Puppy Doges, Nerdlords, Failed Iconic Cities, and More...
Recent articles from Everyman writers around the web
Besides writing for The Everyman, most of our writers are freelancers whose work appears in other publications. This feature gathers these articles into one place every so often and invite readers to read more from their favorite Everymen (and Everywomen) and enjoy some dank memes. You can read the articles from the last installment and catch up here.
To Save the West, We Must Save Socrates’ Children
Auguste Meyrat, Religion and Liberty Online, February 25th, 2025
When considering the many woes of modern Western civilization, classicist Spencer Klavan, in How to Save the West, elaborates on the five main crises contributing to today’s decline: the crisis of reality, the body, meaning, religion, and regimes. In Klavan’s analysis, most Westerners ignorantly feel their way through life and allow vast impersonal forces to determine what they see, believe, think, feel, and do.
While Klavan’s book does an excellent job of diagnosing the problem (of which I write about here), his prescriptions mostly involve acknowledging the situation, reading the classics, and not being a phony. This is fine advice, but it doesn’t go far enough. People today need more than a little tough talk and some heady tomes; they need a complete intellectual revival. To that end, they need to learn philosophy.
As it stands, every Westerner, and especially every Christian, sits atop a mountain of wisdom collected throughout the centuries, even millennia. Brilliant men and women have developed powerful systems of thought that enabled ever-greater understandings of the world. Sadly, outside a small group of scholars and enthusiasts, most people have never encountered these geniuses nor truly experienced the difference their ideas could make in their lives….
Read the rest here.
Adoption Is The Pro-Life Antidote To The IVF Onslaught
By Auguste Meyrat, The Federalist, February 28th, 2025
By now, many people have weighed in on President Donald Trump’s new executive order that will review ways to subsidize in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments for American women struggling to conceive a child. As it stands, these treatments are expensive, often requiring multiple attempts at fertilization, each round costing several thousands of dollars.
While Trump and the majority of Americans believe that IVF is pro-life and pro-family since it helps couples have children, many detractors decry the major ethical problems associated with it. At The Federalist, Jordan Boyd recently pointed out that IVF results in a huge loss of life: “Approximately 93 to 97 percent of the little lives created in labs via IVF won’t ever make it to the womb and certainly not birth.” If life starts at conception, and an embryo is a human life, then this means that countless lives are terminated through IVF.
Catholic chemist and philosopher Dr. Stacy Trasancos explained the grave injustice of IVF since it separates procreation from the marital act and violates the dignity of the child. She asserts that “all children have a right to be conceived in love by a married mother and father.” Even when done with the best intentions by a married couple, IVF nonetheless commodifies children, making them objects to accommodate adult desires. As for the unwanted extra children, they are thrown away….
Read the rest here.
The Iconic City That Isn’t
By Auguste Meyrat, The Catholic Thing, March 1st, 2025
In any discussion about the foundational cities of Western civilization, most scholars would name Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome. Jerusalem was the birthplace of the great monotheistic religions that defined the West’s spirituality, morality, and civic culture. Athens was the origin of the West’s intellectual and artistic traditions. And besides being the exemplar of law, governance, and secular virtue, Rome was also the home of the Catholic Church, which repurposed many of these human pursuits to foster God’s Kingdom on earth.
There are some scholars, however, who would like to add Alexandria, Egypt to this list. Not only is it a city that has endured for millennia, but it has arguably played a large role in forming and inspiring Western Civilization throughout the ages.
One writer trying to make this case is the British-Alexandrian historian Islam Issa. His latest book Alexandria: the City that Changed the World ardently tries to prove that Alexandria “is neglected in comparison to other centres of antiquity” despite being “a megalopolis without which Judaism, Christianity, and Islam would be unrecognisable.” In support of this thesis, he gives a comprehensive history of the city, starting from its founding by Alexander the Great in 331 BC up to the current day….
Read the rest here.
New immigrants struggle to assimilate — and we all pay for it
By Auguste Meyrat, The Blaze, March 1st, 2025
When it comes to addressing mass illegal immigration, most people agree that the first ones to deport are the violent criminals who pose a direct threat to Americans. Aside from a few open-borders radicals, few people will defend the presence of “bad hombres” in the country.
But what about the dumb hombres?…
Read the rest here.
San Francisco Desperately Needs Its Own DOGE
By Katya Sedgwick, Legal Insurrection, February 17th, 2025
DOGE, The Department of Government Efficiency, is no doubt president Trump’s most talked about second term initiative. Headed by Elon Musk, DOGE is uncovering tremendous amounts of waste, fraud and abuse, generating optimism among Americans and promoting openness in all levels of government. My dream is to see puppy DOGEs emerge in California on the state and local levels. The city of San Francisco is a prime candidates for a chainsaw-style audit.
San Francisco’s annual budget for fiscal year 2024-25 is 14.6 billion. For comparison, seventeen states have budgets smaller than the Golden Gate City. What justifies the lavish expenditure is not immediately clear — the population of the municipality is well under a million and the median household income hovers at about $140,000. If San Franciscans are in desperate need of social services, it’s those of a matchmaker — otherwise it’s a wealthy enclave. Our art connoisseurs are not traveling the world, buying up masterpieces. We have a few decent museums and a handful of theaters, but the art scene here doesn’t match the ambition.
The city justifies expenditures by evoking the ever-deepening substance abuse crisis, promising that it
[…]will focus on continuing to maintain and deliver investments focused on the City’s biggest challenges, to include public priorities such as clean and safe streets, restoring San Francisco’s Downtown and economy, homelessness and behavioral health, and strengthening coordination and efficiency of government….
Read the rest here.
A deplorable implores Zuck to cede control of Meta
By Peter Merkl, The American Thinker, February 26th, 2025
A recent interview reveals Mark Zuckerberg should not be in control of Meta.
Remember the bezitted, bespectacled, algebra-loving, skinny, front-row-sitting, disheveled, geometry-loving, over-mommied, two-handed-set-shot-shooting, shoe-staring, baseball-whiffing, hand-raising, AP Physics-loving, football-dropping, chess-playing, girl-repelling, calculus-loving, coding-loving, inappropriately laughing nerdlord of your high school class?
The kid who knew every word in the textbooks but not a thing about life. The guy you asked — in a welter of summer-school-dreading desperation as you slow-walked in to take the final — “what the hell is a quadratic equation anyway?”, but would not be the guy you’d go to for advice about anything else in the entire world?…
Read the rest here.
Fallen Angels, Guardian Angels and Archangels: A Scriptural Guide
By Bradley Shumaker, National Catholic Register, February 26th, 2025
As revealed in the Bible, angels not only adore God but also serve as his servants, messengers and warriors, and our protectors.
We don’t know when angelic beings were created, but we know they were present before our creation, are immortal, and are spiritual beings without physical bodies (but which at times can take on the appearance of a bodily form).
Angels, like us, are finite creatures, though greater in might and power when compared to us, and they are not bound by the concepts of space and time. Human beings share much in common with angels, including intelligence, free will, a beginning, and the fact that we are all part of God’s creation….
Read the rest here.
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