Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination by President Trump for the blessed vacancy left by retiring justice Anthony Kennedy, author of the civilization-defying Obergefell opinion, supplied the heat necessary to cause the vaunted American melting pot to boil over and reveal its rancid contents. Those contents included the innocent limbs and brains of David Daleiden videos, eagerly devoured...
The other day I came across the pianist Simon Barere on YouTube, and I was glad to see him there—the recognition he has received is certainly deserved, though it is hard to know what would be the appropriate reward to a performer who never got his due. And just when he seemed to be getting...
Recently I read of a 67-year-old woman who wanted to run in a marathon. She had never run for exercise in her life, but her desire and passion led her to put on a pair of sneakers, leave the house, and walk a mile. Every day she walked through her neighborhood, extending the distance a...
The photo went viral: a little girl crying after she’d been separated from her mother at the U.S.-Mexican border. Time photoshopped it so that the little girl was crying while the Evil Donald Trump looked down at her, looming over her like some giant troll as she sobbed for her mother. It was tweeted and...
My wife and I obey a simple rule regarding our leisure travel: She makes the plans; I follow them. Since she enjoys researching hotels and locations, and my tastes overlap with hers, we find it easier for her to do all the planning without any inputs or complaints from me. This system has worked well...
Shakespeare contains the cultural history of America. From first to last, Shakespeare is the graph of evolving American values. He early made the transatlantic crossing: It is thought that Cotton Mather was the first in America to acquire a First Folio. Richard III was performed in New York in 1750, and in 1752 the governor...
Is there a distinctly British brand of heroism? That is the implicit question running through Christopher Sandford’s Zeebrugge, a gripping new history of the British naval raid in April 1918 on the German-held Belgian port of that name. The sheer audacity of the operation and its attendant tales of sacrifice and derring-do resulted in a...
“Watch what people are cynical about,” said General Patton, “and one can often discover what they lack.” Since the 1960’s I’ve been watching what are often called revisionist historians trying to destroy the American heroes I grew up admiring. At first I couldn’t understand why such historians would be so hell-bent on tearing down figures...
“We lived spitting distance from the Catholic church, the priests’ rectory, the nuns’ convent, the St. Rose of Lima grammar school—all of it just a football’s toss away, across the field of wild grass. I literally grew up surrounded by God. Surrounded by God and—and all my relatives.” The Hollywood elite has been painfully boring...
A successful national leader (“good” or “bad”) is able to redefine the terms of what is politically possible in accordance with his values, and to produce durable desired outcomes. Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan come to mind at home, and Churchill, De Gaulle, and Deng Xiaoping abroad. Very few are able to effect a profound, long-lasting...
August is the time for cruising. Once upon a time, cruising the Med was fun, especially around the French Riviera. Now the sea is full of garbage, the ports packed with horror megayachts owned by horrid Arabs and eastern oligarch gangsters, while most Italian, Spanish, and French resorts are overrun by sweaty tourists covered in...
All of us, I imagine, are granted from time to time moments of uninvited insight that will, for years to come, provide a basis for reflection and a more penetrating glimpse of the forces that shape the realms in which we live and labor. Such a moment was granted to me back in the early...
First Reformed Produced and distributed by A24 Written and directed by Paul Schrader Won’t You Be My Neighbor? Produced by Tremolo Productions Distributed by Focus Features Fashionable reviewers have brought out the heavy artillery to praise director Paul Schrader’s latest film, First Reformed, calling it transcendent, uncompromising, soaring, etc, etc. Maybe they saw a different...
Summer is the time for lazy fishing in the hot sun. That calls for a fish story. And what follows is no tall tale, although I think the moral of the story is quite significant. For I am now willing to say, without exaggeration, that catfish perfectly symbolize our great national problem. When I was...
I met Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbàn in May of last year. With a few others, we shared breakfast before the opening session of the second Budapest Demographic Forum. He was every bit the “footballer” I had been told to expect. Of modest stature, he moved—even at age 54—with an assured athleticism. This event was...
Let’s say that a state passed a statute proscribing teachers from teaching reading in a language other than English until the student had passed the eighth grade. Violation of the statute was a misdemeanor. The state’s rationale was to assure that immigrant children learned English and assimilated. In fact, the state declared that teaching immigrant...
The Referendum that took Great Britain out of the European Union by a large popular majority occurred two years ago. President Trump was elected two years ago this coming November in something like a landslide in the Electoral College. Marine Le Pen’s Front National (since renamed the Rassemblement National) won a third of the popular...
“Never lose your temper except on purpose” was a firm maxim of Dwight Eisenhower’s. Donald Trump seems generally to observe the same rule, though certainly not always. His critics failed to understand this during the primaries in 2016, and they have continued to do so since. Gleefully, they report daily—almost hourly—on the President’s latest “belittling,”...
When the review copy of A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, by Alistair Horne, hit my desk at National Review in 1977, I found a reviewer immediately and waited for a second copy to follow from the publisher (as is so often the case in the publishing business). When it failed to arrive, I...
Women in Combat: Unnatural, Foolish, Immoral, by Mark C. Atkins (Cottage Grove, TN: Gildersleeve Publications; 212 pp., $10.99). Mark Atkins describes himself as a “failed Marine” who has never been in combat and who writes “with the same authority as that little boy who cried, “The Emperor has no clothes!” He is also a businessman...
NeverTrump really means “forever war.” Proof of this could be seen in the 2016 election, where anti-Trump Republicans fielded a candidate of their own, ex-CIA man Evan McMullin, rather than casting their votes for a third-party ticket with two non-Trump Republicans on it. That ticket was the Libertarian Party’s, with former New Mexico governor Gary...
Russian sexuality and the country’s general mores have become a topic of conversation in the United States, mostly in relation to President Trump’s alleged connections with the Kremlin and his behavior during his trip to Russia some time ago, which is the subject of the infamous “Steele Dossier.” The British press has not ignored the...
South Africa has rarely been out of the headlines in 2018. In late February, the South African government voted to amend the constitution to allow for the expropriation of land from white farmers without compensation. The vote put an international spotlight on the many problems plaguing the country. In January, President Donald Trump was reported...
