can offer analysis, musings, questions, and observations. I work to do a weekly check-in for readers. Whether someone is struggling or has observations, I like to stoke those conversations. The more activity from the members the more activity from me.

You do not have to start when I start. All bookclub topics, for now, are always open. For instance, if you wish to read The Prince next month, which was the last topic, you can go ahead and ask me questions, offer musings, and I will engage with it.

I also understand that some books, like all picked for this topic, are big. Go at your own pace. No need to rush, no need to feel like you need to crank. Reading works best when you go through it at your pace. If you decide to start Last King tomorrow, have at it, let me know, and I will start the dedicated thread for it.

The goal is conversation, getting you inspired to engage with the work.

I will also do videos. I’m working toward a weekly video, it may not always be possible with travel or my daughter. The videos recap, add some thoughts, and so forth. I may include some article riffs. Those will be more unedited and raw. They will depend on the writing schedule and writing projects which I will share below.

I will do livestreams, I’d like to do more of these since the last one was a blast, and I believe people got a lot out of it, so I hope. I know I did, I enjoyed it, and when I found out I can bring people onto the video chat, it became a whole lot more fun.

With a topic like America, and it being mainly history, the questions are going to be more of an overview, like, “What is America?” And with this historical focus, what shaped it? What makes it unique?

With the book A Patriot’s History it’s more or less a counter, a correction in my opinion, to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. I read Zinn’s work. I read it twice. I studied it in college. Then read it once a few years after college. Each time it was no different, fabulist, full of holes, annoyingly full of Zinn’s heavy-handed agenda, and outright wrong in many instances. I’ve yet to read Patriot’s History but many thinker’s I respect admire it, and it is known as a robust counter to Zinn’s sophomoric yet famous work.

And Patriot’s might be the most intense read of this topic.

This topic may take over a year with given breaks and some jumps into other topics. And that’s ok, it has big books, it will naturally take time And we may need time post reading to chew over what we learned.

I will announce again as I get closer. But if you’re interested in either reading along or being a fly on the wall, comment below.

Again, it’s for paid members only.

Subscribe now

Article Style Update

As I’ve waded into the one man review books lane, I’ve sat on something for a bit. I have a few cultural riffs, a few essays, some percolating, some written, and one ready to publish.

Lately, I’ve been reading, then doing a Recommends. I’m playing with my own style of these versus a more traditional review of books style found in Claremont Review of Books or New York Review of Books.

Yet, I’m lacking in an area, but have been stewing over it. That is, the essays, the cultural pieces, the musings, and so on that makes a review of books stand out. I want to write them, but as soon as I finish a book, I begin a Recommends piece, and it gets long.

I need to give time to flesh out and publish the more essay type pieces. With that, I’m going to keep the Recommends, but will not do a piece for every book I read. I will do them for some books absolutely, but not all. I need to throw my hat in the ring for some pieces that will challenge me and possibly resonate or ruffle feathers. So, I will do a recap of books read, a quick blip, instead of a longer recommends. For instance, I will publish an article today or tomorrow that is a piece I’ve been shaping lately. Then I’m going to dig into a piece I wrote awhile ago (which might need a total rewrite, seeing how I wrote it when I was struggling with my sleep before I got a CPAP — it’s rambly, repetitive, and choppy) about The Iliad and masculinity. I cranked few a few books lately, and while I have those other articles in the works, I will do a brief recap of those books since they are worthy of reading.

Like standard review of book publications, I need to and am burning to get into those essays or opinion pieces. They need my focus. Some will outright be inspired by what I’m reading or what I have just read. I also want to do a few pieces on better reading. And to focus on on all that along with the essays and opinion pieces, the Recommends will likely be for exceptional books, or what I’m in the mood for. They will still come, but it got too much to do it with every book, and my site is in want of new colors.

For any of you still reading it, the chat is still open. All bookclub topics are always open. If you want to go back into a previous topic, author, or book, have at it. With any of the books featured in my Recommends you can ask me directly here. Maybe I should start a chat thread on those…

Also this bookclub is still early in its stages. I’m learning from you. I really enjoyed the livestream. I’d like to do a Machiavelli post mortem livestream. I do not have a date set yet, but if it interests you please like or reply to this message, and I’ll find a time.

I’ve been thinking on Machiavelli since finishing it. My first assessment of The Discourses: after Book I it gets redundant and repetitive. But, for the sake of posterity and for the clarity of understanding his theories, it’s good Discourses gets redundant. The redundancy, the repetitive rambles of his theories, his exegesis of Livy, all adds clarity and em…

Read more

The judgement of beauty orders the emotions and the desires of those who make it. It may express their pleasure and their taste: but it is pleasure in what they value and taste for their true ideals.

Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of ways. Yet it is never viewed with indifference: beauty demands to be noticed; it speaks to us directly like the voice of an intimate friend. If they’re people indifferent to beauty, then it is surely because they do not perceive it.

Beauty encompasses a vast set of meanings, definitions, and applications. That Roger Scruton wrote a succinct book on beauty and that he encompasses beauty’s vast set of meanings, definitions, and applications with clarity, wisdom, and does so beautifully, is extraordinary. Beauty: A Very Short Introduction is a philosophical masterpiece. Scruton analyzes, defines, and argues the concepts of beauty—from taste, fashion, and sexual desire to music, judgment, nature, art, architecture, spirituality, film, and the desecration of beauty. It is an enlightening work that at one end provides wisdom and perspective on the various forms of beauty and one’s taste for it, and at the other provides enjoyment in the beauty that surrounds us, whether it is a beautiful smile, the view from a window, or a piece of art.

