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...
Year: 2015
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Samantha Power’s Ignorance of Islam
On August 24 the United States Mission to the United Nations published remarks by Samantha Power, the UN Ambassador, devoted to the mistreatment of homosexuals by the Islamic State. The key part of her statement reads as follows: “No religious beliefs justify throwing individuals off of buildings or stoning them to death because of who...
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Dis-Integrating America
The Wednesday morning murders of 24-year-old Roanoke TV reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward, 27, were a racist atrocity, a hate crime. Were they not white, they would be alive today. Their killer, Vester L. Flanagan II, said as much in his farewell screed. He ordered his murder weapon, he said, two days after...
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More On The Alien Invasion of Europe
Following his column on the current deluge of migrants now inundating Europe, Srdja Trifkovic received the following note from a contact who has worked many years as an asylum processing officer with the Dutch Ministry of Immigration: Dr. Trifkovic points out that none of the countries affected by the current deluge (save perhaps Hungary) exercise...
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Robert Conquest Demolished Myths About Communism
The following article by Allan C. Brownfeld appeared originally at the website of FGFBooks.com and is reprinted with permission. Robert Conquest, a historian whose landmark studies of the Stalinist purges and the Ukraine famine of the 1930s documented the horrors perpetrated by the Soviet regime against its own citizens, has died at 98, having outlived the...
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Is Trumpism the New Nationalism?
Since China devalued its currency 3 percent, global markets have gone into a tailspin. Why should this be? After all, 3 percent devaluation in China could be countered by a U.S. tariff of 3 percent on all goods made in China, and the tariff revenue used to cut U.S. corporate taxes. The crisis in world...
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Alien Invasion of Europe: Now a Deluge
The Italian navy rescued 3,000 “migrants” aboard more than a dozen boats in the Mediterranean on Saturday. Like hundreds of thousands of others before them, they were taken to Europe for de facto permanent settlement. At the same time, any semblance of border control along the southeastern land route has collapsed. Thousands of migrants stormed...
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Hillary: Nominee or Indictee?
While perhaps too early for Democratic elites to panic and begin bailing out on Hillary Clinton’s campaign as a doomed vessel, they would be well advised not to miss any of the lifeboat drills. For Hillary’s campaign is taking on water at a rate that will sink her, if the leakage does not stop, and...
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Maybe Voters Do Care About Immigration and Trade After All
There is little doubt that the rise of Donald Trump in the polls is a result of widespread disgust with a contemptuous establishment, as I noted back in June and as Allan Brownfeld and Peter Spiliakos argue, from somewhat different perspectives, this week. Brownfeld writes that Trump “seems to realize that the right-wing cliches which are...
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Blame the Fed, not China, for yuan devaluation
Donald Trump is right to blame our government for its many bad trade deals with China. But he makes a mistake when attacking China’s recent devaluation of the yuan. “They’re just destroying us,” he said in a CNN interview. “They keep devaluing their currency until they get it right. They’re doing a big cut in...
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Immigration—Issue of the Century
“Trump’s immigration proposals are as dangerous as they are stunning,” railed amnesty activist Frank Sharry. “Trump . . . promises to rescind protections for Dreamers and deport them. He wants to redefine the constitutional definition of U.S. citizenship as codified by the 14th Amendment. He plans to impose a moratorium on legal immigration.” While Sharry...
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The Mideast Quagmire
Next year marks the 25th anniversary of Desert Storm, the US led effort to remove the Iraqi military from Kuwait. Although the US military had no problem kicking Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, removing ourselves from that troubled region has proven far more difficult. David Stockman recently provided a trenchant explanation of why that is...
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The Kayla Mueller Case: Rape is Endemic to Islam
American aid worker Kayla Mueller was regularly raped by the head of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in the months between her capture by ISIS in August 2013 and her death last February. The Western media have been quick to claim that the 26-year-old’s ordeal was due to a particularly perverted, un-Islamic ideology of...
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GOP Elites Call for Purge of Trump
In the Cleveland debate, Donald Trump refused to commit to support whomever the Republican Party nominates in 2016. Trump would be wise to maintain his freedom of action. For there is a plot afoot in The Washington Post Conservative Club to purge Trump from the Republican Party before the primaries begin. “A political party has...
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Not News — Rolling Stone Sued, Editor Quits
So Will Dana, the managing editor of Rolling Stone, has quit. And three members of the fraternity at University of Virginia, smeared in the magazine’s infamous hoax titled “A Rape On Campus,” have filed a defamation lawsuit. Neither result is a surprise. The idea that Dana “resigned” is hard to swallow. “After 19 years at...
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Taking Down The Donald
If his Republican opponents will not take down Donald Trump, Fox News will not only show them how it is done. Fox News will do the job for them. That is the message that came out loud and clear from last Thursday’s debate in Cleveland, which was viewed by the largest cable audience ever to...
