Solitude can offer a blissful disengagement from the horrors of modern-day life, even if it’s forced upon us by a government lockdown. Enforced solitude could even be a spiritual blessing, but for the escapism of television, that medium of absolute rubbish, vulgarity, and violence that Hollywood calls entertainment. As long as we avoid sabotaging diversions, we...
The United States finds itself at a geostrategic crossroads. The moment is comparable to the period between the dispatch of George Kennan’s “Long Telegram” from Moscow in February 1946 suggesting a new strategy for relations with the USSR, and the announcement of the Truman Doctrine in March 1947, pledging U.S. political, military, and economic assistance to...
If there is anything that we should have learned from the 20th century, it is that socialism turned out to be a colossal failure. That was not, however, obvious to large numbers of Americans at the time. Though they might not have bought into full-blown socialism, many 20th-century American intellectuals, economists, and politicians insisted that...
In 1882 Congress took steps to control Chinese immigration with the passage of “An Act to execute certain treaty stipulations relating to Chinese.” The act later became known misleadingly as the Chinese Exclusion Act. In high schools and colleges it’s taught that the act was simply another example of American racism. The real story is more...
How Dead Languages Work, by Coulter H. George (Oxford University Press; 240 pp., $25.00). If, like University of Virginia classics professor Coulter George, you find dead languages an “endless source of intellectual delight,” then perhaps it’s time to explore Ancient Greek, Latin, Old English, Sanskrit, Old Irish, and Welsh. Admittedly, that esoteric list won’t help...
Now that statues of Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Grant, and Theodore Roosevelt have been desecrated, vandalized, toppled, and smashed, it appears Woodrow Wilson’s time has come. The cultural revolution has come to the Ivy League. Though Wilson attended Princeton as an undergraduate, taught there, and served from 1902 to 1910 as president, his name...
The great and good French novelist and thinker Jean Raspail died on June 13, three weeks short of his 95th birthday. I was deeply saddened by the news, although at his age it was to be expected. It is ironic that he succumbed to the COVID-19 virus, the product and totemic symbol of our age...
Some polls now have Joe Biden running ahead of Donald Trump by 10 points and sweeping the battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. This vindicates the strategy Biden’s advisers have adopted: Confine Joe to his basement, no press conferences. Trot him out to recite carefully scripted messages for the cameras. Then lead him back...
On October 11, 2019, President Donald J. Trump commemorated Christopher Columbus’s discovery of America with these memorable words: On October 12, 1492, after a perilous, two-month journey across the treacherous Atlantic Ocean, Christopher Columbus and his crew aboard the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria landed in what is today the Bahamas. This watershed voyage ushered...
The left’s war on America’s past crossed several new frontiers last week. Portland’s statue of George Washington, the Father of his Country and the first president of the United States, the greatest man of his age, was toppled and desecrated. While the statue stood, an American flag was draped over its head and set ablaze....
My new anthology, The Vanishing Tradition: Perspectives in Conservatism (from the Cornell and Northern Illinois University presses) does not paint a flattering picture of the present conservative movement. The general impression conveyed by the contributors to this volume is that the movement is driven by the demands of sponsors who do not have a single...
Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met for seven hours at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii with the chief architect of China’s foreign policy, Yang Jiechi. The two had much to talk about. As The Washington Post reports, the “bitterly contentious relationship” between our two countries has “reached the lowest point in almost half...
The American news media with hardly any exceptions is propagating a falsehood, a lie which is fatal to what remains of the old American republic. Practically all our political leaders, including most Republicans and establishment conservatives, have bought into it. America at its core, goes the narrative, is a racist society, drenched in historic systemic...
The left talks often about so-called white privilege. Being “white” is a privilege, in that it is a privilege to be a biological, spiritual, and moral heir of the best civilization the world has known, from the Old Testament and Homer via Rome and Constantinople, via the leftward turn of the Renaissance and the heresy...
“Can we all just get along?” That was the plea of Rodney King after a Simi Valley jury failed to convict any of the four cops who beat him into submission after a 100-mile-an-hour chase on an LA freeway. King’s plea came after the 1992 LA riots, the worst since the New York City draft...
Who’s afraid of being labeled homophobic? A great many people, that’s who, importuned incessantly by the liberal media and other keepers of the woke flame of proper public behavior. That behavior trends ever more left-wing, collectivist, and anti-Western—following Barack Obama’s “arc of the moral universe.” The Supreme Court’s recent decision to enshrine anti-discrimination protections for...