Background on Scruton

Roger Scruton is a famous conservative intellectual. Though, to the very online, “conservative” is a pejorative for no good reason other than dorkish purity signaling. Still, to avoid casting him into the same pot as Mitt Romney for the reflexive reader, Roger Scruton is a prominent right-wing intellectual. He is a near polymath with the breadth of his thought—from political philosophy to theology to the philosophy of art and, with this book, the philosophy of beauty. While he is an intellectual, he has a gift for making his arguments accessible. He has a way of unlocking depth whether he is excoriating the New Left or simply defining what’s behind our senses when we observe beautiful green stretches of farmland in Nebraska.

Subscribe now

What Is Beauty

Beauty is not subjective. Yes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder; that eye comprises taste and that person’s ideals. But beauty is not subjective. The true and the good exist in beauty. Beauty is both physical and metaphysical. Beautiful people exist just as beautiful art exists, and either can emanate impressions. A woman can have a sensual grace about her that adds to her physical beauty, as a man can have intellectual depth that adds to his rugged good looks. A Winslow Homer watercolor can elicit sentiments of the environment, whereas the intense realism and masterful detail of a Flemish painting make the painting alive. We can stand on a beach and watch a sunset, or in a Midwestern field on a late-summer afternoon, and either stirs something in us, just as we are stirred when we face the sublime of large snowcapped mountains. What all that does to us and to others is objective. Absolute judgment of it exists, and judgments can wade into the abstract. But a person’s taste, depth, and disposition move the abstract closer to an absolute truth. A simplistic example: the beauty of Mozart is universal. But when Yoko Ono howled gratingly into the microphone during Chuck Berry and John Lennon’s live performance on television, we know that as ugly.1

We also know a beautiful landscape can be accentuated by buildings or desecrated by formulaic commercial buildings. The latter is perhaps best—and hilariously—shown by the parody account Mason Home Builder:

Beauty is objective. Beauty comes in many forms, as does its opposite, ugliness. Our perception of beauty is taste. We each have personal tastes. Our taste is a result of our disposition and education (education in the broad sense of life experience, intellectual depth, culture, and so forth). Taste wades into the abstract, and disagreements—strong ones—can arise. I will share my strong disagreement with Scruton below. But on the whole our taste, innate and learned, shapes not merely individual preferences but culture.

Implicit in our sense of beauty is the thought of community—of agreement in judgments that makes social life possible and worthwhile.

Healthy, well-adjusted people recognize beauty without needing a PhD from a university to explain it to them. The sublime expanse of the Grand Canyon stops people when they see it; it moves and stirs them. Certain paintings have that effect as well. You yourself may have been to a museum, stopped in front of a piece, and time slipped away as the piece stirred something within you. Our education, our level of curiosity, can add depth to our taste. We may not be an expert in, say, Impressionism, but we can look at a Renoir or a Van Gogh, and the sensuousness the painting captures or the live feeling it depicts sharpens our enjoyment, understanding, and taste. For instance, why do we detect a “sensuousness” in a field and all the emotions, sentiments, and impressions from a particular Renoir? In other words, education helps inject vocabulary to articulate the feeling. This recognition goes beyond art. We recognize beauty in people too. People of depth recognize both the metaphysical and the physical in a person. The metaphysical consists of the qualities, traits, and dispositional factors. The physical can be the distinct features of the person, most obviously attractiveness or sexual desirability, which then wades into The Eros—a person’s sexual expression and the desires from the primal, emotional, and cerebral. This sexual desire can be expressed via a painting or even how you or your date dresses for a night out.

Scruton argues how a culture and its individuals can contribute to the beautiful by building, exemplifying, or working toward a society aimed at the good and the true, and how the beautiful affects people. The beautiful can educate our tastes, provide a moral incentive that weakens our impulse toward vice, and create a form of harmony. For instance, a beautiful park in a city surrounded by tasteful, beautiful, and—perhaps most important—vernacular buildings (meaning it pays heed to the past and the culture rather than rejecting it all, while maintaining a modern sensibility) enhances the pleasantness and usefulness of the space. In architecture, modernists became obsessed with rejecting the vernacular. One sees this in the generic, homogenized glass skyscrapers that reject the vernacular of the city, lifeless strip malls, or homogenized business parks.

Turning to fashion, Scruton details how the way we present ourselves to the world and for specific situations speaks of our ideals and personality. For instance, a man and woman dressing up for an intimate date at an upscale restaurant will choose different styles depending on location. Women have greater capacity for this form of expression. A sexy date in Las Vegas will have a different fashion approach for a woman than a tasting-menu dinner at an inn on the coast of Maine. But how we dress for each expresses ourselves, our ideals, our intentions, and our cultural sensibilities. Our sensibilities, personal and vernacular, we inherit and pass on, yet culture informs these sensibilities. Transgression is now common, along with a lack of development of sensibilities. Going back to our date example, what might work in Las Vegas might be transgressive at the inn in Maine, just as the opposite looks stiff. In other words, dressing performatively modest is attention-seeking, as is dressing overtly transgressive.

Share

Cultural Relativism: The Moderns Destroying Beauty

More recent art cultivates a posture of transgression, matching the ugliness of the things it portrays with an ugliness of its own. Beauty is downgraded as something too sweet, too escapist and too far from the realities to deserve our undeceived attention. Qualities that previously denoted aesthetic failure are now cited as marks of success; while the pursuit of beauty is often regarded as a retreat from the real task of artistic creation, which is to challenge comforting illusions and show life as it is.

The antithesis of beauty is everywhere, from how we dress to activist paintings, novels, music, and the landscape you see walking down your street. A postmodernist conviction exists: art must be transgressive. Beauty must reject tradition or norms. Anything inherited from the past is a pastiche, and art instead must contain a message, an activist symbol, or denigrate tradition. This belief derives from a modernist theory that traditional art was becoming tired, a pastiche, or Christian propaganda to stifle the masses and the artist.

A famous example of this “art must be transgressive” imperative is Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ.

