This extraordinary tome proposes a cure for our cultural illness: the resurgence of the muscular Christianity that once permeated higher education. The success of Fulton Brown’s project is far from assured, but in this essay collection she embraces the task with zealous ecstasy. The book is ostensibly the story of the author’s unlikely relationship with...
April 18 marked the 70th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Paris, which established the European Coal and Steel Community. The leaders of France, West Germany, Italy, and the three Benelux countries thus laid the foundation for European integration. It was primarily meant to facilitate economic recovery, but also to help overcome old...
American institutions have been allegedly occupied by Marxists who are waging a war against the “American Revolution,” according to conservative commentator Mark Levin. Demonstrating how this alleged occupation occurred is at the core of Levin’s American Marxism, a work driven to the top of the bestseller list by conservative book clubs and Fox News. ...
On a beautiful Sunday morning, I was out of town for a business meeting in the city of Santa Barbara, California, an affluent area where the rich and famous live. Demographically, it isn’t exactly Wakanda. Before getting on the 101 Freeway for the long drive back to Los Angeles, I pulled into a gas station...
Anyone paying attention knows the American government is broken. Whether we understand the Constitution or not, we know intuitively that something isn’t right. We may grouse generally—“Government spends too much money,” or “Government should be doing X”—but it’s hard even to begin explaining why the system isn’t working. There are several major trends that explain...
Why are Poles so conservative? And why are Western countries like the United States, and my country of Canada, so liberal? Although Poland claims to be Western and democratic, its government and culture are markedly different from those of Western countries such as Canada. Poland and Canada have been shaped by their pasts to evolve along...
Thanks to Britney Spears’ court battles over her hard-earned fortune, more Americans than ever before are learning about how predatory lawyers, judges, doctors, conservators and guardians collaborate to defraud and destroy the lives of innocent victims. The 39-year-old Spears went public last week with her 13-year-long struggle against her father and court-appointed guardian Jamie Spears—who...
The Stonewall Riots in New York City in 1969 were a great, good thing that signaled the beginning of the LGBTQ social and cultural movement, and only positive things flow from them—or so the narrative goes. The “gay liberation” rioters are our heroes and heroines, and police, government, and traditional public opinion, on the other hand, are...
In 1986, Ronald Reagan said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.” That was 35 years ago, and I’d like to suggest a nine-word update: “I’m woke, and I’m here to change the world.” The woke folks suck the fun out of everything,...
Distinctions between the First, Second, and Third Worlds have blurred in contemporary America as government competence stretches in odd and tyrannical directions while leaving the basic functions of government untouched. This misalignment of priorities could well serve to delegitimize the government in the eyes of many of its citizens. The post-WWII political landscape was simple....
About that clash between a British destroyer and Russian warplanes and warships in the Black Sea last week there are conflicting versions. The Kremlin version is the more dramatic. HMS Defender, says Moscow, entered the Black Sea, made port in Odessa, Ukraine, and then sailed for Batumi on the coast of Georgia. However, the British...
Late last year I wrote how a personal bout with COVID-19 changed my perspective and gave me hope that the pandemic wasn’t as dire as many made it out to be. My perspective changed in part thanks to a private practice doctor who had great success in treating COVID. According to him, COVID, if treated...
As soon as I heard that a man had stabbed three women to death and wounded seven others in the Bavarian town of Würzburg on June 25, I was near-certain of three key facts of the case: that the attacker was a Muslim, that the powers-that-be would claim to be mystified as to his motives,...
Joseph Bolanos’ reputation as a pillar of New York City’s Upper West Side community was shredded in February when FBI agents and heavily armed police raided his mother’s apartment where Bolanos was spending the night. They handcuffed him while other agents battered down the door to his home and kept him in the street in...
(This article is a translation of an original interview by Branimir Stanić and Ivan Tašev) Earlier this month Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán—long maligned by the Brussels machine as an authoritarian reactionary inside the ever-so-progressive European Union—gave an interview to the Croatian Catholic weekly Glas Koncila (The Voice of the Council, 20 June 2021). Orbán made several...
We are living in a political culture in which anyone identified with the now-vaguely-defined “right” can lose his fortune, reputation, and possibly his freedom. Meanwhile, the racist, vandalizing left can do what it wants with total impunity. A professor lecturing at the Yale School of Medicine dreamt aloud about “shooting white people,” and has not suffered...
On Tuesday, Brooklyn Borough President and former police captain Eric Adams took the lead in the New York mayoral race with 32 percent of the Democratic primary vote, 10 points more than progressive Maya Wiley, who had the endorsement of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. How did Adams beat the elite? Said The New York Times: Adams...
