Donald Trump has a new best friend. “President-elect Trump, thank you for your warm friendship and your clear-cut support of Israel,” gushed Bibi Netanyahu, after he berated John Kerry in a fashion that would once have resulted in a rupture of diplomatic relations. Netanyahu accused Kerry of “colluding” in and “orchestrating” an anti-Israel, stab-in-the-back resolution...
Year: 2016
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Barack Backhands Bibi
Did the community organizer from Harvard Law just deliver some personal payback to the IDF commando? So it would seem. By abstaining on that Security Council resolution declaring Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem illegal and invalid, raged Bibi Netanyahu, President Obama “failed to protect Israel in this gang-up at the UN,...
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Angela Delenda Est
Having written dozens of articles on the subject of Islamic terrorism and Europe’s ongoing suicide, following the latest jihadist carnage in Berlin I find myself lost for words—unable to think of anything useful that has not already appeared on this blog. Let me explain . . . In August of last year I wrote that...
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Trump Triumph Means Chronicles Wins, National Review Loses
Are you sick of winning yet? I’m not! And one of the biggest winners is Chronicles Magazine. While one of the biggest losers is National Review, a shadow of its former self, the great magazine I grew up with in the 1960s to the 1980s. NR besmirched itself by attacking Trump all along, especially its February...
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The Real Saboteurs of a Trump Foreign Policy
The never-Trumpers are never going to surrender the myth that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the hacking of Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and the Democratic National Committee to defeat Clinton and elect Donald Trump. Their investment in the myth is just too huge. For Clinton and her campaign, it is the only way...
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The Globalists go for Broke: The Russian E-mail Hacking Story
The Democrats’ hissy fit over the Trump election victory continues, with the usual suspects piling on with claims that the Kremlin hacked the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign’s e-mails in order to help Trump get elected. Obama’s deputy national security advisor, Ben Rhodes, upped the ante by claiming that Putin personally directed the...
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Trump’s Global Vision and Challenges
Translated excerpts from Srdja Trifkovic’s latest interview with the RTRS (the Bosnian-Serb Republic public media service). [Video] Q: There’s a whole host of generals among Trump’s appointees. Is he creating a junta? ST: First of all, we should differentiate between political generals and true soldiers. Men like Wesley Clark and Colin Powell, or even David Petraeus,...
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Lessons of Aleppo—for Trump
In this world, it is often dangerous to be an enemy of the United States, said Henry Kissinger in 1968, but to be a friend is fatal. The South Vietnamese would come to appreciate the insight. So it is today with Aleppo, where savage reprisals against U.S.-backed rebels are taking place in that hellhole of...
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Europe’s Submission
On December 9, Geert Wilders was found guilty by a Dutch court of “incitement to anti-minority discrimination.” His crime was asking a crowd in The Hague in 2014, “Do you want more or fewer Moroccans in this city and in the Netherlands?” “Fewer, fewer!” came the reply, to which he responded: “I’ll take care of...
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Will Trump Defy McCain & Marco?
When word leaked that Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson, a holder of the Order of Friendship award in Putin’s Russia, was Donald Trump’s choice for secretary of state, John McCain had this thoughtful response: “Vladimir Putin is a thug, a bully, and a murderer and anybody else who describes him as anything else is lying.” Yet,...
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Has the Trumpian Revolution Begun?
The wailing and keening over the choice of Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to head the EPA appears to be a lead indicator of a coming revolution far beyond Reagan’s. “Trump Taps Climate Skeptic For Top Environmental Post,” said the Wall Street Journal. “Climate Change Denial,” bawled a disbelieving New York Times, which urged the...
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A Christmas Desert
On Sunday, I got to hear a wonderful Christmas concert by the Cleveland Orchestra. Particular highlights included the three carol medleys performed by the Orchestra: Robert Wendel’s “Christmas a la Valse,” Malcolm Arnold’s “Fantasy on Christmas Carols,” and Leroy Anderson’s “A Christmas Festival.” There was nothing incongruous about one of the world’s premier orchestras playing...
