“A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches,” said wise King Solomon. In the fall of 2018, Democrats pressed with all their might to take Brett Kavanaugh’s good name away, in an effort to retake control of Congress. This was, to say the least, unjust, as the nominee himself—by all reasonable accounts...
Month: November 2018
Post
Kavanaugh in Retrospect
Hours after the U.S. Senate voted to confirm Judge Kavanaugh as the 114th Supreme Court Justice, a commentator on FOX News remarked that no winners had emerged from the legislative ordeal. He was wrong, of course. Kavanaugh himself was the primary winner, having survived the fury of Hell itself to prevail over the persons and...
Post
Cradle of Empire
As of October, the U.S. has been fighting a war in Afghanistan for fully 17 years. Young men who were not even born when the war started are now almost of an age to serve and be deployed. And if that’s the case with our forces, you can just imagine how many of today’s Taliban...
Post
Defying the Determinists
President Donald Trump is unique among post-NAFTA presidents for rejecting the economic determinism that has dominated U.S. economic policy since 1993. His predecessors took it for granted that, given the exigencies of “free trade,” domestic manufacturing job losses were inevitable. Then they crafted trade policies that fulfilled their own prophecies. During the signing ceremony for...
Post
Obsession!
Reading Ann Coulter’s newest polemical masterpiece brings to mind one of her previous ones. I don’t mean her sparkling In Trump We Trust, published just before the 2016 election (and reviewed in this magazine), in which she predicted that the unthinkable would happen. Rather I refer to her 2011 book, Demonic: How the Liberal Mob...
Post
What Leads to What
Last fall, when they stopped in New York on their way to vacation in Europe, Chronicles editor Chilton Williamson and his wife invited Taki and me to dinner. Before the wine started flowing and Taki’s raconteurial skills became the primary entertainment, Chilton mentioned his desire for more reviews of books of economic history in the...
Post
A Matter of Necessity
God, War, and Providence approaches the story of Roger Williams by exploring the relationship between Puritan Massachusetts and Williams’s Rhode Island, and the relations both colonies had with the Indian tribes inhabiting these regions. Plymouth Plantation was founded in 1620 by English Separatists. The plantation system had first been employed in Ireland to subjugate the...
Post
Age of the F-Bomb
The suppression of manners and the power of the halfwit elite Sometime during the 1920’s, at an exclusive party at Count Boni de Castellane’s, a great French lady felt herself beginning to die at the dinner table. “Quick, bring the dessert,” she whispered to the waiter. She was not overcome by greed. She simply wished...
Issue