This classic essay was originally published at FEE.org on July 21, 2016. Have you ever attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony of a new local business? Perhaps you’ve seen the corny shovel groundbreaking ritual of a new building. These events are usually rather innocuous affairs – filled with hopeful mom-and-pop dreamers, nervous glad-handing, cookies and wine and […]
The following essay was originally published at WND.com on March 14, 2016. You know what’s worse than Trump’s crass language and love for the poorly educated? Highly educated fools cawing on about the relative respectability of the other Serious candidates – as if using divisive language was more uncivilized than the bombs and sanctions that […]
This article originally appeared at The American Conservative on October 23, 2017. “Do you mean to tell me, that if there was a law against state attorneys using blue pens and you found incontrovertible evidence that I was using blue pens, you could not follow the law and render a guilty verdict based on the […]
This classic essay was originally published at Intellectual Takeout on October 11, 2018. I have a friend in Papua New Guinea named Monica Paulus who was accused of casting sorcery spells because a person died in her village. Her neighbors almost murdered her until she fled the region. Now she works to save other women falsely accused […]
This essay was originally published at WND.com on February 25, 2016. A few years ago I used to write for WND under the pen name David Hanson. I derived the name in honor of my maternal great-great-great, etc. grandfather John Hanson, the first president of the Continental Congress under the Articles of Confederation. Besides being […]
This classic essay originally appeared on WND.com in December 2016. As poets are wont to do, Johnny Cash led a prophet’s life for his time. His performance art and accompanying dusty, rumbling lyrics dared to look into the soul of America’s violence-haunted heart with equal parts affection and anger. When I speak of the state’s “sacred violence” […]
Let me show you an example of the insanity of a culture that is addicted to politics and is addicted to words over actual violence as a concern. Matt Taibbi is a journalist, a person of the Left, but he knows how to actually like speak the truth still; he’s not totally consumed. Taibbi put […]
Political correctness and its clean rhetoric is our society’s vestige of myth; myth contains symbols that obfuscate the violence that the stories conceal and justify. Trump was such a powerful cultural moment for us because his disabuse of Political correctness and its language has unleashed the ugly truth of the barbarity of the state and […]
I am blown away in discovering Jesus’s seemingly hyperbolic symbolic aside at the entrance of Jerusalem is actually a prophecy: Luke 19:37-40: “As he was drawing near—already on the way down the Mount of Olives—the whole multitude of his disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works […]
Mimetic theory suggests that humans are magnetically attracted to model-obstacles. We want to imitate being which appears scarce in its attainability. We fashion gods in the image of the kind of power we admire and covet: capricious, “hard to get” lovers who can also turn to disinterest or condemnation on a dime. Likewise, it is […]