Mere pandemics cannot stop the Richard Wagner bibliography from expanding, indeed from metastasizing. Yet, even as the catalogue of new books on the famed, 19th-century German composer expands, “woke” culture threatens to drive him, and the Western civilization he represents, into a state of cancellation. Vast quantities of ink have been lavished upon every bizarre...
The Biden regime’s frantic moves in recent weeks to escalate tensions with Russia—at a time of China’s continued economic and military rise—are irrational, inexplicable by any standard method of foreign policy analysis, and perilous to this country’s security interests. Mr. Biden’s decision less than two weeks after his inauguration to move B-1 bombers to Norway “to...
America’s Revolutionary Mind, by C. Bradley Thompson (Encounter Books; 584 pp., $32.99). Thompson’s examination of colonial America’s natural rights political culture and the effects of the Declaration’s oft-quoted passage about unalienable rights is not likely to please members of the traditional right, and as such I consider it required reading. Thompson presents copious evidence that...
Seizing control of the means of information is the sine qua non of a successful coup. Radio, television, and newspapers must be grabbed first and foremost. That is what the Greek colonels did in the last successful European coup, back on April 21, 1967. Some years later, a colonel tried but failed to overthrow the elected post-Franco Spanish...
Nearly every Wednesday night for the past seven years I’ve watched Married at First Sight, a reality show which finds expertly matched couples meeting each other at the altar. My wife finds it inexpressibly tasteless, and two of my daughters who watched it with me, each once, expressed irritation that I made them sit through...
Ms. Mullarkey misrepresents comments of the Roman Catholic bishop of Madison, Wisconsin in “Politics as Spiritual Warfare” in the November 2020 number of Chronicles. Her quotations are totally accurate but they are grossly out of context and do not convey what the bishop actually says [about abortion as a voting issue] in his Sept....
The only thing those on the left hate more than a conservative white male is a conservative black male. It simply infuriates leftists when a black man rejects their socialist dogma and espouses such conservative ideals as individual initiative, freedom from government, self-reliance, responsibility for decision making, and competing in the marketplace. How dare he! A...
In may of last year, C. Bradley Thompson published a piece in The American Mind entitled “The Rise and Fall of the Pajama-Boy Nietzscheans,” taking aim at the radical left and its cheerleaders at The New York Times, as well as the unfashionably reactionary right. Both, he argues, are fundamentally at odds with the political...
Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life; by Zena Hitz; Princeton University Press; 240 pp., $22.95 “What do I need to know for the test?” This common refrain, repeated endlessly by high school and undergraduate students, sums up one of the great heresies of our age: the view that learning is a...
The New York Times’ “1619 Project” is a series of articles published in 2019 to mark the 400th anniversary of the first enslaved Africans to arrive in America. In an introduction to the series, New York Times Magazine Editor-in-Chief Jake Silverstein claims that slavery “is the country’s very origin.” He writes: Out of slavery—and...
Someone’s head must have rolled at the Aspen Institute when Anand Giridharadas’ book came out. Giridharadas didn’t miss a rung as he climbed the American establishment’s social ladder: born in Shaker Heights, schooled at Sidwell Friends, the University of Michigan, and Harvard, employed at McKinsey, the International Herald Tribune, and The New York Times, and...
“I don’t know if he’ll run in 2024 or not. But if he does, I’m pretty sure he will win the nomination.” So says Mitt Romney, the sole Republican senator to have voted twice to convict President Donald J. Trump of impeachable acts. But is it possible Trump could win the nomination in 2024? What...
I was a sheltered white girl working my way through my teen years, when circumstances suddenly threw me into regular contact with minority children and families in inner city Minneapolis. Although it was a bit of a culture shock and sometimes difficult, I quickly grew to love the time I spent teaching, talking with, and...
Most readers upon seeing the title of this article likely thought, “Well duh.” However, The New York Times opinion page apparently needs a reminder of this basic fact of metaphysics, as philosophy professor Crispin Sartwell argues that this idea is “a good candidate for the originating idea of Western thought. And a good candidate for the worst.” There is...
Sitting in a pew last summer, waiting for a small funeral service to start, I saw a young woman walk to the podium and begin to speak. To my surprise, she introduced herself as the minister who would be conducting the service, and then she began to lead those gathered to remember the departed through...
Sicily ’43: The First Assault on Fortress Europe, by James Holland (Atlantic Monthly Press; 599 pp., $30.00). By 1943, Hitler, given to paranoia and dreading loss of his North African outpost, had become obsessed with territory north of the Mediterranean out of concern that the Allies would gain a foothold in Sicily. With little confidence in...
