Donald J. Trump is the political issue of our time. Yet Mr. Trump is, in a very real sense, peripheral to present events. He is a result, not the effective cause; a symptom, not the disease. The significant thing is not the rebel candidate but the crisis of the Republican Party, so long arriving, which...
In the final weeks of spring the Islamic State finally seemed to be in serious trouble. Its capital of Raqqa came under simultaneous pressure from forces supported by the Syrian government advancing from Palmyra in the southwest, and from the U.S.-supported (mainly Kurdish) Syrian Democratic Forces to the north. The scene was set for a...
Some of us have long predicted the breakup of the European Union. The Cousins appear to have just delivered the coup de grace. While Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain in the EU, England voted for independence. These people, with their unique history, language and culture, want to write their own laws and rule...
As some of you may have heard, the Cleveland Cavaliers defeated the Golden State Warriors on Sunday, June 19 to win the NBA Championship, making the Cavs the first Cleveland team to win a major sports championship since Jim Brown and Frank Ryan and Gary Collins and the rest of the Cleveland Browns defeated the...
The news was spread far and wide last weekend that George F. Will is no longer registered as a Republican and is now politically “unaffiliated,” owing to the GOP’s acceptance (however grudging) of Donald Trump as its presidential nominee. “Far and wide” is probably a good deal further than the columnist’s reputation, or even name...
Stripped of its excesses, Donald Trump’s Wednesday speech contains all the ingredients of a campaign that can defeat Hillary Clinton this fall. Indeed, after the speech ended Clinton was suddenly defending the Clinton Foundation against the charge that it is a front for a racket for her family’s enrichment. The specific charges in Trump’s indictment...
“Peers v. People”: the EU referendum campaign appeared as a remake of the great debate a century ago, and like most remakes it was not up to the original. The recast Peers certainly filled their roles, and robes. “The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters, / The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and...
“I am prepared to stay here until hell freezes over,’’ declared Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) on Wednesday. Apparently, hell froze over at 2:05 PM Eastern on Thursday, when the Occupy Washington Democrats who call themselves the people’s representatives walked out of the House chamber to refresh their deodorant and head home to their districts for...
Some 50 State Department officials have signed a memo calling on President Obama to launch air and missile strikes on the Damascus regime of Bashar Assad. A “judicious use of stand-off and air weapons,” they claim, “would undergird and drive a more focused and hard-nosed U.S.-led diplomatic process.” In brief, to strengthen the hand of...
by Edward Lozansky and Jim Jatras Since the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy could almost have been designed to undermine our national interests. Whether under Republican George W. Bush or Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, we have seen “regime changes” and “color revolutions,” facilitation of global jihadism while claiming to combat...
If the cliches hold—nothing succeeds like success, the past is prologue—this generation will not likely see an end to the jihadist terror that was on display at Pulse in Orlando on Sunday. For terrorism has proven to be among the most cost-effective and successful strategies of war that the world has ever seen. Consider. The...
The neocons are gloating that Donald Trump’s poll numbers have slumped. “Donald Trump is in the midst of a fairly dramatic collapse in public opinion polls,” enthuses Peter Wehner in Commentary. “What seems to be happening isn’t that Hillary Clinton is on the rise. Rather, Trump’s popularity is dangerously low for a presumptive presidential nominee...
President Barack Obama’s tirade on June 14 was filled with angry passion. His rhetoric was not directed against the perpetrator of the Orlando attack and his ilk, however, but against the (unnamed) GOP nominee and others who do not subscribe to Obama’s fundamental views on the nature of Islam and his “strategy” of confronting the...
On Saturday night, Omar Mateen was a loner and a loser. Sunday, he was immortal, by his standards, a hero. Mateen had ended his life in a blaze of gunfire and glory. Now everybody knew his name. He had been embraced by ISIS. His face was on every TV screen. His 911 call to Orlando...
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a U.S. citizen and the son of Muslim immigrants, was investigated by the FBI for connections to Islamic radicals. They dropped the investigation. He and his brother killed three people and injured 264 others at the Boston Marathon in April 2013. Syed Farook, a U.S. citizen and the son of Muslim immigrants, was...
Orlando’s Little Sodom was shot up early Sunday morning by a Muslim who thought that pleasing Allah by murdering homosexuals was more important than being a husband, father, or living person. Before police bulldozed their way into one of the Pulse nightclub’s several spacious bathrooms where Omar Mateen was holed up and shot him dead,...
