Casey Chalk

Thursday

Casey Chalk

The urban elite thinks they’re a victim class

I’m Facebook friends with a woman who has been in Democratic Party politics since we attended high school together. Since then, she’s worked for power politicians, (unsuccessfully) run for office, and played a central role in the public takedown of an elected official. She has a degree from an Ivy League institution, as does her husband, who works in finance. Hers is the quintessential lifestyle of the urban elites. And boy, do I mean elite. There are vacations to Italy and the UK, foodstagramming at prominent eateries and bars in major cities, shows on Broadway, and weekend excursions to country estates. There’s the constant churn of attendance at upper-crust city events at beautiful historic locations. And that’s just since the economy started tanking earlier this year.

Saturday

Casey Chalk

Little league keeps me sane

There were runners on first and second. The batter hit a ball through the gap between the shortstop and third base, and off the runners went. Except the shortstop immediately got in the way of the runner coming from second, and started smacking him with a glove. The confused runner covered his head with his hands as he maneuvered around the shortstop, and barely made it to third base in time to beat the throw from left field. Such are the joys of little league baseball, of which I recently completed my third season of coaching. I approached the shortstop after that play, and explained to her that she was not allowed to tag the runner with her glove unless she actually had the ball. “Oh, I know,” she retorted. “I was trying to stop him from getting to third base.

Sunday

Casey Chalk

The reviled Woodrow Wilson

Woodrow Wilson can’t seem to catch a break. Since Princeton University’s 2020 decision to remove the name of the former president (both of the United States and the university) from its school of Public and International Affairs for his “racist thinking and policies,” other academic institutions have followed suit. An elementary school in Trenton, New Jersey, decided in May to drop his name because of Wilson’s “racist values.” Another school in San Leandro, California, made the same decision, as has a high school in our nation’s capital. There’s more than a little irony here. Wilson, racist though he was, was also a leading champion of the progressive, globalist worldview shared by our technocratic elites.

woodrow wilson

Monday

Casey Chalk

AAPI, an incoherent identity

May is Asian-American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, which if you work for the government or for woke capitalists, you probably already knew. It’s a time, we are told, not only to celebrate the achievements of Asian Americans, but as HR departments and Diversity, Inclusion and Equity offices declare, to help us understand the racism Asian Americans face as “persons of color.” One such example of the many trials and tribulations endured by Asian Americans as objects of micro-aggressive racist behavior is what a 2021 New York Times article referred to as “The Cost of Being an ‘Interchangeable Asian.’” This apparently occurs when non-Asians misidentify one Asian for another Asian, typically in the workplace.

aapi

Tuesday

Casey Chalk

America the busybody neighbor

Imagine a neighbor who is constantly in everyone’s business. Perhaps you have such a person, or persons, in your own community. The neighbor complains about the paint colors of shutters, the height of lawn grass, and the number of cars parked on the street. You better hope he doesn’t find out about your backyard chicken coop if it's prohibited in your county. It’s bad enough to have neighbors like this, constantly on the alert, monitoring everyone’s behavior, and complaining to everyone in earshot. But imagine if an entire country was like this. Actually, you don’t have to imagine. For that is America — at least the foreign policy establishment and the powerful elite institutions like corporate media and the academy that influence it.

neighbor

Tuesday

Casey Chalk

Laying down our arms

The recent killing of ten people in Buffalo has renewed calls for gun control legislation. Buffalo mayor Byron Brown, speaking on CBS’s Face the Nation, urged “sensible gun control.” One of the victims, the Washington Post noted in morbid irony, was herself an outspoken advocate for more gun control. Sadly, there’s nothing new about any of this. Again and again we learn of senseless mass shootings by white nationalists, the mentally deranged, and substance abusers. Again and again we desperately search for answers. And again and again we are both shocked and cynically unsurprised when another mass shooting occurs. Yet as much as we declare “never again,” we seem incapable of stopping mass shootings.

