“But other men know not what they are doing when awake, even as they forget what they do in sleep.” —Heraclitus, Fragment Whenever an act of violence is committed against Muslims by a non-Muslim, as Brenton Tarrant did in March when he viciously gunned down 50 Muslims at prayer in Christchurch, New Zealand, the left-liberal...
“You can’t run an army without profanity; and it has to be eloquent profanity. An army without profanity couldn’t fight its way out of a piss-soaked paper bag.” —George Patton My father is an Army veteran, a former auto-body worker, and a retired policeman who for many years worked undercover in vice and narcotics. Needless...
We often hear opponents of U.S. action abroad denounced as “anti-American.” On the other hand, these alleged anti-Americans present themselves as anti-interventionists—opponents of the policy and not the country. So how to tell the difference? One sign of anti-Americanism is the surrounding rhetoric used by the opponents of intervention in question: Are they screaming about...
The night had started off great. A few weeks earlier I had agreed to speak at the New York premiere of the American Enterprise Institute President Arthur Brooks’s forthcoming documentary The Pursuit. The invitation came from the think tank Conscious Capitalism, which was founded by Whole Foods founder John Mackey. Although I knew little about...
To judge from what is going on in Italy, the only major European country where populists are in power, right-wing populism works, but left-wing populism does not. Populism, they tell us, is a meaningless word. What else, after all, can populism mean but what is popular? And so, so what? Nevertheless, populism does exist. Here...
I take a lot of pictures. I am old enough to have spent thousands of dollars on film and photo developing over three decades, from my late single digits up until about the age of 35. While I was an early adopter of the iPhone in June 2007, my film photos trailed off almost four...
Violent incidents, perpetrated by the opponents of a tyrannical regime, tend to enable such regimes to become openly terrorist. They may have been on a brutal trajectory all along, but their enemies’ acts of desperate defiance (or plain insanity) often facilitate their transition to the level of oppression which had been desired all along. Charlotte...
OK, sport fans, get your wallets out and start giving. That’s the latest brainstorm from a New York Times columnist who makes an unconvincing case for reparations to black people. For slavery, that is. And that means you, whitey, or brownie, and I guess that goes for yellow ones also. He wants these reparations to...
In 1979, as John Wayne was dying, his friend and costar in five movies, Maureen O’Hara, went to Capitol Hill to urge Congress to issue a medal honoring Wayne. She told Congress that, “To the people of the world, John Wayne is not just an actor—and a very fine actor—John Wayne is the United States...
Politics are over in America. Political maneuvering will go on, of course, but the old civics-class view of American political life was based on a set of assumptions that are no longer operative. America was once far more homogenous than she is today. But the passing of the 1965 Immigration Act and the political and...
George McCartney is usually right on in his cultural analyses of current films, but he made a couple of statements in his review of Boy Erased (“Mortal Coils,” In the Dark, January) that must be addressed. “If homosexuality is innate, as recent research suggests,” he wrote, “then what right do heterosexuals have to deride people...
Aaron D. Wolf is absolutely right to argue that, from a Christian perspective, J.J. Rousseau is the fountainhead of political evil in our day (“Ignoble Savages,” January-March, Heresies). Indeed, the Prince of this World has been rejoicing in Christianity’s shameless pandering to the courtesan Mlle Égalité, ever since the catastrophe of the First Republic. Rousseau...
Frédéric Bastiat’s Candlestick Makers’ Petition, an open letter to the French Parliament written in 1845, gets trotted out by free-trade fundamentalists every time anyone says the word tariff. Bastiat’s goal was to take the protectionist’s position to its logical extreme in order to mock protectionism via satire. He distinguishes between free-traders who seek low prices...
Heidi Waleson’s Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America (2018) is a challenging and enlightening work—one which dares much and succeeds remarkably well. We must concede that we do not often find a work of expository prose to be as appealing as...
The sight of American leftists getting on their moral high horses to attribute blame to conservatives for the growth of political violence in America is exasperating, to say the least. The dispatch of mail bombs to critics of Donald Trump and the shootings at a synagogue in Pittsburgh were like manna from heaven for these...
Stephen Bodio is a memoirist, journalist, critic, sportswriter, naturalist, outdoorsman, hunter, falconer, bird breeder, dog breeder, and now a novelist. Born in Boston, he has lived in the dusty roadside hamlet of Magdalena in southwestern New Mexico for more than 30 years and has published a dozen books, including the superb Querencia—the literary artist’s autobiographical...
Twilight of the Elites: Prosperity, the Periphery, and the Future of France, by Christophe Guilluy (New Haven: Yale University Press; 184 pp., $25.00). The French dislike what they call “Anglo-American economics” even more than they dislike English and American cookery; also, more recently, progressive Anglo-American views regarding the supposed identicality between the sexes. Christophe Guilluy,...
Always keen to read travel books about Mexico, I picked up an elderly copy (printed by A. Appleton & Company in 1921) of Viva Mexico! by Charles Macomb Flandrau that I came across in a local bookshop. The book, originally published in 1908, is still available in reprint. I’d never heard of Flandrau, but a...
The wind roared all night, darkness in furious motion that yet held solidly in place. It was still gusting hard when Harlan Edmonds’ Dodge pickup pulled into the drive beside the house at ten in the morning and stopped behind my Ford standing with the tailgate fastened in place against a full load. I braced...
Pro-democratic ideological think tanks that evaluate the future of democracy by the extent of its global spread and the fortunes of relatively insignificant countries around the world (the Third one, especially) should be far more concerned with events currently occurring in the Mother of Parliaments in Westminster and with present political trends in one of...
Here at the beginning of the May issue, I am pleased to introduce a new feature, In This Number, which will henceforth introduce each new issue of Chronicles. And in this inaugural notice, I’m pleased to announce also that a merger has been effected between The Rockford Institute, the publisher of Chronicles for over 43...
After two years and tens of millions of dollars, the Mueller investigation ended in a shattering anticlimax for Democrats. On March 22, Special Counsel Robert Mueller sent Attorney General William Barr his report, and Barr promptly informed Congress that Mueller found no collusion between Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia. Mueller recommended no prosecutions—though Barr’s...
Boyd Cathey is an 11th generation Carolina Tar Heel who was mentored by and worked with Russell Kirk. The Land We Love: The South and Its Heritage is written reverentially, just as one might reflect on the memory of one’s mother. For the South is not just any region of the United States, like the...
I’m quite moved these days when I meet Americans and they ask me, ever so delicately, “How’s Brexit?” Or: “How’s that Brexit thing going?” Or, “Are you guys going to be OK with the Brexit?” Perhaps it’s politesse, a passing interest in a small country’s affairs. They often wear this anxious look, though, the expression...
Mary, Queen of Scots Produced and distributed by Focus Features Directed by Josie Rourke Screenplay by Beau Willimon The Favourite Screenplay by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara Distributed by Universal Pictures Stan & Ollie Produced and distributed by Sony Pictures Classics Directed by Jon Baird Screenplay by Jeff Pope Can You Ever Forgive Me? Produced...
This is a massive biography of an economic historian whose popular fame rests on his having been made one of 65 Companions of Honour by the Queen while remaining a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. It suffers from many of the difficulties encountered by biographers of men of thought. Like William Howard...
