Sen. John McCain’s death at 81 on August 25 was followed by effusive praise from everyone who is anyone in the Permanent State. His memorial service at Washington’s National Cathedral on September 1 confirmed that, inside the Beltway, even death is eminently political. It was the biggest gathering of the nation’s bipartisan establishment and its...
Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight . . . —Psalm 144:1 According to the Washington Post, McAllen, Texas is an “all-American city,” albeit one “that speaks Spanish.” So it’s small wonder that “immigration isn’t a problem for this Texas town—it’s a way of life.” ...
Thursday is shaping up to be the Trump presidency’s “Gunfight at O.K. Corral.” That day, the fates of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and much else, may be decided. The New York Times report that Rosenstein, sarcastically or seriously in May 2017, talked of wearing a wire into the...
In his latest interview with Radio Sputnik International, Srdja Trifkovic discusses President Donald Trump’s speech to the UN General Assembly and contrasts his defense of national sovereignty with French President Emanuel Macron’s advocacy of multilateralism before the same forum. The first question concerned Trump’s suggestion that his Administration has already accomplished more than almost any...
On Saturday morning, September 22, I switched on Fox News and there witnessed a gaggle of five garrulous women, all talking at the same time, all vacuous and empty headed, and all saying basically nothing—a so-called “panel” discussing the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and the last-minute and largely-unfounded accusations hurled...
Greece is lovely most of the time and irresistible in the late summer, so I am back for a second stint in two months. Mercifully there are fewer tourists around now. There is no line to get into the palace of Knossos and even the ferry to Santorini is half-empty. The intense heat is gone,...
From the December 1991 issue of Chronicles. To the degree that it is remembered at all, the America First Committee (AFC) has gone down in history as an organization most suspect, at best composed of good people serving a bad cause, at worst riddled with conscious agents of a Nazi transmission belt. During its heyday...
Writing on the events preceding the Terror of the French Revolution, Augustin Cochin described a scene that might be familiar to us today. Indeed, there are many parallels. What follows is an excerpt (emphasis mine) from Organizing the Revolution: Selections From Augustin Cochin, edited and translated by our late friend Claude Polin and his wife, Nancy,...
By the end of his second term, President Ronald Reagan, who had called the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” was strolling through Red Square with Russians slapping him on the back. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. And how have we husbanded the fruits of our Cold War triumph? This month, China’s...
“Dirt is dirtier than clean is clean,” observes one of John O’Hara’s characters—a history professor, I think—remarking on the human race’s observed partiality for darkness and grime in their news diet, rather than sweetness and light. Note the uproar over Brett Kavanaugh’s behavior—nice or nasty—at a high school party he attended at age 17, during...
From the September 2010 issue of Chronicles. John Poindexter—Navy veteran and national-security advisor during President Reagan’s second term—resigned in disgrace after congressional hearings revealed that the United States, with Poindexter’s approval and with the help of an enterprising young lieutenant colonel named Oliver North, was selling arms to Iran and giving the profits to the...
Upon the memory and truthfulness of Christine Blasey Ford hangs the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh, his reputation, and possibly his career on the nation’s second highest court. And much more. If Kavanaugh is voted down or forced to withdraw, the Republican Party and conservative movement could lose their last best hope for...
From the July 2005 issue of Chronicles. Whatever happened to Randolph Scott ridin’ the range alone? Whatever happened to Gene and Tex And Roy and Rex, the Durango Kid? Whatever happened to Randolph Scott His horse plain, as can be? Whatever happened to Randolph Scott Has happened to the best of me. So sang the...
Our diversity is our greatest strength. After playing clips of Democratic politicians reciting that truth of modern liberalism, Tucker Carlson asked, “How, precisely, is diversity our strength? Since you’ve made this our new national motto, please be specific.” Reaction to Carlson’s question, with some declaring him a racist for having raised it, suggests that what...
From the June 2016 issue of Chronicles. In 1996, Barry Alan Shain published his Myth of American Individualism: The Protestant Origins of American Political Thought. It was a book that should have shaken professional conservatism to its foundations. At the time Patrick J. Buchanan was a standard-bearer for an America bound by a common cultural...
From the December 1992 issue of Chronicles. I had heard about, but not read, “The End of History?” Francis Fukuyama’s star-burst essay published in 1989; but I felt a twinge of sympathy for him as his critics chortled and pointed at history rumbling anew: people dancing atop the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union falling to...