“Never retreat. Never explain. Get it done and let them howl.” Donald Trump has internalized the maxim Benjamin Jowett gave to his students at Balliol who would soon be running the empire. And in rejecting demands that he apologize for his remarks about the La Raza judge presiding over the class-action suit against Trump University,...
India’s prime minister Narendra Modi paid his second visit to the White House in two years on June 8. President Barak Obama was greatly pleased by Modi’s stated willingness to proceed with ratification of the Paris agreement to limit greenhouse gases, and this was the theme duly emphasized in the Western media coverage of their meeting....
Gerald Celente likes to mock “The Brilliant” Larry Summers, top economic guru to the Clinton and Obama administrations, and therefore a primary architect of America’s economic decay, especially of its middle class. Greg Palast detailed Summers’ long and close ties to Goldman Sachs, the primary beneficiary of the 2008 TARP bank bailout of Wall St....
Before the lynching of The Donald proceeds, what exactly was it he said about that Hispanic judge? Stated succinctly, Donald Trump said U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who is presiding over a class-action suit against Trump University, is sticking it to him. And the judge’s bias is likely rooted in the fact that he is...
“The Security of the U.S. & the Peace of the World” by Jim Jatras and Anthony T. Salvia One cannot help but wonder if Hillary Rodham Clinton is smart enough to be President. She evidently learned nothing from her attempt a few weeks ago to play the “woman card” against Donald Trump. He responded by...
Donald Trump already is the presumptive Republican nominee for president and easily will win Tuesday’s California primary. Yet he has continued to campaign in the state, which has revealed the top issue of this campaign: Trump vs. tyranny. Every rally he has held in the Golden State has been met with protesters trying to shut...
“Clinton to Paint Trump as a Risk to World Order.” Thus did page one of Thursday’s New York Times tee up Hillary Clinton’s big San Diego speech on foreign policy. Inside the Times, the headline was edited to underline the point: “Clinton to Portray Trump as Risk to the World.” The Times promoted the speech...
For nearly 200 years the United States and Mexico coexisted as a series of antonyms separated by a desert. The United States was prosperous and free. Mexico was poor and despotic. For a time, the United States was the preeminent middle-class society. Mexico has been a society of extremes. For most Americans, Mexico was a...
In 1996, Barry Alan Shain published his Myth of American Individualism: The Protestant Origins of American Political Thought. It was a book that should have shaken professional conservatism to its foundations. At the time Patrick J. Buchanan was a standard-bearer for an America bound by a common cultural and religious tradition and was being resisted...
The Jungle Book Produced and distributed by Disney Pictures Directed by Jon Favreau Screenplay by Justin Marks from Rudyard Kipling’s book Midnight Special Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Written and directed by Jeff Nichols Are the Disney executives rethinking their political correctness? You know, their belief that homosexuals and transgender folk are uniformly good...
Bolling Hall has squatted on its plot since the 14th century, hunched against the wind and rain of the West Riding—a North Country architectural essay in dark yellow sandstone looking warily down a steep hillside onto Bradford’s Vale. Old though the building is, the estate’s foundations go deeper than Domesday, when Conqueror companion-in-arms Ilbert de...
What follows is not an anthropometric description of France, but neither does it reflect the fancy of the author: It is what one can see of France from a certain distance, which blurs the finer details but allows the main features to stand out. When looking at the Great Wall of China from a certain...
To the extent that a man may be judged by his enemies, Donald Trump is a very good man, indeed. And the more extended and successful his campaign becomes, the more it proves that everything he has ever said about the conjoined political and media establishments in America is spot on, beginning with his charge...
The English and Their History, by Robert Tombs (New York: Knopf; 1,024 pp., $45.00). This superb, and superbly readable, book is a model of historical writing for a general readership, outstanding for its concision, clarity, and even-handedness. The strong narrative component easily accommodates a tremendous amount of detail without ever becoming weighed down by it,...
Philippe de Villiers, a French entrepreneur, politician, and author, belongs to what one might call the New French Resistance, a group of contemporary French patriots for whom Paris, not Vichy, symbolizes treason against both the French Republic and the historic French nation. Descended from an aristocratic family in the Vendée, Villiers is the founder and...
The response of the Western European governments, and of a substantial portion of what is called the European elite—roughly speaking, the upper-middle classes—to the invasion of the Continent from the east and south must be among the most unusual and perverse spectacles in human history. For nearly a year now, the world has looked on...