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Preparing for a Turbulent Four Years
During the campaign for the presidency, the major media were relentless in their attacks on Donald Trump. Reading the Washington Post daily I couldn’t believe the news coverage. It was one anti-Trump story after another. The reporters didn’t even bother to disguise what clearly were opinion pieces, passing them off as news. “Racist,” “sexist,” “anti-Semite”—these...
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Is Trump Calling Out Xi Jinping?
Like a bolt of lightning, that call of congratulations from Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen to President-elect Donald Trump illuminated the Asian landscape. We can see clearly now the profit and loss statement from more than three decades of accommodating and appeasing China, since Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger made their historic journey in 1972. What...
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Erdogan’s Syrian U-Turn
On November 29 Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan raised many eyebrows when he declared that Turkey’s military involvement in Syria, which started in the last week of August, had the objective “to end the rule of the tyrant al-Assad who terrorizes with state terror.” He even added that Turkey did not intervene there “for any...
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Carpe Diem, Mr. Trump!
Last week I attended a legal conference hosted by a well-positioned law firm with many significant corporate clients. What I heard there was surprising, and encouraging. An expert on tax policy declared that Trump had been substantially right about trade, and that Paul Ryan’s tax reform package contained provisions that could, and maybe even would,...
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Trump’s SCOTUS Nominee: Don’t Trust, Just Verify
As I wrote on the Day After the Election, it is incumbent upon America’s Deplorables not to sit idly by, content with a mere victory in a presidential contest, as if suddenly all of our problems are solved. The rabid mainstream media, still licking its wounds, is working 24/7 to undermine any agenda item that...
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Europeans Increasingly Skeptical of the EU
Excerpts from Srdja Trifkovic’s latest Sputnik Radio interview, in which he comments on the findings of a new poll which indicates that an increasing number of Europeans want their countries to leave the European Union. More than half (53%) of the respondents in Italy said they would like their government to hold a referendum on...
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A P.C. Little Christmas
Christmas is a time of wonder, when the best and the worst of our sputtering culture is on display. For every magnificent four-part rendition of Stille Nacht, we seem destined to endure umpteen episodes of godless grinches screaming about tolerance and diversity in order to keep authentic Christmas symbols out of the public square during...
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A Complete Man: Remembering Terry Kohler
During the late 1950’s, Terry J. Kohler was a jet pilot with the U.S. Air Force, flying T-33 fighters and B-47 bombers with the Strategic Air Command. Like most others of that tribe whom I have met, the experience gave him an almost startling directness of manner. On meeting him, you quickly became aware of...
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Christmas Fruitcakes
Angela Merkel isn’t as nutty as she sounds, or so she would have you to believe. She simply wants to have her Obst kuchen (“fruitcake”) and eat it too. The Obst kuchen, in this case, is liberalism, whereby people from every tribe under heaven—including the Islamic ones—live happily together in the Motherland, and all ethnic,...
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Signs of Hope in the East
In the United States, the forces of the cultural left have been particularly aggressive in seeking to diminish the influence of our Christian heritage on American society. The Obama administration has led the campaign for the complete separation of religion from the public square. It has used executive orders, regulatory rule-making authority, and the bully...
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Collateral America
The Mirror Test is John Kael Weston’s testament and witness to seven years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Weston worked as a State Department political officer alongside U.S. Marines and Army soldiers in some of the most dangerous areas of both countries, advising—and sometimes overruling—American military commanders in what became political nation-building operations growing...
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Continuing Conversation
My name was invoked by Scott P. Richert in the October issue (What the Editors Are Reading), in reference to my comments on the avant-garde at a John Randolph Club years ago, during which I asked the rhetorical question, “What is creativity without editing?” Had someone actually replied, “Stephen King,” I would not have been...