T-Mobile and ABC, owned by Disney Company, will stop advertising on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show in view of his scandalous comments on the Black Lives Matter movement. Or so I’ve just learned. On Saturday, the news host referred to the protests as “Black Lives Matter riot.” Carlson also asked why he was “required to...
On Gen. George Washington’s orders, the Declaration of Independence, signed in Philadelphia, was read aloud to his army. On hearing it, the troops marched to Bowling Green, decapitated and pulled down the statue of George III, and sent the remnants to be melted down into musket balls. It was a revolutionary act, a symbolic statement....
It is impossible to present a coherent and forthright analysis of the causes, character, and likely consequences of the misnamed “protests” in the U.S. mainstream media. The same restraint on free speech and thought applies to most of Western Europe, and notably to the Federal Republic in which denazification has led to de-Germanization. It is...
Allow me to express my displeasure bordering on nausea over the predictably gutless way in which Conservative Inc. and its most prominent representatives have responded to the riots in American cities. Although our authorized conservatives have indicated that vandalism, mayhem, and killing should not be tolerated on our streets, and although they generally accept President...
Newly painted in huge yellow letters on 16th Street, just north of the White House, is the slogan: “Defund the Police.” That new message sits beside the “Black Lives Matter” slogan, also in huge letters, painted there at the direction of D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser. She renamed that section of 16th Street “Black Lives Matter...
In his statement to The Atlantic magazine, former Defense Secretary General James Mattis says of the events of the last 10 days that have shaken the nation as it has not been shaken since 1968: “We must not be distracted by a small number of lawbreakers.” Is “a small number of lawbreakers” an apt description of wilding...
Saturday the mob descended on my hometown of Cleveland. With the police operating under rules that rendered them largely impotent, the vandals had their way, and business after business was sacked. The charming downtown that had impressed so many visitors to the city during the Republican convention, NBA Finals, and World Series just four years before was devastated, perhaps permanently...
On June second, Dr. Trifkovic gave an interview to Serbia’s most popular morning news program, Pink TV’s Novo jutro (The New Morning) on the ongoing disorder in American cities. We bring you a slightly abbreviated transcript of his remarks in English. The first question concerned the causes and background of these extraordinary events. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTniTDXM4kE [Transcript starts...
On the fifth night of rioting, looting and arson in Minneapolis, the criminal elements were driven from the streets. By whom? By the same cops who had been the constant objects of media derision and mob hatred. Without the thin blue line, far larger sectors of dozens of America’s cities would be in ruins, burned...
It is hard to know where to begin in responding to Jack Trotter’s profile of a founding father of the modern conservative movement (“Remembering William F. Buckley, Jr.,” April/May 2020). In discussing Buckley’s background, Trotter relies heavily on John Judis’s biography, Patron Saint of the Conservatives (1998). While Judis seems to provide an objective account,...
Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella of split personality, the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) immediately caught the attention of the late Victorian reading public and has been catching attention from new audiences ever since. It has provided the inspiration for 123 film adaptations, including the madcap 1953 version featuring Abbott and Costello....
In 1941, bestselling novelist Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957) ignited a religious controversy that reverberated throughout England. Leading to discussion in Parliament, her BBC radio plays about Jesus were accused of being subversive and irreverent. Ironically, Sayers was motivated not by a defiance of tradition but by an intense desire to preserve it. Sayers’ lifelong interest...
The world has reached a new level of boredom, it seems. Lately, since the NBA has suspended its season, ESPN has been televising a different sort of basketball game: NBA players playing the basketball video game NBA 2K. In their oppressive boredom, people tune in to watch and, I suppose, to comment on and argue...
The Art of Statistics, by David Spiegelhalter (Basic Books; 448 pp., $32.00). Eminent statistician David Spiegelhalter has written a primer on his expertise intended for the general reader. It’s one of those “for the rest of us books” which promises to take a complex technical subject and simplify it, sort of like Analytic Geometry for...
Radically recasting America’s formative years would be damaging enough, but The New York Times’ “1619 Project” is applying that same radical intellectual perspective on American history to contemporary social issues and problems. That intellectual perspective has its own history. It developed in earnest during the tumult and chaos of the Black Power radicalism of the...
At first glance, the personal history of Whittaker Chambers does not suggest a conservative frame of mind. His favorite poet was Walt Whitman, the bard of unshackled emotion and free-verse effusions. The most influential novel in his life was Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, with its profound pity for the downtrodden. His chosen religion was the...