Well, shootfire: That didn’t work. U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) is against requiring women to register for Selective Service in our Brave New Military. Accordingly, he proposed an amendment to the 2017 defense-spending bill that accomplishes the opposite of what he believes. The idea, Hunter claimed, was that he didn’t want the executive branch to...
Tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran, which have frequently flared over the years, reached full intensity this winter when the Saudi government executed 47 regime opponents, including the prominent Shi’ite cleric Nimr al-Nimr. Immediately, there were riots in Iran directed against Saudi targets, culminating in the burning of the Saudi embassy—an incident that even Iran’s...
I was recently perplexed to see in the news that Harvard, the oldest institution of higher learning in the nation, had declared that, though master has no etymological relation to slavery (but rather to magister), the word would nevertheless be abandoned as a title for a resident supervisor of student housing, and be replaced by...
It’s nine o’clock on Tuesday. First into the classroom today are my Advanced Placement European History students. I begin the class, as I always do, with a prayer, and then deliver a lecture on such Enlightenment luminaries as Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Diderot. (Given the irreligious beliefs of these figures, the irony of prayer is not...
In his March Correspondence, “EMP (‘Are You Experienced?’),” Christopher Sandford asks if rock music is truly an art. The Oxford Dictionary defines the arts as “various branches of creative activity such as painting, music, literature and dance.” The answer, therefore, is an obvious yes. So what is Mr. Sandford really getting at? He claims some...
The March issue (“Against Ideology”) was a brilliantly perceptive one, notably as it stresses the utmost importance, for any true conservative, of defending loyalties to local mores and traditions, small hometowns and family farms, regional cultures—things that have passed the test of time and matter most to real people. With such ideas I could not...
Sing me back home with a song I used to hear Make all my memories come alive Take me away and turn back the years Sing me back home before I die Merle Haggard was a real American. At its best, his music was folk art, Americana poetry, each song capturing a snapshot of his...
On April 27, Donald Trump gave a long speech on foreign policy. It was his first attempt to present his views on world affairs in detail. Refreshingly, it contained no reference to promoting freedom, democracy, and “human rights”; confronting tyranny and evil; or making the world a better place in the image of the exceptional...
A substitute teacher in a public school in what is, by today’s standards, still a relatively socially conservative part of the country uses “an anatomical word during a teaching lesson.” She is fired, and the story goes viral. Just another battle in the never-ending culture war, right? Yes—but not in the way you might think....
A recent story in the British press about Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, the English author, journalist, and broadcaster, in retirement at the age of 92, prompted me to order one of his books, Democracy Needs Aristocracy, first published in 2004. It is an excellent work, and one I wish I’d consulted when I was working up...
E.M. Forster infamously said that, if he had to betray his country or a friend, he hoped he would betray the former. He was cheered for it by Oxford swells who had seen their elders slaughtered in the trenches during World War I, and by fellow homosexuals whose proclivities were illegal at the time. This...
I bought my wife tickets to a Bruce Springsteen concert for Christmas. This may sound like the stereotypical man-gift—a present a husband bestows on his long-suffering spouse because he wants it for himself, like a riding lawn mower—but Amy really did want to see The Boss in concert again. Twenty-eight years ago, in our sophomore...
A boyhood pastime when I was growing up was building radios. We did it in Cub Scouts and again, at a more sophisticated level, in Boy Scouts. Various kits were available, but we all started with a simple crystal set. It seemed almost magical that with a few components, essentially wire and a crystal, and...
A visit to Cyprus helps to dispel the myth that the British Empire died of natural causes half a century ago. It did nothing of the sort. The empire rebranded itself as the Commonwealth of Nations, and carried on much as before. The Commonwealth countries—53 in all, including two, Rwanda and Mozambique, that were never...
In his op-ed in the Washington Post, Chris Grayling, leader of the House of Commons, made the case for British withdrawal from the European Union—in terms Americans can understand. Would you accept, Grayling asks, an American Union of North and South America, its parliament sitting in Panama, with power to impose laws on the United...
Martin Hacklett is English. He lives in London. His father, who used to work on the Thames, has been unemployed for 15 years. His elder brother has been in and out of prison. School consisted of the usual encounters with bullies and institutional indifference, and now he’s working as a bicycle courier, weaving his way...
The stunning success of the Trump campaign has upended what has passed for conservatism lo these many years and opened up new vistas for the American Right. Many if not most readers are familiar with the story of how the neoconservatives emigrated from the far left and colonized the conservative movement, hijacking what had been...