Did you hear the one about Bruce Jenner? No? You missed it? Well, then, it’s probably too late. A grown man says he’s a woman, shaves off his Adam’s apple (for starters), and shows a former network anchor his little black dress. You’d think the late-night comedians would have enough material to get them through...
Clyde Wilson’s View in the April issue (“Society Precedes Government: Two Counterrevolutions”) was excellent. A New England “Yankee” (my great-grandfather was captured and put in Libby Prison during the war) and a Bunyanesque Calvinist at that (I might as well completely alienate myself from your editorial staff while I’m at it), I attended school in...
Blessed is the soul who, early in life, is gifted with a passionate interest in some art, craft, sport, pastime, or field of knowledge. The object of passion might be well-nigh anything at all, so long of course as it is not vicious: stamp collecting or field hockey, cabinetry or the Civil War, boxing or...
It seems to me that in the present phase of European history the essential issue is no longer between Catholicism, on one side, and Protestantism, on the other, but between Christianity and Chaos. . . . Today we can see it on all sides as the active negation of all that western culture has stood...
The waitress at my favorite Japanese restaurant, a spotlessly clean little joint in a Sonoma County hamlet not far from my home, had no idea what she was getting into as she took the order. Two unremarkable looking customers had walked in the door: one an older, rather prissy-looking man with wire-rim glasses, and the...
Russian political analyst Vladimir Pastukhov once wrote that state power, or vlast, and not law “holds a sacred status in Russia.” Russians, according to Pastukhov, experience state power as a “mystical entity,” a “life giving substance,” a “deity” in its own right, from whom, in times of trouble, the narod (the people) expects answers. Anna...
“How shall we sing the Lord’s songin a strange land?” —Psalm 137:4 “[Man] has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart,...
The two takes on American Sniper in the April issue (Wayne Allensworth’s “An American Tragedy,” Correspondence; George McCartney’s “Hopalong Rides the Iraqi Range,” In the Dark) were both great reads . . . but allow for a little Dr. Lecteresque correction: “No no no, Dr. McCartney, you were doing fine. You had established trust with...
Talk about the failure of fundamental journalism! In any other profession—medical, legal, financial—the guilty party would be struck off. In journalism, the guilty party—as in Rolling Stone—continues on its merry way of disinformation and downright fabrication. Some Duke University lacrosse players must be nodding their heads, as in we’ve seen it all before. Let’s start...
They came in the early eighth century across the Straits of Gibraltar, unleashing terror and carnage across Iberia “like a desolating storm.” They were stopped deep inside today’s France, at Tours, by Charles Martel in 732. They kept attacking Europe throughout the Middle Ages, but their next sustained assault was at her vulnerable southeastern flank,...
The South China Sea (SCS) is fast becoming one of the key geopolitical battlegrounds of our time. China’s systematic, rapid and large-scale island-building campaign has suddenly altered the strategic equation in “Asia’s Mediterranean.” It has also presented Washington with a long-term strategic dilemma in the Western Pacific. There are literally dozens of disputed islands, atolls,...
In the cathedrals of New York and Rome There is a feeling that you should just go home And spend a lifetime finding out just where that is People understand catastrophes. The everyday ebb and flow of history, in their own lives and in the world, is much harder for them to grasp. That thought—hardly...
For a news professional, it is hard to say which is more discouraging: that Rolling Stone published an imaginary tale of gang rape from a crazy college girl without double-checking her story, or that no one at Rolling Stone was fired after the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism issued a report that revealed top-to-bottom...
Agents of the Department of Justice wasted little time launching a civil-rights investigation into the death of Freddie Gray. In a press release, Attorney General Loretta Lynch explained that “Department officials heard from residents about concerns regarding the Baltimore Police Department and the lack of trust they feel exists between the police and the community.”...
A growing nationwide disdain for police officers has resulted from several highly publicized shootings of “unarmed” minority men who have resisted arrest or attacked officers. The media’s rhetoric has inflamed passions, resulting in the murders of two New York policemen seated in their cars, and the assassination of four Lakewood, Washington, officers eating in a...
George Garrett used to tell the story of a young writer who visited him in York Harbor, Maine. The writer, who had worked in a prison, wore a cap emblazoned with the letters SCUP, which stood for something like South Carolina Union of Prisons. Sharing some of George’s sense of humor—which bordered on the wicked—he...
“What apparently happened was that the Iraqi forces just showed no will to fight. . . . We can give them training, we can give them equipment; we obviously can’t give them the will to fight.” Thus did Defense Secretary Ash Carter identify the root cause of the rout of the Iraqi army in Ramadi....
