Posts by Allen Mendenhall

The Declaration is less an argument invented than a mind discovered, a consciousness arriving at self-knowledge through its own prose.

When Schmitt dove headfirst into the grass with his nose bleeding and his uniform ruined and the ball in his glove, he looked – briefly, perfectly – like a ballplayer. And the crowd that watched him, sun-warm and loud and happy, looked like an America that was, at least for seven innings, having an absolutely fine time of it.

The schoolmarm from Queens, armed with her X account and the solemn conviction that Providence has selected her to rescue the benighted, arrived in Montgomery to find the patient has not only recovered but is running a temperature considerably healthier than her own. The poor, ignorant Alabamian, whom she had sought to rescue, is meanwhile gainfully employed, paying modest rent, and disinclined to emigrate, which is more than can be said for the constituents she leaves behind on the sidewalks of the Bronx.

Divorce is a wound. I will not prettify it into something fashionable or therapeutic. Some losses remain losses forever. The best you can do is refuse to let them become the only story your children inherit.

And there it is, the thing about raising children that nobody warns you about sufficiently: the milestones that matter most arrive without fanfare, tucked inside ordinary afternoons.

The 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential campaign will not be, on one level, about budgets or trade policy alone. They will be about the relationship between the citizen’s conscience and the coercive apparatus of the state.

Hot water is one of those gifts so constant and quiet that gratitude never quite finds its footing – until an ice-cold shower reminds you that someone, somewhere, made a decision that made your morning possible.

America is now the world’s largest LNG exporter. We have the resource, the infrastructure, and the comparative advantage. The only serious obstacle to full energy independence has been a regulatory environment so burdened by environmental restrictions that it has, at times, made it easier to import energy than to produce it at home.

The SPLC sits in Montgomery. The violations alleged, if true, occurred here. Alabama’s laws are implicated. Silence from either attorney general candidate on this subject should itself be considered a kind of answer. 

The SPLC did not merely fail to fight hatred. It may have tended it, watered it, kept it alive in a lawn chair on Dexter Avenue for the cameras. The map isn’t the territory. But in America, the most profitable business has always been selling the map – and making sure the territory never quite heals. 

Defense contractors who prioritize pigmentation over performance are making a strategic, not merely a philosophical, error.

Politicians are not angels; bureaucrats are not selfless servants; voters are not perfectly informed. Everyone, in the public square as in the marketplace, is working, consciously or not, toward some private advantage.

Perhaps that’s the real inheritance buried inside all those vanished birthdays: not forgetfulness at all, but a child who understood instinctively that love, genuine and lasting, is far too fragile a thing to stake on a single unwrapped moment. The people worth keeping in your life are those who already know you; they don’t require proof once a year in tissue paper and ribbon.

Freedom, including and especially economic freedom, is not the natural condition of nations. It’s an achievement, fragile and contingent, requiring constant defense against the eternal human temptation to trade liberty for the false security of managed outcomes.

It’s not the Alabama Supreme Court that lacks the standing to evaluate law schools. It’s the ABA that has forfeited, through decades of mission creep, cost inflation, and ideological adventurism, its claim to function as the disinterested guardian of American legal education.

For over a decade, the Human Rights Campaign’s (HRC) Corporate Equality Index (CEI) has operated less like a voluntary survey and more like a protection racket with a glossy annual report. Companies submitted, complied and bragged about their LGBTQ-friendliness. The alternative – public shaming, activist investor pressure, reputational artillery – was too costly to contemplate. Then, rather suddenly, it wasn’t.

That is what regeneration actually looks like: not replacement, but incorporation. The old life held inside the new, spring holding winter in its memory even as it refuses to become it.

Moses does not belong to 1956, to Hollywood, or even to the screen. He belongs to the long-unbroken thread of people who needed to believe that the hopeless could be delivered – and who, to their astonishment, found that they were right.

The Republic’s commercial institutions need not choose between principle and profit. They need only remember which principles their charters were designed to serve. 

The Southern Gentleman ... aimed higher – not from snobbery (which is itself another closed form, another mirror), but from the conviction that standards are meant to be kept, that culture is not an ornament but a discipline, practiced as one practices prayer, citizenship or love.

What separates Melania from Donald is not a matter of personality but of category. He remains legible, conversational, and available. She occupies a register altogether different: remote, stylized, untouchable. The disparity is not incidental. Democratic authority performs accessibility; divinity depends on distance.

The mathematics are almost embarrassing in terms of their clarity: public employees would have fared better with low-cost index funds than with the RSA’s active management and its attendant complexities.

Wisdom – real wisdom – resides not in grand gestures but in the patient, humble act of actually removing what troubles us, one careful motion at a time, rather than simply scattering our problems to the wind and calling it progress. 

The question is not whether the ABA should exist, but whether its accreditation regime should continue to enjoy compulsory status. Texas and Florida have answered that question sensibly. Alabama would do well to consider the same course. 

When central bankers presume to fine-tune economic growth through monetary manipulation, when politicians promise prosperity through fiscal profligacy, and when commentators dismiss millennia of economic wisdom as relics of a benighted past, gold stands as a rebuke to hubris.

We are all assemblages, all cobbled together from what remains after loss, all performing wholeness with whatever materials we can find.

In the end, that may be how intellectual history actually happens – not by invention alone, but by the stubborn, imperfect transmission of seriousness from one restless mind to another.