The GameStop saga shows some “equity” movements are more equal than others. Stakeholder theory, the corporate version of social justice, attempts to install this hopelessly amorphous concept of “equity” in the business world. Equity, unlike equality, demands different treatment of individuals and different distribution of resources based on need, identity, and historical injustices. But now...
The Berlin Tagesspiegel recently went after a young Protestant theologian whom naïve readers might have mistaken for a polite, unassuming scholar. This figure was outed by an academic colleague who discovered that he wrote for “new Right” publications, a term that in the German context should be understood quite broadly. One of the venues of this putative extremist...
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...
The insufferable Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) was in the news again, having discoursed at length on social media about her experience during the bizarre events in the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The video showcases what she does best: talk lugubriously about herself and all the things that are causing her pain and suffering. Here’s some of...
I can’t claim to be much of a poetry buff, but upon seeing a footnote reference to a poem called “The Gods of the Copybook Headings,” I was too intrigued to ignore it. Upon hunting down a copy, I found 10 stanzas of verse written by Rudyard Kipling in 1919. The “copybook headings” featured in...
Sparked by the Black Lives Matter movement, cities across the United States went up in flames last year, beset with looters, agitators, and killers. As leaves, and ashes, fell softly last autumn, homicide rates began to soar nationwide as $1 billion-plus in claims registered on the insurance industry’s books, making these riots the most destructive in American history. Even so,...
Gun rights activist Dana Loesch recently complained that she had been denied the right to respond to her critics on Twitter, according to a story reported in the New York Post. Unlike her adversaries, who are free to swing away at her, Loesch is not allowed to use Twitter’s fact-checking platform to correct their misstatements. Loesch...
“Never allow a good crisis (to) go to waste. It’s an opportunity to do the things you once thought were impossible.” Thus did chief of staff Rahm Emanuel advise Barack Obama on the financial crisis he inherited in 2009. Following the Capitol riot by a mob of pro-Donald Trump protesters,...
Everything old is new again. The corruptocracy of the Obama administration is back with a vengeance in the White House. Once more, the “S” in “DHS” stands not for security—but for sleaze. Our nation is back for sale to the highest foreign bidders and their “America last” cronies. Last Thursday, the Senate Homeland Security Committee...
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Each morning’s internet headlines bring a new version of crazy. This morning was no different. In her article “PETA: Using Animal Names as Verbal Insults Is Supremacist Language,” Catherine Smith reports that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is decrying the use of insults and anti-animal slurs...
What really happened on Jan. 6, 2021? The nation still doesn’t know the whole of it, but by all accounts on the Left and from center-right Fox News it was America’s darkest moment since 9/11, Donald Trump’s Waterloo, and the abyss of the Right. As a participant at the Save America Rally, my own perceptions...
Just returned from a trip to Europe, journalist Matthew Tyrmand sat down for an interview with Chronicles to discuss his work and thoughts about the future of America after the 2020 election. He was informed by officials on re-entry to the U.S. that the Department of Homeland Security had revoked his “Global Entry” status, which...
Mank Directed by David Fincher ◆ Written by Jack Fincher ◆ Produced by Netflix International Pictures ◆ Distributed by Netflix Citizen Kane (1941) Directed by Orson Welles ◆ Written by Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles ◆ Produced by Mercury Productions ◆ Distributed by RKO Radio Pictures Netflix is currently streaming Mank, a film dramatizing...
On the fourth floor rotunda of the Oklahoma State Capitol hangs a curious portrait entitled “Carl Albert,” painted in oil by distinguished Sooner State artist Charles Banks Wilson and dedicated in 1977. It depicts the 46th Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Only 5’4” in real life, Carl Albert (1908-2000) looms large in the...
Many years ago, Samuel Francis, that keen critic of American politics and culture, coined the term “anarcho-tyranny” to describe a condition that would seem at least paradoxical, if not self-contradictory. When we think of anarchy, we imagine rioters in the streets, looting, setting fires, and spraying the neighborhood with bullets; Chicago on steroids, beneath...
A comic from NPR caught my eye the other day. Promising to tell parents “how to raise informed, active citizens,” the scrawled images and text stressed the importance of civics and made several recommendations on how parents can work instruction of this topic into everyday life. The suggestions range from using fun and games, to...
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...
