From the October 2016 issue of Chronicles. Business Insider recently reported “a mind-blowing demographic shift” that is about to occur. Considering the globe’s whole human population, the number of adults age 65 and older will in a few years be greater than the number of children under the age of 5. This unprecedented change should...
Month: February 2018
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Cult of America, Part I
Whether or not America is or ever was a Christian nation is hotly debated. It is fashionable today on the left to ascribe whatever currently is deemed by it to be unacceptable—“trans phobia,” say—to the legacy of privileged patriarchal white men whose Christianity gave them an excuse to own slaves and otherwise oppress minorities. The...
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Feds: Stop “Helping”
Student-loan debt in the United States is now $1.48 trillion. That incredible sum is a heavy drag on the economy and a burden on young people. And federal intervention in education is the cause. It wasn’t always this way. In June 1965, I began working as a salesman at the Sears store in Knoxville, receiving...
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Big Tech as Big Brother
Conservatives more than anyone else view with a gimlet eye the rise of the Internet and the gigantic tech companies that are taking over ever larger parts of our lives. Even the place where most of these companies dwell, Silicon Valley, is a bastardization of its real name, Santa Clara, or St. Claire of Assisi,...
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Trump, Beating the Odds
U.S. employment increased over President Trump’s first year in office, expanding from 145,541,000 in January to 147,380,000 in December, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Thus, amid the sound and fury of #NeverTrump media coverage, there has been a significant, and overlooked, development. Donald Trump has avoided an economic curse shared by nearly every...
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Time’s Terpsichorean
Anthony Powell’s million-word, 12-volume novel sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time, is one of the great achievements of postwar English literature, attracting near-universal praise for its subtle and textured evocation of England between World War I and the 1960’s. Powell’s narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, looks on quizzically as a representative cavalcade of 20th-century characters...
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Shoes to Fill
America is a nation of normal people who find themselves thrust into increasingly abnormal situations. Left-wing ideologues want to take a country of families, churches, and businesses and turn it into a playpen of radical identities. This is to be done in the name of fighting oppression, where apparently the most oppressive thing of all...
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Return of the Kings
In a television appearance on January 7, President Emmanuel Macron of France, rather than addressing his compatriots exclusively, directed his remarks to his “fellow citizens of the E.U.,” saying, “2018 is a very special year, and I will need you this year.” Macron, a former investment banker and cabinet minister in the Socialist government of...
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Shepherd in a Strange Land
“I’m a pastor, not a scholar,” Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, head of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia since 2011, said when I interviewed him earlier last year for Catholic World Report about his new book. “A bishop’s job is helping people get to heaven, not to Washington.” In fact, since the death of Francis Cardinal George...
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Drain the Racket
When Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was first passed, “help wanted: men” and “help wanted: women” ads were common in newspapers. Private employers could hire and fire for discriminatory reasons. Title VII made discriminatory ads and the hiring practices they represent illegal. In their new book, Unequal, two law professors, Sandra...
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Beyond Imagination: Uranium One
The multilayered story surrounding Uranium One—the former South African, then Canadian, and now Russian company, of which both Bill and Hillary Clinton and their family foundation are the enriched beneficiaries—has all the usual elements of a typical Clinton scandal. A talented con man, Bill Clinton perfected his game in Arkansas. Through his control over state...
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