Back in the 1990s, I was a Sunday school teacher, a member of my parish council, a small-business owner, and a leader in my sons’ Cub Scout pack. I even put in a year coaching five-year-olds in soccer, though what I knew about the sport could have been penned on a “Sticky Note,” one of...
Catholic & Identitarian, by Julien Langella (Arktos Media; 338 pp., $38.95). French commando Dominique Venner committed suicide inside Notre-Dame Cathedral in 2013 as an act of protest against unrestricted Islamic immigration. One cannot but censure Venner’s sacrilegious act. Yet, calling attention to the existential threat to the West in general and France in particular is a...
“What is America’s mission?” is a question that has been debated since George Washington’s Farewell Address in 1797. At last week’s Munich Security Conference, President Joe Biden laid out his vision as to what is America’s mission. And the contrast with the mission enunciated by George W. Bush in his second inaugural could not have...
A smile came to my face as I drove past a school this morning. No longer was it a desolate ghost town; instead, I had to navigate a long line of cars and buses waiting to turn into the parking lot to drop children off. While it’s good to see kids going back to school,...
Don’t look now, but a serious conflict is brewing with China, infinitely more dangerous than anything regarding Russia or Iran. The problem? China may have developed the ability to militarily defeat the United States and control the Far East. “U.S. policy between the end of the Cold War and 2017,” former Trump National Security Advisor H. R....
This week an older reader, Ed, sent me an email lamenting the current state of education in our country. He gave several examples, including “I remember when I was about nine years old, my dad who didn’t finish the Sixth Grade had to help my brother with Eighth Grade spelling.” Ed’s email took me back...
History—be it that of 1619, or 1776, or some other significant year or event—is often abused in this day and age. One of the latest victims of such historical misrepresentation are the Spartans, whom Lee Smith in a column for Tablet treats rather unfairly. Smith describes the blood-curdling behavior of the antidemocratic Spartans at the end of...
“I’m so glad to be back in the classroom!” a young high school student told me the other day. Her enthusiasm is understandable. As one of the first students to get back to some form of normalcy in public schooling, she’s probably the envy of many others who want to be in person with their...
Is President Joe Biden prepared to preside over the worst U.S. strategic defeat since the fall of Saigon in 1975? For that may be what’s at stake if Biden follows through on the 2020 peace deal with the Taliban to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by May 1—just two months from now. ...
Rush Limbaugh passed away on Ash Wednesday at age 70. I heard that news on the radio after leaving noon services at my church. At first, I felt a profound sadness and a touch of anger. The past year has thrown a barrage of punches at Americans. For those who loved Limbaugh’s program—I only listened...
Germany’s defeat in World War II was accelerated by Hitler’s unwillingness to accept reports at odds with his increasingly fantastical view of reality. His self-deceptions were believed with such firmness that, by mid-1944, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel concluded that the Führer was living in a Wolkenkuckucksheim (“cloud cuckoo land”). The same diagnosis applies to the establishment Right, both in...
Apparently one major problem facing the mainstream media today is the lack of editorial and political cartoonists from diverse backgrounds. In the wake of the successful transition to a Biden-Harris presidency, The Washington Post recently interviewed a number of female and minority cartoonists to get their perspective on this pressing cultural issue. “Fewer than 30 staff newspaper jobs...
In C.S. Lewis’s novel about totalitarianism, That Hideous Strength, we find this line, “Qui verbum Dei contempserunt, eis auferetur etiam verbum hominis,” which translates, “They that have despised the word of God, from them shall the word of man also be taken away.” This line occurs in a passage during which an elite who dreamed...
Twenty years ago, when I was pregnant with my first child, I transformed into a total health nut. A lifelong couch potato, I started exercising, enrolled in Lamaze classes and even took vitamins for the first time. I halted my consumption of caffeine, Doritos, Spam, and sushi. After decades of obliviousness to food labels, I...
“Our historic, patriotic and beautiful movement to Make America Great Again has only just begun.” So said Citizen Trump Saturday on his acquittal by the Senate of the impeachment article of “incitement of insurrection” in the Jan. 6 invasion of the Capitol. “I look forward to continuing our incredible journey together...
From the vantage point of a neighborhood in a midsized Midwestern city where I grew up, I witnessed a curious sociological phenomenon. On the south side of my house was a street filled with decay and depravity: broken-down dwellings, yards littered with auto carcasses, drunken men sitting on porches leering at teen girls and cursing at one...
A little over a year ago I got a note from a reader who told me she was leaving her present job for a better one. She was climbing the ladder of success and… heading home. That’s right, her new job was one which the corporate world might frown upon, with responsibilities including changing diapers,...
