Mitch Landrieu and his growing coalition of disgruntled minorities and public-school-educated leftists give us an idea of where a divided, majority-ruled America is heading. In May, the mainstream media sacrificed valuable airtime and column space normally devoted to unsourced White House leaks to laud the New Orleans mayor’s effort to remove four monuments to the...
Month: July 2017
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Dance With the Devil in the Pale Moonlight
There was a notable convergence some decades ago, one that was noticed musically as two separate and distinct phenomena, but not as a convergence—or even as a conspiracy, or a rivalry. I never heard or saw any acknowledgment that two of the foremost instrumentalists in the world were fiddling around pretty much at the same...
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How He Did It
Roger Stone is a longtime political operative who has worked for every Republican president since Richard Nixon, and numerous presidential and other candidates as well. Stone retains great admiration for Ronald Reagan, but now has only disdain for the Bush family. The Making of the President 2016 recounts what he saw during the Trump campaign,...
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The Coming Backlash
The media frenzy that greeted the victory of Donald Trump is now reaching a pinnacle of manic hysteria. Every single day, it seems, there is some new toxic, trumped-up accusation: He’s a Russian agent! He’s obstructing justice! He’s wants to repeal the First Amendment! Members of the media, who are indeed playing to Trump’s characterization...
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A Free Ride to Clown College
Not content to suffer quietly under a $352 billion state debt, a crumbling post-World War II infrastructure, and a $65 billion unfunded pension liability in its largest city, the state of New York hastened its impending financial devastation this spring by announcing the latest Blue State special: free college tuition. Under its preposterous Excelsior Scholarship...
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Demolition Day
The 150th Anniversary (or Sesquicentennial) of Canadian Confederation will be celebrated on July 1. That holiday was traditionally denominated “Dominion Day,” as Canada was officially called “the Dominion of Canada”—a term which has now fallen into disuse. The holiday is now called Canada Day, and on nearly all state documents, the Canadian state is identified...
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The Wrong War
The assault on American history continues apace, with the further removal of Confederate monuments and symbols, and the expunging of anything relating to slavery or slaveholders. Mounting any defense against this cultural warfare has been next to impossible, because it would seem to demand justifying slavery. The same considerations prohibit any criticism of the Union...
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Economy and Independence
The president of the little village in West Michigan where I was born and raised (Spring Lake, population 2,360, sal-ute!) no longer wants to be village president. The obvious solution to this conundrum seems to have eluded the 84-year-old Joyce Verplank Hatton. Rather than resign the office, President Hatton has decided to take the road...
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Wahhabism First
President Donald Trump started his first foreign tour on May 20 in Saudi Arabia. His two-day visit was punctuated by a series of embarrassingly poltroonish statements and gestures to his hosts. It culminated in a macabre sabre-rattling spectacle, the moral equivalent of tossing Zyklon B canisters into a Silesian compound in 1944. For his part,...
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Long Live the Queen!
Tempus Fugit. A recent ABC program on the death of Princess Diana reminded me that 20 years have gone by in a jiffy. She died August 31, 1997, following a car crash in the underpass of Place de l’Alma, and sent a nation, and the world, into mourning. Mind you, Princess Di is no longer...
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The Devil We Know
If Ryszard Legutko is correct, there is increasingly little difference between the devil we know and the devil we don’t. He makes a compelling case for this claim. The totalitarian temptation, regardless of differences in time, place, and ideology, is ever present. The fact is especially troubling as modern man is aided by unprecedented technological...
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If It Can Happen Here . . .
As a Texas resident and an alumnus of the University of Texas, I can attest that Jon Cassidy’s dreary assessment of the situation there is totally accurate (“Scandalous Education: UT’s War on Standards,” Correspondence, June). Sadly, Cassidy’s exposé merely scratches the surface of the transformation of UT into what he aptly calls “Berkeley South.” Chronicles...
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Fending Off Barbarians
I just finished reading Chilton Williamson, Jr.’s May entry in What the Editors Are Reading, regarding Ed Abbey. I have been reading Edward Abbey’s work for years (my dog-eared copy of Desert Solitaire is a Ballantine paperback purchased in 1972 for 95 cents), and my library of Abbey’s work includes Appalachian Wilderness, Slickrock, Confessions of...
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The Esolen Option
If we don’t like the way of life around us, why not live differently? Why go along with something so inhuman and unrewarding? So asks Anthony Esolen in his new book. Good criticism calls for a conception of what should be as well as an analysis of what is. Esolen provides both. Like any social...