Seventy years ago today, Chapman & Hall published Brideshead Revisited, written by Evelyn Waugh while he was on leave from the British Army during World War II. The book became Waugh’s most popular, and the 1981 British television adaptation remains perhaps the finest film adaptation of any book. One of the reasons for the novel’s...
After 9/11, co-President Bush, co-President Dick Cheney and the others in their repulsive regime panicked. The first thing they did was destroy our liberties with the misnamed, really traitorous USA “PATRIOT” Act. It actually stands for the “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001.” The...
It is hard to see how a country that hates its past can have much of a future. If that is so, the gay marriage referendum in Ireland last week suggests that Ireland has no future. In the aftermath of the vote, Agence France-Presse ran two articles summarizing the reactions of the Irish press. The...
“This is a Christian nation,” said the Supreme Court in 1892. “America was born a Christian nation,” echoed Woodrow Wilson. Harry Truman affirmed it: “This is a Christian nation.” But in 2009, Barack Hussein Obama begged to differ: “We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation.” Comes now a Pew Research Center survey that reveals...
The fall of Ramadi, capital of Anbar, largest province in Iraq, after a rout of the Iraqi army by a few hundred ISIS fighters using bomb-laden trucks, represents a stunning setback for U.S. policy. When President Obama declared that we shall “degrade and defeat” the Islamic State, he willed the ends, but not the means....
Michael Wessel is a Democrat and a trade negotiator who was a big backer of the NAFTA and GATT deals two decades ago. But listen to him on the supersecret Trans-Pacific Partnership; he’s one of the few people actually to have read it. Noting that President Obama has attacked those who criticized TPP for not...
The continuing unrest in Macedonia is a sustained regime change attempt, entirely driven and financed by some Western countries, Srdja Trifkovic told RT International in his latest interview. RT: The protesters have vowed to stay on the streets until the government resigns. Will it go that far? ST: It’s a classic regime change scenario as...
As Middle America rises in rage against “fast track” and the mammoth Obamatrade deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, The Wall Street Journal has located the source of the malady. Last Monday’s lead editorial began: “Here we go again. In the 1990s Pat Buchanan launched a civil war within the Republican Party on a platform...
The Islamic State (IS, aka ISIS/ISIL) advances on a major Iraqi city, and Baghdad’s forces – while outnumbering and outgunning the attackers – flee in utter disarray. Last June it was Mosul. Exactly eleven months later, last Sunday, it was Ramadi. A year of sustained U.S. effort to make the Iraqi army a viable fighting...
Jeb Bush has spent the week debating with himself over whether he would have started the war his brother launched on Iraq. When he figures it out, hopefully, our would-be president will focus in on the campaign to drag us into yet another Mideast war— this time to bring down Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria....
After leading Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture for over 30 years, Dr. Thomas Fleming is retiring. His last issue as editor is the June number. “Dr. Fleming is an intellectual giant, and American conservatism’s unsung hero,” said Rockford Institute Board Chairman Raymond Welder. “The proof is in his consistently excellent work: 30 years of...
In the Daily Beast, Senior Congressional Correspondent Tim Mak is Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs over Marco Rubio’s speech Wednesday before the Council on Foreign Relations: “The student has now become the teacher. “Sen. Marco Rubio, once viewed as a protege of presidential competitor Jeb Bush, schooled the former Florida governor Wednesday evening in the first...
A reader had written in to reproach me for “punching down” in a recent post, and on reflection I can find no reason to disagree. I like fruit that hangs low, the kind that weighs down the branches until it is within grasping distance; in fact, from childhood I remember that apples on the ground...
You might have another notion entirely. I prefer to see the fruits of Raul Castro’s semi-conversion to Catholicism before reaching conclusions as to his sincerity. “I read all the speeches of the pope, his commentaries,” said Raul on Sunday, following a meeting at the Vatican with the hugely popular Pope Francis, “and if the pope...
Srdja Trifkovic’s latest RT interview The Republic of Macedonia has become important to the U.S. policymakers in recent months, as it could be the only way for Russia’s proposed Turkish Stream pipeline to reach Central Europe. Washington does not want that to happen, as Srdja Trifkovic told RT in the latest live interview, and this...
David Cameron is the most successful Tory Party leader since Margaret Thatcher. Yet history may also record that his success led to the crackup of his country, and Great Britain’s secession from the European Union. How did Cameron’s Tories capture their majority? First, they compiled a strong record to run on. More critically, they attacked...