[The setting: a classroom on a liberal arts campus somewhere in the American northeast. A young, very enlightened professor addresses students in her course “Getting Woke, Bashing the Fash: Intro to Critical Studies” following a screening of the 13-minute video of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot shown at the opening of the latest impeachment trial...
“Mandalorian” star Gina Carano made headlines this week when she was fired from Disney. Her crime? Authoring a social media post comparing the censorship of conservatives to Nazi persecution. Disney’s decision set off a salvo of justified attacks on the company. But while the self-righteous anger is gratifying to fans both of Carano’s acting and...
It has been a dreadful three months for the Grand Old Party. On Nov. 3, President Donald Trump seemed to have lost the White House by narrowly losing three crucial blue states he had won in 2016—Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—and Georgia and Arizona as well. Trump immediately mounted an acrimonious two-month...
Two weeks to “slow the spread” proved to be a lie as state government stay-at-home orders stretched on and on, being taken away and reintroduced at the whims of governors rather than by acts of the various legislatures. Even when we were permitted out of our homes, they imposed rules on who we could visit,...
Because of offensive tweets posted by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., before she won office, House Democrats joined by 11 Republicans voted to strip her of her committee assignments. If this is the new standard, can we apply this to the Rev. Al Sharpton, aka a Democratic “kingmaker,” whose support was solicited by every major...
Accounts from individuals, many unknown to Americans, who gave their treasures and lives to defy totalitarianism fill Rod Dreher’s latest book, Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents. Their stories should inspire all of us in the age of fear and fraud we now inhabit. But there’s one problem—a huge problem—with Dreher’s take on...
Liberals rarely defend the property rights of corporations, so it is quite amusing that scores of them are arguing that social media companies have the right to deplatform rogue actors. Unfortunately, by making free speech the crux of the argument conservatives have ceded the debate to liberals. Instead, we should be asking ourselves if companies can arbitrarily...
We live in an era of unprecedently widespread lying. Yet lying itself, is an art—albeit an unadmirable one—in decline in a decadent age. Our leaders have set a spectacularly bad example. Former President Trump lied continually and shamelessly, as do his noisiest enemies and his successor. But they are bad liars—clumsy, unconvincing, and incredibly short-sighted,...
Every once in a while, I speak by phone with the editors of some of the publications I write for. In my most recent conversations with two of them, they conveyed the same basic message. They reminded me they want articles with a positive vision of the future. Realistic, but without the doom and gloom...
In 1989, Japanese businessman Minoru Isutani purchased Pebble Beach’s famous golf course for $850 million, and Mitsubishi Estate Company paid $846 million for 51 percent of New York’s Rockefeller Center. The United States cowered from the kamikaze attack of Japanese capital on American business. American students swamped Japanese language programs, as the Land of the Rising...
To Parliament, in the London of George III, the Boston Massacre of 1770, and the Tea Party of 1773 were not seen in the same light as they were by the Sons of Liberty in the Massachusetts colony. To Parliament, this was mob violence, and the shooting and killing at Lexington and Concord were acts...
I couldn’t believe my eyes. TIME published an article entitled: “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.” Having been constantly told by the media in recent months that conspiracy theories and underground movements are bad, one would not be blamed for turning tail and running as far away as possible from...
Leonid Ilych Brezhnev presided over the irreversible decline of the USSR during his 18 years in power, initially as Secretary-General of the Soviet Communist Party and later also as chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. He was two years younger than Joseph Biden is today when he died in 1982, but – just...
1959: I was eight years old. Had someone told me I would one day own and operate a bed-and-breakfast, homeschool my kids, and possess a laptop that allowed me to write instant letters to far-away friends or read newspapers from England, such predictions would have boggled my mind. “Homeschool,” “laptop,” and so on were words...
When it was learned in 2016 that Russia may have hacked the emails of John Podesta and the DNC, and passed the fruits on to WikiLeaks to aid candidate Donald Trump, mighty was the outrage of the American establishment. If Russia’s security services filched those emails, and a troll farm in Saint Petersburg sent tweets and...
Last Sunday, Chris Wallace solemnly called attention to what he regards as a growing embarrassment in Congress: A Georgia representative, Marjorie Taylor Greene, whom Democrats have now stripped of all assignments in their august body because she refuses to keep her mouth shut. Congresswoman Greene thinks the presidential election on Nov. 3 was full of...
Had I told Democratic friends around the turn of the 21st century that in 2021 their party would insist that a biological man identifying as a woman should be treated as a woman in sports competitions, they would have laughed me under the table. Yet here’s Joe Biden, their man in the White House, claiming that...