Napoleon, Bismarck, Free Speech on Substack, Russell Kirk, and More

Best of Twitter, December 2023

There have been some people trying to push Substack to censor speech. I don’t necessarily recommend paying attention to the controversy, as the leadership of the company has shut them down and they won’t succeed. That being said, I did see that many people were discovering this newsletter through the debate, so I wrote this for a general audience.

This week, I was on the TRIGGERnometry show, which has moved a lot of books. Check it out. And of course buy the book if you still haven’t. I was actually surprised with the extent of the sales bump. I guess YouTube shows are an underappreciated (by me) source of exposure. Yesterday, I was also on some Russian guy’s livestream. The whole livestream concept is weird to me, but if that’s what the youth want, it’s what I’ll give them.

I’ve been reading a few books on Napoleon, with the best one being the Andrew Roberts biography. I’m doing a running thread on my thoughts, which you can bookmark here if you’re an X subscriber.

I’ve also been really enjoying Jonathan Sternberg’s Bismarck: A Life. For now, see the excerpt below, which captures the man’s genius as a writer. There’s a lot more to say about Bismarck other than the fact that he composed delightful letters, much of it not good, but all of that will have to wait.

On Amy Wax’s suggestion, I read Russell Kirk for the first time this month. You can get my thoughts under the paywall.

And on the suggestion of one of my readers, the link on each screenshot now goes to the article itself rather than the tweet.

See you all in 2024.