The war in Europe ended 70 years ago today. It was the most destructive conflict in human history, but it was not the most important. In metahistorical terms it was but the second round of Europe’s extended suicide which started at the height of the Old Continent’s economic, scientific and civilizational achievement in July 1914....
In the first quarter of 2015, in the sixth year of the historic Obama recovery, the U.S. economy grew by two-tenths of 1 percent. And that probably sugarcoats it. For trade deficits subtract from the growth of GDP, and the U.S. trade deficit that just came in was a monster. As the AP’s Martin Crutsinger...
One of the basic political problems of today is the increasing tendency of political leaders to ignore the views of those who elected them. Across the board, political leaders advance the interests of the wealthy elites who bankroll their campaigns and feather their nests after they leave politics, rather than the interests of the people...
One of the more absurd, not to mention offensive, aspects of political correctness is the increasing tendency to treat the Confederacy as the equivalent of Nazi Germany. An ad currently running on TV shows the now middle-aged actors from The Dukes of Hazzard driving a car very similar to the one they drove on the...
The U.S. Constitution is clear: “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises… To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations….” But here are the headlines from the DrudgeReport: Extreme secrecy erodes support for Obama’s trade pact… Lawmakers forced to surrender notes… Forbidden from discussing details with public… USA runs more...
Whatever the wisdom of Pamela Geller’s Mohammed cartoon event in Garland, Texas — and there’s much not to like about it, as Chronicles executive editor, Scott Richert, wrote of Charlie Hebdo’s repulsive fare after the massacre at the magazine’s office — one thing ought not be forgotten: No matter what kind of event Geller had...
A singer by the name of Masha Rasputina, who, when a good deal younger and not quite as surgically enhanced, used to thrill nascent Moscow bourgeoisie by appearing on stage in latex lingerie, has just recorded a new song. A few minutes’ research shows that the words, or “lyrics” as these banalities are known the...
Who killed Freddie Gray? According to Baltimore prosecutor Marilyn Mosby, Freddie was murdered in a conspiracy of six cops who imprisoned him in a police van and there assaulted and killed him. The killer was African-American officer Caesar Goodson, driver of the van, who, with a “depraved heart,” murdered Freddie. This is a summation of...
Here’s how it stands with Western civilization—what’s left of it, I mean—insofar as various Westerners are concerned. You keep your lip buttoned whenever foes, internal as well as external, jump up and down on you, kick you around, make known their fondest wish is to do you in, ideals and all. You hope for the...
A galloglass was a professional warrior hired by an Irish chief. The practice of employing such men became common in the decades following the Norman invasion, when it became obvious that heavily armed and mail-clad fighters were needed to contest the battlefield. One Irish contemporary described how the Gaels of Ireland had gone into battle...
A dozen years ago (give or take), I tried to commission a piece for Chronicles on how Big Business was increasingly pushing a leftist social and cultural agenda. For years, the conservative orthodoxy in the United States had been that capitalist institutions, from mom-and-pop shops up to the largest corporations, were essentially conservative. (In the...
In the aftermath of Benjamin Netanyahu’s electoral victory last March, the “two-state solution” to the Arab-Israeli conflict is off the table for the foreseeable future. Netanyahu’s public disavowal of the two-state formula (despite his subsequent denials) was not a last-minute campaign ploy. It reflected his deeply held belief that Israel can survive and prosper by...
Latin America has repeatedly failed to achieve the kind of settled distribution of property that could support a middle-class society. This is a disjunction of subtle but increasing cultural importance as the United States becomes more of a Latin country. With Jeb Bush running for the 2016 Republican nomination based in part on his ties...
“There is no more potent instrument of fate in 19th-century fiction than the legacy.” So writes a female columnist in Britain’s best newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, before going on to say some rude things about trust-fund babies. According to the lady, a will stands as a symbol of the “baleful power of crabbed old age...
Michelle Parker, a young mother of two, disappeared from her Florida home in 2011 and has never been seen again. The only suspect in her disappearance is her husband, who has left the state with the two children. Michelle’s mother, who has not seen her grandchildren since 2011, has repeatedly petitioned the Florida legislature to...
In March, France was given a good spanking by the European Committee on Social Rights (ECSR). The issue under litigation was France’s brutishness in allowing the corporal punishment of children. The mission of the ECSR is to judge whether the signatories to the European Social Charter are in conformity with all of the charter’s provisions. ...