Year: 2014

Ferguson is on fire? Blacks are looting and trashing black stores, homes, and even churches? Who could have imagined? There is really nothing to be said about such  events, as predictable as a celebrity face lift and as unsightly as a Kim Kardashian photo shoot. Those of us who lived through the 60’s have seen...

Last week the British government stopped considering the usual trifles – Ukraine, ISIS, UKIP, the budget deficit, as well as the unsurprising news that, now according to Forbes, America’s nuclear arsenal is a pile of rusting junk – and turned to the vital affairs of state, notably the urgent need to block the entry into...

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam war veteran and the lone Republican on Obama’s national security team, has been fired. And John McCain’s assessment is dead on. Hagel, he said, “was never really brought into that real tight circle inside the White House that makes all the decisions which has put us into the incredible...

The measure of how far the American left will go to press its phony “hate” narrative can be found in five statements about the grand jury’s sound decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for shooting and killing black teenager Michael Brown, the thief whom Wilson tried to stop for robbing a convenience store. Brown...

It’s been almost 10 years since the death of Sam Francis. But his best-known saying, “anarcho-tyranny,” contains more descriptive power than ever. His phrase described when government, which is supposed to protect ordinary citizens, instead leaves them to anarchy; while the law-abiding are subject to monstrous centralized controls over every aspect of their lives. That...

As luck would have it, we Chronicles editors were thinking about immigration, the theme of the January issue, when the President issued his marching orders on Univision. I was not especially interested in the details drawn up by the President’s clueless policy advisors: One way or another, he and they are bound and determined to...

President Barack Obama’s predecessors have taken executive action on immigration, but no previous president has acted on such grand scale or justified his move by prior executive action instead of a statute. In 1987 and 1990 Reagan and George H.W. Bush were acting with the support of Congress, rather than in defiance of its leaders....

Asserting a legal and constitutional authority he himself said he did not have, President Obama is going rogue, issuing an executive amnesty to 4 to 5 million illegal aliens. He will order the U.S. government not to enforce the law against these 5 million, and declare that they are to be exempt from deportation and...

Today President Obama accelerated his Anschluss of illegal aliens into the country whose Constitution he has sworn to uphold, but which he has shredded at every chance. Assuming America even survives, he perpetually will be held in obloquy by the people he has so harmed. But his brazen edict finally drew the lines clearly. Republicans,...

We now add immigration amnesty to the arsenal of styrofoam clubs Republicans use for beating Democrats and driving voters to the polls.  “We need immigration reform,” so we hear, “but the President has violated the Constitution!” For most Republicans, the “path to citizenship” is not a question of “if,” but of “when.”  They talk of...

It is no longer the issue of legality or constitutionality – we are long past that. It is about identity and survival. Obama is the enemy of America, however defined. He is the embodiment of an anti-America, culturally, spiritually and morally, that is hell-bent on destroying the surviving vestiges of a real country. So we’ll...

Spending more than a minute or two to discuss Barack Obama’s latest assault on the Constitution that he has sworn to uphold is, quite frankly, a waste of time. Even before the announcement of his “executive action” plan for amnesty for five million illegal immigrants, the President’s defenders had claimed that he wanted to do...

There is much to be said about Barack Obama’s announcement last night of an executive amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants, and other Chronicles writers have already addressed several important aspects. But I would like to say a word about what this announcement reveals about President Obama. Last night, Barack Obama showed that he holds...

I’m watching lot of film noir lately, from the 1940s (the style persisted through the 1950s, so there’s much more to be seen), and wondering about noir in general. What is “pure” film noir? Why is film noir so enduringly popular? I answer my first question easily, though I suspect hardly to anyone else’s content,...

Four years ago, when, from the relative safety of my Sicilian bolthole, I was writing a weekly column for Snob, then still a leading organ of Moscow’s bien pensants, a strange thing happened. I published a column entitled “A Tale of the Future Man,” describing in some detail an openly sourced Russian government document I...

The reemergence of rape accusations against Bill Cosby have divided this nation of TV-watchers. Most members of Mr. Cosby’s race and a large percentage of his fellow males have responded with a skepticism that is not entirely unjustified. It is all too common for women to “discover” through therapy or introspection that their lives have...

Not only does the U.S. government spy on everything we watch on websites, say on the phone or write in emails or messages. At least 40 agencies use Undercover Big Brother agents to infiltrate everything we do. The Washington Post, itself long the company newspaper of the D.C. autocracy, reported: “The federal government has significantly...

Yesterday there was supposed to have been a debate at Christ Church College in Oxford between two British writers whose work I have enjoyed, Tim Stanley and Brendan O’Neill. The topic was to have been whether the abortion culture harms Britain. Stanley was going to argue that the abortion culture harms Britain, though he was...

