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...
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...
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...
All through the Cold War, the Turks were among America’s most reliable allies. After World War II, when Stalin encroached upon Turkey and Greece, Harry Truman came to the rescue. Turkey reciprocated by sending thousands of troops to fight alongside our GIs in Korea. Turkey joined NATO and let the U.S. station Jupiter missiles in...
Allan Brownfeld has written an excellent piece concerning the likely parole of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard in November. As Brownfeld notes, while there may be humanitarian grounds justifying the parole, this is not why Pollard’s supporters began clamoring for his release shortly after his conviction. Contrary to what Pollard’s supporters claim, he is not a...
Last Friday, Texas Senator Ted Cruz took to the Senate floor to accuse Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of lying to him and other Senate Republicans when McConnell denied that he had made a deal over the Export-Import Bank in order to secure the passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. I cannot recall such blunt language being...
More than a few conservatives and Republicans, by no means necessarily the same people, denounced Donald’s Trump’s imprudent remarks about Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who spent more than five years as a POW in Vietnam. Said Trump, “he’s a war hero ’cause he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured, OK.” This insulted all...
The American political class has failed the country, and should be fired. That is the clearest message from the summer surge of Bernie Sanders and the remarkable rise of Donald Trump. Sanders’ candidacy can trace it roots back to the 19th-century populist party of Mary Elizabeth Lease who declaimed: “Wall Street owns the country. It...
Srdja Trifkovic’s live RT interview, published 28 July 2015 Results of the ongoing investigation of the MH17 crash are almost preordained because the five countries taking part in it are all politically motivated to blame Russia, Srdja Trifkovic told RT in his latest live interview for the global TV network. RT: Russia’s UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin...
The post-Maidan Ukrainian government is often criticized in Poland and Russia (a rare point of convergence) for indulging in historical revisionism over the controversial role of Stepan Bandera during the Second World War, and in particular for glossing over his followers’ slaughter of hundreds of thousands of eastern Poles, Jews, and other minorities in Galicia...
“If God does not exist, then everything is permissible.” Ivan Karamazov’s insight came to mind while watching the video of Deborah Nucatola of Planned Parenthood describe, as she sipped wine and tasted a salad, how she harvests the organs of aborted babies for sale to select customers. “Yesterday was the first time … people wanted...
Back in 1965, I was ten and an avid coin collector. I inserted silver dimes and quarters, and other coins, into the slots in the blue collection books. Then in 1965, I remember President Johnson asking Americans to start circulating silver coins again, along with the new, non-silver coins. I was a patriotic kid—the same...
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell recognizing a non-existent right to gay marriage in the Constitution, there have been numerous articles stating that America has accepted gay marriage and that social conservatives should now shut up. A variation of this theme has been taken up by certain social conservatives such as...
If the role of religion in America today is to teach the faithful to bend over and kiss the ring of postmodernity and beg for forgiveness for actually believing something, the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod just failed spectacularly, flubbed its lines, and fell off the stage. I, for one, am elated. Tuesday’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch revealed...
As President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran is compared to Richard Nixon’s opening to China, Bibi Netanyahu must know how Chiang Kai-shek felt as he watched his old friend Nixon toasting Mao in Peking. The Iran nuclear deal is not on the same geostrategic level. Yet both moves, seen as betrayals by old U.S. allies,...
In his latest RT live interview (video; transcript) Srdja Trifkovic discusses the U.S. State Department’s decision to give its Human Rights Defenders Award to a Kyrgyz national, Azimzhan Askarov, who, as an ethnic Uzbek activist, in 2010 played an active role in Kyrgyz-Uzbek ethnic riots that shook the country. Askarov was arrested during the violence,...
On June 17, Dylann Roof walked into the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston and murdered 9 of the innocent people he found there. Seizing on the fact that Roof had posed in one picture with a Confederate battle flag, many politicians and media personalities immediately demanded that the Confederate battle flag come down. South Carolina...
From first reactions, it appears that Hill Republicans will be near unanimous in voting a resolution of rejection of the Iran nuclear deal. They will then vote to override President Obama’s veto of their resolution. And if the GOP fails there, Gov. Scott Walker says his first act as president would be to kill the...
