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,...
Year: 2017
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Down Here Among the Lilliputians
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...
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White Slaves
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...
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The Moral Clarity of the Morally Depraved
Tolerant, kind, generous, forbearing—none of this you’d call our everyday Islamic mass murderer. One thing you may justly call him: discerning. He knows the stakes in the war on terror. He knows the degree to which the Christian, or semi-Christian, West makes impossible the realization of his ideals. Accordingly, he murders explicit Christians, as many...
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Prudence Isn’t Fear
Last week saw two particularly grisly Islamic terror attacks of the type that have become all too common: 22 people, mostly children and teenagers, were killed after a bomb exploded at a pop concert in Manchester, England, and 28 Egyptian Copts, including young children, were massacred when ISIS ambushed their bus, which was taking them...
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Breakup of the West?
By the time Air Force One started down the runaway at Naval Air Station Sigonella in Sicily, to bring President Trump home, the Atlantic had grown markedly wider than it was when he flew to Riyadh. In a Munich beer hall Sunday, Angela Merkel confirmed it. Europe must begin to look out for itself, she...
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True Grit
A remark one often hears from the current crop of film critics is that John Wayne might indeed merit the iconographic status conferred on him by tens of millions of ordinary cinemagoers around the world, were it not for the troubling matter of his alleged evasion of military service during World War II—an issue, it...
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After the Confederates, Who’s Next?
On Sept. 1, 1864, Union forces under Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, victorious at Jonesborough, burned Atlanta and began the March to the Sea where Sherman’s troops looted and pillaged farms and towns all along the 300-mile road to Savannah. Captured in the Confederate defeat at Jonesborough was William Martin Buchanan of Okolona, Mississippi, who was...
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Gigantic Weaknesses
One of the sights that most amazed me as I approached the center of Moscow for the first time was a huge poster, stretched across the flat rooftop of a large building not far from the Kremlin, boldly advertising PHILIPS in large letters that needed no further explanation. Not to be outdone by the famous...
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Will DC Pull Trump Into War in Syria?
Since Donald Trump entered the Oval Office, he has enjoyed only two brief periods of praise from a mainstream media that otherwise is working overtime to destroy him and his presidency. One of those periods commenced with his visit to Saudi Arabia, where he effectively reversed his campaign pledge to work with Russia to defeat...
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A Special Prosecutor for Criminal Leaks
Who is the real threat to the national security? Is it President Trump who shared with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov the intelligence that ISIS was developing laptop bombs to put aboard airliners? Or is it the Washington Post that ferreted out and published this code-word intelligence, and splashed the details on its front page, alerting...
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Moscow Notebook
Here I am in Russia, for the third time in two months. This means the FBI should start an investigation, if it has not done so already. This time I was invited to a conference (“Exporting Democracy”) at the Russian State University for the Humanities on Thursday. As is often the case with Russian conferences,...
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Rosenstein Joins the Posse
“With the stroke of a pen, Rod Rosenstein redeemed his reputation,” writes Dana Milbank of the Washington Post. What had Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein done to be welcomed home by the Post like the prodigal son? Without consulting the White House, he sandbagged President Trump, naming a special counsel to take over the investigation of...
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Appointment of Special Counsel for ‘Russiagate’ Could Derail Trump’s MAGA Agenda, Lead to War
Letter from Pergamum-on-the-Potomac On the heels of Donald Trump’s Oval Office visit with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and other American and Russian officials, it finally seemed the fledgling US administration was turning the corner and making progress toward cooperation with Moscow against radical Islamic terrorism, particularly in Syria. Then the fake news came flying...
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Forty-Five Blows Against Democracy
How U.S. Military Bases Back Dictators, Autocrats, and Military Regimes Much outrage has been expressed in recent weeks over President Donald Trump’s invitation for a White House visit to Rodrigo Duterte, president of the Philippines, whose “war on drugs” has led to thousands of extrajudicial killings. Criticism of Trump was especially intense given his similarly...
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An Over-the-Top ‘Scandal’
Let us concede that President Donald Trump talks too much and—maybe especially—tweets too much. Let us concede the complexity of his explanation(s) for firing former FBI Director James Comey: Comey was doing a bad job; Trump always meant to; Trump relied on the deputy attorney general’s observations, etc., in whatever order you want to consider...
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Comey & The Saturday Night Massacre
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce, said Marx. On publication day of my memoir of Richard Nixon’s White House, President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey. Instantly, the media cried “Nixonian,” comparing it to the 1973 Saturday Night Massacre. Yet, the differences are stark. The resignations of Attorney General Elliot Richardson and...
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The Price of Empire Globalism and Its Consequences
From the June 1997 issue of Chronicles. I know it will strike many people as odd to call the current foreign policy of the United States a form of “empire building” or “imperialism,” and of course none of our leaders would ever call it that. They would prefer some such term as “peacekeeping” or “spreading democracy”...