The Invisible Man (2020) Directed and written by Leigh Whannell ◆ Produced by Blumhouse Productions and Universal Pictures ◆ Distributed by Universal Pictures Seven Stages to Achieve Eternal Bliss (2018) Directed by Vivieno Caldinelli ◆ Screenplay by Christopher Hewitson, Clayton Hewitson, and Justin Jones ◆ Produced and distributed by MarVista Entertainment Panic in the Streets...
Over the centuries, plague has been understood variously as a purely natural phenomenon, astrological fatalism, the judgment of God, or, most perplexing, a manifestation of divine mercy. Since plague is one of those natural disasters whose origin cannot be assigned to human agency, it can pose seemingly insoluble moral problems. If, for example, plague is...
In 1920 a group of writers gathered at the home of playwright Sidney Hirsch in Nashville for bi-weekly sessions of reading and dissecting each other’s prose and poetry. It was the beginning of an outpouring of creativity from a group that would try to defend and restore the traditional Southern way of life against the...
It is a universally acknowledged truth that when epidemics strike, men and women turn to God. In this latest of epidemics, most churches the world over have been closed and their worshippers have been directed to websites where leaders hold virtual ceremonies. There have been reports of crackdowns on Christians attempting to worship in the...
At the end of the ongoing global melodrama’s first quarter, it seems reasonable to predict that this will be a two-act play with the final curtain coming down in July. It will end as a tragedy, not because the outcome was preordained in a world impervious to human choices, but because men have free will....
As I began to contemplate the theater of the absurd that we Americans have been living through in recent days, I found the most useful place to begin was an essay by Sam Francis published in Chronicles 26 years ago, “Anarcho-Tyranny USA.” In this long, thoughtful piece, Francis contrasts the eagerness to criminalize what had...
The sun broke through the thin, whispery clouds, and its reflection in a pool of water collected from the previous night’s rain caught my eye. Suddenly the day was bright and the morning as clear and joyful as hope itself. Resurrection Day. It was Easter morning in a year that will surely be marked down...
Imperial Legacies: The British Empire Around the World by Jeremy Black Encounter Books 216 pp., $25.99 Although this relatively short book is closer to an extended, episodic essay than to the comprehensive history of the British empire implied by the title, it is an excellent example of the author’s style. Jeremy Black takes a broad...
Before the coronavirus slammed into the United States in a way that few foresaw, it seemed Donald Trump was heading to reelection based on a record of genuine, though modest, accomplishments. Despite being treated as an usurper by the media, the Democratic Party, and many of those who work in the federal government—particularly in the...
When Americans look back on 2020, the year of the virus, they will see multiple transformations. I fear that some of the most sweeping changes will come in the realm of religion, marking a grim turning point in the story of American faith. Historically, pandemics have played a major role in shaping religion, by undermining...
The scene before our eyes resembled something from a disaster film. Roadblocks, fencing, sanitized police checkpoints, sniper’s nests, vehicles loaded with heavy-duty surveillance equipment darting through the streets as an armored vehicle called The Rook lurched onto the field. An armored track vehicle built on a Caterpillar chassis, The Rook is armed with a hydraulic...
A debate unfolded in March last year in American Greatness between Chronicles contributor Mark Pulliam and the Claremont Institute’s Edward Erler, a devotee of Harry Jaffa. According to Erler, Robert Bork and others who adhered to strict constitutional originalism were essentially moral nihilists because they would not apply natural law standards to our governing document....
The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 by Dorian Lynskey Doubleday 368 pp., $28.95 Few works in literature are as terrifying as 1984, that look into the future written by George Orwell and published in 1949. British scholar Dorian Lynskey unravels the novel’s themes, inspirations, and intentions in his latest book. Since...
A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith, by Timothy Egan. Viking Press 384 pp., $28.00 “Men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the broad tide of rivers, the vast compass of the ocean, the circular motion of the stars, and yet...
In his half-century in national politics, Joe Biden has committed more than his fair share of gaffes. Wednesday, he confused Pearl Harbor Day, Dec. 7, 1941, with D-Day, June 6, 1944. The more serious recent gaffe, a beaut, came at the close of a recent contentious interview with black activist Charlamagne tha God. A miffed...
Recent polls show that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo enjoys a popularity rating among New Yorkers that is somewhere in the stratosphere. His ratings remained high, around 80 percent, even after we learned about his “fateful mistake” leading to the deaths of more than 4,500 elderly COVID patients. Fox News polls also indicate that Biden would trounce Trump...
Is the U.S. up for a second Cold War—this time with China? What makes the question newly relevant is that Xi Jinping’s China suddenly appears eager for a showdown with the United States for long-term supremacy in the Asia-Pacific and the world. With the U.S. consumed by the coronavirus pandemic that has killed 100,000 Americans and...