Is President Donald Trump about to intervene militarily in the Syrian civil war? For that is what he and his advisers seem to be signaling. Last week, Trump said of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s campaign to recapture the last stronghold of the rebellion, Idlib province: “If it’s a slaughter, the world is going to get...
Two words of caution before we close down our judgment on the Salisbury poisonings. One: I have never seen what’s in it for Putin. He’s had to take a deal of international flak for a crime committed shortly before the World Cup of football—which was designed to be, and was, a huge propaganda triumph for...
The primary purpose of a grand jury is to vote on indictments. The Pennsylvania grand jury that examined the Church issued two indictments. Forty-four percent of the priests mentioned in the report are dead; the average age of the remainder is 71. The Pennsylvania grand jury report does contain details of actions that can only...
Now that a week has passed since Sen. John Sidney McCain III was given a truly presidential sendoff in Washington, it is not in poor form to try and amend the gushing record presented by the media and the bipartisan establishment. The plaudits and perorations are well known, including Meghan McCain’s amazing claim that America’s...
The campaign to overturn the 2016 election and bring down President Trump shifted into high gear this week. Inspiration came Saturday morning from the altar of the National Cathedral where our establishment came to pay homage to John McCain. Gathered there were all the presidents from 1993 to 2017, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and...
From the August 1995 issue of Chronicles. A popular belief about the founding era is that America was a society of atomistic individuals. All that Americans demanded, according to myth, was that their life and property be protected by government; the remainder of their affairs was to be their own concern, Barry Alan Shain, in...
If kids aren’t reading books, maybe it’s because they don’t have exciting books to read. According to the American Psychological Association, a third of all teens have not a read a book for pleasure in a year. The report cites the usual culprits, especially the prevalence of spending time on social media, which is even...
HASTINGS: ‘What news, what news in this our tott’ring state? CATESBY: ‘It is a reeling world indeed, my lord, And I believe will never stand upright Till Richard wear the garland of the realm.’ —(RICHARD III, 3.2.37-40) Catesby is testing out the reaction of Hastings to the question: where will he stand when Richard makes...
“It is time for this war in Afghanistan to end,” said Gen. John Nicholson in Kabul on his retirement Sunday after a fourth tour of duty and 31 months as commander of U.S. and NATO forces. Labor Day brought news that another U.S. serviceman had been killed in an insider attack by an Afghan soldier....
Last week, a prominent American replied “Of course not” when he was asked on FOX News whether Donald Trump was racist. He added that America wasn’t racist, either. When asked about NFL players protesting during the national anthem, he declared: “We should never denigrate our flag and our national anthem. We should always be Americans...
A personal and national narrative of resistance to globalism Twenty years ago I somehow managed to get my act together and get out of Paris, where I had haunted a cheap hotel for a year in the wake of the death of Princess Diana like the ghost of the Marlon Brando character in Last Tango...
In 1912, at dusk walking home, Henry Adams spotted something he thought to be a hippopotamus in the nation’s capital. As he drew nearer he saw it was President Taft. He gave me a shock. He looks bigger and more tumble to pieces than ever . . . but what struck me most was the...
The political establishment in California has become self-admittedly secessionist in recent months, rebelling specifically against federal immigration policy and more broadly by raising the possibility of leaving a backward and reactionary country that does not share its culture and its politics. The secessionist spirit is spreading on the left and in leftist portions of the...
Heralding the rise of the daily newspaper in 1831, French poet and politician Alphonse de Lamartine declared journalism would emerge as “the whole of human thought,” but that thought itself “will not have time to ripen, to accumulate into the form of a book.” The book, Lamartine proclaimed, “will arrive too late.” “The only book...
Midway through Billie Holiday’s plaintive 1941 recording of “Jim,” there is a short piano solo barely 25 seconds in length—not even a full 32-bar chorus—by Teddy Wilson. “Jim” is largely forgotten today, but Wilson’s lightly swinging interpretation of the melody is typical of his elegant, rhythmic playing, exemplary for its Swing Era sensibility, and neatly...
Londonistan: The content is in the book’s title. Melanie Phillips, the author, had great difficulty in finding a publisher; no main house would take it, even though she is a distinguished and successful writer, and in the end it came out in 2006 with a minor publisher, Gibson Square. The book’s theme is that Britain...
President Donald Trump’s meeting with President Vladimir Putin of Russia and their joint press conference in Helsinki on July 16 have ignited an ongoing paroxysm of rage and hysteria in the U.S. media. Morbid Russophobia and Putin-hate are déjà-vu, but the outpouring of vitriol against Trump has been raised to an entirely new level. The...