This transgressiveness, which often gives people an identity, imbued itself into the fiber of modernity. It lowers the bar and the standard. One need look no further than the sloppy dress—athleisure, sweats, pajamas, adult men in comic-book T-shirts—donned in airports. Not that athleisure cannot look good (women often pull it off better than men), but athleisure is often a form of pajamas. We see athleisure pants on overweight men with untamed beards while they wear Marvel Comics T-shirts. Modern songs have become wholly homogenized; fewer words and instruments are used, and the analog experience is denigrated. Even in education, standards are lowered, tech is deified at the cost of teaching young minds to conceptualize an answer—whether it is a math problem or grasping Gulliver’s Travels. Anything not “activist” or a push for testing efficiency is seen as right-wing, dangerous, or outdated.

Functionality, or utilitarianism mixed with materialism, optimization at any cost, and even forms of transhumanism, are hailed as better replacements for the beautiful. Instead of reading as an end in itself, we must treat reading as a means for personal purposes: 10x income, become a better leader, remove your white privilege, and so on. Or all strip malls must feature lifeless, homogenized, functional looks in the name of efficiency. Inevitably, those modern strip malls will be knocked down and rebuilt again, since they lack beauty, lack meaning, and in the end lack long-term functionality.

A great example of the rejection of beauty is at the Denver Art Museum’s fourth-floor exhibition. It features modern art that is all activist. From a brown tattered blanket tacked up on the wall (its tatters and color represent America’s racism and oppression of Black and Brown people) to the most egregious of the too-on-the-nose paintings in the Kent Monkman exhibit.2 Monkman takes traditional painting elements to then create all Indigenous people as trans or queer (always men) and as dominating white traditional males who always happen to have erections, seemingly turned on by the queer Indian chief, unable to hide their attraction despite getting shot full of arrows. Which, of course, is a banal play on sexual attraction being a construct and a Freudian trope that the white men decrying gay marriage or decrying men playing women’s sports harbor insatiable sexual desire for the trans Indian chief killing them.

Monkman’s work is pornographic kink and a fetishization of progressive activism. What’s telling: the rare instance a woman makes an appearance in his work, she is often frumpy and homely, whereas the gender-queer Indian is depicted as more sexually appealing. The fourth floor at the Denver Art Museum is an outright rejection of beauty and fully embraces the transgressive.

While art like this exists in a museum, modern media marinates us in it. A television commercial will make a husband a childlike dolt, and a woman married to him finds her sexuality, personal expression, and personal happiness to have found a graveyard from which she yearns to escape. You can go on Instagram, see a picture of a family from the 1950s, and it is inevitable to read sneering comments about the father being a physically abusive alcoholic married to either a dumb woman or a woman stifled in all manners by her husband, and kids who grew up with emotional issues—yet this somehow makes the kids enlightened, especially if they hate their parents.

What does a culture move toward when the transgressive is hailed versus when the beautiful is hailed?

Subscribe now

Counters to Roger Scruton

Beauty is a masterpiece, an important piece of philosophy that would benefit anyone. Scruton is an icon; Roger Scruton would be a nightmare in an HOA. Scruton is a snob. Scruton scoffs at anything lowbrow.

On Kitsch

Roger Scruton excoriates kitsch art as anti-beauty. He says kitsch art seeks to destroy the good and the true. I agree that much of kitsch art is silly, looks garish, and is forgettable. For instance, walk into a boomer’s house and a good chance exists of seeing it cluttered with kitsch. Like the wooden signs with clichéd humor:

You see these signs in the bathroom featuring corny defecation jokes, above with jokes about dishes, and near where alcohol is kept telling us how it’s “five o’clock somewhere.” Yes, it is all largely silly, largely tacky, and largely a pile of clutter. We also see kitsch on T-shirts, often a man wearing some self-castrating shirt about his wife being his boss, and the wife wearing a shirt saying “I’m with stupid” that points at the husband. That, in the theme mentioned above, is all about attacking tradition and buying into the idea of how awful marriage is. I hate this form of kitsch most. It is self-castrating. It neuters personal strengths. It neuters sexual polarity between a man and husband.

Yes, kitsch gets overwhelming, it gets silly, it looks like clutter, and it can be self-defeating.

But Scruton needs to lighten up.

Some kitsch art or elements of it can draw up a special memory, a moment. I do not see how a reminder of that moment somehow pulls society into ugliness when instead it keeps us grounded and honoring something of the past. It may be a coffee mug you got on a trip with your father. Dad might be gone now, but that silly mug brings a moment of special reflection while sipping your morning coffee. Perhaps that silly sign Grandma had over the sink; your daughter always liked it, and it went into her bathroom. As she has gotten older, it perhaps sits somewhere on the wall of her apartment—a reminder of Christmases at Grandma and Grandpa’s. Whatever it is, some kitsch has a place; it can stir a memory. When it wades into clutter or hanging onto the past so much that it becomes vicarious, yes, I understand and agree with Scruton’s position. But that points to an issue the person needs to work through. A little bit of kitsch, something with sensibility, meaning, and done tastefully—like that garden gnome sitting in your garden that perhaps is just like the one your grandpa had in his tomato garden—is not going to bring down the West, nor is it an outright desecration of beauty as Scruton claims.

On the Primal Expression

This counter entails the elements of pop culture, fashion, and music. Scruton, both in Beauty and in other writings, scoffs at elements of each. He sees them as anti-beauty.