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What Is America’s Goal in the World?
For the World War II generation there was clarity. The attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec 7, 1941, united the nation as it had never been before—in the conviction that Japan must be smashed, no matter how long it took or how many lives it cost. After the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945, however,...
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Sing Me Back Home
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...
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Macron’s Victory: A Dark Day for Europe
Emmanuel Macron’s predictable victory in the second round of the French presidential election on May 7 is bad news for France and detrimental to the prospects of Europe’s cultural and demographic survival. For details see my June column in Chronicles: he is a paradigmatic pastiche of Europe’s postmodern transnational elite, a former international banker and...
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The Tyranny of Non-Thought
The sullen self-righteousness of the progressive left (i.e., “We’re right, and the rest of you can go to the hot place!”) glows on college campuses everywhere but also in big cities—such as my beloved New Orleans, come to think of it: a locality embroiled in useless controversy over the removal of four Confederate-themed statues. City...
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Nixon and Trump, Then and Now
For two years, this writer has been consumed by two subjects. First, the presidency of Richard Nixon, in whose White House I served from its first day to its last, covered in my new book, Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever. The second has been...
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Forbidden Questions?
24 Key Issues That Neither the Washington Elite Nor the Media Consider Worth Their Bother Donald Trump’s election has elicited impassioned affirmations of a renewed commitment to unvarnished truth-telling from the prestige media. The common theme: you know you can’t trust him, but trust us to keep dogging him on your behalf. The New York Times...
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How Berkeley Birthed the Right
In December 1964, a Silver Age of American liberalism, to rival the Golden Age of FDR and the New Deal, seemed to be upon us. Barry Goldwater had been crushed in a 44-state landslide and the GOP reduced to half the size of the Democratic Party, with but 140 seats in the House and 32...
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The Strange Career of Individualism
What is individualism? John Stuart Mill answered this question with a theory of rights. Mill looked for a “simple” theoretical principle that could distinguish the liberty of the individual from that of the state. Not only is there no such principle, but we miss the full character of individualism if we try to grasp it...
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North Korea’s Overrated Threat
There seems to be no end to the deluge of inane and/or deranged commentary on “the North Korean nuclear threat.” On Wednesday Matt Pottinger, the Asia director on President Trump’s National Security Council, said that “they want to use these weapons as an instrument of blackmail to achieve other goals, even including perhaps the coercive reunification...
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Of Baseball Bats and Tax Reform
The coming fight over tax reform highlights distinct and seemingly irreconcilable views of government. We might want to reflect on them, as the major players ready the armament: brass knuckles, baseball bats, Fox News and New York Times commentaries. The two warring views: 1. Government knows more than you do. 2. On many topics, you...
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Nixon’s Revenge: The Fall of the Adversary Press
Saturday’s White House Correspondents Association dinner exposed anew how far from Middle America our elite media reside. At the dinner, the electricity was gone, the glamor and glitz were gone. Neither the president nor his White House staff came. Even Press Secretary Sean Spicer begged off. The idea of a convivial evening together of our...
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A Splendid Little War Could End Trump’s Presidency
Letter from Pergamum-on-the-Potomac Here’s an interesting hypothetical. Suppose the Trump Administration’s game of chicken with Pyongyang goes wrong. Suppose it results in the vaporization of a goodly portion of Seoul’s 10 million-plus population, not to mention almost all of the 28 thousand or so American troops in South Korea. It’s not an unrealistic scenario. Sure,...
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Blurred Lines
What’s with Pope Francis? What has been his effect on the Church? To understand the situation we need to look at secular culture, the state of the Church, and Francis himself. Public culture today is atheistic. It excludes God, natural law, and higher goods; bases morality on individual preferences; and views reason as a way...
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Racial Follies
Get Out Produced by Blumhouse Productions Written and directed by Jordan Peele Distributed by Universal Pictures Fences Produced and distributed by Paramount Pictures Directed by Denzel Washington Screenplay based on August Wilson’s play From what I had read in advance of seeing Get Out, a film written and directed by Jordan Peele, I had...
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The Vanity Press Remains
When, in 2009, a shady Russian oligarch and his foppish son took over London’s Evening Standard, the great British journalist Perry Worsthorne remarked, “I think it’s one more example that we are no more a serious nation.” Well, Perry, you were right, but I suspect even you didn’t see how silly British high society could...
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The Fun of Brexit
Arron Banks looks out proudly and pugnaciously from the cover of Bad Boys of Brexit like a character in a Hogarth engraving, flanking the equally Hogarthian Nigel Farage in a photo taken as Farage faced the globe’s agog media on the auspicious morning of June 24, 2016. The four men pictured—Banks, Farage, Richard Tice, and...