Here’s a question for you: Could the “monster” of the #MeToo movement get a fair trial anywhere in these United States? Is there a potential jury member that has not made up his mind that Harvey Weinstein raped, mistreated, and oppressed women? Since last October to be exact, every news organization in America has been...
When historians survey Europe’s 20th century, rarely do they question the fundamental evil of the old irrelevant monarchies and aristocratic regimes, and the obvious necessity of replacing them with progressive socialist and nationalist substitutes. A strong case can in fact be made that those ancien regime states disappeared some decades too early, and that had...
The United States recently came under an attack by an activity so insidious that Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and his Wisconsin colleague Tammy Baldwin joined forces in an effort to demand it be “reined in.” Massachusetts’ Elizabeth Warren, the Senate’s modern-day firebrand who never tires in her perpetual imitation of the maniacal abolitionist John Brown,...
The very idea of dual citizenship is downright absurd. It’s a contradiction that cannot be resolved. The concept of citizenship is based on the expectation of loyalty to the country, and this, in turn, means that citizens owe their exclusive allegiance to the community in which they live. So how is it possible to have...
The first problem with Brexit is the word Brexit—one of those stupid portmanteau words, like motel or brunch. It is a joined-up abbreviation of “Britain’s” and “exit from the European Union.” Conceived in a think tank, by someone who wanted to remain in the E.U., the term should have been murdered at birth. Instead, like...
It’s easy in this business to read too much journalism at the expense of books. Every morning I go through the New York Times (faster and more selectively with each week that passes), the (London) Daily Telegraph, and Le Figaro (it has some strong conservative writers, like Luc Ferry, and interesting essays and well-done interviews...
Many a new genre of journalism has sprung up thanks to President Trump. The latest is the “victims of tariffs” industry profile. As the Trump administration slaps tariffs on foreign steel, aluminum, and manufactured goods of various kinds, trading partners—i.e., rivals—such as China and Mexico are imposing retaliatory tariffs of their own. The problem for...
You Were Never Really Here Produced by Why Not Productions and the British Film Institute Directed and written by Lynne Ramsay, based on Jonathan Ames’s novel Distributed by Amazon Studios Tully Produced by BRON Studios Directed by Jason Reitman Screenplay by Diablo Cody Distributed by Focus Features This month we have two—you’ll excuse the expression—art-house...
In 1935, as president of France, Pierre Laval banned “weapons of war” and decreed that all firearms should be registered with the government. In 1945 he was tried and found guilty of treason for his collaboration with the German occupation. Between those two years, Hitler built his strong war machine, and in 1940 he invaded...
Some of the best-loved characters in English literature are observed only dimly through the eyes of an unreliable first-person narrator; like fish seen through the glass of a tank, they swim toward us, momentarily dazzling in their colors, before receding again into the murk. Such is surely the case with P.G. Wodehouse’s immortal creation Reginald...
I have been told that there is something called the “Pavarotti Effect,” and that this phenomenon is observable and definable. Perhaps sometimes the Pavarotti Effect was an affect, or perhaps it was subsumed by the “Superstar Effect,” as Sherwin Rosen called it in a paper published in The American Economic Review in 1981. Rosen insisted...
Pope Francis is wrong to change the Catechism of the Catholic Church to suit his postmodern, antibiblical leanings, making capital punishment utterly “inadmissible” in civil society, like hearsay evidence in court. Pegging his new teaching on the “inviolability and dignity of the person,” he has offended decent people by blaspheming against the Bible, calling evil...
My wife and I shall visit Paris again this fall, as we have done for years, but the city will be an empty place for us following the death of our dear friend and my revered colleague, Claude Polin, on July 23. Mercifully, Claude was spared the horrors of modern death in a nursing home...
If ever there was a democratic election in a giant modern nation-state, it was Donald J. Trump’s victory in 2016. And I’ve closely watched every presidential election since I was nine in 1964, when Lyndon Johnson lied his way to a landslide against Barry Goldwater. Trump gathered the remnants of Nixon’s Silent Majority and the...
A book faces me across the room from a bookcase in my office. It has a blood-red and black cover. The author’s name is printed in black down the upper part of the spine and the title in white below that. The title is Io Uccido—“I Kill” in Italian. I’ve meant for some time to...
This summer, the sex scandal that has bedeviled the Catholic Church went critical. First came the stunning revelation that Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, former Archbishop of Washington and friend to presidents, had for decades been a predator-priest who preyed on seminarians and abused altar boys, and whose depravity was widely known and covered up. Came then...