Unplanned Produced and distributed by Pure Flix Entertainment Directed and written by Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon Cold Pursuit Produced by Studio Canal Directed by Han Peter Moland Screenplay by Frank Bladwin, adapted from the Norwegian film Kraftidioten Distributed by Summit Entertainment The Mule Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Directed by Clint Eastwood Screenplay...
Year: 2019
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Republic of War
For a pacific, commercial republic protected by two giant oceans and two peaceful neighbors with small militaries, America sure has fought a lot of wars. Michael Beschloss’s Presidents of War details eight American leaders beginning in 1807 who took us to war and just one, Jefferson, who didn’t. The text wraps up after the Vietnam...
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Gun Grabbers Wave the Red Flag
Every man, whether he is conscious of it or not, has drawn a line in the sand behind which he will not retreat. Most Americans have ancestors who defended that line when it was crossed by government tyranny. It is now being crossed in Colorado. Colorado Governor Jared Polis signed into law in April an...
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A Memorable Secession
I haven’t read The Land We Love: The South and Its Heritage, and judging by Donald Livingston’s review (May 2019 issue) I probably won’t. Why? Because it sounds like yet another attempt to defend “Lost Cause” ideology. According to the book’s author, Boyd Cathey, the real reason the South seceded had little to do with...
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Pious Tariffs
In “Protectionism as a Path to Piety” (May 2019 issue), John Howting appears to assert that protective tariffs are acts of piety. Where is the justice in the politically powerful forcing, ultimately under the penalty of death, the politically weak to subsidize them—which is what a protective tariff does? Protective tariffs require politicians to pick...
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Against the Barbarians
The 21st century is a return to the Age of Walls. As historian and archeologist David Frye writes in his important new book, Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick, few have noticed that a new era of wall building is now upon us, driven by mass migration and Islamic terrorism. While the...
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Belgians and Bureaucrats
Some years ago my friend and neighbor Baron Philip Lambert had my wife and me to dinner in his chalet in Gstaad, Switzerland, and the talk turned to Belgian history. Philip’s grandfather, a banker, had lent money to King Leopold II of Belgium to buy real estate in Africa. He bought the Congo. Then paid...
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The Price of Overstretch
“Everything in strategy is very simple,” Carl von Clausewitz wrote almost two centuries ago, “but that does not mean that everything is very easy.” The author of On War said it is easy to chart the course of a war once begun, but “great strength of character, as well as great lucidity and firmness of...
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The Word Remains
In the beginning was the Word. (Not the picture. Or the number.) —John Lukacs, “The Reality of Written Words,” Chronicles (January 1999) The last time I visited John Lukacs at Pickering Close, his home just outside of Phoenixville, Penn., he greeted me in Hungarian. My knowledge of that language is confined to goulash and paprikash...
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The Lion of Idaho
From the November 1998 issue of Chronicles. The latest fad among leftist historians, according to the New York Times, is the study of the conservative movement. “By marrying social and political history,” the Times announced, “this new wave of scholarship is revising the history of Americans on the right”—a prospect that is at once depressing...
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Books in Brief
Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey From a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League, by Dan-el Padilla Peralta (New York: Penguin Books; 320 pp., $17.00). I read Dan-el Padilla Peralta’s memoir of his illegal residency in the United States last week while on vacation in Germany, another country arguing about immigration. The book answered several questions...
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Farage’s European Victory Upends British Politics
When the 751 Members of the new European Parliament (MEPs) gather in the French city of Strasbourg on July 2, the largest national group present in all the EU will be the MEPs of Britain’s new Brexit Party led by Nigel Farage. While the 29 newly elected Brexit Party MEPs intend to upend the EU,...
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Camp of the Saints, Stateside
In early June, border agents near San Diego did what they do a lot these days. They collared two previously deported sex criminals who had re-entered the United States illegally. Both men were convicted of sex crimes against children, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reported. Yet the two are somewhat unusual in one respect: they...
