Year: 2016

“If his poll numbers hold, Trump will be there six months from now when the Sweet 16 is cut to the Final Four, and he will likely be in the finals.” My prediction, in July of 2015, looks pretty good right now. Herewith, a second prediction. Republican wailing over his prospective nomination aside, Donald Trump...

Friday evening’s Donald Trump rally in Chicago was broken up by a foul-mouthed mob that infiltrated the hall and forced the cancelation of the event to prevent violence and bloodshed. Brownshirt tactics worked. The mob, triumphant, rejoiced. And the reaction of Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and John Kasich? All three Republican rivals blamed—Donald Trump. With...

It is by now a familiar pattern. The left begins targeting a conservative figure for promoting “hate.” Soon, organized protests pop up, designed to prevent the promoter of “hate” from speaking in public and to prevent the public from hearing him. Any opposition to the concerted attempt to silence the conservative figure is then cited...

The organized, violent, Mexican-flag waving mob that forced Donald Trump to cancel a rally in Chicago underscored the desperation of the globalist oligarchy as the Trump campaign advances toward the Republican presidential nomination. The mob was apparently backed by the George Soros-funded MoveOn.org, and a mass media that has spewed propaganda casting Trump as Hitler,...

I knew the real Ronald Reagan. In 1976, I was a single mother and young politician who risked everything to support him against Gerald Ford, a sitting Republican president. Four years later I helped deliver the key state of Pennsylvania to President Reagan, then I served beside him in the White House and as one...

Tuning in last night, one could be forgiven for thinking the United States (or at least Miami) was no longer functionally an English-speaking land. Taking place under a backdrop proclaiming El Debate Demócrata, the exchange pretty much dispelled any lingering doubt that the Democrats are in any sense a party serving the interests of a...

Narrow victories in the Kentucky caucuses and the Louisiana primary, the largest states decided on Saturday, have moved Donald Trump one step nearer to the nomination. Primaries in Michigan, Mississippi and Idaho on March 8, and in Florida, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina on March 15, may prove decisive. If Marco Rubio does not...

Reacting to the rise of Donald Trump, National Review’s Rich Lowry recently called on the Republican Party to get over its inordinate attachment to Ronald Reagan and his legacy. He suggests Reagan’s heirs must devise new policies to broaden the GOP’s appeal, and (implicitly) take down Trump.    Meanwhile, such conventional Republican candidates for president...

Donald Trump “appeals to racism.” “[F]rom the beginning . . . his campaign has profited from voter prejudice and hatred” and represents an “authoritarian assault upon democracy.” If Speaker Paul Ryan wishes to be “on the right side of history . . . he must condemn Mr. Trump clearly and comprehensively. The same goes for...

Not for the first time the government of Germany is acting as if it owned Europe. On two occasions in the 20th century it sought to occupy most of Europe; this time, with almost equal arrogance, it is trying to bully the rest of Europe into not resisting the ongoing Muslim occupation. The consequences of...

Republican front runner Donald Trump has been criticized for not being “conservative” in the manner of the Beltway Right, for changing his positions (especially on abortion), and for his past associations with Democratic politicians. Trump-haters frequently claim that The Donald has no fixed views, is merely opportunistically taking advantage of popular anger with political elites,...

To Guvner J.E.B. Bush Floridy or maybe Conneckticut Dear Guvner Bush, I know we have not always seen I to I, as they say, but fair is fair, as they say, and I feel it is my duty to let you know that one of your opponents has been making fun of you and misreporting...

Is rock music truly an art?  This question has never met with a straightforward answer, either by the musicians themselves or the many who venerate them, and it hangs over the massive bulk of the Experience Music Project and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame here in Seattle.  The EMP is a 140,000-square-foot...

The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding, by Eric Nelson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press; 390 pp., $29.95).  Historians have long noted the seeming paradox that the Framers of the U.S. Constitution invested the office of the American president with greater powers than those enjoyed by the English king, whose “yoke” they had just thrown...

The fate of conservatism is thought to be hanging in the balance these days, and with it, perhaps, the fate of the country, of a political party, of presidential candidates, of a movement. Well, good.  Now is the time for reevaluation or, dare I say it, reformation. “Conservatism isn’t just passivity,” wrote Joseph Sobran in...

“Beautiful losers” was the phrase Sam Francis borrowed from Leonard Cohen to sum up the failure of the American conservative movement.  Beautiful or not, American conservatives have been losers from their movement’s inception, and the same can be said for every conservative movement since the French Revolution and going back at least to the Enlightenment,...

Virtue signaling is a term that has recently caught on in Britain.  Coined in The Spectator (the magazine I work for) by James Bartholomew, it refers to the way that people seem to think that being good means expressing fashionable liberal opinions.  To be considered—or to consider yourself—virtuous, you don’t have to do; you just...

The Big Short Produced by Plan B Entertainment  and Regency Enterprises  Directed by Adam McKay  Screenplay by Charles Randolph  and Adam McKay  Distributed by Paramount Pictures  In the 90’s of the last century, I used to supplement my academic income by coaching investment bankers and corporate CEOs.  My job was to help them prepare presentations...

