“Free speech!” has been the rallying cry of Republicans and conservatives for months on end. This really ought to stop. Milo, Gavin McInnes, Ann Coulter: These conservative and libertarian provocateurs have been met with radical opposition from roving gangs of snowflake thugs who set things on fire, break glass, pepper-spray bystanders—all in order to keep...
As a literalist of the imagination, I have somehow supposed that the fall equinox on September 22 meant that according to astronomical rules, the roses would—with a clunk—stop blooming. But when last December, I saw many rosebushes still going at it even in a northern clime, I had to amend my faith in the lovely...
In 2003, the Supreme Court expected “that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary” in university admissions. That was the conventional wisdom of the time. Affirmative action was supposed to be a temporary deviation from the principle of nondiscrimination, a remedy for injustices past, a bit of accelerated...
Healthcare is a problem, and not merely a sociopolitical one. If we are to believe the media pundits, it’s also very much a religious question. Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times berates Paul Ryan for attempting to repeal the Affordable Care Act on the grounds that Ryans’s opposition to ObamaCare is a denial of...
My local newspaper is now unreadable, and I’m damn mad about it. In order to understand the earthshaking significance of this turn of events and its emotional impact on me, you have to understand the role my paper, the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat, plays in my life. It is the centerpiece of a long-standing ritual, one...
This past December, the United States commemorated the 75th anniversary of Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. Most commentators rightly played down any conspiratorial suggestion that Franklin Roosevelt had deliberately provoked that particular attack, although they agreed that the U.S. had been putting heavy diplomatic pressure on Japan in the months leading up to it. ...
For many years I taught a U.S. history survey course. One of my lecture topics was American slavery. I made a real effort to put the peculiar institution into historical perspective. I noted that slavery was not something reserved for blacks here in America but was as old as man himself and recognized no racial...
I first entered Rockford the way that most people do when they’re coming from the east, taking the exit off I-90 onto East State Street, where the ramp T-bones into the Clock Tower Resort and Conference Center, now closed for good but then, in November 1995, still home to “the world’s most comprehensive collection of...
Emmanuel Macron’s victory in the French presidential election provides conclusive proof that no major European nation can save itself from demographic and cultural suicide through the electoral process. That outcome is not merely a victory for status quo politics, which millions of lower-middle-class French people prefer, but a triumph of the globalist establishment. Macron is...
As I’ve often written, The Spectator of London is not only the oldest magazine in the English-speaking world but the most elegant by far. (As, of course, is Chronicles.) I’ve been fortunate to have a column in the Speccie, as readers lovingly refer to it, for 40 years, a lifetime when it comes to journalism. ...
I turned forty-one this year. I left a psychological plateau (a crisis would have been way more exciting) and a legal career behind. I suppose an alcohol-fueled bender or an illicit affair broadcast on social media would be what most “folks” (as Barack Obama says) my age might do nowadays, but I opted for sobriety...
“Nominalist in ontology, relativist in epistemology.” In one short statement, Anthony Esolen sums up everything wrong with art and society in the modern world (“Ut Plures Sint,” View, April). This is what I love about Chronicles: Every month there are observations that illuminate far beyond the particular topic that is being discussed. How many times...
Kong: Skull Island Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts Screenplay by Dan Gilroy and Max Borenstein Moonlight Produced and distributed by A24 Directed by Barry Jenkins Screenplay by Barry Jenkins and Tarell Alvin McCraney Lion Produced and distributed by The Weinstein Company Directed by Garth Davis Screenplay by Saroo Brierly from his...
One would expect race-baiting liberals and leftists to try to glorify the “civil-rights movement” and the laws of the early 1960’s, insisting that we view all of it as earth shaking history, more important than the fall of the Roman Empire, the Norman Invasion, the battles of Tours and Lepanto, the Reformation, the American, French,...
Randy teenage boys and hyphenated man-loathing feminists can agree on one thing: Prom is no place for patriarchal body-shaming. In this context, by body we must read cleavage, midriffs, thighs, and intergluteal clefts; and by shaming, we are to understand that the aforementioned have been unjustly deemed unfit for public viewing. To establish rules prohibiting...
What is the justification for abortion? Is abortion a moral or therapeutic concept? Medical or legal? Sociological or personal? These considerations underlie Gosnell: The Untold Story of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer, a narrative of the comprehensive criminal enterprise of Kermit Gosnell, M.D., Philadelphia’s notorious baby killer and drug trafficker, by the Irish journalists Ann...
Progressive arrogance. Technocratic overreach. Social engineering. Racial tension. Expanding executive powers. Aggressive and endless waves of “experts.” Economic disparity and unrest. “Us” versus “them.” All are characteristics of social and political life in recent years in the United States. So much so that some pundits and observers apparently find the combination alarming and unique—even unprecedented—in...
“Make it new!” demanded Ezra Pound. Would he have liked the cover for the outrageous winter 2017 issue of the Sewanee Review, America’s oldest continuously published literary quarterly? It consists of a mustard-yellow ground on which, in addition to the title, in a new font, are scattered six rough parallelograms, blue, as if scissored from...
“Democracy Dies in Darkness” is the motto of the Washington Post. The editors of the Post belong to the honorable group of which Norman Podhoretz once confessed himself a member—Idolaters of Democracy. They idolize Big Government also, that implacable enemy of democracy, or so democrats believed before the 1930’s. No doubt the editors could demonstrate...
An unfortunate effect of more than two decades of war between the West and the Middle East, and the resulting terrorist campaigns launched from there, is the replacement of the charm, even the magic, the historical Persia held for Europeans—and for me—by their opposite: contempt, disgust, even fear. In the late 80’s and the 90’s...
The Habsburg Empire: A New History, by Pieter M. Judson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard; 592 pp., $35.00). This book continues the arguments historians have made over the past three decades that challenge the long-received and -accepted view of the Habsburg Empire as an anachronism among European states in the 19th century. As Judson says, historians had...
It was said (by Bernard DeVoto?) of America before World War II that it was as if the United States had been tipped to the left and downward, so that, across the rest of the country, whatever was unattached or unsecured slid southwest into California. Today we might say that the Democratic Party is sliding...
Contrary to what John McCain and others in Washington are saying, North Korea’s nuclear program is not a “Cuban missile crisis in slow motion.” Nor does tough talk from President Trump mean he’s about to launch preemptive strikes against Kim Jong-un. Where would be the profit in that? North Korea is not a cripple like...
Winston Churchill is one of the most closely examined (and lionized) of all politicians, and it is accordingly difficult to think of new angles from which to view him and his legacy. But now here are two original and complementary studies coming at once, one profiling his wife, Clementine, the other examining the impressive public...
Donald Trump campaigned on an “America First” foreign policy. But he hasn’t been immune to the vapors of the Swamp. Not even three months after his inauguration, administration officials were praising NATO; affirming commitments to Japan and South Korea; discussing troop surges for Afghanistan; talking about permanently stationing forces in Iraq, increasing aid for Saudi...