As the decay of America’s urban centers continues, Milwaukee, Wisconsin has experienced a nearly 200 percent increase in car thefts this year, prompting city council members to take action. But rather than calling for more police officers, or even the left’s preferred curative of social workers, to be hired, Alderman Khalif Rainey and Alderwoman Milele Coggs wrote...
If there were a Museum of Terrible Ideas, the permanent collection would surely include today’s elected leaders who believe the best way to represent impoverished neighborhoods is to demand the defunding of police departments and supporting policies to undermine public schools. How can anyone argue that poor people benefit from lax law enforcement or ending...
As disruptive as the 2020/2021 academic year was, it led to many positive educational changes that will be transformative and long-lasting. Most notably, parents have been re-empowered to take back the reins of their children’s education from government bureaucrats and teachers unions. Frustrated by school closures and district “Zoom schooling,” families fled public schools in droves...
A good historical novel—as Rafael Sabatini’s Scaramouche is—resembles a bridge game, where the hands and strategies are revealed only gradually. History itself unfolds irregularly, with disruptions, false starts, and surprises. Against the backdrop of complicated, vicious, and corrosive events in France in the late 1780s and early 1790s, Sabatini draws his characters from smallscale lives into the...
Hitler’s Germany attacked Stalin’s Soviet Union 80 years ago today, thus unleashing the greatest, bloodiest, and most meaningless clash of titans in history. Thanks to the German Führer’s obsession with Lebensraum (“Living Space”) in the East, and his equally self-defeating, criminal race theory, Operation Barbarossa resulted in the mutual near-destruction of the two nations. Flawed from the outset,...
Last week, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops voted 168-55, more than 3-1, to provide new guidance for receiving Holy Communion. Behind the decision? Bishops’ alarm that the public religious practice of President Joe Biden is conveying a heretical message to the faithful and the nation. At Sunday Mass, Biden regularly receives Communion. Yet he...
Another weekend, another round of shootings. We’ve only just hit the summer solstice and we’re already off to the races of chaos and crime. Per usual, the biggest rampage came from Chicago, where 54 people were shot over the weekend, 21 on Saturday night alone. But Chicago is not the only city having problems. A recent...
TANSTAAFL with its triple repetition of the letter “A” is an acronym popularized by science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein meaning, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” TANSTAFL with a double A is my play on Heinlein’s contrivance: “There ain’t no such thing as free love.” Free love may bring to mind that term...
Quaker’s “Aunt Jemima” has been replaced by the Pearl Milling Company. “Mrs. Butterworth” and “Uncle Ben” have followed her into the dustbin of history, all because these venerable product images ran afoul of current ideological purity tests. Woke ideology is rolling like an avalanche through corporate America, and removing these objectionable products is one of the chief ways these...
By a vote of 30-1 in the House, with unanimous support in the Senate, Juneteenth, June 19, which commemorates the day in 1865 when news of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation reached Texas, has been declared a federal holiday. It is to be called Juneteenth Independence Day. Prediction: This will become yet another source of societal...
Father. Now there’s a word weighted with meaning. For Americans indoctrinated in gender politics, father brings to mind the patriarchy, male domination, and oppression. For others, the word father summons nightmares from childhood, abuse, slaps and punches, drunken rages, constant criticism, and neglect. Or maybe they remember Dad as the man who would come home...
Policies designed to achieve racial equality have existed for decades, but a profoundly different cure now dominates public discussion—eliminating structural racism (also called “systemic racism”). Given that structural racism is allegedly hard-wired into American society and responsible for a multitude of what were once believed to be self-inflicted pathologies among blacks, i.e., crime, illegitimacy, and academic failure,...
Presidents Joseph Biden and Vladimir Putin met in Geneva on Wednesday, June 16. Both separately noted that the talks went well. “There’s been no hostility,” Putin said. “On the contrary, our meeting took place in a constructive spirit.” Biden meanwhile declared “the tone of the entire meeting… was good. Positive.” The spirit may have been constructive and the tone...
There is a picture in our family of my great-grandfather holding a Model 94 lever-action .30-30 carbine—”Treinta Treinta,” as it was affectionately called—with a cartridge belt strapped across his body. He fought in the Mexican Revolution with an American-made Winchester rifle. This little piece of family history pops into my mind now and then. Not...
Every once in a while something pops up on YouTube that knocks me for a loop. I was messing around there recently when I found “Woody Allen Looks at 1967,” a variety show hosted by the comedian in which he featured guests like actress Liza Minnelli and singer Aretha Franklin. Nothing unusual there, but then...