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U.S. Economy Nears Growth Record
The U.S. economy, absent a precipitous decline in payroll employment this quarter, will set a momentous record in July: the longest economic expansion in the nation’s 243-year history. This news is a reminder of the perils of relying on the doomsaying mass media and economists to judge current macroeconomic conditions. “So we are very probably...
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A Century of Disorder
A hundred years ago, on June 28, 1919, the Treaty of Versailles was signed in the illustrious Hall of Mirrors, the same spot where the German Empire was proclaimed in January 1871. It was the most ambitious gathering of its kind in history. Leaders and diplomats of 27 nations convened to establish a new order...
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Memo to Trump: Trade Bolton for Tulsi
“For too long our leaders have failed us, taking us into one regime change war after the next, leading us into a new Cold War and arms race, costing us trillions of our hard-earned tax payer dollars and countless lives. This insanity must end.” Donald Trump, circa 2016? Nope. That denunciation of John Bolton interventionism...
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In Memoriam: Justin Raimondo, 1951-2019
Justin Raimondo, long-time Chronicles columnist, vociferous anti-war activist and a leading member of the paleolibertarian political movement, died Thursday at age 67 after a long battle with lung cancer. An influential champion of anti-interventionist foreign policy within the Libertarian and Republican political parties, Raimondo lobbed broadsides at warmongers left, right, and center from his post...
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The Establishment’s Hatred Can’t Stop Boris Johnson
“The necessary man” is the term that explains everything in British politics. Boris is the target of all the focused loathing of the Establishment, a force so powerful and widespread that no man can say who drives it. But in a myriad outlets—BBC, The Times, the Platonically-named Guardian, the City of London, academe high and...
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Orwell and Religion
This article first appeared in the December 1986 issue of Chronicles. In his novel 1984, George Orwell created a world devoid of freedom and justice, truth and goodness. But there is another void in the book that critics seldom notice: the utter lack of religious faith. The absence of any vestige of religion seems to...
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Trump: War President or Anti-Interventionist?
Visualizing 150 Iranian dead from a missile strike that he had ordered, President Donald Trump recoiled and canceled the strike, a brave decision and defining moment for his presidency. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, John Bolton and Vice President Mike Pence had signed off on the strike on Iran as the right response to Tehran’s...
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Boris Johnson Is Bulletproof
For an informed insight into British politics, avoid the mainstream media. You would rest on a waterbed of misconceptions. The final ballot for the Tory leadership candidates closed with this result: Boris, 160; Hunt, 77; Gove, 75. So the top two go into a series of nationwide hustings, with the run-off put to Conservative Party...
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Will Joe Repudiate His Segregationist Friends?
“Apologize for what? Cory should apologize. He knows better. There’s not a racist bone in my body.” Thus did a stung Joe Biden answer rival Cory Booker’s demand he apologize for telling contributors, in a southern drawl, “I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland, He never called me ‘boy.’ He always called me...
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Anglo-Americana
From the October 1990 issue of Chronicles. In 1858, as British and French forces pushed their way to Peking in the Opium Wars, Josiah Tatnall, commander of the neutral American naval squadron, intervened to save the British ships from Chinese guns and tow them safely out of range. When asked why he had abandoned his...
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The Tory Contest Is Bad TV
“Excruciating” was the verdict on the TV debate of the five remaining candidates for the Tory leadership. They were perched on stools, like five barflies in search of a bar. I regretted the absence of a woman, though not for the standard reason. It would have been diverting to see a candidate clad in a...
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Mohamed Morsi: The Score
Judging by the corporate media obituaries, “Egypt’s first democratically elected president”–who died while on trial in a Cairo courtroom on June 17–was a well-meaning but inept leader who “governed clumsily” before being overthrown by the military. In reality Mohamed Morsi was an Islamist supremacist. He tried to use his narrow electoral victory in 2012 to...
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War With Iran Would Become ‘Trump’s War’
President Donald Trump cannot want war with Iran. Such a war, no matter how long, would be fought in and around the Persian Gulf, through which a third of the world’s seaborne oil travels. It could trigger a worldwide recession and imperil Trump’s reelection. It would widen the “forever war,” which Trump said he would...
