It seems that National Review Editor Rich Lowry never tires of carrying water for the sponsors of his magazine, whether it’s the high-tech giants who help pay his gargantuan salary, or his neoconservative donors, whom he also faithfully serves. Most recently he honored his patrons with a dutiful denunciation of Russian President Vladmir Putin entitled...
What makes a prince? Machiavelli had some ideas. “Above all he should do as some excellent man has done in the past who found someone to imitate who had been praised and glorified before him,” he wrote. “[One] whose exploits and actions he always kept beside himself, as they say Alexander the Great imitated Achilles;...
Queen Victoria’s corpse had hardly cooled before modernism in the United Kingdom rebelled against Victorian styles, attitudes, and mores. The ideas of arguably the four most important thinkers of the modern era—Darwin, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud—were written during Queen Victoria’s lifetime but only gained influence after her death. So too did the literary high...
Guillaume Faye: Truths and Tributes by Pierre Krebs, Robert Steuckers, and Pierre-Émile Blairon Arktos Media 210 pp., $27.50 La puissance et la foi: Essais de théologie politique by Alain de Benoist PG de Roux 336 pp., EUR$39.00 I stumbled upon the writing of Alain de Benoist more than a quarter century ago as a graduate...
A cowboy is scalped and cannibalized by Indians. A villain’s head is stomped from his shoulders into the squat hole of an ancient, grim prison. A beautiful woman is executed with a machine gun blast to the face. Not everyone has the stomach for the violence that abounds in the movies of dissident director S....
Western elites recently heaped scorn on the Hungarian government for passing child-protection legislation. The Land of the Magyars outlawed the portrayal of homosexuality and “sex reassignment” surgeries in school education material and television programs aimed at minors. Hungarians view the law as protecting children from radical ideologies about sex and gender, while European Commission President...
That Soviet agents successfully infiltrated the Roosevelt administration is a matter of historical fact. Among others, United States counterintelligence efforts identified Alger Hiss in the State Department and Harry Dexter White at Treasury. As I showed in my book, Stalin’s War (2021), their presence partly explains the administration’s bias toward Soviet interests in Europe and...
Today’s commentariat is prone to ignore history, or to simplify past events to make them fit their current ideological preferences. The discourse of regime-approved conservative intellectuals and their mass media cohorts—such as Victor Davis Hanson and the tedious George Will—remains liberally optimistic and upwardly linear. The notion that our civilization is on a downward course...
Jon Gruden, an NFL coach with a $100 million contract from the Las Vegas Raiders, was recently forced to resign after making what The New York Times called racist, homophobic, and misogynistic remarks in emails over the last 12 years. Shock! Horror! Pro footballers making misogynistic remarks—why, I never heard of such a thing! It’s definitely...
I had the good fortune to talk regularly about movies with my good friend and conservative thinker Sam Francis. With intellectual heft, he generously shared what he had learned from his own moviegoing. What follows is offered in the same spirit: a list of 10 movies I have repeatedly enjoyed and unhesitatingly recommend. The Searchers (1956):...
Our new issue of Chronicles contains several essays that assess films that can be classified in some sense as “conservative,” or at least dealing with themes of interest to the political right. Several of those who participated in making these movies and whom we discuss in this issue, such as Russian filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov, American...
The Soul of Politics: Harry V. Jaffa and the Fight for America by Glenn Ellmers Encounter Books 408 pp., $31.99 Glenn Ellmers, a former student of Harry V. Jaffa associated with the conservative Claremont school of thought, has produced an exhaustive study of his mentor. Ellmers has pored over Jaffa’s available writings, including a dozen...
Gerald Russello, an author and editor often associated with Russell Kirk’s life and work, passed away on Nov. 7, 2021. He was 50 years old. Russello’s death took me by surprise, as I wasn’t aware until recently that he was fatally ill and being treated for brain cancer. Since he was around the same age...
Although Hollywood is now considered a monolithic bastion of leftist, “woke” political and cultural sentiment with almost no dissent tolerated, it was not always that way. Though Tinseltown was never a haven for conservative and traditionalist cinema, actors, and screenwriters, 60 years ago a person could still be on the right and have a career...
Bringing history to the big screen is a contentious matter. To reflect the dominant historical narrative of our time—the “march of progress”—filmmakers must ensure that their script and their casting choices reflect current-year values. Where, then, can viewers turn to find historical cinema that promotes traditional values, not the libertine cosmopolitanism of Hollywood? The closest...
A stunning new film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s science fiction epic, Dune, recently graced America’s silver screens. The talented Quebecois director Denis Villeneuve has fully utilized modern cinematic technology to bring to life Herbert’s bizarre story of a far-flung neofeudal humanity existing some 20,000 years in the future. Villeneuve’s adaptation of these best-selling science fiction...
Donald Trump made headlines when he warned of illegal-immigrant drug runners and rapists pouring across the U.S.-Mexico border. But he wasn’t the first to do so. Ohio Rep. James Traficant, Jr., was well-known for voicing similar comments on any given morning from the floor of the House. Before there was Trump, there was Jim Traficant—the...
OLD HENRY (2021) Written and Directed by Potsy Ponciroli ◆ Produced by Michael Hagerty and Shannon Houchins ◆ Distributed by Shout! Studios The weight of the past so often looms large in the Western film genre. In classic films like The Gunfighter (1950), High Noon (1952), Ride the High Country (1962), or Unforgiven (1992), the plots...
There was a very odd occurrence in the “Cradle of the Confederacy” in July 1987: Presidential aspirant and civil rights activist Jesse Jackson paid a visit to the Montgomery, Alabama, home of George Corley Wallace. It had been 126 years since Jefferson Davis stood on the steps of the Alabama capitol and been sworn in...
Enemies Among Us: The Relocation, Internment, and Repatriation of German, Italian, and Japanese Americans During the Second World War, by John E. Schmitz (University of Nebraska Press; 430 pp., $65.00). How can we possibly avoid history’s repetition when we don’t learn anything from it in the first place? For 50 years after World War II,...
Milk cartons carry expiration dates. But, for obvious reasons, they don’t need them. History books don’t carry expiration dates. But, for less obvious reasons, they do need them. History books expire when archival discoveries supplant earlier narratives or when new interpretive theories emerge. Lucky for historical posterity, decades more will have to pass before Matt...
Things Worth Dying For: Thoughts on a Life Worth Living by Charles J. Chaput Henry Holt and Co. 272 pp., $25.99 “Death is common to us all,” goes the old adage. The subject of mortality is certainly pertinent, given the current “great plague,” against which safety is dispensed by way of the great fear. It...
