Richard K. Munro

@MLB hooray Great is the box score and the game of baseball

Philosopher and MD Ronald W. Dworkin says in @NCCivitas magazine that my new book The Primate Myth "has done humanity an important service." I ask in my new Substack why the proponents of the idea that humans are very much like apes won't debate me. open.substack.com/pub/jonathanle…

He won the Civil War, broke the Klan, went bankrupt at 62, got terminal throat cancer, and wrote one of the greatest books in American literature in the final year of his life. He finished it 5 days before he died. Ulysses S. Grant was born 204 years ago today. His name wasn't even Ulysses S. Grant. He was born Hiram Ulysses Grant in Point Pleasant, Ohio on April 27, 1822. The congressman who nominated him to West Point wrote down the wrong name. Grant kept it. The "S." stands for nothing. He hated his father's tannery and loved horses. Graduated 21st of 39 at West Point. Fought in the Mexican-American War, then came home convinced it was an unjust war designed to expand slavery. He later said he believed the Civil War was divine punishment for it. He married Julia Dent in 1848, into a slave-owning Missouri family. His abolitionist father refused to attend the wedding. In 1859, broke and desperate, Grant freed the one enslaved man he'd briefly owned instead of selling him. He could have gotten a year's wages. In the Civil War he became what no other Union general was: relentless. Vicksburg (July 4, 1863) split the Confederacy in half. Lincoln then gave him every Union army. His Appomattox surrender terms: officers kept sidearms, men kept horses for spring planting, no one prosecuted. As president (1869 to 1877) he did something no president would do again until LBJ: used federal troops to crush the Ku Klux Klan. He suspended habeas corpus in 9 South Carolina counties, prosecuted Klansmen before predominantly Black juries, and broke the first Klan. His presidency was also rocked by scandal: Black Friday 1869. Crédit Mobilier. The Whiskey Ring. Belknap. Grant himself never took a dime. He was just disastrously loyal to corrupt friends. The pattern damaged his reputation for a century. After the White House, he toured the world for 2 years. Dined with Queen Victoria. Met the emperor of Japan. Then in 1884, a Wall Street partner named Ferdinand Ward ran what we'd now call a Ponzi scheme. Grant was wiped out. 62 years old. Penniless. Weeks later he was diagnosed with terminal throat cancer. Mark Twain offered to publish his memoirs. Grant wrote in agony, sometimes 50 pages a day, racing the disease to leave Julia an inheritance. He finished the manuscript July 18, 1885. He died July 23. The book made Julia $450,000, about $14M today. It's now considered one of the finest memoirs in the English language. For decades historians ranked Grant a failure. Since 2000 he's jumped 13 spots in the C-SPAN survey, the biggest rise of any president. Happy birthday, General 🇺🇸

@jpodhoretz world spittoon

I’m embarrassed my governor is tree-stump level dumb

@jpodhoretz @rkylesmith i love movies; but haven’t gone in 9 years. There is nothing i want to see. Every once and a while we get a pay per view at home. watch news youtube live sports.

My friend @rkylesmith takes me to task today in WSJ for saying the movies are over. I'm old, he says, and don't know better because I only talk to old people. Well, I do have kids 21 and under, and they barely go. And in next tweet, unassailable facts:

@VividProwess idf are like RAF heroes of 1940 ; they are changing history

This little girl met an IDF soldier and wanted a picture with him. In Israel, IDF soldiers are seen as heroes in children’s eyes, as they should be. God bless our heroes.

Don't commit acts of violence, leftists. Besides being illegal and immoral, you're only helping @NoahCRothman sell books.

@VecchTweets @RBrookhiser funny

@RBrookhiser I have a big brass key with an eagle carrying a swastika that a G.I. Brought back from the War and occupation and gave to my uncle. Then and now it has been referred to as "the Key to Hitler's John." Too good to check.

I am speechless.

@RBrookhiser Both were religion friendly. Both were also gifted intellectuals and morally serious people. Both understood the critical importance of virtue and of the institutions of civil society that foster it.

@p_m_robinson Nick Adams stories are excellent

Read the Nick Adams stories. You just have to.

@VividProwess ne obliviscaris do not forget

In memory of Adar Ben Simon, who fell in battle on October 7th while bravely fighting Hamas terrorists head-on and shielding 120 recruits. She fought for 40 minutes until her life was taken. Adar was only 20. Her bravery will always be remembered. May her memory be a blessing.

@paul_jkrause The Snows of Kilimanjaro is one of the best also Big Two Hearted River

Best short story by Ernest Hemingway? There's a good selection to choose from...

🚨 50 YEARS AGO TODAY: Dodgers legend Rick Monday became an American hero. Two protesters ran onto the field at Dodger Stadium trying to burn the American flag… and Rick Monday sprinted in like a damn boss and SNATCHED it right out of their hands. No hesitation. No apologies. Pure patriotism @TheVinScully with the call!

What's the key difference between our two political parties? Republicans play politics, Democrats exercise power.

Thread 🧵 You cannot play around with this, Rob — education is the genesis of everything that’s gone wrong in the West. You can’t refuse to take control of the curricula at schools and universities and still expect things to work out. It won’t. You’re currently funding and breeding an entire generation of Mamdani’s — students who are taught to hate the U.S. and Western civilization, and to actively work toward its destruction. These universities have become indoctrination camps for producing anti-white communist revolutionaries. The U.S. government is effectively funding and cultivating the downfall of both America and Western civilization. It’s that simple. The U.S. will become the Soviet Union, if nothing is done. Critical Race Theory, Postmodernism, and other insane radical left-wing, (neo)Marxist curricula that’s being taught in schools and universities. For instance law schools. That’s just the U.S. government funding and cultivating the destruction of its civic, cultural, political and legal systems. Not today, not yet, but that is not corrected, it will bring the whole system down. As of now, the universities are not taking the demand to reform seriously. They are laughing in your face. The question is: what are you going to do about it? The strategy of these institutions is obvious — stall, wait out the Trump administration, and resume business as usual once it’s over. That is why the Right, and this administration, must stop pretending the Left’s input is constructive. It is not. Their only aim is to delay and block what must be done. Don’t let them. Execute the program — more decisively, more aggressively, and to a greater extent than first planned. Take active control of what is being taught, and of who is entrusted with teaching the next generation. That also means firing al the (neo)Marxist and Communist teachers and Professors. That will be a lot of them. That is the true public good. The lesson, in my view, is that those who were most “paranoid” ultimately proved right — like Senator Joe McCarthy and President Richard Nixon. Let that be the key lesson going forward.

Relative to Americans with a high school education, Americans with graduate degrees are twice as likely to support political violence. More education = higher support for political violence. It couldn't be otherwise.

@ArthurLHerman i always spend part of my week re-reading books that fascinate me such as Empires of the Word by Ostler or Paideia by Jaeger