According to the indictment by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Russian trolls, operating out of St. Petersburg, took American identities on social media and became players in our 2016 election. On divisive racial and religious issues, the trolls took both sides. In the presidential election, the trolls favored Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein and Donald Trump, and...
Year: 2018
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Now They Tell Us
For years, National Review has been relentless in its criticism of conservatives who questioned the benefits of free trade, even though the conservative tradition in America has historically been skeptical of free trade. “Protectionist” was one of the most common epithets the magazine hurled at Pat Buchanan during his runs for the White House. In...
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Letter From Lebanon: The Phoenician Phoenix
“For thousands of years, the land that carried the mountains of Lebanon and hugged the Mediterranean Sea was restless,” says painter Antoine G. Faddoul of his Phoenix as a metaphor for his native land. “Those who inhabited the very first civilized cities suffered numerous invasions destroying their cities time and again [but] the survivors always...
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The Motives Behind the Massacre
“Enough is enough!” “This can’t go on!” “This has to stop!” These were among the comments that came through the blizzard of commentary after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Broward County. We have heard these words before. Unfortunately, such atrocities are not going to stop. For the ingredients that produce such...
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Is US Being Sucked Into Syria’s War?
Candidate Donald Trump may have promised to extricate us from Middle East wars, once ISIS and al-Qaida were routed, yet events and people seem to be conspiring to keep us endlessly enmeshed. Friday night, a drone, apparently modeled on a U.S. drone that fell into Iran’s hands, intruded briefly into Israeli airspace over the Golan...
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A Korean Thaw?
In his latest interview with the Iranian English-language Press TV network, Srdja Trifkovic discusses the latest developments on the Korean Peninsula. The first question was whether we are seeing a positive development in the relations between the North and the South, in the aftermath of the visit of Kim Jong Un’s sister to the Winter Olympics and...
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Trump—Middle American Radical
President Trump is the leader of America’s conservative party. Yet not even his allies would describe him as a conservative in the tradition of Robert Taft, Russell Kirk or William F. Buckley. In the primaries of 2016, all his rivals claimed the mantle of Mr. Conservative, Ronald Reagan. Yet Trump captured the party’s heart. Who,...
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An Undereducated Admiral
Since there are no pressing global issues that cannot wait until next week, I’ll devote my column to a book I’ve just finished reading. Its title, Sea Power: The History and Geopolitics of the World’s Oceans (Penguin, 2017), and the reputation of its author—retired admiral James George Stavridis, who ended his career as NATO Supreme...
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Machine Politics
From the December 1993 issue of Chronicles. “Modern liberty begins in revolt.” —H.M. Kallen In 1943, in the midst of the dark years of World War II when collectivism seemed to be sweeping all before it at home and abroad, three fiercely independent and feisty women, all of them friends and libertarians devoted to what...
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Nunes Duels the Deep State
That memo worked up in the Intel Committee of Chairman Devin Nunes may not have sunk the Mueller investigation, but from the sound of the secondary explosions, this torpedo was no dud. The critical charge: To persuade a FISA court to issue a warrant to spy on Trump aide Carter Page, the FBI relied on...
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Perpetual War—and How to End It
Whether the rationale is the need to wage a war on terror involving 76 countries or renewed preparations for a struggle against peer competitors Russia and China (as Defense Secretary James Mattis suggested recently while introducing America’s new National Defense Strategy), the U.S. military is engaged globally. A network of 800 military bases spread across...
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A Never-Trump Press in Near Panic
“All the News That’s Fit to Print” proclaims the masthead of the New York Times. “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” echoes the Washington Post. “The people have a right to know,” the professors at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism hammered into us in 1962. “Trust the people,” we were admonished. Explain then this hysteria, this...
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American Artisan
Whenever Robert Valade embarked on a commissioned piece, or simply took his hammer and chisel to cut an exquisitely fashioned design into a gift for a friend, he first bowed his large head and prayed to God to help him finish the job right. It was a simple ritual Robert performed some 14,000 times during...
