One year ago, House Republicans were girding their loins to introduce legislation that would amnesty millions of illegal aliens. The “path to citizenship” was reportedly off the table, as GOP leaders, in an effort to please everyone (meaning no one), prepared to veer off onto the “path to legalization,” kicking the can of citizenship down...
Month: January 2015
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Living With Foreigners
My grandfather, Nicola Raimondo, came from a little town called Torre di Ruggiero, at the tip of the Italian boot. It was a poor place then, and it looks to be even poorer today, from what I can tell, with half the place for sale and the other half in ruins. He was 15 years...
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A Cynic’s Dictionary: D-E
cynic (’sin-ick) n.—One who no longer believes in the comforting illusions and protective half-truths that others use unreflectively to get through their lives. D debt, n.—An ingenious device cooked up in the early days of capitalism to promote the work of bankers and others of wealth by convincing people of the counterintuitive truth that owing...
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A Guilty Elite: Immigration Beyond Economics
America’s immigration enthusiasts, which is to say her entire ruling class, have such untrammeled access to the mainstream media that they are able to launch obviously absurd memes in shamelessly coordinated fashion. Thus, in the wake of the Republican triumph in the 2014 midterm elections—which of course had no effect on them at all; being...
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Rudderless at the Pentagon
Chuck Hagel’s abrupt departure from the Pentagon on November 24 became inevitable after weeks of disagreement with the White House over strategy against the Islamic State (IS). The split had become public a month earlier, when Hagel’s blunt two-page memorandum on Middle East policy was leaked to the press. Addressed to national security advisor Susan...
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Benjamin Franklin’s American Dream
Today’s preferred way to think about immigration and the nation-state is exemplified in the title of a 1964 pamphlet that the Anti-Defamation League published posthumously under the name of John F. Kennedy: A Nation of Immigrants. The next year, the martyred President’s brother Teddy had his name put on the 1965 immigration act of such...
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Stomaching ISIS
I was not surprised that Chuck Hagel had to go. After all, he was among the very few in governments of late to have ever seen combat, not to mention to have been wounded. Men of his ilk do not draw their swords at the drop of a hat—unlike neocons, that is, who demand bloody...
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Aliens and Strangers
“Pope Francis: Caring for the Poor Doesn’t Make You a Communist,” screamed the headline the day before Halloween. Perhaps not, I thought when I read the story, but why is it that caring for the world’s poor always seems to involve massive national and international programs of wealth transfer that might have been copied directly...
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Who Is One to Judge?
I found myself aghast that, after more or less favorably reviewing Calvary (“Vocation,” In the Dark, November), which sounds like a disgusting and anti-Catholic movie, George McCartney takes the opportunity to declare that “mandatory celibacy in the Roman Catholic clergy is a benighted institution that’s done much harm to the Church.” He credits the recent...
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Boris at Home
I enjoyed Emma Elliott Freire’s very thorough chronology of the life and times of London Mayor Boris Johnson (“The Exceptional Rise of Boris Johnson,” News, December). May I offer just two brief additional points, including a mild correction? Mrs. Freire writes, “Only MPs are eligible to become prime minister.” Such has certainly been the convention...
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Church, Immigration, and Nation
In the realm of the spirit, there are few prospects more terrifying than meeting God—the Father, the Creator, the unconditioned Absolute Whose essence is His existence. Even Moses, the appointed mediator for his people, could not view God face to face; so God granted him a burning bush as an icon. God’s spirit or shadow...
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The States Fight Back
What if the states started to fight back against federal refusal to protect American borders? What if they started challenging, even nullifying, federal actions that promote illegal aliens coming and staying here? Despite the centralization of America since at least 1865, the 50 states retain a surprising amount of autonomy. And oddly enough, the flood...
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After Strange Gods
In Hungary last October, U.S. diplomat André Goodfriend noted that Americans’ “right to express their views would be protected under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.” Making clear that his sympathies lay not with U.S. citizens arrested in Budapest but with the Hungarian officials who had arrested them, he hastily added, “We’re glad to...
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Adrift in Eminent Domain
I begin with a flourish of disclosure, which gives me great pleasure as a gesture of wistful recollection. Professor Baldwin was my roommate at university, occupying the bunk above mine. The wall space over that prisonlike fixture of canvas ticking and rude ironmongery was decorated with an enormous portrait of Karl Marx that would not...
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The Revenge of the Confederacy
The American political divide is no longer between Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, religionists and secularists. It is between roughly two halves of the country, each of which would be perfectly happy to see the other wiped, by violence if necessary, from the face of the earth. That was not how the North and...
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Is Immigration Our Fate?
Political correctness has it that immigration is a perennial phenomenon in Western countries. This is preposterous. Immigration as we know it today is an extremely recent phenomenon. The United States has always been a nation of immigrants, they say. This is just plain ridiculous. A small group of people leaving their country to found their...
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Insecure Liberalism
As I was reading my monthly Bible—guess what that is—I came across an enthusiastic review of a book, written by a French political philosopher, Pierre Manent, entitled Metamorphoses of the City. I rushed to buy a copy. The book purports to be an account of the evolution of European political systems from the days of...
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A Book That Needs to Be Read
There are many reasons why one might conclude that the United States is in a spiral of self-destruction and is in fact no longer a Christian country. One of the most obvious—apart from 40-plus years of legalized abortion—is the current effort to redefine marriage to include homosexual couples. But this is just the latest in...
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A Helluva Good Universe Next Door
Interstellar Produced and distributed by Paramount Pictures Directed by Christopher Nolan Screenplay by Christopher and Jonathan Nolan Nightcrawler Produced by Bold Films Written and directed by Dan Gilroy Distributed by Open Road Films In their latest film, Interstellar, Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan have tried to revive a tired science-fiction premise about the world’s...
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The Exterminator
As John McCain and Lindsey Graham hector us to invade the Middle East once more, we might pause to reflect on a 2001 article published by Zev Chafets, an American-Israeli journalist who is currently the Likud Party’s unofficial spokesman. (Chafets, as you may know, is the author of A Match Made in Heaven: American Jews,...
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The Practice of Politics
This is a history of liberalism as it appears to an intelligent, well-informed, and thoroughly convinced English liberal who worked for many years as an editor and correspondent for The Economist. It is useful as a sympathetic exploration of the stages through which the political outlook that rules us today has advanced. The book is...
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A Racial Revolution
“My tradition is not to remark on cases where there still may be an investigation,” declared President Obama as he upstaged New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio on December 3, speaking from the White House Tribal Nations Conference. His statement was not difficult to evaluate for its truth content, but remarkable—even from him—for its revelation of...
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