It’s become an accepted opinion that marine biologist Rachel Carson, the author of Silent Spring (1962), was the founder of the modern environmentalist movement. But this may very well be a myth. Recent historical scholarship suggests that this title more likely applies to controversial Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich, author of the 1968 best seller...
When Booker T. Washington delivered his “Atlanta Compromise” speech in 1895 at the Cotton States and International Exposition, nearly 15 years after the founding of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, the effect was galvanizing. Frederick Douglass, until then the most prominent black American leader, had been in his grave only six months. Washington, now ascendant,...
It’s after 4 o’clock on a Monday afternoon, and I just walked to my mailbox and received a check from the federal government for $600. And I am furious. Here are a few reasons why. First, I am self-employed. I work eight to nine hours every day, seven days a week, writing articles for outfits...
If not for the COVID-19 pandemic, it is likely that Donald Trump would have won reelection. He achieved a growing economy that was seeing more wage gains at the bottom than the top, he refused to start another foreign war, and he appointed three Supreme Court justices and nearly a third of all active federal...
“What is Truth?” is a question that has been around since the Greeks. One can speak of moral truth as well as aesthetic truth, yet scientific truth seems to be the only one that’s undeniable. And yet, even though there’s scientific proof the world is round, those who deny it can still live normal lives...
The Essential Scalia: On the Constitution, the Courts, and the Rule of Law; By Antonin Scalia; Edited by Jeffrey S. Sutton and Edward Whelan; Foreword by Justice Elena Kagan; Crown Forum; 368 pp., $35.00 Steven Calabresi, one of the founders of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, maintains that Antonin Scalia was the greatest justice ever...
In the first week of September 1792 the French Revolution entered its openly terroristic phase with the massacre of some 1,600 prisoners in Paris. It was an outrage euphemistically called les Journées du Septembre (or the September Days). It was justified by the claim that the country was in danger from foreign enemies and domestic...
Taking Flight: The Nadine Ramsey Story; by Raquel Ramsey and Tricia Aurand; University Press of Kansas, 2020; 312 pp., $29.95 Taking Flight tells the remarkable tale of a courageous woman, Nadine Ramsey, who survived a difficult childhood to become Kansas’ first female commercial pilot, a World War II WASP (Women Airforce Service Pilot), an instructor of male fighter...
“Jan. 6, 2021, is not over, but it already lives in infamy. A sitting president of the United States, having lost re-election, incited a mob to storm the Capitol as the Congress sat in joint session to certify the Electoral College vote. This act was without precedent. It was based on a lie, fed by...
For years I’ve been listening to the hot air produced by Conservative Inc. about the political conservatism of Martin Luther King, Jr., who was dedicated to “self-government based on absolute truth and moral law.” Supposedly King was also a proud member of the GOP. This last claim is not even remotely true, as Alveda King,...
Napoleon and de Gaulle: Heroes and History; By Patrice Gueniffey; Belknap Press; 416 pp., $35.00 Both Napoleon Bonaparte and Charles de Gaulle rose in a time of turmoil and war to restore order. Napoleon’s service to France lay in ending revolutionary violence, while de Gaulle led free France in the struggle to overcome Nazi dominated Europe. The demerits...
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...
Is it still possible to believe that the rule of law prevails in the United States of America? That concept—that we are governed by our laws and Constitution, and not the arbitrary power of dominant individuals or groups—is endangered as never before, especially after the 2020 presidential election, the loss of two Republican Senate seats...
The Baseball Writers’ Association of America (BBWAA) continues to block Curt Schilling’s entry to the Hall of Fame, not because of his performance on the field, but because of his politics. What should have been a straight-forward decision finalized years ago was tarnished by sports journalists’ horror at Schilling’s bold proclamation of conservative views. Apparently...
As soon as the Senate received the lone article of impeachment accusing President Donald Trump of “incitement of insurrection” in the Jan. 6 mob assault on the Capitol, Rand Paul rose to object. The Senate, he said, has no right to try a private citizen, which Trump now is. Thus, what we are about to...
The Crusader Strategy: Defending the Holy Land, by Steve Tibble (Yale University Press; 376 pp., $35.00). If one gets his Crusades history from Karen Armstrong or the History Channel, one is likely to think that nasty and brutish Franks went off half-cocked to the Holy Land to rape, pillage, and enslave peaceful Muslims. This is an ignorant...
