I’ve been reading “progressive” looks at our national divisions so as to understand the intellectual winds that will blow more intensively if we have a Biden presidency.

Mollie Hemingway in her mid-40s has emerged as a leading defender of Donald Trump on Fox News and a thoughtful analyst in her role as senior editor of The Federalist, a well-read online magazine. She earned a degree in economics at the University of Colorado and is a member of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod. Here are edited excerpts of our Q&A in Washington, D.C., on the morning after January’s March for Life.

Parental advisory: This column quotes some graphic descriptions of Holocaust atrocities.

Amid stories of how the coronavirus focuses our attention, I recalled a Russian short story about an officer marching idealistic political prisoners on a muddy road to where a firing squad waits. He carefully avoids puddles, keeping his boots shiny. Watching these noncriminal criminals die sickens him. On the way back he does not avoid puddles: What does it matter if mud cakes his boots?

Social isolation is a tremendous opportunity for self-education through books delivered by Amazon or others. Ever since my first trip to China 14 years ago I’ve tried to read a lot about the country—and what follows are brief descriptions of books I’ve found useful. If you’ve ever wanted to learn more about the world power from which a virus came and other threats are likely to come, now’s the time: I’m not suggesting that you read one per week over the next year, but I hope this article piques your curiosity.

“Men have forgotten God: that’s why all this has happened.” Elderly Russians in the last century, asked why so much had gone so wrong in their country, gave that summary. Alexander Solzhenitsyn called it the most “precise and pithy” explanation. 

Passover and Easter are brothers, as are Jews and Christians, as are (metaphorically) national talk show host Michael Medved and I. We both grew up in Jewish homes and had immigrant grandparents who grew to love America. He became an Orthodox Jew, I became a Christian, and we’ve both written books praising this sweet land of liberty. 

In The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien portrays his hobbit heroes toiling up a long, winding stairway that perhaps looks like early April’s rising curve of coronavirus cases and deaths. Sam Gamgee says he once thought adventures “were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for.” Sam realizes “that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind.” Frodo agrees: Those in a hard adventure never know “what kind of a tale it is, happy-ending or sad-ending.”