Free Republic

You may have noticed that the enemies of the West no longer need to hide their animosity or their purpose. In the wake of my 2015 book, The Devil's Pleasure Palace, I was often asked what, exactly, did the Frankfurt School and its spawn in academe and its fellow travelers in the media desire in the wake of the collapse of Western civilization? What would follow the triumph of "Critical Theory"? A new communist paradise? The teleological resolution of their imaginary "arc of history"? The sunny uplands of "fairness," "equality," and even "equity"? None of those things, I replied. What...

Michael Walsh’s new book The Devil’s Pleasure Palace is pivotal in its explication of how poor and purely evil ideas have subverted America, and eaten away at the pillars of Western civilization. While we often hear the refrain “ideas have consequences,” too frequently we attribute the decline of the American system to politics or particular political figures, while giving the power of ideas short thrift. But as Walsh’s important work illustrates, ideas are everything, and if you lose the war of them you lose all of the other battles too. One such idea that has trumped to date deals with...