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What the Editors Are Reading
Anthony Powell’s 12-volume Dance to the Music of Time is a work I’ve had in mind to look into for decades without ever having done so, until the publication last year of Hilary Spurling’s biography (reviewed in this issue by Derek Turner, the Lincolnshire man of letters) of the late English novelist, a contemporary of...
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Books in Brief
The Dead March: A History of the Mexican-American War, by Peter Guardino (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; 512 pp., $39.95). This is an excellent account—part social, part military, and part political—of the Mexican-American War, fought between 1846 and 1848 and concluded by the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1849 that ceded, essentially, the northern half of...
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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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The Long Retreat Through the Institutions
Twenty-sixteen was the year when American liberals confidently expected to consolidate the quiet political and cultural revolution they had been conducting for decades in the coming national elections. When the Republican Party nominated Donald J. Trump as its presidential candidate, the apparent miracle was enough (nearly) to cause the Democracy to reconsider the possibility 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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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...
Issue
February 2018
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The Klondike Stampede, Part II
For Part I of “The Klondike Stampede,” see Sins of Omission in the December 2017 issue. The 250 Indians who inhabited Dyea on the eve of the gold rush were Chilkats, members of the Tlingit tribe. They were short and stocky, and excellent packers. They commonly carried packs of 100 pounds or more. They charged...
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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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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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Signs and Revelations
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri Produced by Blueprint Pictures Written and directed by Martin McDonagh Distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures Lady Bird Produced by Scott Rudin Productions Written and directed by Greta Gerwig Distributed by A24 Three Billboards is hilarious; yet it could hardly be sadder. How can it be both at once? That’s director...
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Neocon Security Strategy
Devising a great power’s national-security strategy is serious business. When external challenges are properly evaluated, tasks prioritized, and resources allocated, the results can be impressive. The Roman Empire from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius (a.d. 96-180) provides one example; Britain from Napoleon to the Great War another. The rise of Prussia and unification of Germany during...
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Never Be Royals
Had she claimed to be 100-percent African-American, or to be a lesbian, transgender, or simply bisexual, the adoration would have been even more pronounced. If she had a criminal record, the perverse New York Times would have gone bananas, praising her to the skies. Not to mention the British politically correct media, like the BBC,...
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The New Deplorables
After Roy Moore secured the Republican nomination to fill Jeff Sessions’ seat in the U.S. Senate, the Washington Post ran an article claiming that, roughly four decades ago, Moore had dated two teenage girls and asked out a third in front of her mother, who did not approve. These girls were over the age of...
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Freedom From Monopolies
In June 2017, the European Union fined Google a record-breaking €2.42 billion for abusing the dominance of its popular search engine while building its online shopping service. Brussels found that Google illegally and artificially endorsed its own price-comparison service in searches. (In plain English, Google’s search results were biased in favor of its own services.) ...
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Freedom From Obligation
For many Americans at or near the mid-century mark of their lives, Frank Capra has shaped their understanding of the meaning of Christmas in a way that only Charles Dickens could possibly rival. Of all of his films, It’s a Wonderful Life was Capra’s personal favorite, but even though it was nominated for Best Picture...
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The Long Sadness
From the July 2014 issue of Chronicles. William Ball was just shy of 19 and living in the town of Souris on the prairies of Canada when war erupted in Europe in August 1914. The region was still something of a frontier, devoted to trapping and trading with Indians, and inhabited by hearty, adventurous types,...
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Chained Bible
The Church of England is now a citadel of advanced liberalism. It went over to secularism long ago, and its zealots intensify their hold upon doctrine and practice. The charge sheet includes, but is not confined to, support for the transgender lobby, for illegal immigrants, and for pandenominational movements. The Church smiles upon the “marriage”...
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A Patriotic Tax Plan
Aside from its sheer incomprehensibility, the U.S. federal tax code is immoral, by design. Its 75,000 pages exceed its 1917 length 187-fold. Paradoxically, even though the tax code contains more than four million words, the United States effectively has no tax code. At that absurd immensity the tax code says whatever your team of lawyers...