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How Rand Paul Blew It
“We blew it.” —Wyatt (Peter Fonda) in “Easy Rider” I thought Rand Paul was positioned to do well at the beginning of his campaign. But his poor performance in last Thursday’s debate underlined that his campaign long ago blew it. Further evidence is several Tweets by him Monday attacking Donald Trump for not pledging to...
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Bill O’Reilly: the Big Dog Who did not Bark
Sherlock Holmes famously noticed the importance of a dog not barking. In the aftermath of the FOX Republican Debate there has been no discussion of the absence of FOX News (FNC) star Bill O’Reilly. Before the debate O’Reilly commented that his aggressive style of interviewing would be inappropriate to a news situation, where the object...
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Seven Decades of the Bomb
Seventy years ago first Hiroshima, then Nagasaki, were obliterated. Three generations later the grand-strategic consequences of those events can be discerned with reasonable clarity. They are by no means uniformly bad. The claim that the destruction of two large cities and the killing of over two hundred thousand humans was justified in order to prevent...
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John A. Howard, R.I.P.
John Addison Howard, founder of The Rockford Institute, which publishes Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, has passed away at the age of 93. A decorated soldier of the First Infantry Division in World War II (two Silver Stars, two Purple Hearts), Dr. Howard was president of Rockford College for 17 years, then founded The...
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Some Thoughts on the Debate
I do not know who won last night’s debate, but I do know who lost: Jeb Bush. His comments consisted largely of empty platitudes, weakly delivered. He came across as someone who didn’t really want to be President, or at least didn’t want to work for it. I watched the debate at a gathering of...
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Obama v. Bibi—Fight to the Finish
In his desperation to sink the Iran nuclear deal, Bibi Netanyahu is taking a hellish gamble. Israel depends upon the United States for $3 billion a year in military aid and diplomatic cover in forums where she is often treated like a pariah state. Israel has also been the beneficiary of almost all the U.S....
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Safety First!
On Wednesday morning, I saw an article stating that one third of those surveyed want bags and purses checked before letting customers into movie theaters, and an equal number want metal detectors placed outside theaters. Fourteen percent even want an armed security guard placed in each theater. (This was before the news broke of a...
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The Way We Are Now (with apologies to Anthony Trollope)
Americans are more upset by the killing of a wild beast in Africa than they are by chopping up babies and selling their parts. Americans are more interested in the divorce of Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy than they are in the various wars their government is engaged in. (Killing innocent people and planting...
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The Plot to Destroy Nixon
In his new biography Being Nixon: A Man Divided, Evan Thomas concedes a point. Richard Nixon, he writes, “was not paranoid; the press and the ‘Georgetown set’ really were out to get him.” Carl Bernstein’s review found Thomas’ book deficient in its failure to chronicle the “endemic criminality” of the Nixon presidency. Yet, recent revelations...
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My Only Light
One of the things that James VI of Scotland liked about becoming James I of England—apart from the money—was that as head of the Church of England he would never be bossed about by a Scotch Calvinist minister again. Moreover, unlike his predecessor Elizabeth I, who never cared much for that aspect of her job,...
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Enter the Vandals
As everyone in America knows, on the night of June 17 Dylann Roof, armed with a .45 Glock, slaughtered nine black men and women in Charleston’s historic Emanuel AME church. Well before Roof was apprehended the following day, the mediasphere went ballistic. Hoping to start a “race war,” Roof generated instead what the Rev. Rep....
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Abolishing America
June was a depressing month for genuine conservatives. Apart from the Supremes putting their stamp of approval on ObamaCare, the horrifying murders of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, unleashed a jihad against the Confederate Battle Flag (Beltway “conservatives” piled on in support of the jihadists), while a majority of the robed Politburo found...
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Britain Decides
There’s something admirably old-fashioned about a British general election. Instead of the two years of incessant blather we get over here (“Just 11 weeks until the first GOP debate!” I heard recently on FOX News), the whole thing is over inside a month. The odds are good that nobody will call you in that period...
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Two Flags
From the welter of democratic hysteria, illogic, historical ignorance, and political self-positioning and posturing, the eminently sensible remark by Tate Reeves, lieutenant governor of Mississippi, regarding the public display of the Confederate Battle Flag stands like a stone wall above the general confusion. “Flags and emblems,” Mr. Reeves said, “are chosen by a group of...
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The Wellesley Zarathustra
“Laws [concerning ‘reproductive health’] have to be backed up with resources and political will and deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs, and structural biases have to be changed.” Thus spake Zarathustra at the Women in the World Summit in New York City last April, an annual celebration of the Transvaluation of All Values. “Religious beliefs ....
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A Watch in the Marches
“Oh, the wild hills of Wales, the land of old renown, and of wonder . . . ” —George Borrow, Wild Wales I step silent across the flagged floor below weathered slates and beams, sleep-held family breathing behind, the only other sounds the scratching of terriers’ claws as they push past...
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Life on the Frontier
The Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia enjoyed a full 24 hours of resurgent infamy before Gay Day came and took it all away. Screaming and shrieking throughout the process was the puerile, facile, and ultimately Manichaean Weltanschauung of our ruling class, which is best summarized in the phrase, “We are on the...