How Scruton discusses each element and decries it, he misses aspects of human nature. For pop culture, it is more or less the masses enjoying something simple and of their times. It may be celebrity gossip, music, or something viral. Yes, at times it can be somewhat engineered by legacy media at the cost of other fashions, tastes, and traditions, but on the whole it is the masses enjoying various elements of life. Much of pop culture is not highbrow. Sure, it would be great if more highbrow work were featured, but highbrow does not speak to everyone. Even those who are more highbrow oriented sometimes are drawn to something primal or easy-humored because it offers release or joy. In other words, some people want to blow off steam or have a simple enjoyment. Pop culture has a socializing feature, much like getting together at your local pub. While our modern day has an issue of isolation, pop culture, when you are out and about, still makes it easy for people to connect. At the gym someone can laugh about the latest thing going viral. A group of girlfriends who haven’t seen each other in a while may get together and have a lighthearted discussion about the latest thing. Pop culture can have, in its various features and elements, a sense of spirit about it. Not everyone enjoys it. Current pop music suffers compared with popular music of twenty years ago and earlier. But still, various songs hit, and it has a unique way of pulling people together. A guilty-pleasure movie, song, or book has a lightness to it. It draws out joy, fun, spirit, a time of our life.

Let’s turn to music.

I share Roger Scruton’s disdain for the band Nirvana. While not covered in Beauty, he does write about the band elsewhere. Nirvana ushered in an ennui that spread like wildfire, and much of modern music, especially rock, has never recovered. I personally cannot stand the sound of Nirvana, their songwriting, or their utter nihilism and ennui. And how it became edgy to like them—that edginess felt like a shtick to me, the “woe is life, woe is me, everything sucks” clichés. Some say Nirvana was needed to end cheesy hair metal of the 1980s. Yet, as more and more comes out about that era, it looks more and more like tastes did not change overnight; rather, presidents of radio stations simply scrapped 1980s glam rock in favor of grunge.3 Grunge did not have the lasting impact; it faded before the end of the 1990s as tastes moved on and many of the stars, like Kurt Cobain, died. Regardless, Nirvana signaled an end of rock music being fun and its shift to being largely introspective, emotional, nihilistic, and about personal anguish.

Aside from that, Scruton veers into pearl-clutching, saying music such as the Rolling Stones influences degenerate behavior, that the Rolling Stones are anti-art and beauty, and that their music is grating. It is here, and not just on the Stones (though I do love the Rolling Stones), where Scruton misses, ignores, or rejects the primal element of our human nature. This is a shock since he writes so beautifully on the Eros, which contains the primal features and expressions of our nature.

Consider Mötley Crüe. A band full of debauchery, wild tales, and hedonistic lyrics. Many people decry a band like Mötley Crüe. Many have said listening to Mötley Crüe is akin to worshipping the devil, or that if your child hears it once, they will instantly turn into a degenerate mess. That is pearl-clutching and moralizing. It smells of insecurity to believe that if a woman listens to Mötley Crüe she will suddenly start an OnlyFans and try to rival Bonnie Blue, or that if a man of faith listens to Mötley Crüe he will suddenly find himself a drug-addicted criminal. These puritan claims smell of purity signaling and insecurity, sure, but most of all they deny the human spirit.

Mötley Crüe captures a primal spirit of human nature. Their sound captures the spirit of youth, rebellion, release, ambition, fun, and carnal desire. Absolutely, parts of this spirit can run wild and lead us into dark places, regret, excess, debauchery, and spiritual enervation. But that is on the disposition and education (experience, parenting, school, culture) of the person, and sometimes it is youth itself that provides experience and wisdom to forge our virtues as we mature. Scruton misses that this spirit wants to come out and always has. Erasmus in Praise of Folly mocks the “high brow” and moralizers; he shows that to beget children, to laugh with friends, to grease the wheels of life, and to live a life that adds strength, depth, context, perspective, and wisdom behind our virtue requires that spirit. Great cities would not be built without that spirit. Vetting and dating for a husband or wife comes with that spirit. And the humor that can connect people or help us with self-honesty all come with that spirit.

Vernacular, too, can entail the primal part of our nature, the spirit, the release. And yes, at times the primal can get away from us easily and lead into the crude or pornographic. But the thing is, containing the primal is a challenge, and cultures that try to contain it have a habit of not thriving; they are often oppressive and stagnant. The belief that if someone listens to a song then a person and society are cooked is an insecure form of heteronomous determinism. What does it say of the man if he hears Poison’s “Nothin’ but a Good Time” and goes from a straight-edged churchgoer to a drug-addicted criminal? What does it say of the woman if she hears Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” and that is what leads her to compete against Bonnie Blue as to who can be the wildest gonzo OnlyFans star?

While you can answer it yourself, it wasn’t that a Rolling Stones song put people over the edge. People who go over the edge have innate psychological and dispositional factors motivating them, willingly, over the edge. Yes, these songs can have a kind of influence, but they are not the agency of the person. The person makes the choice and begets the action; they are not a zombie. As said, the primal will come out in some manner, whether it is song, sensuous or sexual dress, or what have you. A more troubling concern today is that our primal expression happens increasingly vicariously. It occurs more and more online and less so in person. This vicariousness Scruton discusses, particularly when he discusses pornography and its turning the Eros into a cheapened experience.

If one were to have a solution to steer us toward higher beauty, it will come down to more and more individuals yearning for higher beauty in culture. Which is a battle. Our education system scoffs at beauty. We are taught to hail anti-beauty, such as “fat is healthy” movements. The decorum of dress has lowered. I argue that lewd dress is not the main problem; one gal showing too much skin calls attention, but that attention distracts us from the more pervasive issue of personal dress: the pajamas and athleisure mentioned above. And for many people, those clothes accentuate their aesthetic defects and accentuate the modern issue of pervasive obesity.

How we address the cultural lowering of the bar is multifaceted and complex, but it will have to come from the bottom up, not from policy or someone’s moralizing vision blathered on X. Still, it is impossible to fully contain the primal, but perhaps we can inspire sensible restraint of it. For our culture not to succumb to its darkest corners, we need the good, the true, and the beautiful to sway us toward a higher ideal.