Another day, another de-banking. Imagine a ruthless country where peaceful citizens who fearlessly defend their heritage, their families and their faith can wake up in the morning and find themselves cut off from their entire life savings with no explanation and no recourse. That country is not Russia, China, North Korea, Venezuela, or Iran. That...
The civil rights movement is often placed on a pedestal today with an almost religious fervor, with its own Christ-like figure in the form of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Such an attitude is on display in a recent, generally incisive critique by Victor Davis Hanson on the breakdown of lawfulness and the eruption of crime in...
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. Karl Marx’s comment came to mind as President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Boris Johnson sought to equate their tete-a-tete at the G7 confab in Cornwall, England, to the Atlantic Charter conference of 80 years ago. Those were historic days, to which these days cannot compare....
On Wednesday, June 16, presidents Joseph Biden and Vladimir Putin will hold their first summit meeting in Geneva. Taking place amidst heightened tensions between the United States and Russia, relations between Washington and Moscow are arguably at their lowest point since the end of the Cold War. Serbia’s top-rated Happy TV network asked me, from my...
Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class, by Paul Embery (Polity Books; 216 pp., $64.95). Paul Embery, a firefighter and trade unionist, has written a searing critique of Britain’s modern Labour Party. He believes Labour has betrayed its core constituency, the working class. Rather than reaching out to that traditional base, the current party...
Twelve-year-old North Carolinian Mike Wimmer recently graduated as valedictorian of his high school class while simultaneously earning an associate’s degree at his local community college. Cooped up like everyone else during the pandemic, young Wimmer decided to go to a full court academic press and add some classes to his schedule. “Well we’re sitting here doing nothing, right?...
An interesting sidelight on our current ruling regime is its changed attitude toward Russia. From the time of the Russian Communist takeover until quite recently, American leftist “intellectuals” sympathized with the Russian regime and gave it every benefit of the doubt. During the Cold War leftists pushed for unilateral Western disarmament, beating down those who...
In 1859, Abraham Lincoln related the tale of an Eastern monarch who charged his wise men with discovering words that would everywhere and always be true. The wise men went away and returned to present the monarch with this six-word sentence: “And this, too, shall pass away.” So, the question: How long will Sen. Joe...
Joy. Pure unadulterated joy. This is what I felt on the first of June when I stepped into my favorite coffee shop here in Front Royal, Virginia and found all of the employees except one without face coverings. Gone were the bandanas and surgical masks, and for the first time in a year I could...
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 indissolubility of marriage...
Young people have never been famous for their political acumen. Recall the Children’s Crusade of 1212 when thousands of unarmed youngsters attempted to march to the Holy Land to convert Muslims with persuasion and divine inspiration. Nevertheless, the current generation exhibits a level of political naiveite that would certify the children of the 1212 disaster as rocket...
About a month ago, I confronted an odd-looking man who had flagrantly double-parked his beat-up truck in the grocery store parking lot. Not only did he refuse to move; he also seemed incapable of understanding why anyone would have a problem with what he’d done. “What do you care?” he blustered. “You’re already parked, and...
“Take away this pudding; it has no theme,” is a comment attributed to Winston Churchill, when a disappointing dessert was put in front of him. Writers have used Churchill’s remark to describe a foreign policy that lacks coherence or centrality of purpose. For most of our lifetimes, this has not been true of the United...
Please hop into my time machine, and I’ll give you a short tour of Boonville, North Carolina in the summer of 1959, before bringing you back to the present day. Strolling around this small hamlet of 600, note the town’s most historic building, the old brick bank founded long ago by Mr. Shore. Take in...
It is hard to keep a straight face while reading the hysteria over the United States Supreme Court agreeing to hear Dobson v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Mississippi case challenging the state statute prohibiting nearly all abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy. For those in the legal establishment, the greatest fear seems to be that this...
Foreign ministers of nations both great and small make statements all the time, most of them silly or just forgettable. Some of them are utterly sinister, like Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s promise to promote homosexual “rights.” This has led to the U.S. Embassy to the Holy See, among others, to display the rainbow flag of politicized...
In a rambling performance taking three-quarters of an hour, President Joe Biden spoke at Tulsa on the anniversary of the murderous events of 1921. He subjected his audience to his usual mangled sentences, omitting key words or parts of speech, sometimes to the point of total incomprehensibility. In fairness it should be noted that he is hardly...
A few months into the COVID pandemic, an acquaintance of mine got an adorable puppy and named it… Fauci. Admittedly, it is kind of a cute name for a dog. But after the past several days’ news reports, I’m wondering whether my acquaintance will choose a new moniker for that poor puppy sometime soon. For...