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A Masque of State–and Its Parody
“Soft Power” is real power. The State Banquet at Buckingham Palace earlier this month showed royals and the President at their best, with an unstated but perfectly clear implication: no other country can do this. It were well to keep on good terms with the people who can put on a show like this. Everyone was at the top of their form: Trump behaved impeccably, and...
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Russiagate Is No Watergate
“History is repeating itself, and with a vengeance,” John Dean told the judiciary committee, drawing a parallel between Watergate, which brought down Richard Nixon, and “Russiagate” which has bedeviled Donald Trump. But what strikes this veteran of Nixon’s White House is not the similarities but the stark differences. Watergate began with an actual crime, a...
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Brexit Party Beats the Tories Again
“The main lesson to draw from the Peterborough by-election is that the Brexit Party can wound but it cannot kill.” Thus the London Times, in all its majestic myopia verging on outright blindness. Have the wordsmiths who write its editorials ever heard of “mortal wounds,” or wounds that are so serious they require years in...
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Danger of War With Iran Averted, For Now
To Mike Pompeo’s and John Bolton’s great regret, the conspiracy to push the U.S. into yet another war in the Middle East—likely more catastrophic in cost and consequences than all previous ones taken together—has been averted, for now at least. For several months until the end of May, tensions between the United Stated and Iran...
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Are Abortion & Gay Rights American Values?
“My religion defines who I am. And I’ve been a practicing Catholic my whole life,” said Vice President Joe Biden in 2012. “I accept my church’s position on abortion as . . . doctrine. Life begins at conception. . . . I just refuse to impose that on others.” For four decades, Biden backed the...
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The American Cult of Bombing and Endless War
Ten Tenets of Air Power That I Didn’t Learn in the Air Force From Syria to Yemen in the Middle East, Libya to Somalia in Africa, Afghanistan to Pakistan in South Asia, an American aerial curtain has descended across a huge swath of the planet. Its stated purpose: combatting terrorism. Its primary method: constant surveillance...
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Bernie & Joe: Two Old White Males Take the Lead
In 2018, a record turnout of women, minorities and young added 40 House seats to Democratic ranks and made Nancy Pelosi speaker. This, we were told, is the new diversity coalition—women, people of color, millennials—that will take down The Donald in 2020. So, how has the Democratic field sorted itself out half a year later?...
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The Last Jeffersonian
From the December 1990 issue of Chronicles. Let Vermont State Senator John McClaughry describe himself (with what he calls “a notorious Ozark accent”): “I am a 1700’s Virginia republican, an 1800 Tertium Quid, an 1830’s Loco Foco, an 1850’s Republican, an 1890’s Western progressive, a 1930’s agrarian distributist, and today a plain old decentralist agrarian...
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Do Trump’s Hawks Speak for Trump?
For a president who won his office by denouncing the Middle East wars into which George W. Bush and Barack Obama plunged the nation, Donald Trump has assembled the most unabashedly hawkish conclave of foreign policy advisers in memory. And he himself seems to concede the point. If foreign policy were decided by my security...
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Faces of Clio
From the October 1986 issue of Chronicles. “The obscurest epoch is today.” —Robert Louis Stevenson Taken together, these three books serve nicely as a kind of group portrait of Clio and her several faces. In reverse order we have the historian as diarist and memoirist, as documentarian, and as reflective sage. As one of the...
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Tethered and Beleaguered
Us Produced by Monkey Paw Productions Written and directed by Jordan Peele Distributed by Universal Pictures Diane Produced by Sight Unseen Pictures Written and directed by Kent Jones Distributed by IFC Films Jordan Peele is the executive producer of the revived Twilight Zone series now streaming on CBS All Access. The original series fascinated him...
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The Other Road to Serfdom
The World Trade Organization (WTO) has been criticized since its founding in 1995. Leftists claim that free trade places the Third World at a disadvantage, while President Donald Trump and paleo conservatives argue that some WTO policies threaten U.S. sovereignty. But what is the origin of the WTO and the neoliberal economic theory that underlies...
