The Nightstand

Our best ally should not be a man or woman who lacks the aptitude to discern right from wrong...one should not draw unto himself or herself a companion like Lady Macbeth, for Lady Macbeth does not exercise virtue.

Somewhat surprisingly, this is also McCarthy at his most delighted at everyday joys. There are many tender passages of drinking coffee in porcelain cups in diners, eating tortillas and beans on stops in the desert, working with cowboys at small jobs on ranches, and companionship with horses, mules, even wolves.

There's no place that division would not make things better. I don't say utopian, just better.

So too does my eye for the Creator veiled and present in His evidence. Without them, how could I recognize what was first and larger in what I sense of the present? I couldn’t love the Appalachians without learning the language of their cosmic and physical existence.

What is more radical, and more conservative, than to cast the ring into the fire? That would be a real “regime change,” would it not?

Why Liberalism Failed was a good book, but Regime Change is a better one, and I think will be recognized as such—as well as one that will gain notoriety in a way that the earlier, more academic book mostly did not.

Spider-Man now devalues human-scale kindness and decency by questing in the multiverse, and ideological rigidity and swift judgment have replaced his former nuance and virtue-seeking.

After excluding less plausible interpretations like Roosevelt’s, I think the Old Testamentish version of the Founding is the most defensible: the Founders left us some good principles which later were often disregarded, but which brave men and women in later eras fought for, often with success.

Even Rosa the respectable sociologist entertains the possibility that if we relearned how to listen, the mountains might speak. Perhaps they too have their spirits, mute but waiting.

Antonin Scalia’s judicial legacy was ratified on June 24, 2022 as the Supreme Court effectively overturned Roe v. Wade with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision.