The latest election cycle did not deliver happy results for the political right. Our dismay is compounded by the strong impression of an unfair result. Whatever you think of the integrity of last November’s elections, it cannot be denied that in the months prior a great many very big thumbs—Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the...
Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife; by Bart D. Ehrman; Simon & Schuster; 352 pp., $28.00 Were popular success an index of scholarly mastery, Broadway musical composer Andrew Lloyd Webber would be recognized as a world authority on Christology. He is not, but Bart D. Ehrman is, and his presumptive expertise in the...
The political theorist Leo Strauss (1899-1973) is perhaps an unlikely subject for Chronicles’ “Remembering the Right” series. Although no one can deny the extensive influence of his ideas on the conservative (and later, neoconservative) movement in America during the Cold War and beyond, Strauss usually gave the impression that he was not a conservative in...
I Care a Lot Directed and written by Jonathan Blakeson ◆ Produced by Andrea Ajemian and Sacha Guttenstein ◆ Distributed by Netflix The Shrike (1955) Directed by José Ferrer ◆ Written by Ketti Frings ◆ Produced by Aaron Rosenberg ◆ Distributed by Universal Pictures Rosamund Pike is one of the most versatile and accomplished actresses in...
The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech, by William Deresiewicz (Henry Holt; 368 pp., $27.99). Members of a book club at my highly selective undergraduate business school were stung by William Deresiewicz’s portrait of careerist, grade-grubbing college students in his scathing 2015 book,...
The novelist Martin Amis is the son of Kingsley Amis, whose Lucky Jim (1954) was a spectacular success. Noting the father’s “brilliance and ‘facile bravura,’” Atlantic critic Geoffrey Wheatcroft asserted that Martin “misunderstood his hereditary gifts when he turned from playful comedy to ‘the great issues of our time.’” Among his “great issues” is that...
In January, Donald Trump’s President’s Advisory 1776 Commission released its 45-page “1776 Report,” which, according to The New York Times, is “a sweeping attack on liberal thought and activism that…defends America’s founding against charges that it was tainted by slavery and likens progressivism to fascism.” Joe Biden scrapped it the day he entered office, and...
Illuminating History: A Retrospective of Seven Decades; by Bernard Bailyn; New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2020; 288 pp., $28.95 Great historians must be first or primarily expert storytellers, insists historian Bernard Bailyn in his latest book. But the Pulitzer Prize winning author also declares that historians must be social scientists as well. Yet, if greatness...
“Decolonization” is the new badge for right-thinking professors and teachers. The word reveals more about those who use it than about their imaginary oppressors. Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. The great haters in our midst have the word “hate” perpetually on their lips. So do the decolonizers. What that term...
Do men have more teeth than women? The actual answer is no. Both men and women have 28-32 teeth, depending on how many wisdom teeth grow in. But, if you’re fourth-century B.C. Greek philosopher Aristotle, the answer is a resounding, “Of course!” “Males have more teeth than females in the case of men, sheep, goats, and...
(This op-ed is written by a politically correct analyst, who will remain anonymous, but brought to you by Walter E. Block.) I cannot in good conscience take the COVID vaccine. Why not? Because its producers are mainly toxic white males. We wokesters want a COVID vaccine created in a more inclusive manner. Yes, yes, we...
Are we witnessing the end of justice and equality before the law in America? On April 15, the Department of Justice announced that the still-unnamed police officer who shot Ashli Babbitt during the protests at our Capitol in early January would not be charged with her death. We still have no real explanation as to why the...
“It is time to end the forever war.” So said President Joe Biden in his announcement that, as of Sept. 11, the 20th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, all U.S. troops will be gone from Afghanistan. The longest war in our history, which cost 2,400 dead, 20,000 wounded and...
My establishment conservative acquaintances are still swooning over an anti-Biden tirade that Mark Levin delivered on his TV program last week, when we learned that our current president is the most racist person who has ever occupied the Oval Office, a charge that was then qualified with the phrase “since Woodrow Wilson.” Only two points in...
Patrisse Cullors is a co-founder of Blacks Lives Matter. About her background, she said in 2015: “The first thing, I think, is that we actually do have an ideological frame. Myself and Alicia (Garza, BLM co-founder) in particular are trained organizers.” Cullors also said: “We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological...
For over a year now, governments across the world have introduced and enforced a series of arbitrary restrictions on their citizens and their businesses, but not without a certain degree of pushback. Some small businesses in Germany have found a creative way to maneuver around the diktats of Chancellor Angela Merkel and other governmental leaders. The...