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The War of Nihilisms
The first English translation of Ernst Jünger’s journals from the Second World War is a cause for celebration. The journals were like treasures stashed away in an old castle, behind a door that could be unlocked only if one learned to read German. It’s open now, and what’s inside are literary gems on every page....
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Cuba: What’s Next?
The limited economic changes introduced by Gen. Raúl Castro in Cuba following the decades-long rule of his brother, the revolutionary communist Fidel Castro, encouraged some observers to proclaim the end of communism and the dismantling of the totalitarian system in the island. Notwithstanding Raúl Castro’s own statements that he was not elected to restore capitalism,...
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The Lady of the Camellias
I once asked a most discriminating gentleman, who had studied singing, which opera he would call his favorite. He named La traviata. Since then, René Weis has lent support to his opinion at fascinating length in his book, The Real Traviata: The Song of Marie Duplessis (2015). In demonstrating the worth and intensity of Verdi’s...
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Let’s Stop Equating Slavery and Abortion
Frequently, pro-life leaders draw a parallel between slavery and abortion. “You Say Abortion Is Legal? The Supreme Court Also Legalized Slavery,” reads one popular bumper sticker. The motivation for this comparison is understandable, since slavery and the Civil War occupy central places in the American historical imagination. By gesturing toward one of the issues associated...
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Covington Catholic and the Hour of Decision
Nicholas Sandmann, a young teenager unwittingly made the centerpiece of the Covington Catholic media attack, will never have the chance to restore his online presence, despite his innocence. The internet’s permanence—negative, false and defamatory articles and headlines never ceasing to appear upon a Google search of the word “Sandmann”—will function as a perpetual thorn in...
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The Art of the No-Deal
Trump’s decision to walk away from the Hanoi Summit in February and reject the terms of a possible deal—ending all sanctions in return for a partial denuclearization—was a disappointment for his supporters. But it is only the beginning of a protracted peace process that must accompany this historic opportunity. In any case, Trump wasn’t buying...
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College Admissions and Other Rites of Fragility
Think of the angst the recent college admissions scandal has caused in wealthy households from Greenwich to La Jolla, and nowhere in between, except maybe Winnetka. After speaking with friends navigating the modern-day rite of passage that applying to college has become, I imagine dinnertime conversations like this: “Sequoia? Sequoia, can you put down your...
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Notre Dame and the Lost ‘Means of Culture’
The fire that gutted Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris during Holy Week was no doubt caused by nothing more banal than negligent builders doing restoration work on the roof. Nevertheless it compelled all of us to search for a deeper explanation. A Gothic masterpiece begun in 1163, Notre Dame has become an icon of European...
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Missing the Main Story
In 1946, the U.S. intelligence community published a series of studies on the current and future dangers threatening global peace, and among these was a surprisingly detailed essay entitled, “Islam: A Threat to World Stability.” Those remarks obviously carry a special weight in light of subsequent decades. I am not the first person to discuss...
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The Death of Comedy
The left hates comedy. It subverts and challenges the dicta of the liberal hegemony, and is closed down whenever possible. The Left has had notable successes, especially in Britain, where I can point precisely to the roughly two decades in which the free comic spirit operated on TV before the cultural commissars took control. This...
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Getting Real About Reparations
The call for slavery reparations is reverberating throughout the land once again. It will be entertaining to watch the Democratic presidential candidates for 2020 position themselves on this topic. They must know the very idea is irrational and entirely impractical, but at the same time they will worry that one candidate or another will endorse...
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Not ‘Woke’ and Not Sorry
“Woke” is the concept that everything must be inclusive and inoffensive. Oh dear! Being hyperaware of everyone’s sensitivities makes one a hell of a bore. I recently flew down to Charlottesville, Virginia, where I had gone to university, to speak at a memorial service for my friend Willy von Raab. The other speaker was P.J....