In the opening pages of The Future of Christian Marriage, Mark Regnerus notes a troubling truth well known to anyone who has set foot in an institution of higher education in the last several decades. “To talk seriously about marriage today in the scholarly sphere is to speak a foreign language: you tempt annoyance, confusion,...
If the American right feels pinned down by an enfilade coming from the institutions it has traditionally identified with and defended, that’s because that is precisely what is happening. Pressed up against the berm, the only way out for the right is through a place it has avoided. With the fall of academia, the ideological homogenization...
Arguing with my liberal high school teachers did not endear me to them. It got worse when a day or two after one of these disagreements I brought to class material demonstrating the teacher had been feeding us a false narrative. The teacher was not doing so intentionally but simply out of ignorance, having accepted a...
All recorded history can be viewed as a long record of the use of force, or threats of force, in relations between human communities. This applies to all epochs, civilizations, and geographic spaces. Violence is immanent to man. Its constant presence is indicative of the immutability of his nature, regardless of the cultural context or...
“All politics is on one level sexual politics.” —George Gilder Extremists break out of the margins and take power when they fool opponents into advancing their agenda. By politicizing the family and sexuality, the left duped conservatives, and all of us, into becoming their accomplices. Since last fall’s electoral coup, the United States has been...
The Education of John Adams; by R. B. Bernstein; Oxford University Press; 368 pp., $24.95 It is not fashionable these days to admire the Founding Fathers, and yet the flood of books, articles, and even Broadway musicals devoted to them has not ceased. Attention is usually focused on George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jeff erson,...
General Robert E. Lee, Charles Lindbergh, and Ernest Hemingway were among the names of great Americans I listed in a London Spectator article quite a long time ago. Needless to say, if one were to mention these names today in an American publication or news program, all hell would break loose, and the name-dropper would instantly become a...
The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working- Class Revolution; By David Paul Kuhn; Oxford University Press; Hardcover, 416 pp., $29.95 Mayday 1971: A White House at War, a Revolt in the Streets, and the Untold History of America’s Biggest Mass Arrest; By Lawrence Roberts; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Hardcover,...
Most of us objected to The New York Times’ notorious “1619 Project” because it trashes the great achievements of Americans (creating free institutions and conquering a continental wilderness), substituting a story of supposed victimization as the core of our history. Alas, Professor Hall, in his speculations in the March issue (“Slavery and the American Founding”)...
My mother’s older sister Sadie and her husband Roy spent a lifetime concealing a secret: both had been in earlier marriages that ended in divorce. My aunt wanted no one of the younger generation— not even her children—to know about this source of embarrassment and only told me about her first marriage when I was...
Broad swaths of conservative opinion today would have it that the enemy of the right is some variant of Marxism. But this does not accurately describe people like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, or CNN’s Jeff Zucker. All the tech and media executives who are censoring and deplatforming voices on the right can hardly...
Marriage and divorce. Is there any topic on which it is easier to find self-professed conservatives who somehow cannot bring themselves even to seriously contemplate the truly conservative position than this one? Louis de Bonald’s On Divorce remains, more than 200 years after its first publication, the most profound and philosophically sound argument for the...
A French woman who met the American poet Allen Tate (1899-1979) in the 1930s remarked, “Monsieur Tate is so conservative that he’s almost radical.” Etymologically, “radical” fits Tate well; his conservatism entailed returning, in the face of destructive social practices, to fundamental truths and the established customs embodying them, many immemorial. He espoused the primacy...
I met my mother’s fourth husband last fall. Now retired, they were traveling cross-country, from South Carolina to California, to be with my sister as she gave birth to her first child. My mother brought me a present, which included a coffee cup imprinted with the slogan “Life is About Creating Yourself.” My parents have...
Happily Directed and written by BenDavid Grabinski ◆ Produced by Common Wall Media ◆ Distributed by Saban Films The Father Directed and written by Florian Zeller ◆ Produced by Film4 ◆ Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics Goodbye Again (1961) Directed and produced by Anatole Litvak ◆ Written by Samuel A. Taylor ◆ Distributed by United...
With Tom Bethell’s death in February, those who refuse what Orwell called the “smelly little orthodoxies contending for our souls” have lost an eloquent and redoubtable champion. Over the course of Bethell’s five decades as a writer (consisting of seven books and hundreds of essays), the malodorous certitudes of political correctness have piled up to...
The 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex should be a time of celebration for his many fans. However, my advice to Darwin’s admirers is: Don’t pop the corks yet. The last couple of years of “woke” culture have cast a pall over the legacy of the...
Identity Capitalists: The Powerful Insiders Who Exploit Diversity to Maintain Inequality, by Nancy Leong (Stanford University Press; 240 pp., $28.00). Nancy Leong recounts her chagrin at a friend’s wedding to start her jaundiced polemic, Identity Capitalists. The tipsy bride, gushing with thanks for Leong’s attendance, hugged her before joking indelicately, “I mean if you hadn’t...
The Mystery of Charles Dickens By A. N. Wilson Harper Collins 319 pp., $32.50 It’s no secret that Charles Dickens was in an unhappy marriage to his wife, Catherine, and that the great author was verbally and emotionally abusive to her. In his 1939 essay, “Dickens: The Two Scrooges,” Edmund Wilson tries to mitigate this...