The revelation that Planned Parenthood is selling body parts from children that they have aborted in their clinics is shocking, even though it is hardly surprising. Pro-lifers have argued for years that Planned Parenthood is less concerned with the lives of the women that they claim to “help” than they are with making a profit....
In November, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, a leftist scribe for Rolling Stone, fired a nuclear missile at the University of Virginia and a fraternity, spinning a lurid yarn of gang rape headlined “A Rape On Campus.” In December, after The Washington Post and other media exposed that missile as a dud, the magazine kind of retracted...
On Tuesday, July 14, the Irvine, California-based Center for Medical Progress released the first of three videos aimed at exposing some of the horrifying practices of Planned Parenthood, including the harvesting of baby organs through elective abortion for sale to biomedical research groups. The hidden camera shows Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s Senior Director of...
Every mid-July, I think back to the Apollo 11 landing on the moon back in 1969. I was a kid back then and followed everything about the space program. I still love all the documentaries about early space exploration and such dramatizations as “Apollo 13.” The moon landing was the apogee of American civilization, when...
On January 2, 2016, I will celebrate 20 years of employment at The Rockford Institute. It seems like a long time in many ways, but a rather short time in others. One of my first acts here was to write a fundraising letter for the Center on the Family in America, explaining why the Defense...
“Truth and reason are eternal,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to Rev. Samuel Knox in 1810. “They have prevailed. And they will eternally prevail…” Jefferson was wrong. As the current media pack coverage of the 20th anniversary of the “Srebrenica massacre” indicates, his belief that “error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left to combat it” was...
On arrival in La Paz, Pope Francis was presented by Bolivian President Evo Morales with a wooden crucifix carved in the form of a hammer and sickle, the symbol of Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Fidel. Had Pope John Paul II been handed that crucifix, he might have cracked it over Evo’s head. For John Paul...
The run-up to the Presidential sweepstakes for 2016 is not very exciting so far. There are so many Republican wannabes that it is hard to keep track of them all. Let’s face it, Bushes and Clintons are old hat, boring. They are used goods. We need new products to liven up the market. I have...
Public commentary on recent murders and acts of violence against African Americans has been universally explained as evidence of ingrained racism of American society, the racism of police, and implicit racism of the Republican Party. The result has been wholesale rejection of the display of symbols associated with the Confederate States of America. Even Sen....
The bohemian Left in Europe is as untrustworthy as the GOP “Right” in America when it comes to taking a tough, principled stand. As I have repeatedly predicted that it would do (here and here), the government of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has caved in to EU creditors. The package he accepted after a marathon...
Last week, Catholic World Report ran an article by regular Chronicles contributor Jerry Salyer on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The piece is well worth reading. Solzhenitsyn’s name will forever be linked to his rigorous denunciation of the evils of Communism. After Solzhenitsyn, no morally responsible person could ignore the tens of millions murdered by Communists, or pretend...
The Oklahoma Supreme Court, in a 7-2 decision, has ordered a monument of the Ten Commandments removed from the Capitol. Calling the Commandments “religious in nature and an integral part of the Jewish and Christian faiths,” the court said the monument must go. Gov. Mary Fallin has refused. And Oklahoma lawmakers instead have filed legislation...
Earlier this week, Michael Gerson, formerly a speechwriter for George W. Bush, now a scribbler for The Washington Post, trained his sights on those he termed “Rust Belt revivalists.” These are the Republicans who have noticed that “the GOP has been dominated by corporate interests and needs to identify more directly with the economic frustrations...
On June 11, 2014, more than a year ago, I wrote here on the Chronicles blog, “Right now the immigration issue is lying in the street for whatever Republican presidential candidate, if any, is willing to pick it up – and not just toy with it, but make another 40-year ban the centerpiece of his...
In the 2016 race, June belonged to two outsiders who could not be more dissimilar. Bernie Sanders is a socialist senator from Vermont and Donald Trump a celebrity capitalist and legendary entrepreneur and builder. What do they have in common? Both have tapped into what the bases of their respective parties believe is wrong with...
Last week I made a prediction that went against the media pack consensus, when I wrote on July 1 that the Greeks would vote “no” in last Sunday’s referendum. The banks had been closed for a week, cash withdrawals were limited to 60 euros ($66) a day, and they still did it. My assessment was...
