Srdja Trifkovic’s interview with Sputnik Radio International RS: What is your take on the migrant crisis inside Europe, and what’s happening between Serbia and Croatia? ST: “Migrant crisis” is the right term. I wouldn’t use the term “refugees” because, strictly speaking, most of these people had already been safe and sound in Turkey and other countries...
Year: 2015
Post
Bye, Bye Boehner
The revolt against the Establishment continues. The three leading contenders for the Republican nomination for president – Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina – never have held political office. Now House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, has been pushed out for a lack of accomplishment. Consider: In 2010, Republicans stormed back into majority status in...
Post
The Question Isn’t Whether They Can (But Most Can’t), The Question Is Whether They Should
A few observations relevant to the Navy’s opening SEAL teams to women, and to Tom Piatak’s post about women in combat: As I wrote for Chronicles in 2013, the strongest women are only as strong as the weakest men, according to testimony before the President George H.W. Bush’s Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in...
Post
A Muslim President? Was Ben Carson Right?
Beliefs matter. “Ideas Have Consequences,” as conservative scholar Richard Weaver wrote in his classic of that title in 1948. Yet, for so believing, and so saying, Dr. Ben Carson has been subjected to a Rodney King-style night-sticking by the P.C. police. Asked by Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press” whether he could support a Muslim...
Post
Letter from Greece: A Meaningless Election
For what was widely expected to be the grand finale of the Greek snap election campaign—the country’s seventh since 2012—I drove to Thessaloniki, 400 miles south of Belgrade. Greece’s marvellous second city of half a million prides itself on being the country’s cultural and artistic capital, and its diversified economy offers a broader cross-section of...
Post
US and Catholicism in Crisis
During the 1950s, the twin pillars of worldwide anti-communism were Dwight Eisenhower’s America and the Roman Catholic Church of Pope Pius XII. During the 1980s, the last decade of the Cold War, Ronald Reagan and the Polish pope, John Paul II, were the pillars of resistance. When Pope Francis arrives in Washington on Tuesday afternoon,...
Post
A Pope and His People
Notice the Washington Post-ABC News poll on Pope Francis. The results indicate that people over here love him. He throws open doors too long closed. “He’s calming, he’s relaxing, and he’s reassuring,” says one Catholic quoted by the Post. Another—a sociologist at Catholic University—says, “He talks like a person who actually knows something about human...
Post
Putin: Friend or Foe in Syria?
What Vladimir Putin is up to in Syria makes far more sense than what Barack Obama and John Kerry appear to be up to in Syria. The Russians are flying transports bringing tanks and troops to an air base near the coastal city of Latakia to create a supply chain to provide a steady flow...
Post
Some Thoughts on the CNN Debate
Even though FOX was replaced by CNN last night, the second GOP debate had some of the same problems as the first one, with an additional problem all of CNN’s own devising: It was far too long. Spending three hours watching the candidates swap platitudes, soundbites, and non-sequiturs is more akin to an “enhanced interrogation...
Post
Ideology Uber Alles
One of the clearest signs of how ideological American society has become is the push to put women in combat. No one argues that our armed forces will fight better if women are put in combat roles. The argument, instead, is that we should put women in combat roles because we believe in “equality,” that...
Post
Purging America’s Heroes
With that kumbayah moment at the Capitol in South Carolina, when the Battle Flag of the Confederacy was lowered forever to the cheers and tears of all, a purgation of the detestable relics of evil that permeate American public life began. City leaders in Memphis plan to dig up the body of Confederate General Nathan...
Post
Kim Davis vs. Judicial Tyranny
“If the law supposes that, the law is a ass—a idiot.” Charles Dickens gave that line to Mr. Bumble in “Oliver Twist.” And it sums up the judgment of Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis about the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision, which said the 14th Amendment guarantees same-sex couples the right to marry. Davis refused to...
Post
A Vote of No Confidence
The latest CNN poll on the Republican presidential race is simply astonishing. It shows Donald Trump with the support of 32% of the registered Republican voters and Republican-leaning independents sampled in the poll, and Ben Carson with 19%. Put together, they have the support of 51% of such voters sampled by CNN. Neither Trump nor...
Post
Fourth Generation War and the Migrant Invasion of Europe.
Fourth Generation War theory provides a useful tool to understand the migrant invasion of Europe. 4GW basically is non-state warfare. The people invading Europe are not doing so inside T-34 tanks or Stukas. They’re walking. No government is leading their march, although some governments, such as that of Turkey, are encouraging it. An classic 4GW...