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Sobering Up With SSM
Same-sex marriage still does not exist. Yes, the Supreme Court of the United States issued an opinion, 5-4, covering Obergefell v. Hodges and three other cases, which effectively makes “same-sex marriage” the law of the land. But five “justices” or 50 million Facebook “likes” cannot change what is woven into the fabric of creation. Of...
Issue
August 2015
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Dying With a Kardashian
For those who like to see their name in print, the Hiltons and Kardashians of this world, make sure that, when the man in the white suit visits you, you’re the only one he’s dropping in on. In fact, even if the white-suited gent visits you within a day or two of having called upon...
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Quiet, Please
Silence can be a bad thing if there is too much of it, but today that is not often the case, for we live in a noisy world. The postindustrial era promised to turn down the volume, but it didn’t—too often, we are ourselves directly responsible for a lot of noise. But not all of...
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The Relevance of Russian Tradition
My first exposure to Alexander Dugin came via YouTube, when I discovered Vladimir Pozner’s 2014 interview with the controversial theorist. Marred somewhat by cultural relativism, Dugin’s critique of Anglo-American empire nonetheless contained more depth than a year’s supply of the Washington Post. Civilization cannot exist without a willingness to use lethal force on its behalf,...
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What the Editors Are Reading
The Hemingway Log: A Chronology of His Life and Times, by Brewster Chamberlain, just out from the University Press of Kansas, is one of those books that appears designed to turn a major literary career into a mere cottage industry. Nearly everything and anyone that could be related to Hemingway’s life and work, however distantly,...
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Clash of Civilizations
I am a “liberal Democrat” who likes to read different perspectives on the many issues facing our country. I picked up Chronicles to read your article on Rolling Stone’s and Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s egregious misreporting (“UVA: Facts Versus the Left’s Narrative,” News, June), which I’m interested in as a UVA alumna and parent. When Mr....
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A Better World
I guess the misguided call it whining—the apparent conservative fixation on modern awfulness; on the disappearance of morals, manners, handwritten notes, and neckties, and the concomitant nonstop appearance of . . . shall we just leave it at H. Rodham Clinton? Thanks, I’ll do that. The misguided require guidance into a loftier understanding of the...
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Power and Passports
In June, the Supreme Court greatly augmented executive power by holding that the president has the exclusive right to grant formal recognition to a foreign sovereign. This decision further pushes presidential power in the direction of royal prerogative through which monarchs enjoy the exclusive care over foreign affairs to the detriment of the people’s representatives....
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Mapping Verona
A map of Verona is open, the small strange city; With its river running round and through, it is river-embraced, And over this city for a whole long winter season, Through streets on a map, my thoughts have hovered and paced. I still wake up some nights, thinking about the streets of Verona and of...
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Bumpy BRICS Road
Until a year ago it had seemed that BRICS, the association of five emerging economies—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—was morphing from a loose economic alliance into a geopolitical force willing and able to challenge the global order. Its members’ potential to do so appeared impressive: They account for three billion people (two fifths...
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The Color of Money
In the midst of the uproar over the Confederate Battle Flag (America’s latest Two Minute Hate), an odd rumor began making the rounds on the internet. As far as I can tell, it began on InfoWars, the website of crank conspiracy theorist and talk-show host Alex Jones. As companies like eBay and Amazon began pulling...
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Laudato si
The release of Pope Francis’s second encyclical (and the first that can truly be called his alone, since Lumen fidei was essentially cowritten with his predecessor, Benedict XVI) was anticlimactic. By the time the final text was released on June 18, there seemed hardly any point in reading it, since FOX News and Rush Limbaugh...
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#CallMeMilton
Like most individuals my age who have both X and Y chromosomes and a conventionally male sexual organ, I was assigned a specific identity at birth. I obviously had no choice in the matter, though I can hardly blame the delivery-room doctor or my parents, since, in those benighted days, even the most enlightened members...
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The Worst Verse Since 1915
Exactly 50 years ago, T.S. Eliot died. Exactly 100 years ago, “Prufrock” appeared. What better moment, then, to perform the long-overdue public service of identifying the single worst poem to have been published during the last century? To name and shame? To award the IgNobel Prize for (Nominally Versified) Literature? A dirty job, but someone...
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The Third Great Awakening
California is showing the way forward for the aspiring authoritarians in our midst—and the drought is providing them with the perfect opportunity. The front page of my local rag, the Press-Democrat, ran a story by Washington Post writer Bob Kuznia, “State’s wealthy guzzling water,” which sported this lede: “Drought or no drought, Steve Yuhas resents...
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Getting Out of Bed With Korea
In some ways—even more than Japan and the People’s Republic of China—South Korea is dominating key U.S. markets. I’ve noticed this for years in Orange County, where Hyundai North America just built its new $200 million U.S. headquarters in Fountain Valley, the city next to where I live in Huntington Beach. It’s double the size...