Just over a century ago, in August 1914, the major European nations plunged their peoples into one of the most disastrous conflicts in history. The First World War claimed at least seventeen million lives, destroyed the social and economic fabric of Western Europe, and played a vital role in the expansion of state power around the world. It is therefore difficult to exaggerate its importance.

The dominant story in last week’s news cycle was Google engineer James Damore’s diversity memo and his subsequent firing by CEO Sundar Pichai for allegedly violating Google’s code of conduct. Damore argued that at least some of male-female employment gap at tech firms can be attributed to average biological differences between men and women, rather than discrimination. 

This relentless politicization of American culture has eroded goodwill and inflamed the worst impulses in society. Antifa and the alt-right may represent simple-minded expressions of hatred and fear, but both groups are animated entirely by politics: the perception that others can impose their will on us politically.

As the war drums with North Korea get ever louder, it’s appropriate that this week was the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Japan. As the great Ralph Raico noted in a piece we shared this week:

The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war crime worse than any that Japanese generals were executed for in Tokyo and Manila. If Harry Truman was not a war criminal, then no one ever was.

The US unemployment rate stood at 4.3% in July against 4.4% in the month before. The number of unemployed stood at 6.981 million – an increase of 4,000 from June. A relatively low unemployment rate is considered by most experts as an important factor for economic growth.

It seems that anyone on Planet Earth with a pulse now is familiar with the situation at Google in which a male engineer sent a 10-page memo over the company’s internal listserv in which he questioned some of Google’s “diversity” policies. As most of us expected when the story became public, Google fired the employee, citing “incorrect” thoughts about “gender” as its justification.

Throughout history, the state has justified itself on the grounds that it is necessary to protect us from others whose habits and beliefs — we are meant to believe — are dangerous. For millennia, this fiction was easy to maintain because most people interacted so little with people outside their nearly autarkic — and therefore impoverished — communities. 

But, with the rise of industrialization and international trade in recent centuries, the state’s claim that it is necessary to keep us “safe” from outsiders has become increasingly undermined. 

It was a temperate summer day when I went down into the New York City subway. As I came up at Union Square there was a downpour. It was so thick with people who were standing under cover trying to avoid the deluge that one could barely get up the stairs.