In his article on his trip to Rome (“Buried in History,” Correspondence, January), Jeff Minick comments on the apparent decline of attendance at Mass.  Italians for centuries have avoided the Mass, puzzling other Catholics when Italian immigrants began arriving in the United States.  Italians expressed their faith mainly in large public processions such as those...

The reports of China’s pending economic collapse have been greatly exaggerated.  There are signs that the world’s second-largest economy is entering a period of long-term restructuring marked by a slowdown, but the process is neither unexpected nor chaotic.  A sober look at China’s economic transition will allow us to assess its impact on the country’s...

Aaron D. Wolf’s “Drafting Our Daughters” (Heresies, January) is an excellent article.  Having served three tours in Vietnam as an artillery surveyor, forward observer, and civil-affairs team chief, I’ll make some additions. On December 3, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter demonstrated an incredible ignorance of infantry combat reality and a possible hatred of 18-year-old females. ...

Two Oregon ranchers, Steven Dwight Hammond and Dwight Lincoln Hammond, Jr., have been at the center of ethical and cultural clashes for several years.  Even while a standoff purportedly held in their honor between armed militia and the federal government was occurring in January, the ranchers reported to the Bureau of Prisons to serve five-year...

Forrest McDonald, the great historian of the American founding and early Republic, passed away on January 19 at the age of 89.  Born in Orange, Texas, McDonald earned his doctorate from the University of Texas-Austin in 1955, and taught at Brown University, Wayne State University (Michigan), and the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.  He retired to...

When I was very young my father would take me to the Panatheniac Stadium, built from Pentelic marble in Athens for the first modern Olympics in 1896.  This was in the late 1940’s, and the stadium, which held 70,000, was packed.  The event was track and field, and only amateurs competed.  My father had been...

Reports that North Korea tested a hydrogen bomb in early January caused consternation bordering on panic in both Washington and the East Asian capitals.  That reaction appears to have been a bit excessive.  The available evidence indicates that the explosion was far too small to be a thermonuclear device.  Most likely, it was the test...

Recently, I watched The Maltese Falcon (1941), featuring Bogart, Greenstreet, and Mary Astor.  This prompted me to reexamine, after many years, the work of Dashiell Hammett, on whose novel the film is based.  I was unable to find Falcon in my library, but I did discover The Glass Key and The Continental Op, so I...

In an essay first published in Chronicles in 2006 and collected in the Chronicles Press volume Life, Literature, and Lincoln, the late Tom Landess relates a story about Arizona Sen. John McCain.  While stumping in South Carolina for the Republican presidential nomination, the Mad Bomber encountered a textile-mill worker who was not a fan of...

The first four Republican contests—Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada—produced record turnouts. While the prospect of routing Hillary Clinton and recapturing the White House brought out the true believers, it was Donald Trump’s name on the ballot and his calls for economic patriotism, border security, and an end to imperial wars that brought out...

The year was 1964.  I was 13 years old.  Sitting in the family room of my parents’ home in Yorktown Heights, New York, with the TV on, I picked up the envelope that had arrived in the mail that day.  I had sent away for information to all sorts of political parties and organizations in...

The December 2, 2015, killings of 14 people in San Bernardino, California, by Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, is the sort of story that garners the label “only in America,” with plot twists that include arranged marriage, Facebook jihad, and irrelevant gun laws.  It also includes Enrique Marquez, Jr., an Hispanic-American. Farook...

Many conservative Christians have reservations, at least, about supporting Republican front runner Donald Trump, and not without reason. He has had a less than completely convincing conversion to a pro-life position; has said (more than once) that Planned Parenthood has done some good (on screening for cervical and breast cancer, for instance), while declaring that...

In a Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump race—which, the Beltway keening aside, seems the probable outcome of the primaries—what are the odds the GOP can take the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court? If Republicans can unite, not bad, not bad at all. Undeniably, Democrats open with a strong hand. There is that famed...

As the returns came in from South Carolina Saturday night, showing Donald Trump winning a decisive victory, a note of nervous desperation crept into the commentary. Political analysts pointed out repeatedly that if all of the votes for Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Jeb Bush and Ben Carson were added up, they far exceeded...

“A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian,” Pope Francis declared on his flight back to Rome last week.The political implications of his statement have been considered in some detail in recent days, but his assertion also needs to be examined in the light...

Another week has come and gone, and here are some highlights and cultural trends. Celebrity Apprentices Here’s a lede you didn’t imagine five years ago: The Pope and Donald Trump are engaged in a public feud over illegal immigration.  Trump is “not Christian,” says the pontiff.  This latest brouhaha comes with Pope Francis’s visit to...

Republican hawks are aflutter today over China’s installation of anti-aircraft missiles on Woody Island in the South China Sea. But do these Republicans, good free-traders all, realize their own indispensable role in converting an indigent China into the mighty and menacing power that seeks to push us out of Asia? Last year, China ran up...

In the days and weeks ahead President Obama will face an important decision: whether to allow the conflict in Syria to escalate by approving Turkey’s and Saudi Arabia’s direct intervention, or to come to terms with the continued survival and expanding area of control of the government of Bashar al-Assad. Informed commentators note that this...