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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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“The World’s Greatest Pianist”
The lives of musicians can be more than a bit repetitive. The same patterns are repeated again and again, as is the case with athletes—with all people who master a particular art or calling. The gifted one excels and develops a career, sometimes without breaking off from the master. This pattern fits Mozart—and also Nadia...
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What Mean Ye By These Stones?
Following the 1862 battle at Perryville, the angry Unionists who held the Kentucky town declined to bury their slain foes. When the stench and sight of wild hogs gorging themselves on corpses finally proved unbearable, the task of laying the dead to rest fell upon one Henry P. Bottom, the secessionist upon whose once-prosperous farm...
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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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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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Campus Utopias
As we gathered in the gazebo, sitting on the hard white benches with the paint peeling off in strips, nursing Marlboros—the girls wielding cigarette-holders, like scepters—we decided then and there who and what was the main obstacle to our goal. Sheryl called it the “Marshmallow Conspiracy,” and of course we didn’t need a translation, although...
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A Promising Year
On this month’s form, 2018 will be an interesting year. So far it has brought rich rewards to us world affairs aficionados. The overall global tempo is accelerating, affrettando, like de Falla’s Danza Ritual del Fuego. What would have been considered bizarre if not outright insane but a few years ago is now commonplace. Take...
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Too Many Wars. Too Many Enemies.
If Turkey is not bluffing, U.S. troops in Manbij, Syria, could be under fire by week’s end, and NATO engulfed in the worst crisis in its history. Turkish President Erdogan said Friday his troops will cleanse Manbij of Kurdish fighters, alongside whom U.S. troops are embedded. Erdogan’s foreign minister demanded concrete steps by the U.S....
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Bitter Never Trumper Admits Free Trade is a Loser
President Trump’s decision to impose tariffs of up to 50% on Asian washing machines being dumped into the United States in response to a trade case brought by Whirlpool prompted howls of outrage among Trump opponents everywhere, especially among Trump opponents who used to masquerade as conservatives. The most revealing howl came from National Review‘s...
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In a Trump Hunt, Beware the Perjury Trap
Asked if he would agree to be interviewed by Robert Mueller’s team, President Donald Trump told the White House press corps, “I would love to do it . . . as soon as possible. . . . under oath, absolutely.” On hearing this, the special counsel’s office must have looked like the Eagles’ locker room...
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Suicide of the West (Reconsidered)
From the February 2014 issue of Chronicles. The elegant duplex maisonette at 73 East 73rd Street in Manhattan, formerly the residence of the late Mr. and Mrs. William F. Buckley, Jr., was recently bought by Mr. and Mrs. Mark Rockefeller, son and daughter-in-law of the late Gov. Nelson Rockefeller. A writer for the New York...
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Where the Buck Really Stops
From the October 1995 issue of Chronicles. “The question is,” Humpty Dumpty tells Alice in Through the Looking Glass, “which is to be master—that’s all.” As overused as the quotation may be, it nevertheless communicates a perennial truth that most people forget when it comes to understanding not only the answer but also the question...
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Is Democracy on the Way Down?
“The Western democratic system is hailed by the developed world as near perfect and the most superior political system to run a country,” mocked China’s official new agency. “However, what’s happening in the United States today will make more people worldwide reflect on the viability and legitimacy of such a chaotic political system.” There is...
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A Conservative Case for Open Borders?
As I write this, the federal government remains “shut down” because congressional Democrats have committed themselves en masse to open borders. The Democrats know that they can secure congressional approval of President Obama’s unilateral DACA amnesty if they give President Trump funding for a wall on our southern border. But the Democrats are unwilling to...
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Blessed Division
According to a poll conducted in the late summer of 2017, 56 percent of respondents agreed that President Trump was “tearing the country apart.” We consistently read reports and see on the news the accusation that Trump, and others, are being “divisive” when what we really need is “unity.” We are repeatedly told we need...
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A US-Turkish Clash in Syria?
The war for dominance in the Middle East, following the crushing of ISIS, appears about to commence in Syria—with NATO allies America and Turkey on opposing sides. Turkey is moving armor and troops south to Syria’s border enclave of Afrin, occupied by Kurds, to drive them out, and then drive the Syrian Kurds out of...