In Woody Allen’s farce “Bananas,” he’s being air-dropped into a Central American banana republic to foment a revolution. On the plane are two CIA agents who say this time they’re backing both sides of the revolution to make sure America is on the winning side. As usual in modern America, reality has overtaken farce. From...

I am writing a piece refuting some of the pseudo-Christian arguments against restricting immigration. Much of the evidence I had previously collected for the chapter of my never-ending book project, but I had been looking more closely at some of Pope Francis’ naive statements and comparing them with the misleading entry in the Cathechism, which...

Last week, Organized Leftism twisted its knickers into a knot over something someone said, and it used the usual tactic — scare quotes — to suggest that what the person said is false, even though it is obviously true. That person was Geraldo Rivera. Media Matters posted a video of Rivera’s appearance on Fox News with no...

In July of 1941, after Japan occupied French Indochina, the Roosevelt administration froze Japan’s assets in the United States. Denied hard cash, Japan could not buy the U.S. oil upon which the empire depended for survival. Seeing the Dutch East Indies as her only other source, Japan prepared to invade. But first she had to...

“Any incidence of offense or insult directed against the Soviet Union or its institutions, irrespective of where the incident may take place (in the street, in a shop, at the theater or cinema, or elsewhere), must be reported immediately to a senior supervisor at the Soviet embassy or consulate. In the event such offense or...

The elections in the two self-proclaimed republics in eastern Ukraine on November 2 resulted in the victory of Aleksandr Zakharchenko in Donetsk and Igor Plotnitsky in Lugansk. The outcome was never in doubt, since the two leaders faced less prominent candidates whose programs were also based on the demand for complete independence from Kiev. In...

Propose anything containing a genuine idea or principle rather than an advertising slogan. Get rid of affirmative action. Address the immense fraud in Medicare and Medicaid. Do anything substantive towards retiring the catastrophic national debt or eliminating dependence on foreign bond-holders. Reduce taxes on the middle and working classes. Save Social Security. Put unemployment among...

Back in 2004, I was part of the 62% of Ohio voters who supported a referendum to amend the Ohio Constitution to define marriage as “a union between one man and one woman.” Last week, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals decided, in a 2 to 1 decision, that my vote—and those of some 3....

Nov. 4 was a national vote of no confidence in Barack Obama. Had a British prime minister received a vote like this, he would have resigned by now. The one issue on which all Republicans agreed, and all ran, was the rejection of Obama. And by fleeing from him, some even refusing to admit they...

Treat their election victory and new  majorities as a mandate for anything other than enjoying additional power and perks and maneuvering for the White House in the next election. Repeal Obamacare. Block the Obama illegal immigrant ukase (if he should pursue it). They may adopt some cosmetic “compromise” invented by PR men which will pretend...

Who killed Osama bin Laden? The question is almost as fraught with mystery as who killed JFK—or the man who shot Liberty Valance. Two different Navy SEALS on the scene have sold competing accounts, one to a book publisher and the other to Esquire,  a magazine that in better days purveyed soft girlie pictures and...

“On hearing the rockets, mines or projectiles coming in towards the hotel or after hearing explosion lay on the floor in your room away from the windows,” said the welcoming letter on the desk of my room at the Ramada in Donetsk. “It is also necessary to do when hearing shooting by an automatic weapon...

Last night’s midterm elections marked a decisive repudiation of Barack Obama. Not only did the Republicans seize control of the Senate, increase their majority in the House, and win an overwhelming number of the governorships being contested, but most Democratic candidates wanted nothing to do with Obama, with the Kentucky candidate for the U.S. Senate...

“When I was arrested, they brought me to the newer of the two prisons, which is by far the less comfortable. At the old prison, when an inmate has meetings – with a visitor, a psychiatrist, a lawyer – he is conducted across an inner courtyard, with a lawn in the middle and trees all...

“The polls” have it that Americans in 2014 expect virtually nothing from the 2014 style in Washington politicians. Amid the horrors we trip over every morning when evacuating our beds, this revelation may count as very, very, very good news. We don’t want to expect much from our politicians, of whatever sex, party, creed, and...

After billions in attack ads that turned the approval ratings of almost every candidate, in both parties, upside down, Republicans appear primed to take control of Congress. Why are Democrats falling like dominoes? Easy. Theirs is the Party of Government. And government is failing. And their leader Obama projects diffidence and incompetence. National surveys also...

Part of being a paleoconservative is facing down hostile remarks and insults by the usual suspects of the Left and the neocon Right. Aside from the ubiquitous “racist” (defined by VDARE’s Peter Brimelow as “someone who’s winning an argument with a liberal”), used in response to the most inoffensive, barely un-PC remark, there is also...

To turn an American phrase already well worn out: If doing something over and over again and expecting different results is the definition of insanity, all 30 million Republican voters Tuesday should be put in asylums. Assuming Republicans win back the Senate and make gains in the House, we already know how this one is...