Why Read It

Beauty is a masterpiece of philosophy. It is a masterpiece of wisdom. Reading it, you will walk away with a better grasp of art, your eye will sharpen, your taste will deepen, and you will have a more meaningful grasp of the beauty of the green fields of Nebraska as you will of the beauty of a Winslow Homer painting, and a better appreciation of the design and architecture of Seaside, Florida. Scruton does have a habit of name-dropping particular philosophers that may require looking up, yet on the whole he is accessible.

I especially recommend this book to people who consider themselves on the right and have heard that the right doesn’t care about art or has lost the culture war, as was claimed by right-wing journalist Christopher Rufo. This book proves that claim to be self-loathing and made from ignorance. Here are some names of famous right-leaning modern creatives from a variety of backgrounds:

• David Mamet

• Nicki Minaj

• Howard Subin

• Sydney Sweeney

• Vince Vaughn

• Jon Voight

• Clint Eastwood

• Clint Black

• Chris Pratt

• Scott Johnston

• Tom Wolfe

• P. D. James

• Mark Helprin

• Mel Gibson

• James Woods

The contributions from the right are significant, Scruton’s book being among them.

Beauty is a work well worth reading. It won’t take long, and you will walk away with a lot.

Subscribe now

The Discourses, in my opinion, past book one gets redundant. I can’t not say it. Yet, while Machiavelli is redundant and contradicts himself, he is consistent. He injects his political theory in all chapters, and hammers his points. The more I read it, the more I get the gist of modern politics.

But I’ve noticed something else as well.

The “do something” cry of constituents, which is often a cry from the Left side of the spectrum, is inherently Machiavellian. An event happens, and then the “do something” wants to overhaul the current system and instill a new government system with new laws, new morals, and severe punishment for those opposing.

A similar impulse exists on the Right. Some call it the New Right, but I find the New Right label sometimes vague and sometimes way too online but more often than …

Read more

“Healthcare is a right!”

“Trans-rights are human rights!”

“Equality is not a privilege, it’s a right!”

Human rights are the harbinger of Western enervation. Not all rights are bad per se, but they’re theoretical; they’re based not on human action but on theoretical action. They are a counter to what makes society, in all its corners, right down to our daily lives, stable, free, and good. Rights counter, fight, and work to supplant Natural Law. What Natural Law is and the forces that counter it comprise the core aim of Pierre Manent’s Natural Law and Human Rights: Toward a Recovery of Practical Reason. While it’s a book on political theory and political philosophy, and one of profound depth and meaning, it’s just as profound and meaningful and just as much a book on human nature, psychology, theology, legal theory, culture, and social analysis. Personally, it’s one of the most profound works I’ve ever read. And Manent was the final yet biggest push for me to return home to my Catholic faith.

Who Is Pierre Manent?

Pierre Manent is a French political philosopher. He’s Catholic, conservative, and describes his thinking as a triangle: politics, religion, and philosophy. Manent is a student of Raymond Aron, who is of the Leo Strauss school, and Manent’s close friend and mentor is Allan Bloom, the author of the famous The Closing of the American Mind. Manent has an exhaustive background and understanding of Thomas Aquinas, Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx, Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Blaise Pascal, and, I’ll add, a gifted and exhaustive understanding of human nature. His writings in America mostly appear via the University of Notre Dame and The Claremont Review of Books.

While European conservatism, or rather the European Right, has different ingredients than the American Right, they do meet and align in various manners. But Manent’s work transcends the quibbling differences between the European Right and Left versus the American Right and Left. His work considers human nature, which transcends boundaries and is universal.

Subscribe now

Natural Law versus Human Rights

What is Natural Law?

One definition from Natural Law and Human Rights:

Natural law is the law or practical principles that human beings do not make because those principles belong to their nature, but that motivate, illuminate, and guide man-made laws.

To help define:

The very notion of natural law presupposes or implies that we have the ability to judge human conduct according to criteria that are clear, stable, and largely if not universally shared.

And a little further:

Natural law as I propose to view it here offers precisely this advantage: while providing explicit and concrete criteria that make it possible to appreciate the conformity of an institution or of a mode of conduct to the natural law, it leaves the agent as well as the evaluator great latitude for exploring paths of improvement, or rather encourages him to explore such paths of improvement.

Natural law is innate to humans and universal to all humans. Where it goes sideways is through disordered reason or a form of ideological shortcut that promises a personal or cultural utopia that is, in reality, the result of misguided passion. For instance, tribes sacrificing children. That barbaric act is a form of passion to chase a shortcut to a promised land, such as better crops or heaven on earth, and it’s also wielded as a tool of power or manipulation.

Natural law is innate to us. And the law here doesn’t just mean something like going the speed limit. It’s the law that governs us humans, and it’s intuitive, natural, and we get it. It’s not always some grand moral question either. Yes, we intuitively know slaughtering a family in cold blood is bad, just as we know cheating on a spouse is bad, and just as we know robbing a store is bad. Natural law extends into daily events such as going on a date to a fancy steakhouse. We know to dress up and dress for the occasion, and given the place, environment, or reputation of the restaurant, it all gives cues to the appropriate style decorum to respect. Whereas if a woman shows up in a G-string bikini to this steakhouse, and let’s say it’s in a stodgy blue-blood Yankee part of town in Massachusetts, wearing that is purposely and performatively transgressive. While the G-string might be sexy, it’s the inappropriate place to don it, and wearing it in that manner is to knowingly shock, is to knowingly perform a stunt because the woman wearing it understands wearing a G-string bikini to a fine steakhouse is transgressive for the setting. Whereas variations of the cocktail dress, sensual or modest, are more appropriate. Just as a man showing up wearing a baseball cap inside because he wants to is also a rebuke of natural law, perhaps best revealed in the iconic Sopranos scene of Tony telling a young man to remove his hat at an upscale restaurant:

