When Summer of Blood 2015 came to a close, 3,702 people had been killed in the United States by people wielding guns. That’s according to a website called Mass Shooting Tracker, a left-wing “crowdsourced” collective dedicated to reporting every single incident of “gun violence” and to using phrases like “gun violence” and “killed by guns.” ...
Month: October 2015
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Immigration: The Greatest Government Failure of Our Times
Migration is a reality that concerns no more than 200 million people on earth now living outside their country of origin—that is, only three percent of the world’s population. Why should we even talk about it? The reason is simple: Global statistics are worthless; the whole phenomenon is concentrated in Europe and the United States. ...
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The Poet: Companion of the Common Man
What is the role of the poet in society? In a frequently misunderstood remark, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in “A Defence of Poetry” (1821) that poets are the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Shelley’s idea is that poets shape our view of ourselves and the world, which in turn shapes the very course of history...
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Burning Bright in the Darkness
I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. To discover, at his memorial service, that Dr. John Addison Howard’s favorite verse of Scripture was Philippians 4:11 came as no surprise to anyone who knew him well. Those who had simply met him once or twice, or never...
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The New Nationalism
During her short imprisonment for contempt of court, Kim Davis, the Rowan County, Kentucky, clerk who refused on religious grounds to issue marriage licenses to homosexual couples, was compared with (among others) Martin Luther King, Jr., Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John C. Calhoun, Saint Paul, and even Jesus Christ Himself. Setting aside the propriety of...
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Europe’s Ongoing Demise
“The Third Muslim Invasion of Europe is entering its mature stage by sea,” I observed in these pages in June, as thousands of Middle Eastern and African illegal immigrants sailed from Libya to Italy day after day. In the intervening four months, in a dramatic development, a new southeastern land route was stormed by a...
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Browning Europe
With every passing day, Europe is turning browner and browner, the Old Continent being overrun by a tide of humanity not seen since the upheavals following World War II. Just think about it: 3,000 migrants from Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Niger, and Eritrea pass daily through the Balkans on their way to Germany, France, Austria, and...
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Nuclear Baksheesh
For several months Republicans and Democrats have been jawing over the nuclear “deal” with Iran. Unlike so many partisan debates, this one may actually involve issues of national security, but only if both sides are serious. The Iranians have legitimate reasons to be afraid of an American Empire that has destroyed Iraq; plunged Syria, Tunisia,...
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Disenchanted With Globalism
The political story this year was supposed to be a familiar one: A member of the Bush family was going to begin a successful march to the Republican nomination, and a member of the Clinton family was going to do the same thing on the Democratic side. Through June 30, Jeb Bush had raised $114.1...
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How to Keep From Getting Deported
In September, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that an illegal alien, although properly found to be a danger to the community, should not be removed from the United States because he considers himself to be a transgender woman. Finding that Mexico is not in the progressive vanguard in embracing transgender identity, the court...
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The Left’s True Target
Arguments, as Malcolm Muggeridge astutely observed, are never about what they’re about. As when “You’re never on time anymore” turns out really to mean, “When are you going to quit sitting around and get a real job?” And so on. The national argument over Confederate symbols and monuments—assuming you want to call it an argument...
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Table Talk
“Quiet, Please,” by James O. Tate (The Music Column, August), was, like all his writing, excellent. I learned much, especially when he concentrates on providing historical and cultural knowledge. His formulation of how the internet can be of great help to those who already have an historical and literary formation, but overwhelming and even nefarious...
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Wrecking Ball
Donald Trump has upended the GOP presidential primary process and turned it into the most entertaining reality show yet. If The Donald’s road to the White House is blocked—either by the Republican elites or by his own tendency to go too far—and he returns to TV land, he’ll have a hard time topping this one....
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More Than an Inkling
“Every great man nowadays has his disciples,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “and it is always Judas who writes the biography.” Even conceding that Wilde was writing for effect, it is nonetheless true that biographers often betray their subjects with either a kiss or a curse, and that the kiss is sometimes more deadly than the curse. ...
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How Long Has This Been Going On?
We live in revolutionary times of rapid technological change, and yes, it is a little disconcerting when the rules morph and the practices mutate. But I did predict years ago that vinyl would be back, and so it is. This year’s junque is next year’s antique. And I remember back even to Before Vinyl. A...
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I Heart Big Brother
Ashley Madison, the adultery website seemingly named for Honey Boo Boo’s fiercest rival, unwillingly yielded all of her secrets to the prying eyes of a hacker group that calls itself The Impact Team. At midsummer, the Team informed Ashley Madison’s parent company, Avid Life Media, that they would release all of the immoral website’s data—“all...
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John Addison Howard, 1921-2015: A Remembrance
John Howard, founder of The Rockford Institute (publisher of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture), passed from this world on August 7, 2015, a week shy of his 94th birthday. He is survived by his wife, four children, and nine grandchildren. A memorial service in his honor was held on August 29 at Westminster Presbyterian...
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Exceptional America
Tocqueville was the first author to apply the adjective exceptional to America, but the compliment—if he meant it as a compliment—was a backhanded one, referring narrowly to circumstances that “concurred to fix the mind of the American upon purely practical pursuits.” Certainly, he had nothing in mind comparable to the notion of “American exceptionalism” that...
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The Union as It Was
A minority on the left is possibly willing to admit that a few “good Southerners” during the War Between the States opposed slavery, secession, and the Confederacy. Probably a much smaller minority would concede that a considerable number of Northerners opposed the war either to preserve the Union or to free the slaves. That, in...
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What the Editors Are Reading
In my youth I must have read nearly every word H.L. Mencken wrote—The American Language excepted, though I did dip into it from time to time before setting the book aside as being dry as the Sahara. A couple of weeks ago I ran into almost the entire set (the successive Supplements and Editions) at...
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The Future of Europe
When the king of Poland, Jan Sobieski, defeated the Ottoman army at the Siege of Vienna in 1683, that army of 23,000 soldiers did not have scores or hundreds of thousands of hungry and desperate civilians at its back, hoping to find a new life in Europe. The Ottomans were attempting a military invasion of...
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Kennedy v. Kennedy
On the last day of August, Judge Richard J. Leon of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia found for March for Life in its suit against the Department of Health and Human Services, among other agencies. March for Life is a secular, nonprofit organization, founded after Roe v. Wade, that opposes abortion...
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The Curtain Descends; Everything Ends
Phoenix Produced by Schramm Film Koerner & Weber and Bayerische Rundfunk Directed and written by Christian Petzold Distributed by Sundance Selects The Gift Produced by Blue-Tongue Films and Blumhouse Productions Directed and written by Joel Edgerton Distributed by STX Entertainment and Showtime Networks German director Christian Petzold’s new film, Phoenix, begins with a perfectly dark...
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Two Experiments
It is a commonplace among American conservatives that, at some point in the past, the way Americans understood their constitutional and cultural tradition diverged from the reality of the constitutional order established in 1787. For the Southern Agrarians and their intellectual descendants, the great change occurred with the Civil War, which elevated “union” over the...
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Conservatives and the Gay Agenda
“The average American watches over seven hours of television daily. Those hours open up a gateway into the private world of straights, through which a Trojan Horse might be passed.” —Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, “The Overhauling of Straight America” (1987) If one had not already been convinced that the gay-rights...
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Mechanical Nihilism
This is a book about life in a society from which higher goods have been expelled, leaving no place for love, wonder, or beauty. The “compulsion” of the title is that which guides people in such a setting. In default of anything better, people fall under the dominion of itches, obsessions, and impositions, and mistake...
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