Friday

Casey Chalk

The left’s great abortion freakout

Can the left-wing hysteria over the Supreme Court's leaked opinion on abortion get any more ridiculous? Corporate media have claimed that the potential overturning of Roe v. Wade marks only the beginning of a slew of conservative judicial decisions that will ban everything from sodomy to birth control. "Next they'll go after gay marriage and maybe Brown v. Board of Education," Joy Behar postulated on The View. “They want to send us back to the dark ages,” 85-year-old woman Eleanor Oliver, who procured an illegal abortion in Washington, D.C. in the 1950s, told a Washington Post columnist. The justices who have reportedly endorsed the draft opinion have been called “barbarous and cruel.” The prospective ruling has been accused of racism.

Wednesday

Casey Chalk

How ‘defund the police’ hurt the black community

Murders skyrocketed in the United States in both 2020 and 2021, increasing 5 percent over 2020 and 44 percent over 2019, according to an analysis of crime trends released earlier this year by the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ). That increase was felt the most in major urban areas, and affected black Americans more than any other demographic. Just don’t tell that to the corporate media. They’re still obsessing over supposedly deadly and racist police. The Washington Post recently featured a front-page story on an African immigrant family whose son was killed by police in Michigan. The angle was obvious: yet another example of how police in America are disproportionately killing blacks. Nor is this piece an anomaly at the Post.

Sunday

Casey Chalk

Why the pro-life movement is winning

A strange abortion story is unfolding in the nation’s capital. In March, several outlets began reporting that DC police had found “five fetuses” in the home of “anti-abortion activist” Lauren Handy, who is a member of the “Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising group.” The PAAU is not exactly what one thinks of when it comes to pro-life activism. According to its website, the organization is “committed to radical inclusivity while magnifying secular, feminist, liberal, and LGBTQIA+ identifying pro-life voices, especially those belonging to people of color.” Amazingly, it also claims to have collected 115 fetuses from a Washington, DC clinic's medical waste. It has to be one of the more bizarre news stories of 2022.

Thursday

Casey Chalk

China: one bully to rule them all

Several years ago, I visited the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. It’s located, a bit surreally, in the former United States Information Agency building. Formerly called the "Museum of Chinese and American War Crimes," it showcases various captured US military equipment. What was particularly jarring to me was learning of the millions of Vietnamese civilians killed during the Vietnam War era. Of course, there’s a bit of irony here: a building formerly dedicated to projecting American public diplomacy and messaging in Southeast Asia now serves the different propaganda purpose of seeking to portray America as a violent aggressor guilty of war crimes.

Wednesday

Casey Chalk

There’s no such thing as a ‘global citizen’

Watchers of the news might be forgiven for thinking the Biden administration is worried about the election-year optics of more migrants at our southern border. The International Committee of the Red Cross is predicting high waves of migration through Mexico and Central America. The Department of Homeland Security last week requested help from the Pentagon. Also last week, the administration announced that asylum officers, rather than just immigration court judges, will be permitted to adjudicate the claims of immigrants seeking asylum at the border. In addition to these initiatives, I’d suggest another policy: do away with birthright citizenship and dual citizenship.

Sunday

Casey Chalk

The left comes for the parents’ rights movement

Surveying the effect of British education on families, G.K. Chesterton wryly observed in his 1910 book What’s Wrong with the World: “The only persons who seem to have nothing to do with the education of the children are the parents.” Little more than a decade later, the compulsory public education movement was to pick up steam across the United States, often presented as a necessity for the protection and wellbeing of American children. History, Mark Twain might say, is rhyming.

loudoun

Saturday

Casey Chalk

When victimhood is a game, everyone loses

Black History Month is now over, and we’ve moved on to Women’s History Month. In April, we’ll get the best of both worlds, with Black Women’s History Month. May will be Jewish-American Heritage Month, and then in June the nation will enjoy a blowout celebration of LGBT Pride Month, if the normalization (and commercialization) of the cause in recent years is any indication. The point of all of this is to serve as an annual national re-ratification of diversity, inclusivity and equity as America’s preeminent causes (and doctrines, as Spectator World editor Matt Purple has so perceptively assessed).