A key component of natural law, the engine of it, are the three human motives, which are universally shared and innate to human nature: the pleasant, the useful, and the just (noble or honest can also be used here). According to Manent, and Daniel J. Mahoney in the introduction, as well as Aristotle, all human action, all our choices, are tied to, result from, and are all willingly under our direction from these particular motives. Even when we or someone else is “wrong” or making an immoral decision, or is knowingly sinning, we all think, we’re all convinced, that we’re right in the decision and, again, decide and act willingly. That willingness is our agency choosing. The lyrics of a song didn’t make us misbehave, being drunk did not force us to hook up with someone, nor did society make you choose a choice you came to regret—you make your choices willingly, and often eagerly. The pleasant and the useful are the more natural, the more innate, motives. The just, the noble, is often where the theoretical or conceptual exists. Focusing on the pleasant and the useful, returning to our romantic date, we pick the restaurant in a way that kills two birds with one stone. The food is, hopefully, dependably good according to reviews or past experience, and the ambience is pleasant and in line with a romantic atmosphere, all that makes for a pleasant dining experience. The useful is picking this spot because the food is good, the ambience is good, and we know it’s useful to make for a pleasant and romantic environment. We get dressed to look and feel good, to attract the other, to present our values and ideals, both useful and pleasant. It’s one environment, but the natural law is there; each individual intuitively knows it and knows the unwritten rules guiding certain choices. The just, in this scenario, would be picking a place that perhaps openly aligns with held political opinions or ideologies or is for activism or not of activism. Most sane people do not pick a romantic restaurant based on the just, but in some cities, like Denver, progressives have a habit of making a stink about it.

Naturally, we can get carried away, just as we can get carried away with the useful. We can overindulge in pleasure. We can become obsessed with the useful and act as jaded cynics. But we make choices, good or bad, all with the pleasant and the useful in mind. The noble, as stated, is more conceptual, more theoretical. Yet it does have elements we know are sound, are right. The Tony Soprano example is an example of him enforcing the values of decorum. How he went about it is gruff, to some, but in his mind, and to others, he is just in his action since he’s willing to do what others want to happen but don’t act for whatever personal reason—to tell the young man to respect tradition and the environment.

Walking down a bit more, the natural law, and the motives comprising it, are tied to the archic command. As defined by Manent:

Since the human world is a world of action, a practical world, it is naturally or essentially archic. Divided into commanding and obeying—a person either obeys or commands—it is also held together and put into motion by an act that begins and commands.

Or, summarized aptly by Daniel J. Mahoney in his superb introduction (worth a read itself):

In his view (Manent’s), our ever-more-imperial affirmation of human rights needs to be reintegrated into what he calls an “archic” understanding of human and political existence, where law and obligation are inherent in liberty and meaningful human action. Otherwise, we are bound to act thoughtlessly, in an increasingly arbitrary or willful manner.

Rights and the concept of rights fuel the arbitrary and willful manner. The arbitrary and willful manner, argues Manent, was spawned by Niccolò Machiavelli and Martin Luther. Machiavelli, especially, discarded, rejected, and rebuked The Gap. The Gap being that space between what people do and what people should do. Or, you could say, the choices they make versus what they should make. The gap is moral just as much as it is psychological; it’s cultural just as much as it is social. We behave in a manner and we sometimes know what we should do but sometimes fail that should and act in another way, willfully. A simple instance: we know we should drive the speed limit but we often go five or ten miles over it. Manent argues that people who make self-defeating decisions tend to adhere to the theories and lifestyles emanating from that arbitrary and willful influence. Take certain New Age pseudo-philosophies. Most give license to act upon any indulgence and treat this indulgence as a pathway to enlightenment and, conveniently, it also offers pseudo-wisdom to rationalize if regret happens with that indulgence or the person wishes to call it anything other than what it was and cast the accountability onto an “old self” that is somehow no longer you, or onto a “story” or some other outside factor other than their volition and eagerness in their choice they now try to construct pretenses around.

Going further, Manent shows how individual, cultural, and political choices tie to Thomas Hobbes taking Machiavelli’s concept of fear and making it more appetizing via Hobbes’s moralizing cause. An easy example: “abortion is healthcare.” Not only is that an ideological cliché but it’s a doctrine people hand their agency over to in order to show fealty to the cause and to never stray from it. They see abortion as healthcare as a right and any objection to this claim must be rebuked harshly and even removed from culture. This removal, and process of removal, we see on social media, like this man, and the people in the comments, calling for the boycott of a coffee shop in Castle Rock, Colorado for serving coffee to a “Christian Nationalist”:

@patrickgarrett145Oo•de•Lally Coffee in Castle Rock is a coffee shop I have highlighted in the past. Given their decision to endorse a candidate I strongly oppose, I felt it was important for me to express my decision to recind my coverage of them and make it clear they do not align with my values... #colorado #coloradocheck #smallbusiness #liberal #coloradocoffeeshop

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

We find adherence and hailing of the moralizing cause in media, from commercials, shows, and movies, all of which depict pregnancy as a kind of disease, family as backwards and always stifling to a woman’s potential and her sexual satisfaction, among other worldview-signaling tropes. These tropes align with “abortion is a right” and are concomitant with fashionable progressive ideologies. This is part of a wonky Command + Obey cycle that Hobbes spawned. At a baseline, all of us either command our action, our choice, or we obey either a command or an action, and from there begin or command an action. A simple example of obey: if you’re not a Catholic and you go to a Catholic church, and you have social tact, out of respect you obey the traditions and parishioners by not acting however you want to act. You don’t get up and throw tomatoes at the priest. You command your action out of an unwritten rule of behavior. Hobbes’s Command and Obey, which has now permeated institutions and much of the behavior of progressive individuals, is wonky because it is unclear what the command element is and who obeys. And the command is often directed at others who express disobedience. For instance, the corporate company that makes a DEI statement or initiative of some sort. They, or the board who approved it, do this action feeling morally sound and intellectually ahead, and they command this onto their business and into the public marketplace. But are they doing it from their own agency, or are they obeying a group or ideology that demands fealty to this cause? On a more personal level, going back to that coffee shop example, that place is about fifteen minutes or so from my house. That person outraged at the shop serving a Christian is not uncommon here in Colorado. The man is upset that this coffee shop does not have purity; he posts his rant; he feels superior. But is he commanding from his principles or is he obeying an ideology, or is it a mix of both?