From across my small office I winked at Marse Robert. He winked back—so his 7-by-6-inch portrait seemed to suggest—white-bearded, gray-uniformed, arms folded serenely and confidently. When the nation whose future military leaders you trained at West Point mauls and mutilates the cause in which you trusted, serenity comes hard. Only a Robert Edward Lee type...
However the Greek crisis ends, whether with Athens leaving the eurozone, or submitting and accepting austerity at the dictates of its creditors, the European Union appears headed for an existential crisis. Greece borrowed and spent beyond its means, like New York City in the ’70s, and Detroit, Illinois, and Puerto Rico today. But the crisis...
President Barack Obama, during a May speech in Oregon, insisted that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal is good for small-business workers, helps the middle class, and maintains U.S. trade power versus China, which is not a signatory to the 12-nation pact. “This is not a left issue or right issue, or a business or...
Mad Max: Fury Road Produced by Village Roadshow Pictures Written and directed by George Miller Distributed by Warner Brothers Ex Machina Produced by Film 4 Written and directed by Alex Garland Distributed by Universal Pictures We never know how feminism will show up at the movies. We only know that it will. Currently, it’s on...
I can’t recall where I first encountered them. It must have been in one of the rundown bars, like Clarence’s or The Shack, in the redneck section of Chapel Hill. Let’s call them Larry and John. I was one of a handful of notorious hard-core reactionaries in the student body, and they were among the...
This is a tale of two cultures. The first is that of the 1960’s Britain where I grew up. By and large, the taxpaying householder was still the unchallenged master of his domain. The phrase “An Englishman’s home is his castle” hadn’t yet been tainted by satire or irony, nor by any hint of spurious...
On May 22, the Irish people voted by a large majority to permit marriages between two men or two women. Of the two million people who voted—a 60-percent turnout—62 percent supported same-sex “marriage.” It had been a very one-sided contest, with all the major political parties urging their supporters to vote yes. Only 22 years...
During the last few months in Britain there have been yet more revelations of new Muslim crimes and detailed confirmations of older ones. In 2014 Lutfur Rahman, a Muslim, was elected for a second term as the mayor of Tower Hamlets, a London borough where one third of the population is Muslim. This April a...
By any reasonable measure, the policies carried out by the U.S. government since 1990 toward the Muslim countries of the Middle East (democracy promotion, regime change, political stabilization, “peace process,” antiterrorism) have failed disastrously. Not only is nothing better over there, but everything is worse over here, the home of the not-so-brave and ever-less-free. Every...
I first encountered the poetry of B.H. Fairchild when I chose to review Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest (2003). Despite its odd, even off-putting title, which seems to extrude tendrils of the New Age, the book was—is—one of the best original collections of contemporary poetry I’ve read. It proceeded to win the...
Dear Dr. R——: Recently, I read an article about the explosion in the number of Americans receiving disability from the federal government. In fact, that same government now pays out more for disabilities than it does for food stamps and welfare combined. Certainly, many of those receiving aid truly require this assistance. But after perusing...
Within the Marine Corps the World War I Battle of Belleau Wood is legendary. Outside the Corps it is relatively unknown. Yet the battle was a turning point in the history of the Corps, clearly demonstrating that the Marines could operate at brigade strength in conventional warfare. Until then Marines were used principally as landing...
Greece is now technically in default, having failed to pay its $1.8 bn monthly installment to the IMF which was due June 30. Contrary to the mainstream media treatment of the story, there will be no ripple effect and no major financial crisis. The Greeks are in dire straits, but their economy (the size of...
A few years after he was removed from office in 1890, Otto von Bismarck remarked that “Europe today is a powder keg, and the leaders are like men smoking in an arsenal.” At present, the Iron Chancellor’s dictum is applicable to the entire planet. The most important event by far this year has been Europe’s...
It was, in Edward de Vere’s words, much ado about nothing. The media didn’t think so, called it Deflategate, and one of America’s great sporting heroes, Tom Brady, was pilloried as if he had inflated the beautiful model Gisele Bundchen, his wife, against her wishes. In case any of you Chronicles readers missed it while...
When Metternich famously dismissed Italy as “a geographical expression,” the peninsula was divided into states ruled by (to name only the principals) Austrians, the Vatican, and Spanish Bourbons. Yet even 150 years after the Kingdom of Piedmont united Italy by conquest, the truth of Metternich’s description remains perceptible to anyone who travels from Torino to...