The Department of Education must be destroyed. This holdover from the Carter administration costs us $80 billion per year, for which we have received in return a centralized educational bureaucracy beholden to wildly leftist teachers’ unions and the proliferation of ignorance. Cut this monstrous budget in half, and federal spending on education is still not...
One symptom of decline and confusion at the end of an age is the prevalent misuse of terms, of designations that have been losing their meanings and are thus no longer real. One such term is public opinion. Used still by political thinkers, newspapers, articles, institutes, research centers, college and university courses and their professors,...
We are living in a racially charged climate. Problems associated with the relations between the races seem endemic to all areas of our sad and beleaguered culture. Discussions of law enforcement are dominated by the alleged racism of police officers and whether “black lives matter.” The ongoing debate on immigration seems centered on the alleged...
It was a clarion call to his supporters and a hard slap in the face to his adversaries—the latter being gathered just a few feet behind him as he delivered his Inaugural Address. Donald J. Trump never minces words, and on January 20 he showed that he isn’t about to start, now that he’s President...
The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) has over 15 million members. With over 46,000 churches, they are present in all 50 states (as well as several foreign countries). It is the largest Protestant denomination in the United States. Nonetheless, for nine straight years, the SBC has reported a net loss of membership. Last summer, the SBC...
Only where love and need are one, And the work is play for mortal stakes, Is the deed ever really done For Heaven and the future’s sakes. Long-time readers of Chronicles may recall that this column bore a different rubric when it first appeared in the January 2001 issue. The initial mission of the Letter...
The pro-life movement has made great strides in recent years, though many people who consider themselves active pro-lifers may not realize it. That’s because the good news has all happened at the state and local levels. State laws combining health-code restrictions on abortuaries with reasonable waiting periods and required ultrasounds have given local pregnancy-care centers,...
A country’s rising economic strength tends to be reflected in her geopolitical clout. In the late 1880’s the United States overtook Great Britain as the world’s largest economy; a decade later, having defeated Spain, America took over the remnants of her empire. During the same period Germany’s massive economic growth enabled her to establish colonies...
Hollywood is in a snit. Hollywood is very angry. Hollywood is having a nervous breakdown. The Donald is in the White House, and Hollywood types cannot take it any more. Ditto for the New York Times and the TV networks, except for FOX. Madonna, that aging show-off whose vocabulary consists mainly of the F-word, said...
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. —T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding” Precious memories, unseen angels Sent from somewhere to my soul How they linger, ever near me, As the sacred past unfolds I...
The title of Joseph Pearce’s profound piece “Fighting the Dragon With Solzhenitsyn” (Society & Culture, January) hit me like a punch to the solar plexus, for Solzhenitsyn frequently directed its first three words to me in the form of a question—“Yeshche boryoutsya s drakonamy?”—as a sort of general “How goes it?” As a callow Harvard...
I thank Mr. Jeff Minick for his letter “Blood From a Stone: Observations of a Serf” (Correspondence) in the January issue, on the burden of personal taxes and the sorts of things these onerous obligations fund. I do sympathize and empathize with his words. If I were as articulate as he, I would have written...
Aaron D. Wolf has written the best summary I have seen of the moral confusion of the Millennials (“Rise of the Alt-Left: After This, the Deluge,” View, January): “Their morality is . . . entirely relativistic and personal. They are the world.” Wolf asks, “Who will teach them otherwise?” Yes, a very difficult reeducation problem...
Abortion politics has consumed my adult life, starting in 1972 when, at 17, I helped defeat the abortion-legalization Measure B on Michigan’s ballot. A few weeks later, on January 22, 1973—like December 7, 1941, a date that will live in infamy—the U.S. Supreme Court dive-bombed the country by erasing all state abortion laws—including in those...
“Breathitt County in east Kentucky is the only county in the United States not to have had selective service enforced during the Second World War. That was because there were so many volunteers.” —Gordon McKinney Since I have long been convinced that the Appalachian South embodies a grounded yet radical alternative to the American mainstream,...
President Trump’s executive order restricting travel and refugees from seven Islamic countries evoked utter hysteria from the mainstream media, Democrats, some Republicans, and even some church leaders. That it was handed down so abruptly, providing Week One photo and protest ops for leftist demonstrators shouting “f–k Trump,” “not my president,” and “the ban is racist,”...
A little over 30 years ago, I was attending a conference in a faraway place when disaster struck. I became sick, really sick—the sort of illness where one can barely crawl out of bed, let alone attend conference sessions. Lacking care of any sort, I lay in bed for two days, waiting for some semblance...
The mood in Washington during the weeks leading up to the inauguration of Donald J. Trump combined the bloodthirsty rage of the Reign of Terror with the wild comedy of A Night at the Opera, as the New Jesus and his holy family prepared for their ascension from the Capitol Building on January 20 immediately...
Stalin’s Englishman: Guy Burgess, the Cold War, and the Cambridge Spy Ring, by Andrew Lownie (New York: St. Martin’s Press; 433 pp., $29.99). This book, the first full biography of the most important of the Cambridge spies, is also a first-rate work of social and intellectual history and a highly successful character study of a...
Courtesy of our Westminster correspondent, Freddy Gray, who kindly sent me the book from London as an unexpected present, I’m nearly through Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family, by Alexander Waugh, the son of the late journalist Auberon Waugh, grandson of Evelyn, and himself a classical-music critic (ironic, as Evelyn Waugh loathed music...
Donald Trump exploded upon the political scene as a strongly charged individual, not as the head of a faction of the Republican Party or of a movement of his own. The great question, from the moment he announced his candidacy for the presidency, has been what effect he might have on the party whose candidate...
At last, the Tacoma Public Schools’ board has recognized the obvious educational potential of the Prince of Darkness. For years, this hopelessly hidebound and reactionary institution has restricted itself to providing what it calls “a welcoming, nurturing environment [to] . . . provide the knowledge and skills for students to become respectful, responsible life-long learners...
When historians someday study Anglo-American relations in the early 21st century, they will find a useful allegory in the saga of the Winston Churchill bust. This is the tale of a smallish sculpture by Jacob Epstein that has come to be a simulacra of the so-called Special Relationship. Tony Blair’s government presented the bust to...
La La Land Produced by Summit Entertainment Written and directed by Damien Chazelle Distributed by Liongate The Founder Produced and distributed by The Weinstein Company Directed by John Lee Hancock Screenplay by Robert D. Siegel In last month’s issue, no less a cinematic authority than Taki pronounced La La Land delightful (“Beyond the Idiot Box,”...
“If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that,” President Obama declared in 2012. But chances are you bought that, especially if you are a Midwestern entrepreneur and the product is Renaissance art. The coastal stereotype of the Midwest as a cultural backwater is dispelled by museums in industrial towns like Detroit, Toledo, and Dayton. Here,...
Historians of our day have long debated whether ideas or interests are the prime drivers of human decisions. The Hegelian school, which includes neoconservatives and neoliberals, believes the answer is ideas—freedom, democracy, and equality. Marxists say material interests alone. We may dismiss both groups as crude simplifiers. What’s more, the debate ignores what from a...
When they are so easily available for free, the opportunities on YouTube don’t leave much excuse for not taking advantage of them, even though in one particular case at least, the musical presentation is puzzling or unidiomatic or off-putting. But even there, gradually, the realization sets in—the realization that one hears the distillation of a...