Wednesday

Casey Chalk

Home is where the racism is

My sophomore year of college, I studied abroad in Ireland. I had pretty high expectations: my mother’s side of the family is almost entirely of Irish descent, and I suppose in some inchoate way I yearned to “go home,” as it were, even though the last of my Irish ancestors had arrived on American soil more than 150 years ago. Still, the Emerald Isle seemed to call to me (admittedly I was listening to a lot of The Chieftains). Boy, was I disappointed. It wasn’t that the Irish aren’t welcoming (they are), or that the adult beverages weren't delicious (they are). It was that Ireland was definitely not my home — not culturally, culinarily, or familialy.

racism

Friday

Casey Chalk

How to resist the age of grievance

At a recent session of the Virginia House of Delegates, Don Scott, a Democrat, blasted Republicans for employing “the old southern strategy to use race as a wedge issue.” He was referring to Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin’s repudiation of Critical Race Theory in public school curricula during his recent gubernatorial campaign. Scott further warned Republicans not to use racially charged politics to “rally your base.” That’s a bit rich, given how much energy liberals expend accusing conservatives of racism to rally the base during, oh I don’t know, every election cycle. “The Republicans aim to reinstitute Jim Crow; the Republicans are stoking white supremacist movements; the Republicans want to whitewash American history.

youngkin grievance

Thursday

Casey Chalk

The deep conservatism of Agatha Christie

Some fiction, regardless of how intimately tethered to a time and place, is timeless. And the work of Agatha Christie certainly seems that way. Christie's novel Death on the Nile is now receiving renewed cinematic treatment under the expert hand of Kenneth Branagh, with the film scheduled for release on February 11. This follows the success of Branagh’s 2017 adaption of Murder on the Orient Express, which grossed $351 million against a production budget of $55 million. “Rest assured," says Belgian detective Hercule Poirot in Christie’s novel Five Little Pigs. "I am the best!” The same might be said of Christie herself, the world’s all-time bestselling fiction author.

Thursday

Casey Chalk

An economy that’s good, not just efficient

After serving in World War Two and many years working in the dental supply business (sans a high school diploma), my grandfather made a decision as a husband and father of five young children: he went into business for himself. It takes guts to start your own enterprise, especially when it means leaving the relative safety and security of steady employment. My grandfather worked long hours. He recruited his children to help with all manner of odd jobs, such as cleaning the warehouse. With no retirement package to speak of, he might have worked into old age, except for a clever merger with another small business aimed at attracting the attention of a UK-based company that in time bought him out. I suppose you could say the global capitalist system worked for my grandfather…sort of.

Tuesday

Casey Chalk

How elites hijacked the conversation on race

Americans in 2021 spent more time watching TV than on any other leisure activity (outside of sleeping). Presumably those numbers increase during the holidays, especially given a hot NFL playoff race and endless bowl games (are you ready for Duke's Mayo Bowl?). Yet for me what stands out are not the touchdowns or halftime shows, but the commercials. Practically every commercial over the course of a three-hour football game features more people of color — blacks, Asians, Latinos — than whites. Many in the media and advertising are celebrating this for increasing diversity and inclusion, while others claim it undermines meritocracy.

Monday

Casey Chalk

Cicero on rejecting the 1619 Project

“Why are the Wisest ever the most easy and content to die, and the Weak and Foolish the utmost unwilling? Is it not, think you, because the most Knowing perceive, they are going to change for a happier State, of which the more Stupid and Ignorant are uncapable of being sensible?” Thus wrote Cicero in On a Life Well Spent, a 2,000-year-old essay. The English version I possess was published by Benjamin Franklin in 1744, and it was beloved by the Founders, one of the most remarkable generations to have graced the North American continent. Well, so people used to think.

Sunday

Casey Chalk

What conservatives get right about masculinity

Conservatives are taking a lot of heat these days regarding masculinity. David French in a recent piece at The Atlantic criticized Josh Hammer, David Azerrad, and Donald Trump, among others, for promoting what French labels a false view of manliness — namely, one that is unafraid to speak unpopular truths regardless of the consequences. It is a farcical “Trumpist toughness” that “treat[s] Twitter as their Omaha Beach.” Washington Post columnist Christine Emba, meanwhile, recently mocked Republican Senator Josh Hawley for being a “champion of masculine virtue” but failing “to engage more deeply on the level of policy and ideas.

trump