I am a social scientist who has written a little bit on media over the years, so sometimes, in the spirit of research, when I have a few extra minutes in the car, I put on the radio. In just 15 minutes or so this morning I gathered the following information. I heard this segment on...
It’s springtime in America. In halcyon days, we’d ring in the new season with fresh starts and fragrant flowers. But in 2021, the arrival of April now ushers in yet another cycle of destructive urban riots—stoked and coddled by toxic journalists downplaying left-wing violence and demonizing all who dare call out the ruinous, race-based chaos...
Riots have kicked off again in Minneapolis, this time touched off by an apparently accidental police shooting of an unarmed 20-year-old black man, Daunte Wright, who was attempting to flee police in his vehicle. Nighttime curfews have been imposed across the city but have been routinely ignored by groups of protestors, who are peaceful by day...
In an age where feminism seems to rule, there’s a lot of pressure for fathers to start acting softer and more feminine in dealing with their children. Not a trace of that “toxic masculinity” should come through! Perhaps that is why we see increasing condemnation of competition (“everyone gets a participation trophy!”) or “dangerous” activities...
In the driveway sits my nine-year-old Honda Civic, which I purchased two years ago after a deer demolished my Accord. Fingerprints of my grandchildren dot the rear interior window, the carpeting and seats are screaming for a vacuum, a large, reddish dent mars the paneling above the rear tire on the passenger side, and the...
With tensions rising between nations such as Taiwan and China, as well as between Russia and Ukraine, many are wondering how involved the Biden administration will be. Should the United States leave these nations alone, or should they interfere? A look at the past through Stephen Wertheim’s new book, Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S....
What are Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping up to? In recent days, Russian tanks, artillery, armor, trucks, and troops have been moving by road and rail ever closer to Ukraine, and Moscow is said to be repositioning its 56th Guards Air Assault Brigade in Crimea. Military sources in Kyiv estimate there are now 85,000 Russian...
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer’s recent rejection of packing the Supreme Court is another welcome addition to the debate, muted in recent months, of whether additional seats should be added to America’s highest court in order to dilute the power of its conservative majority. It also appears to have jogged President Biden’s memory of the...
When the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines first proved their efficacy, preventing nearly 95 percent of coronavirus infections in those who got the shots in test trials, a vexing issue immediately arose. Who should get priority in receiving these life-saving shots? Generally speaking, the answer, while differing slightly from state to state, was that those most...
Given cancel culture’s daily attacks on anyone and everyone who exhibits the slightest deviation from anti-racist norms, one suspects it was calumny that gave up the ghost and handed over the title of Worst Sin Ever. The new title holder is the fuzzily conceived concept that the slightest hint of discrimination, mockery, or even simple...
Tears sprang to my eyes in the fall of 2014 when I read of the short life and impending death of Lauren Hill. You may remember the story, too, though much in our culture works against the retention of stories like Lauren’s for more than a few news cycles. This ill-fated young woman was set...
Recently while driving from town to my house, I was running through some radio stations when I landed on the Glenn Beck show. His guest was Lara Logan, a journalist and commentator unfamiliar to me, and I was sickened and horrified by what I heard. I wish I were exaggerating, but what that woman had...
The values of the French Revolution are those of every radical revolutionary movement that succeeded it, including the one currently dismantling the basic institutions of American society and culture. But there are few historians of the Revolution who can be trusted to avoid propagandizing for it as they write about it. Pierre Gaxotte’s splendidly literate account,...
The trial of officer Derek Chauvin came up in a conversation I had with a friend this weekend. “Yeah, I really haven’t been able to follow it much, but I did see a few headlines,” was the essence of my friend’s comments on the issue. He then noted that the little he had seen made...
Lord Hastings Ismay, Winston Churchill’s trusted military advisor and NATO’s first secretary-general (1952-1957), famously quipped in the early days of his tenure that the purpose of the Alliance was to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” In the early 1950s Ismay’s adage made sense. Stalin’s armored divisions, encamped in...
The reincarnation of Hitler in some national leader and the heroism of Churchill, both stand-by props of neoconservatives, rear their head again in a recent commentary by Daniel Gelernter. Expecting neocons to abandon their continual reference of these props would be comparable to asking the Democratic Party to stop talking about “systemic racism” or Mike Pompeo to...
A look around at our coronavirus-obsessed world leaves those of us still possessing common sense with one question: What on earth have we become? This question arises when viewing videos such as this one, where a pregnant, Catholic mother refusing to wear a mask is cited for trespassing during a Mass in Dallas, Texas. This young...
