Nazis, Statues, and Slippery Slopes

Musician Jeff Hanneman, recently-deceased guitarist and lyricist for the heavy metal band Slayer, wrote a song called Angel of Death about the Nazi monster Josef Mengele. The song, the first track on the album Reign in Blood (1986), was controversial from the outset,...

Scrubbing History

Efforts to denude the South of Confederacy statues, memorials, flags, and other historical depictions have accelerated rapidly in the wake of the Charlottesville white supremacist rally and Antifa counter-rally. A mob mentality has started to creep in, with wanton...

The Hypocrisy Wars

The aftermath of a grotesque display by the worst sorts of racists (actual ones, mind you, not the sort of soft racism that identity-politics- and social-justice-warriors accuse even the best-intentioned and best-hearted people of), and Trump’s infuriatingly...

Internet Muscles

My main Facebook feed is not normally populated by too much in the way of politics. Sure, I have a couple political “friends,” i.e. people who friended me via some political forums, who have 4999 other friends and post politics 50x a day, but they can be...

Slacktivism and Umbranosh

Having spent a lot of time in the poor precincts of New York City I can advise with perfect confidence: the unfortunate and neglected, sick, mentally ill, drug and alcohol dependent, care nothing for what the better-off write and share on social media. None of this...

The Fruits of Ignorance

Christopher Nolan’s much-anticipated war movie Dunkirk opened this past weekend. Highly anticipated and stellarly-reviewed, it tells one of the great stories of 20th century history: the rescue of 400,000 British, French and Belgian soldiers from a French beach...