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The Easiness of Being Liberal
Liberals are keen to sniff out and condemn “privilege,” by which they mean the superior education, the affluence, the influence, and the comfort enjoyed by well-connected, well-born people, usually imagined by them to be political conservatives. None of this has anything to do with privilege in the historical sense of the word, of course, but...
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The Twilight’s Last Gleaming
There are so many difficulties with our National Anthem that it’s hard to keep up with them all. But the explicit question that it asks—whether we see the Stars and Stripes still flying after the twilight’s last gleaming—is actually a pertinent question today, and not only one about the bombardment of Fort McHenry in 1814....
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A Confederacy of Dunces
In the final weeks of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, as our modern-day Madame Defarge’s poll numbers declined slowly but steadily in rhythm to the drip-drip-drip of purloined emails by WikiLeaks, the Clinton campaign settled on a strategy and clung to it for dear life. No one from the campaign would confirm or deny the...
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Taking Back the Culture
By the time you read this, “the most important election of our lifetime” will be headed for the history books. If the last six most important elections of our lifetime are any indication, however, we will once again have a chance to vote in the most important election of our lifetime in 2020. Or perhaps...
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A Sense of Place
I was born and reared in a small Michigan town known as the home of both Gen. George Armstrong Custer and the La-Z-Boy chair company, an accident of local history most people in town do not find strange. The juxtaposition of the annihilation of Custer’s forces at the Battle of Little Big Horn with the...
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Gone to Pot
It is seven o’clock on a peaceful late-summer evening here in suburban Seattle, and I’m sitting in my back garden smoking marijuana. Passively smoking, I should add, lest I shock any reader by this sorry lapse, but smoking nonetheless. This time of year, my property is especially fragrant with the acrid smell of pot, and...
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Start Somewhere
I very much enjoyed Chilton Williamson’s “Class and Identity” (In Our Time, October), especially its vivid description of the leveling steamroller operated by liberalism across generations. Mr. Williamson also quite properly points out that the resulting individualistic, classless society still cannot wholly eradicate the longing for real distinctions and concrete identities. However, I think he...
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What the Editors Are Reading
I read Goethe’s Faust in college and had not looked into it again until the other day when, prompted by curiosity roused by Willi Jasper’s new book Lusitania: The Cultural History of a Catastrophe, I pulled a copy of the play off my shelf and began rereading with the idea of forming a better sense...
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The German Resistance
Certain actions should never be taboo in a modern Western democracy. These include public criticism and protest of government policies, as well as presenting alternatives to those policies. Yet in present-day Germany, citizens are slandered, censored, and persecuted by their own government and media for doing just that. In early 2013, an economist, a former...
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Fake News and War Party Lies
“I have in my possession a secret map, made in Germany by Hitler’s government—by the planners of the New World Order,” FDR told the nation in his Navy Day radio address of Oct. 27, 1941. “It is a map of South America as Hitler proposes to reorganize it. The geographical experts of Berlin, however, have...
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Corsair Ace Ken Walsh
Americans have always loved their real-life Horatio Alger characters. They fired our imagination as children and were worthy of emulating. I hate to see many of those who were an inspiration to me disappear from our histories. A perfect example is Kenneth Ambrose Walsh. Ken Walsh was born in 1916 in Brooklyn, New York. His...
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Books in Brief
Polarized: Making Sense of a Divided America, by James E. Campbell (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; 313 pp., $29.95). This book is probably too academic to suit the taste of the general reader. It is, however, eminently sensible and notably well written for an academic text. Campbell argues that the polarization of American politics began...
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Beating Affirmative Action
Is the composition of the Supreme Court the be-all and end-all of important societal conflicts? Are there effective ways that conservatives can address these conflicts—manifest in political battles over such things as affirmative action—apart from the Court? The Supreme Court’s decision in Fisher v. University of Texas, handed down on June 23, means affirmative action...
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In the Beginning . . .
