Donald Trump reveals something to us about ourselves, if we are honest enough to face it: We care far too deeply about presidential politics and not enough about our actual problems. Please, put down the pitchfork and listen for just a minute. Believe me, I understand. Trump has raised the very important immigration issue, and...
When my father died, I was eight years old, the third of four children. Mother repeatedly made it clear that if we wanted to go to college like our parents—and we must—we would have to study hard to obtain scholarships. The notion became so ingrained that I grew up presuming excellent grades and college were...
I recently obtained a copy of a British newspaper published in 2025, which discussed the country’s favorite television program in that year. The reviewer gives a crisp summary of the latest incarnation of Downton Abbey, and the episode in question is a crowd-pleaser. Everything is bustling in the historic English mansion in 1925, as butlers,...
Hand it to Ann Coulter and Donald Trump: They know how to send the left into an apoplectic conniption. Coulter’s contribution to the left’s unhinged tantrum is her book on immigration, ¡Adios America!: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole. Coulter has gone “full racist,” we are told, because she...
If you think the removal of the Confederate Battle Flag from the grounds of the South Carolina capitol was the end of flag controversy, you may be surprised to learn that an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times declared, “It’s time California dump” the Bear Flag, “a symbol of blatant illegality and racial prejudice. ...
Two thousand fifteen was the year that we Americans broke history. By “breaking history,” I do not mean something like “breaking news,” or “breaking records,” or even “breaking the Internet” (though the Internet certainly played a role). Yes, the “historic moments” of the Summer of #LoveWins and #HateLoses—the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v....
Having read Sir Philip Magnus’s biography of William Gladstone in graduate school, I recently picked up a copy of his King Edward the Seventh, published in 1964 and made the basis of a very excellent series by Masterpiece Theater, with the superb British actor Timothy West in the title role, a decade or so later. ...
In late July, scores of conservative websites erupted with some variant of this headline from Breitbart: “Obama’s Secret Plan to Block Seniors on Social Security from Owning Guns.” There were only three problems: The plan isn’t secret; it doesn’t affect all senior citizens on Social Security (and, conversely, it will affect some on Social Security...
On July 14, in Vienna, the United States, Russia, China, France, Germany, and the European Union signed a 109-page Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran. The Islamic republic has accepted a comprehensive set of international, legally mandated, and (by implication) militarily enforceable safeguards that “will ensure that Iran’s nuclear program will be exclusively...
Law professors like to debate among themselves which of the U.S. Supreme Court’s many opinions is the very worst. There has been a general consensus that the most loathsome is the one in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), in which the Court decided that the right to hold slaves in the territories was a “fundamental...
The newspaper that prints only what fits its piously fraudulent agenda, the New York Times, has reviewed a book by one Ta-Nehisi Coates twice, both times showering it with the sort of praise that would make a Hollywood name-dropper blush. A biweekly magazine, New York, which reports mostly on food and gay porn, put the...
George McCartney is to be commended for his astute review (“Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” In the Dark, August) of the new film adaptation of Madame Bovary. Dr. McCartney’s close acquaintance with Gustave Flaubert’s novel serves him well. In connection with the 19th-century belief in progress, and its pitfalls, illustrated by the unsuccessful operation on Hippolyte’s...
Immanentizing the eschaton via Obergefell v. Hodges, Justice Anthony Kennedy has achieved his long-sought goal—namely, to be to 21st-century America what Bonaparte was to 19th-century Europe. In respectable quarters Justice Kennedy is considered a world-historical personage, having made the oxymoron “same-sex marriage” the law of the land. Several years ago, in a letter to the...
The Left is not generous in victory. The ink on the Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges was barely dry before a vicious assault on organized religion in this country was launched, a multipronged offensive with the clear intention of marginalizing Christians and banishing them from the public square. The first shot was fired...
National Public Radio is a bad idea, as you can tell from the name. But the specific reality is even worse, though I suppose it comes in different forms. The service is varied in that local stations can tailor themselves differently. But I believe that my take on NPR is basically true about the “NPR...
Since the 60’s, liberals have been talking about “victimless crimes,” offenses that are prosecutable by law but that liberals claim “hurt no one.” Prominent among these were homosexual encounters, which over the next several decades were decriminalized by most states and eventually recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court as acts of love, and finally conjugal...
Ann Coulter credits Peter Brimelow’s famous essay published in National Review in 1992 with delivering the blinding revelation that opened her eyes to the social and political crisis precipitated by the Establishment’s immigration policies since 1965. Having been rudely knocked off her horse, Miss Coulter has been hurling thunderbolts of her own all the way...
Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez, who shot five American military personnel to death at the Armed Forces Career Center in Chattanooga on July 16 and was subsequently killed in a firefight with the police, became a naturalized American citizen while still a minor, seven years after his parents immigrated to the United States in 1996. According to...
The strongest parts of Laudato Si’, the latest papal encyclical, are the first sections of Chapter Three, “The Human Roots of the Ecological Crisis,” where Pope Francis addresses the quest for limitless power that has been the dominant ambition of the Western world since the Renaissance: power over nature, and—since, as he points out, humanity...
In 1973 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., published The Imperial Presidency. He argued that the stretching of presidential power by Democrats Roosevelt and Truman had been necessary and benevolent, but that such behavior by Nixon was a dark threat to the commonwealth. Schlesinger’s childishly partisan and superficial tirade was soon forgotten. Time has moved on, and...
Washington and Brussels were surprised by the Kremlin’s strong reaction to the ousting of pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February of last year. They shouldn’t have been. Yanukovych was forced out of office after he backed away from signing a Ukraine-European Union Association Agreement, an agreement Moscow viewed as a threat to its economic...
“For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” —Matthew 16:26 Our Lord taught us all about bad bargains. To lose your own soul and to receive in exchange that mere...
After publishing highly acclaimed biographies of Zola and Flaubert, the New York City-based Frederick Brown established himself as an expert on French cultural and intellectual life with his magnificent book For the Soul of France, a saga of the struggle between the militant secularists and the royalist reactionaries between the fall of Napoleon III and...
London: It should feel like a good time for Britain to leave the European Union. The euro crisis continues to tear the Continent apart. The charming-yet-feckless Greeks must soon be on their way out, in spite of the latest bailout-for-austerity swap between the European Central Bank and Athens. Germany, so long the driving force behind...
Mr. Holmes Produced by BBC Films and See-Saw Films Directed by Bill Condon Screenplay by Jeffrey Hatcher from Mitch Cullin’s novel, A Slight Trick of the Mind Distributed by The Weinstein Company Mr. Holmes is the film adaptation of Mitch Cullin’s curious 2005 novel A Slight Trick of the Mind. Reading the novel, I was...
John Derbyshire is among the most prominent and prolific of writers of the paleo or nationalist right. I think of him as a Tory, and his writing as Swiftian. Some readers of this magazine are likely regular readers of his online essays, a selection of which, all culled from the year 2013, have been reprinted...
