Jerry Kirkpatrick's Blog

The documentary White Guilt by filmmaker Eli Steele and his father professor Shelby Steele is premiering this week at Arizona State University. Below is a repost, from July 13, 2020, of my discussion of Dr. Steele’s book of the same title. I urge everyone to see the film when it becomes available in your area (and to read the book). Trailer can be seen at whiteguiltfilm.com, and you can subscribe

Below is a repost from November 13, 2018. In the first line of paragraph four, I link to two earlier posts that make good companions to the present one. The first is from February 8, 2017, posted shortly after the 2016 election, “Condescension, Intelligence Defense Values—and the Deplorables—And Oh Yes, The Putsch Mentality.” The second is from January 12, 2018, “More on Condescension toward the

From the time I first read Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts, almost sixty years ago, I have thought of myself as someone who thinks in definitions. Why? All our knowledge, with the exception of proper nouns, consists of concepts. Combinations of concepts that make important connections to each other are called principles. When concepts and principles are well crafted, they become extremely

Below is a repost from April 14, 2017. The title is new, replacing the lengthy original: “Brains or Blood? Take Your Pick—The Choice Is Not New but the Threat Is Worse.” The post is about 1960s violence and oppression on university campuses that made blood, rather than brains, the preferred method of settling disputes. The first quotation from Ludwig von Mises about Vladimir Lenin states the

Below is a repost from October 8, 2017, that discusses the origin and meaning of fascism as a form of socialism, which means it belongs on the left side of the left-right political and economic continuum. Following this repost, I have added a postscript on racism. For a detailed presentation of why the German form of fascism, Nazism, was totalitarian socialism, see George Reisman’s essay, “Why

Below is a repost from May 15, 2018, lightly edited. Two months later I posted “Is the Next Step for the Left to Liquidate Its Enemies?” July 11, 2018, in which I ask three times, “Are We There Yet?” A year earlier, October 8, 2017, I posted “The Fascist Left,” explaining the left-right continuum and arguing that fascism belongs on the left, as it is a form of socialism, “socialism of the German

Two prominent and accomplished conservative-leaning news analysts with decades of experience disagree in their assessments of today’s mainstream media. Bernard Goldberg says they are delusional, while Bill O’Reilly says they are lying. Take your pick of the issues. The media, whether print “reporter” or cable news talking head, frequently say things that are not true about our current

Theories of human nature underly theories of political and economic systems. Some people attempt to justify capitalism with the Calvinist theory that says, because of Original Sin, the inherent tendency to evil, we should do our duty by working hard to absolve those sins and ensure acceptance into Heaven. This is the gist of the Protestant Ethic.  Others attack capitalism by saying

Following is a repost from August 8, 2018. The issue today needs to be restated. Masculinity
and femininity are emotional styles that express our sexual
self-confidence as a male or female person in relation to the opposite
sex.*They are psychological achievements that derive from our
different anatomies and physiologies. Deficiencies in masculinity and
femininity, that is, diminished

Communists, socialists, and fascists, as well as the usual American political suspects, Democrats and Republicans, have all advocated, and today still advocate, democracy. The notion of a “soviet,” let me point out, was a locally elected communist council or committee, common in the USSR. Similar “elections” occurred in Maoist China. In World War II, the German people were “advised” to vote