Where Hobbes is dangerous, and what Manent exposes, and what we see today with our bureaucracy, is the goal is to remove government. Not in the libertarian manner, but to remove the agency of the individual. The bureaucracy and government should exist according to Hobbes, but not from individual agency; rather, it should exist from this amorphous Command & Obey cycle, where we don’t know if the media personality, the politician, or the local coffee patron is commanding or obeying. It’s a headless Leviathan, fully in charge and running a command-obey from an ideology that supplants human action and supplants agency. And rights, human rights, are the fuel and source of this Leviathan to snuff natural law into oblivion.

Share

Vertical Line of Action vs Horizontal Plane of Action

Pierre Manent destroys the notions of simple heteronomy. Mahoney defines heteronomy in the intro: “Nor is he a partisan of ‘heteronomy,’ where acting human beings take their direction from the will of others.” Those others, philosophically defined, are outside or external forces controlling our choices. Partisans of heteronomy are best exemplified in the doomer generalizations uttered by pearl clutchers. That, for example, if women are wearing thong bikinis at the beach, it will make other women behave poorly. Another example: the blend of therapy-speak and New Age claims of “I was a different person then” when someone talks about past decisions perhaps now regretted or perhaps the person wishing to absolve all accountability for their past choice in lieu of a perceived conception of their current self-image they want for themselves and how they wish others to view them. Partisans of heteronomy always lay the accountability of an action on an external ideology or an external force.

But why do people choose to date from a position of progressive ideology? Why do 14,000 Gen Z American women each month decide to start an OnlyFans?1 What makes someone like Renee Good or Alex Pretti obstruct federal officers looking to remove criminals and aggressively goad the officers to “come at them” yet seem unaware of the lethal consequences? What makes someone choose Rights as their acting ideology and from those Rights make personal and professional decisions?

What affects our action, our choices, are our disposition and education—education here is not solely school but our experiences, culture, parenting, social circles, and so on.

In brief, the agent’s motives are not up to him, as to either their presence or nature; they belong to human beings as such, to human nature; but the way these human motives become his actions is up to him. His disposition with respect to action, his virtues and vices, are up to him.

Manent has it that true action, the innate “thou shall not kill,” to wear something modest and appropriate to church, derives from natural law; it exists on a vertical line of action. This vertical line of action is innate. These are the intuitive choices. From this vertical line of action we make choices. Not all choices are good, even if made along that line. For instance, how well or poorly one handles romantic relationships. A person may choose to indulge in desires with someone else other than their husband or wife. But within that vertical line, we know acting on that impulse, in this scenario, is wrong, may lead to regret, lead us to dark places, and spiritual enervation, yet someone will make the choice of infidelity willingly and eagerly. In other words, if we can’t contain our desires to various degrees our desires can consume us. Zooming out to legal law, most people with good reason know not to infringe on other people’s freedoms. You don’t rob your neighbor’s house, nor do you build an outbuilding on his driveway. That innate knowledge is on the vertical line of action.

The horizontal plane of action granted new pathways of license. We still act and when we act and believe we’re doing the right action. But the aspect of rights—“women’s rights” or “obese rights” or “trans rights” or “gays have a right to be married” or “blacks have a right to reparations” or “healthcare is a right”—in a sense opens up the door to provide a set of rationalizations and easier access to personal justifications. It gives license to a barista who harasses you to use pronouns; it gives easier pathways to a woman who wishes to be among the 14,000 women a month who are eager to sell their sexual expression on OnlyFans. The horizontal plane is a set of rules, a set of complexities that influence or direct action, or it gives an easier pathway to indulge in our desires, and we obey it or command it. Many groups of people blame the Sexual Revolution for our current cultural issues. That it infested individuals with a set of choices. But the Sexual Revolution did not alter human nature nor did it alter our actions. Rather, it gave license to indulge in desire (the pleasant and the useful). It offered labels of sophistication, free-spiritedness, independence, and more. The Sexual Revolution provided theory and justification if one wished to indulge in their innate desires, whether man or woman. Those desires already existed, they’re in no way new, they’re innate. The people with the disposition to indulge, however, were now armed with reasons to indulge and armed with formulaic pretenses if they felt judged. Though we can’t discount how certain concepts, like the Sexual Revolution, or the culture of a city can influence our behavior to certain degrees. This, Manent argues, is the horizontal plane. It’s this additional set of complexities, from the explicit, from external factors, that offer an additional pathway to how we choose. Consider critical legal theory. It works to supplant natural law and make all judicial decisions based on the horizontal plane of action. Critical legal theory postulates that the legal system is set up to favor wealthy white men and oppress all others, and that criminals are either a victim of this system or wrongly oppressed by this system. From this position, people will command and obey the ideology whether it be a judge or whether it be how someone believes they should act around police. And it also gives a person an identity; they portray this identity by showing fealty to the “correct” moral and ideological view.