The unifying strand in conservatism as a movement and the GOP as a political operation is a superficial desire to limit and eschew power. This position is sloganized in exhortations against “big government,” against “socialism,” against the noxious fumes of power. But movement conservatives, like their political counterparts, are quite all right with both the...
Sputnik News carried a live interview on Jan. 25 with Srdja Trifkovic on the social and political climate in the United States in the aftermath of President Joseph Biden’s inauguration. We bring you Dr. Trifkovic’s translation of some key segments of that interview. Q: [At 7 min. 55 sec.] How seriously should we take the warnings that America...
“There is more than one way to burn a book,” Ray Bradbury once said. “And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.” Bradbury wrote the novel Fahrenheit 451 about a world that systematically burned books. In late December, I resolved to try and read more books than those I review for Western North...
A Small Farm Future, by Chris Smaje (Chelsea Green Publishing; 320 pp., $22.50). Chris Smaje is probably the only sociologist-turned-farmer in England. This unusually ecologically-aware agriculturist hopes the sobering effects of COVID-19 will help reset society by restructuring rural areas. Food chains are fragile due to population pressure and economic and ecological challenges, and Smaje says there...
“COVID is where you die.” So said my three-year-old grandson, John Henry, when I asked him what he knew about COVID-19. Like many of my readers, I come across online articles warning of the negative effects of the virus on young people nearly every day. While only a tiny number of them have died from...
The political jargon and posturing one hears these days seems to suggest that we are in an era unlike any that has ever occurred before. Hope springs anew, there is light at the end of the tunnel, politicians gush, and for those of our elites who really want to impress with their knowledge of history,...
“The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States… does not challenge that position.” Thus did President Nixon, in the Shanghai Communique of 1972, accept China’s territorial claim to the island of Taiwan....
Here’s the answer to that question right off the bat: Joe didn’t go anywhere. Instead, our culture, our lawmakers, our pundits, and others made him invisible. They have erased Average Joe. And Average Josephine too, for that matter. Who today really speaks for the barber in Weaverville, North Carolina who just spent eight hours on...
Fraser Myers recently asked at Spiked how blacks and Latinos could vote for Donald Trump and in some cases enthusiastically join demonstrations for him, given the supposedly obvious fact that that Trump is a white supremacist. According to Myers, New York University professor Cristina Beltrán answered this troubling question in the Washington Post in a memorable gloss on “whiteness”:...
During the 2016 presidential campaign, candidate Donald Trump spoke and acted like every coastal globalist’s nightmare. Criticizing the European Union as America’s devious competitor, Trump called both the World Trade Organization and NAFTA “disasters.” NATO was obsolete, he said, Crimea was none of our business, and better relations were needed between Washington and Moscow. Advising Obama to stay out of Syria,...
My wife and I recently watched The Vow on HBO Max. It’s a nine-part documentary about NXIVM (pronounced “NEX-ee-um”), an organization that claimed to provide personal and professional development training programs. Think Scientology in its early days, when it was an unorthodox therapy program without all the sci-fi religious mythology. Like Scientology, its true nature was much more sinister. NXIVM quickly...
I loved Little House on the Prairie when I was little, but as I grew older, my favorite story from this series of novels centered not on Laura Ingalls’ childhood, but on that of her husband, Almanzo. The youngest of four children growing up in 19th century New York, Almanzo and his siblings were once...
With Inauguration Day behind us, ink spilled on politics is being diverted from Donald Trump and the transition of power to Joe Biden and the exercise of power. One such piece by Jeffrey D. Sachs over at CNN takes a rather disingenuous approach to this theme, calling a small government approach “reckless radicalism.” Rather than...
First the crazies tore down statues they deemed offensive. Next they vandalized churches. Then they demanded trigger warnings on classic movies like Gone with the Wind and Blazing Saddles. If these monsters ever discover libraries, books will be next. Let me suggest you hoard copies of William McNeill’s The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (1963) before...
“We have met the enemy and he is us,” said Walt Kelly’s cartoon character Pogo, half a century ago, about what we Americans were doing to our environment. Rereading President Joe Biden’s inaugural address, Pogo’s remark comes to mind. Biden began on a lofty, hopeful and familiar note: “This is a...
Many argue that whiteness is a major problem in America. On the internet one can find scores of articles depicting the perceived racism of white Americans as the genesis of all ailments. Those who are steeped in history, however, are aware that Western society is distinctly individualistic and open to new ideas. For example, today one is far more likely to find white people...