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Devil Take the Hindmost
“High on a throne of royal state . . . Satan exalted sat, by merit raised To that bad eminence.” —Paradise Lost Hell is a meritocracy. Yet in America the meritocratic ideal is universally applauded. Everyone agrees—or pretends to agree—that the angel of justice smiles upon the triumph of merit. Indeed, the hopes enshrined in...
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The World as Imagination
Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 Produced by Marvel Studios Directed and written by James Gunn Distributed by Walt Disney Studios The Lost City of Z Produced by Plan B Entertainment Directed and written by James Gray, based on David Grann’s book Distributed by Amazon Studios Mixed-race romance has become profitably au courant in popular...
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End the Feds
James Comey’s curious and unorthodox contributions to the media’s rumor-fueled hysteria over the legitimacy of the Trump presidency—and perhaps the fate of the U.S. government and the American people—ought to raise a fundamental question in the minds of conservatives: Why did he have a job to begin with? It matters little whether we like the...
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Farewell to P.C.
“It is true that Professor Esolen enjoys academic freedom,” said Madame Lafarge, who now numbers among my former colleagues, “but academic freedom must be used responsibly.” The assembled students, almost all of them from the political left, cheered and clicked their “clickers,” a form of public approbation I had not witnessed or even heard of...
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Chesterfield and Chesterton
Much of life may come down to a choice between the respective views of Lord Chesterfield, who urged his son always to excel at whatever he did, and G.K. Chesterton, who once wrote that, “If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.” The issue, of course, is what the “thing” in question is. ...
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What the Editors Are Reading
Confined to a three-man tent on a rainy day in the canyons of southeastern Utah, I continued by lantern light my rereading of Cormac McCarthy’s novel All the Pretty Horses, first published a quarter-century ago as the first volume in The Border Trilogy, and got a good start on its immediate sequel, The Crossing. McCarthy’s...
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Books in Brief
Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty, by John B. Boles (New York: Basic Books; 626 pp., $35.00). This excellent, very well-written, and highly readable book is the “full-scale biography” the author set out to write. It succeeds further as an affirmation of the historian’s (and his readers’) need to accept the past on its own terms...
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Who’s Appropriating Whom?
All immigrants to America demand a good deal of us, some more than others. Mexican immigrants (and after them the Muslim ones) demand the most. St. Patrick’s Day parades date from the late, prerevolutionary 18th century and have been an American institution ever since as a celebration of Irish history, culture, and cuisine. Cinco de...
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Second Appomattox
A visitor to the United States from abroad, ignorant of recent American history, might find himself perplexed by the fact that the further the War Between the States recedes into the past, the larger it looms as the angry obsession of “progressive” Americans—the same people who insist at every turn that the country needs to...
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Desperate NeverTrumpers and the Constitution
A year ago the op-ed writers who present themselves as tutors to the nation insisted that Donald Trump could not and would not become president. Progressive pundits were certain of this—after all, they didn’t know anyone who was voting for him. The Republican wing of the commentariat, however, was equally sure that Trump would fail:...
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Progress Amid the Chaos
The foreign policy of the Trump administration remains a mass of contradictions, with the White House evidently divided among nationalists, pragmatists, and certain advisors who prescribe an ever expanding hegemony. These rivals have clashed in recent weeks over the question of sending a surge of U.S. troops into Afghanistan—some 5,000 more to supplement the 8,400...
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Conquista and Reconquista
As its subtitle indicates, this book dispels a number of imprecisions, equivocations, and outright lies regarding the Islamic conquest of Spain in late antiquity or the early medieval period. (The Romans called it Hispania, a word that evolved into the medieval Latin Spannia and eventually the modern España.) Its author, for many years professor of...
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Unnumbered Years
Ravens over North Berwick Law—could any phrase be more hyperborean? I turned the words over lazily as I watched them 50 feet above, circling and diving on one another, flicking expert wings, commenting incessantly on their sport as they alternately dropped or upheld the thin blue vault. Below the volcanic cone of its Law, the...
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Theresa May’s Anglo-Saxon Appeal
The British have a penchant for women leaders: Queens Elizabeth I & II, Victoria, Margaret Thatcher, and now Theresa May. The current Prime Minister isn’t just well liked: People seem to love her. Conservative MPs report that, when canvasing for the general election, voters stop them to say how proud they should be of her. ...
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