“Little lamb, Who made thee?” —William Blake This latest is vintage Tom Wolfe. As in Radical Chic and The Painted Word, he casts his uniquely probing eye on fashionable orthodoxy and its establishment priests—in this case the strange religious cult of evolution. While evolution may presume, sometimes dubiously, to describe the world, it can explain...
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Global Challenges in 2017
In terms of any traditionally understood calculus of national security, the United States is the most invulnerable country in the world. America is armed to the teeth, sheltered on two sides by oceans, and supremely capable of projecting her power to the distant shores. Unlike Russia, China, and India, she has no territorial disputes with...
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A Useful Tool
The Birth of a Nation Produced by Argent Pictures Directed by Nate Parker Screenplay by Nate Parker and Jean Celestine Distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures Nate Parker has entitled his debut film The Birth of a Nation. He chose his title as a rebuke of D.W. Griffith’s groundbreaking 1915 film. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation...
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Mr. Trump: America Doesn’t Need Tiny, Corrupt Montenegro in NATO
During the presidential campaign Donald Trump horrified the bipartisan foreign policy mandarinate by suggesting that NATO was “obsolete” and useless against the only real threat faced by Europe: the massive influx of violent Muslims applauded by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the “EuSSR” bureaucracy in Brussels, and the Obama Administration. Trump also indicated that America’s treaty...
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Any Way You Put It
You are likely reading this after the election, and already one of the following three scenarios is unfolding. One: In a Brexit-like upset, Donald J. Trump mobilizes a coalition of Flyover Country “deplorables,” traditional nonvoters, and those who either lied to or refused to answer pollsters, and is elected President of these United States. The...
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How to Win Fame and Fortune
American writers are on a roll. Bob Dylan wins the Nobel Prize for Literature (for backward children), and Paul Beatty the Booker Prize, the first American to do so because only Brits were considered in previous years. Beatty was the unanimous choice, and it’s easy to see why: He’s a black American, the book is...
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It Just Did Happen Here
Whichever candidate wins the presidency on November 8 (this issue went to press on November 2), the American political establishment—the Democratic and Republican parties combined as America Consolidated—will have decisively lost the presidential elections. That is the meaning of the director of the FBI’s public decision to reconsider the agency’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email...
Issue
December 2016
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“Dangerous Games”: Russia-U.S. Tensions Escalate
In October, Yevgeny Kiselyov, Moscow’s TV propaganda hitman in chief, attacked U.S. policy over Syria, warning his audience that American “impudence” could take on what he called “nuclear dimensions.” Russian warships were on their way to the Syrian coast, Kiselyov noted, to counter potential U.S. air strikes against the Syrian military. He pointedly reminded his...
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Populist-Nationalist Tide Rolls On
Now that the British have voted to secede from the European Union and America has chosen a president who has never before held public office, the French appear to be following suit. In Sunday’s runoff to choose a candidate to face Marine Le Pen of the National Front in next spring’s presidential election, the center-right...
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Abdul Artan: Muslim Snowflake
Another “lone wolf” Muslim has committed an act of terrorism on an American campus, ramming a crowd with a vehicle before slashing fellow-students with a butcher knife and receiving a fatal bullet for his reward. Fittingly, the New York Times, in reporting this barbarous and outrageous crime at Ohio State University, devoted three paragraphs to...
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Pound: Barometers and Engines
What has become of poets and prose-stylists, essayists and novelists, composers and painters, philosophers and theologians, in this poststructuralist era, when everything (especially art) has been politicized and monetized? In this, our late-stage, moribund, materialist “sensate culture,” in which thought itself is a commodity? Is there any value to be found in an essay, a...
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Fidel Castro: Into the Dustbin
In the early years of the second half of the 20th century, some time between Stalin’s death in March 1953 and the Hungarian uprising in October 1956, it had ceased to be fashionable for Western leftist intellectuals to be uncritically supportive of the late Soviet dictator and his bloody legacy. The search was on for...