Post
Henry Kissinger’s Imperfect Vision
Even in his advanced age Henry Kissinger remains hugely influential, and the remnant of the realist school in Washington’s foreign policy establishment looks upon him as its part-guru, part-patriarch. His recent pronouncements are somewhat disappointing, however, and they reflect the confused state of the realist camp after many years of the neoconservative-neoliberal duopoly’s dominance. As...
Post
The New Bulwark of Christendom
During the centuries of struggle between European Christianity and Islam, various countries were referred to as “Antemurale Christianitatis,” the bulwark of Christendom. Today, with the torrent of mostly Islamic “migrants” heading toward Europe only increasing, that title belongs to Hungary. Hungary was roundly condemned in the international press for seeking to enforce EU rules, which...
Post
The Real Meaning of Kim Davis
Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who was jailed for refusing to give out marriage licenses to gay couples, is out of the clink at last. But in political and cultural regards, her nation and ours is not in the clear. Moral consensus has broken down, resulting in the empowerment of the strongest, the best connected,...
Post
Why Trump is making a connection
The following column by Tom Pauken originally appeared in TribTalk, a publication of The Texas Tribune. Donald Trump has made a mess of things in the GOP presidential sweepstakes. What was expected to be a race between establishment favorite Jeb Bush and a conservative challenger emerging from a large field has instead turned into a...
Post
Islam’s Conquest of Europe
“Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide,” wrote James Burnham in his 1964 Suicide of the West. Burnham predicted that the mindless magnanimity of liberals, who subordinate the interests of their own people and nations to utopian and altruistic impulses, would bring about an end to Western civilization. Was he wrong? Consider what is happening...
Post
Do Cops’ Lives Matter to Obama?
Barack Obama, as chief law enforcement officer of the United States, is going to have to stop acting like a conscientious objector in this war on cops. Wednesday, another officer, in Fox Lake, Illinois, Lt. Charles “GI Joe” Gliniewicz, was gunned down. Last Friday, Darren Goforth, a Houston deputy sheriff, was shot 15 times by...
Post
The New Invasion of Europe
Reflecting on the immigrant invasion of Europe, Tom Piatak wrote on the loss of Western man’s will to survive. Here’s my gloss. Europe lost its will to survive and is being invaded by immigrants: It discarded its Christian faith, which plunged its birth rate to half the replacement level, meaning rapid extinction no matter what....
Post
Hitler’s Legacy
Stratfor’s George Friedman published an interesting article on September 1, “Pondering Hitler’s Legacy,” to mark the 76th anniversary of the beginning of World War II. The first outcome of Hitler’s war, he says, was that it destroyed Europe’s hegemony over much of the world and its influence over the rest: Within 15 years of the...
Post
No Will To Survive
Srdja Trifkovic’s contact within the Dutch Ministry of Immigration isn’t the only one who has noticed that the current flood of “migrants” now heading to Europe resembles an invasion. Catholic World News reports that Edward Luttwak has likened the current wave of immigration to the barbarian invasions that doomed Rome. Luttwak charges that the Islamic...
Post
Doing Music Wrong
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...
Issue
September 2015
Post
¡Buena Suerte, Migra!
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...
Post
Come Home, America
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...
Post
Detecting the Personal Beyond
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...
Post
American Samizdat
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...
Post
“Home”-Grown
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...
Post
Church and State
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...
Post
The Tone of Trump
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...
Post
A Boring Brexit
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...
Post
Band-Aids for the Corpse
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...
Post
Royalism and Reaction
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...
Post
We’ve Only Just Begun
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...
Post
Can the GOP Deal With Iran?
Ten weeks before the first U.S.-Soviet summit ever held in Moscow, in May 1972, North Vietnam, with Soviet-supplied armor and artillery, crossed the DMZ in an all-out offensive to overrun the South. President Nixon responded with air and naval strikes on the North. Yet Nixon went to Moscow and signed the first strategic arms agreement...
Post
Alien Report
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...
Post
Light in the Dark
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...
Post
The Worst Decision
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...
Post
Is the Game Worth the Candle?
“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...
Post
What the Editors Are Reading
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. ...
Post
Missing the Forest
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...
Post
The Iran Deal in Context
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...
Post
Sophistory
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....
Post
A Perversion of History
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. ...
Post
White Out
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...
Post
Conquering History
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,...
Post
Same-Sex Marriage: The Continuing Conversation
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...
Post
College, Diversity, and the Middle Class
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...