Last Monday, in a single six-hour period, NATO launched 10 air intercepts to shadow six separate groups of Russian bombers and fighters over the Arctic, North Atlantic, North Sea, Black Sea, and Baltic Sea. Last week also brought reports that Moscow is increasing its troop presence in Crimea and along its borders with Ukraine. Joe...
After months of praising the Chinese response to COVID-19 and trusting their data, the World Health Organization (WHO) has apparently finally found a bridge too far in their public relations game on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party. WHO’s Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and the governments of 14 countries let loose a series of...
The bullets of cancel culture have been flying fast and furious in recent weeks and it seems a new public figure falls almost every day. While many in “woke” society would suggest that cancel culture warfare is being waged for a just cause—to promote whatever their latest politically correct cause may be—many others increasingly disapprove....
If Joe Biden’s American Jobs Program, outlined in Pittsburgh, is enacted, then the federal government will take a great leap forward toward irreversible control of the destiny of the Republic. To finance this leap, to subsidize this giant stride toward socialism, U.S. corporations are to be forced to turn over to the government a far...
The most significant diplomatic event in the month of March was a rapid, seemingly irreversible deterioration of relations between the United States and China. Its signs were on display at the first high-level meeting between the two sides since President Joseph Biden took office on Jan. 20. Held in Anchorage, Alaska on March 18, it ended very...
In 2015 Michelle Malkin wrote a column, praising the wife of distinguished neurosurgeon and later Trump Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Ben Carson. Malkin appropriately designated her subject as the “anti-Michelle Obama.” Her description encapsulates some of the merits of Candy Carson, who graduated from Yale with a triple major in music, psychology, and pre-med,...
The Biden administration’s vaccine passport scheme is just the teeny-tiny tip of a massive privacy invasion iceberg. A year ago this week, I began chronicling the worldwide weaponization of COVID-19 by big government and big business to trace and track the health data of untold hundreds of millions of human beings. Let’s review. In March...
Eating takeout food frequently is not a good thing to do, experts agree. Fine, I won’t quibble too much with this. But that doesn’t prevent takeout from being an excellent source of research on the culture of work and the staying power of bourgeois values in America. I offer to you, then, Pizza Shop Guy...
Last week I invited my young neighbors, Becca and Sam, and their two little girls to supper. I prepared lasagna and salad, and Becca and Sam brought wine and freshly baked bread. After supper, the girls entertained themselves with the Lincoln Logs and Play-Mobile sets I keep handy for my grandchildren, and we adults passed...
“I’ve known Xi Jinping for a long time. … He doesn’t have a democratic—with a small ‘d’—bone in his body,” said Joe Biden in his first press conference as president, and then he ambled on: He’s one of the guys, like (Russian President Vladimir) Putin, who thinks that autocracy is the...
“Our children need to learn more history and civics!” is a regular rallying cry for those who want to see America returned to its moral and common sense roots. That a greater emphasis on history and civics is needed is evident from The Nation’s Report Card, which finds only 24 percent of American high school seniors...
Even as COVID-19 vaccines keep rolling out in the millions, the fearmongering of the American media continues unabated. A recent CNN article instructs parents on “What to do if you’re vaccinated but your kids aren’t.” While the Pfizer vaccine is authorized for people 16 and older, the other vaccines are only approved for those 18...
Two recent mass shootings in Atlanta, Georgia and Boulder, Colorado, have once again roused those whose goal is to destroy the Second Amendment. Before the bodies of the slain were buried, before the bereft were given even a day or two for grieving, these politicians and commentators were calling for new restrictions on gun ownership....
During a joint interview with Jens Stoltenberg, the Norwegian secretary-general of NATO, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, fresh from his bout with the Chinese in Anchorage, took on Angela Merkel and the Germans. Issue: Nord Stream 2, the Baltic Sea pipeline Vladimir Putin is building to complement his Nord Stream 1 and carry more natural...
After three weeks’ absence I am back with a piece untypical of my standard work: an attempt to reconstruct my battle with The Virus and the resulting double pneumonia. I took the first dose of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine upon returning to Belgrade following a three month absence. Booking it online at 48 hours’ notice was easy, and I chose the...
I remember once hearing someone who dealt with such things point out that there was one particular trait characterizing all cult religions: the lack of a sense of humor, not only with regard to others, but in relation to themselves as well. Cult religions, after all, are usually obsessed with one doctrine, to which all...