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Churchill in Africa
“Half-alien and wholly undesirable” was Lady Astor’s assessment of Winston Churchill. For Winston’s father, Randolph Churchill, had taken an American wife, “a dollar princess,” as many cash-strapped members of the English aristocracy did in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But Lord Randolph, dead at age 46, left no inheritance. Poor Winston had to...
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On Deaf Ears
Picture this: A president, working partly through a political appointee at CIA headquarters, presses the intelligence community to come up with the “right” intelligence that this president needs to justify his actions. The president has singled out a particular foreign leader for demonization, has convinced himself that this leader is the embodiment of evil, and...
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No Place for Humanity: Our Free-Chosen Dystopia
By the time of Donald Trump’s inauguration, George Orwell was at the top of Amazon.com’s best-seller list. Readers had developed a sudden passion for antitotalitarian literature, it seemed—not only for Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four but for Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism as well. And with the surge of interest in Orwell came a sales revival for...
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The End of Something
It is remarkable how little notice the advent in America of the self-driving car has drawn. Who would have imagined that mobile, road-obsessed, and by-auto-possessed Americans whose parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents made their prized automobiles the center of their recreational lives and prided themselves on their prowess behind the wheel and their supercharged engines would...
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The Bruckner Problem
There is a Bruckner Problem, yes, or there are even Bruckner Problems, but I think that the longer we consider these problems, the less problematical they are. The first problem is, where to start? We might suppose that Anton Bruckner (1824-96) is remarkable in the fascinating quality of his work. Hardly any composer except Mahler...
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War on Louisville—or War on Kentucky?
In one corner, there is Kentucky’s upbeat governor, whose attractive wife, five biological children, and four adopted children compose a family too large to fit into the traditional governor’s mansion. New England-bred Matthew Bevin speaks out for religious freedom, promotes infrastructure on behalf of orphans in Africa and India, and has tried every trick in...
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Wall of Baloney
Anne Williamson is being generous to Jeffrey Sachs (“The Many Reinventions of Jeffrey Sachs,” View, February). I was in Poland on sabbatical from Rice University in the same time frame working (gratis) for Unido in the introduction of Deming Statistical Process control. I trained economists and mathematicians in the Deming paradigm and then sent them...
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If the Center Cannot Hold
The surprising triumph of Donald Trump has produced what can only be described as an extended temper tantrum by much of the American left, which fully expected a victory by Hillary Clinton to be followed by unending political dominance, as the white, Christian parts of America that generally vote Republican are gradually eclipsed demographically by...
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Big Macs, A-bombs, and Trump
William F. Buckley, Jr., spent his adult winter months in Rougemont, an alpine resort next to its chicer neighbor Gstaad, now the Mecca for the nouveau riche and vulgar. Throughout the 60’s and 70’s, however, the area was known for its music festival run by Yehudi Menuhin, and for celebrity writers like Buckley, my mentor,...
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Confronting Russophobia
There is a paranoid, hysterical quality to the public discourse on Russia and all things Russian in today’s America. The corporate media machine and its Deep State handlers have abdicated reason and common decency in favor of raw hate and fear-mongering. We have not seen anything like it before, even in the darkest days of...
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#FillTheHotTub
There’s an ancient adage—ancient in terms of our Internet Age, at least: If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product. Do you think Facebook is free? Take a look at those ads in your Facebook feed, and over on the right-hand side of the page. Ever wonder why so many of them...
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Power to the People!
The world is broken. There was a time when those words would have been considered unremarkable—a truism, even. Of course the world is broken: Our first parents, Adam and Eve, broke it. They did so by their sin. They had everything that any man or woman could ever reasonably want: a paradise to live in,...
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The US Military Moves Deeper Into Africa
America’s War-Fighting Footprint in Africa Secret U.S. Military Documents Reveal a Constellation of American Military Bases Across That Continent General Thomas Waldhauser sounded a little uneasy. “I would just say, they are on the ground. They are trying to influence the action,” commented the chief of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) at a Pentagon press briefing in...
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The Electoral College: Rooted in Racism?
Prof. Akhil Amar of Yale Law School launched a salvo against the Electoral College. In a piece published on December 12 at the website of Time, Amar claimed that the Electoral College has pro-slavery origins. James Madison preferred it to a nationwide popular vote because he wanted Southern slaves to count in the tally of...
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Where Honor Is Due
I got a call from a Washington-based journalist the other day who wanted to know if Pat Buchanan had any influence on the platform of our current President. What a question! The guy sounded fairly young—at least, younger than me—so he doesn’t remember. Yes, but aren’t there books, articles, easily accessible on the internet? Has...
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Did Populism “Lose”?
After the Dutch election on March 15, both Dutch and international media delivered a unanimous verdict: Prime Minister Mark Rutte had “won the election.” Rutte’s Liberal Party “won” by losing eight seats, while his coalition partner, the Labour Party, suffered an historic loss of 29 seats. Geert Wilders, on the other hand, “lost” because his...