Difference of Sexes and Generational Closeness

Manent shows how the concept of rights is ephemeral, that rights are wholly indeterminate, because the idea of rights is an idea that presupposes that the right existed sometime before it was “taken away.” Such as the recent demand for trans rights. Somehow trans rights were taken away, the claim goes, and by instilling them back, we get back to our natural nature. This is a Rousseauean concept. Most mistake Rousseau as wishing us to return to live in nature and be one with the animals. But Rousseau envisioned a kind of blank slate, that the natural law and inequalities that happened in human history somehow suppressed our natural state and our rights. Yet his rights, the concepts Machiavelli and Hobbes and Marx and the current progressive posture all push for, promise a utopia, a state theorized as our correct and natural state, but, again, it’s based on ideas that presuppose what existed. As in, they never existed. They’re whimsical; they’re a theoretical action; they’re made up. A way we see this playing out is in what I found to be both beautiful and potent, what Manent says about the sexes and generations:

One of the most essential laws is that which, as it were, holds together the difference of the sexes with the difference of generations. The other sex is the strange proximity which is furthest away; the other generation is the strange distance of what is nearest. No human being can by himself regulate this distance of this proximity. To try to do so is to enter into a vertigo, a loss of the self from which there is no return.

That passage sums up so much truth—personal, cultural, and political. Manent sees traditional marriage, one that can beget children, between man and woman, as best representing natural law and upholding the true and good in society. And that gay marriage laughs in the face of natural law because it cannot beget children. Manent reveals a truth: men and women are different. That the natural proximity to the opposite sex we have yet the disparity between the two sexes is a beautiful yet powerful postulation. A man’s nature, his psychology, his biology, is vastly different from a woman’s nature, her psychology, and her biology. One man’s disposition will differ from another man’s, despite some shared nature and biology, but each man has a far greater disparity from the differing dispositions of two women. This is what makes the world special. Yet the world of human rights tries to change this disparity; it tries to erase the differences between men and women, and does it by making men into awful, simplistic, and privileged beings. Whereas we’re much closer to the generations bygone, our parents, our grandparents; we’re close to them, despite them living in different cultural and social fashions than us, and our grandparents are further away, yet we inherit elements from them, a common sense to evolve wisely and smartly. The current progressive posture takes the torch of Hobbes and Machiavelli and works to denigrate past generations and erase the natural differences between the sexes.

Manent, however, is not a doomer. He believes that a way back to practical reason is possible. He believes it to be in the more traditional elements of Catholic sensibilities; he believes it is found in the more traditional sensibilities, not radical revolution. He makes a sound case toward a recovery of practical reason. And what drives this case is his poignant point: natural law is eternal law; it is innate to humans. It is around, despite the doomerism. Constitutional originalism is one such sign that natural law exists. That Trump forcefully works to address the nonsense of transgenderism, particularly men in women’s sports, is another sign that natural law exists. That the young men coming into faith prefer the traditional, prefer the Catholic church over the slick, fashionable Martin Luther descendants we see today with big-box churches. That schools like the Barney Initiative with its classical curriculums are a sign of the natural law. It will take time, but there are forces working against the damages created by Machiavelli and Hobbes in our modern world.

Subscribe now

Manent Pushed Me Back to my Catholic Faith

I’m a cradle Catholic. I rejected my Catholic faith and went hard atheist after a priest hit me up for $500,000 to get my dad into heaven, and my grandmother, who was a devout Catholic, the priest at her main church in Boston turned out to be among the worst child abusers when the sexual abuse scandal became known. I read all the New Atheists, particularly Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins. I also read a fair amount of A. C. Grayling. But the more I read them, and admittedly I was an insufferable atheist for a bit, perhaps most insufferable when I was reading Ayn Rand along with the atheists, I came to find that they couldn’t prove anything. I found it all clever, yet smug, and felt it ignored much. My return to faith did not involve the common “I was a deviant and am now found” permeating social media. But when I got deep into Stoicism around 2017, I began looking at my spirituality. Then I approached Christianity cerebrally, which is how I tend to approach things. When I was reading Edward Gibbon, of all people, I relented and admitted that Jesus is my savior. But I refused the Catholic church. I tried the big-box churches and was appalled. I came to a great church in Colorado, BRAVE Church. BRAVE is led by pastor Dr. Jeff Schwarzentraub, who has a PhD in theology, and is rigorous and a talented pastor. His rigor and depth, however, had a way of opening my eyes to my Catholic faith. When I read Erasmus in the late spring of 2025, Erasmus demolished Martin Luther for me. I started going to the lovely St. John’s Cathedral in Boise, Idaho, and I knew Catholicism was my spiritual home. Still, I hemmed and hawed. David Mamet pushed me closer in the summer of 2025, but Manent gave the final push to my spiritual home. I believe Catholicism to be true, and Manent hammered that into my heart.

Why Read It Who Would Like It

It’s heady. It demands time. It demands reflection. But it is worth it. The introduction by Daniel J. Mahoney is worth it alone. This book, when Manent writes it you will see it and not be able to unsee it. He may not convert you to Catholicism, but you will look at politics, art, people, and yourself with far greater enhancement. He clarifies so much of the world. It’s a powerful work. It’s not a long book, about 140 pages give or take with the introduction, but one requiring diligence.

If you want to understand modern politics and the self, this is the book to read. From human interactions to how an institution sets up rules, it’s all in Natural Law. It’s readable, but passages will take some time to grapple with, as Mahoney states in the introduction. Manent is French, and this book was translated into English. French translates beautifully into English and maintains the French style. The French style of prose ruminates, tumbles, and winds like a stream. To grasp his arguments, you will likely need to spend time with a paragraph, reread it, and be willing to return to a few passages. This isn’t a lack of clarity; rather, it’s how Manent’s ruminating and articulating an argument, and he does it well. It will click if you’re willing to engage with it.

Conservative writer Michael Brendan Dougherty calls it a must-read for conservatives and to understand conservatism—he’s right. If you’re right-leaning in any way, shape, or form, it should be required reading to understand your viewpoints.

If you have any interest in human nature and human psychology, I’d say it’s a must-read. How Manent extrapolates human behavior is otherworldly. He will provide a depth to your perception of self, perception of others, and even perception—enjoyment, taste, understanding—of characters in movies, stories, and songs.

It’s a powerful book. Read it.

Subscribe now