TORIES FEAR INFILTRATION BY UKIP MEMBERS warned a headline in The Times this week. That journal of record has been slow on the uptake, but this is now a settled trend. People are joining the Conservative Party in large and growing numbers, not because they believe in it—au contraire—but because they reckon a leadership contest...
The War for the Tory Succession is about to resume in all its fury, as the combatants leave their summer quarters and prepare for the fall campaign. The War Cry will be voiced by Boris Johnson, who has a Monday column in the Daily Telegraph paid at £275,000 a year. It is a bully pulpit,...
“McCain’s Death Leaves Void” ran the Wall Street Journal headline over a front-page story that began: “The death of John McCain will leave Congress without perhaps its loudest voice in support of the robust internationalism that has defined the country’s security relations since World War II.” Certainly, the passing of the senator whose life story...
In his latest interview for Serbia Today, the country’s most poplar news and current affairs site, Srdja Trifkovic outlines the likely grand strategy of President Donald Trump’s enemies to remove him from office. [Excerpts, translated from Serbian.] The “deep state,” which is solidly against Trump, includes all key editorial boards of the leading daily newspapers...
“The conscience of the Senate”: Senator Jeff Flake (R-Az) on Senator John (“Bomb-bomb-bomb-bomb bomb-bomb Iran”) McCain.
“If anyone is looking for a good lawyer,” said President Donald Trump ruefully, “I would strongly suggest that you don’t retain the services of Michael Cohen.” Michael Cohen is no Roy Cohn. Tuesday, Trump’s ex-lawyer, staring at five years in prison, pled guilty to a campaign violation that may not even be a crime. Cohen...
President Donald Trump announced late on Wednesday that he had asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to study South African land and farm seizures and killing of farm owners, by implication of white race. The African National Congress (ANC)-controlled government in Pretoria accused the President of stoking racial divisions in the country, while his haters...
Entryism: the very word is like a knell. It conjures up the many efforts by Moscow Central to take over British politics. They had successes. In the general election of 1945, two Communist M.P.s were returned to Westminster. They were heavily backed by Moscow, not unreasonably, considering the vast numbers of Communists in France and Italy. But those two had...
In backing John Brennan’s right to keep his top-secret security clearance, despite his having charged the president with treason, the U.S. intel community has chosen to fight on indefensible terrain. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper seemed to recognize that Sunday when he conceded that ex-CIA Director Brennan had the subtlety of “a freight...
History never repeats itself but can offer echoes and rhymes. One rhyme coming shortly is Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign. The old man had retired, deeply wounded by Disraeli’s victory of 1874. He was enticed back by the difficulties of that Government, and Gladstone made a barnstorming attack on the misdeeds of the Ottomans. “The Turks one...
Is anyone really surprised by New York governor Andrew Cuomo saying, “We’re not going to make America great again. It was never that great.” The Left has been saying that, if not quite so bluntly, for decades. The only difference is that many more Americans now hold that view, including a disconcerting number of putative...
If ex-CIA Director John Brennan did to Andrew Jackson what he did to Donald Trump, he would have lost a lot more than his security clearance. He would have been challenged to a duel and shot. “Trump’s . . . performance in Helsinki,” Brennan had said, “exceeds the threshold of ‘high crimes & misdemeanors.’ It...
The United States has created “chaos” in its management of foreign affairs, Turkey’s foreign minister Mevlüt Çavusoglu said on August 13. “There is confusion in the U.S. administration, and no one knows who is doing what,” Çavusoglu said after meeting his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov in Ankara. “We are at a turning point in the...
Boris. Only one politician in the land is universally known by his first name. “Boris Johnson” is unnecessary. He is now the center of a political storm, since he wrote in his Daily Telegraph column last week that burka-wearers looked like letter-boxes and bank robbers. They do, actually, but this truthful observation did not save...
Anti-Confederate liberals (of various races) can’t get over the fact that pro-common-sense liberals, moderates and conservatives (of various races) can’t go over the fact that rhetorical agitation over race has led us down a blind alley. The supposed “nationalist” rally in Washington, D.C., last weekend was more an embarrassment to its promoters than it was...
Friday, deep into the 17th year of America’s longest war, Taliban forces overran Ghazni, a provincial capital that sits on the highway from Kabul to Kandahar. The ferocity of the Taliban offensive brought U.S. advisers along with U.S. air power, including a B-1 bomber, into the battle. “As the casualty toll in Ghazni appeared to...
Over lunch last week, a friend told me about a bumper sticker he had just seen: “F*ck Trump and f*ck you for voting for him.” (There were no asterisks in the original). I imagine the owner of the car will face as much censure as Robert DeNiro did for repeating the first part of the...
Is it any of Canada’s business whether Saudi women have the right to drive? Well, Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland just made it her business. Repeatedly denouncing Riyadh’s arrest of women’s rights advocate Samar Badawi, Freeland has driven the two countries close to a break in diplomatic relations. “Reprehensible” said Riyadh of Freeland’s tweeted attack. Canada...
On August 8th, 1918, the battle of Amiens began, with stunning success. It was a masterpiece of planning and execution, utterly different from the blood-soaked failures of previous attacks—which included the Kaiserschlacht of July 1918. Amiens was a surprise attack led by some 500 tanks, with infantry following 200 yards behind the creeping barrage. No artillery had opened up before...
Special Ops, Generational Struggle, and the Cooperstown of Commandos Raids by U.S. commandos in Afghanistan. (I could be talking about 2001 or 2018.) A U.S. drone strike in Yemen. (I could be talking about 2002 or 2018.) Missions by Green Berets in Iraq. (I could be talking about 2003 or 2018.) While so much about...
On August 7 President Donald Trump issued a strong warning to countries trading with Iran, following his re-imposition of sanctions on the country. “Anyone doing business with Iran will NOT be doing business with the United States,” he tweeted. Some reimposed sanctions took effect overnight, while additional, more punitive ones—relating to oil exports and central...
On meeting with the EU’s Jean-Claude Juncker last month, Donald Trump tweeted: “Both the U.S. and the E.U. drop all Tariffs, Barriers and Subsidies! That would finally be Free Market and Fair Trade.” Did Larry Kudlow somehow get access to Trump’s phone? We know not. But, on hearing this, Steve Forbes, Stephen Moore and Arthur...
“In office but not in power.” That came from Norman Lamont in his resignation speech, on John Major’s hapless Government. The line is famous but misleading, for the implication is that what matters is power, and office is mere trappings. It is not so. For all European nations, political power is a chimera. The leader...
A war with Iran would define, consume and potentially destroy the Trump presidency, but exhilarate the neocon never-Trumpers who most despise the man. Why, then, is President Donald Trump toying with such an idea? Looking back at Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, wars we began or plunged into, what was gained to justify the...
“Republics exist only on tenure of being agitated.” —Wendell Phillips If anything might have transformed the presidential election of 2004 from a dull ritual of mass democracy into an interesting and perhaps even meaningful act of civic decision, it would have been the presence of Patrick J. Buchanan, whose wit and sharp conservative intelligence enlivened...
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...
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...
“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,”...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
“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...
“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...
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...
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...
S.O.T. is the latest acronym to come out of Liberal HQ: Save Our Terrorists. The unco guid are outraged because Sajid Javid, the Home Secretary, has written to the US Justice to confirm that he has no objection to the American authorities trying two nominally British jihadists for their crimes—and without lodging the standard reservation, that if found guilty they...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...