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...
Speaking in Tulsa on the 100th anniversary of the racial atrocity there, Joe Biden belatedly turned to the issue of voting rights, to explain why he is having such difficulty winning passage of the party’s priority legislation. I hear all the folks on TV saying, ‘Why doesn’t Biden get this done?’ Well, because Biden...
Traditional church buildings are emptying at an accelerated rate in recent years, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic erupted. Yet that same pandemic has seemingly caused an explosion of worshippers at the church of science. Science is the new religion, a false god to whom we must pay homage, following its every dictate. The idea that...
In the movie Casablanca, Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) demands her brokenhearted former love, Rick (Humphrey Bogart), hand over some letters of transit that will allow her husband Victor to escape the Nazis. When he refuses, she pulls a gun and repeats her request, but Rick tells her, “Go ahead and shoot. You’ll be doing me a favor.”...
The right is often accused of fascist tendencies in many of today’s political diatribes. A typical response is for the right to return the same accusation toward the left, a fact Edward Ring explores in a recent article for American Greatness, citing Jonah Goldberg’s famous book Liberal Fascism. Ring provides an intellectual service by bringing up the relationship...
Nowadays, feminists are all up in arms about the insertion of males who declare themselves to be females into women’s sports. This is not an unreasonable concern for, if encouraged, or even allowed, transsexuals will sound the death knell of female athletic competitions. The latest episode of transgender incursions in women’s sports concerns New Zealand weightlifter...
Parents, beware. The dominion you have over your own children is under attack like never before. Teenage puppets for Big Pharma are being deployed on the ground and across social media airwaves to convince their peers to inject themselves with experimental drugs to allegedly prevent a disease for which the youth mortality rate is practically...
Identity Capitalists: The Powerful Insiders Who Exploit Diversity to Maintain Inequality, by Nancy Leong (Stanford University Press; 240 pp., $28.00). Nancy Leong recounts her chagrin at a friend’s wedding to start her jaundiced polemic, Identity Capitalists. The tipsy bride, gushing with thanks for Leong’s attendance, hugged her before joking indelicately, “I mean if you hadn’t been...
The 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex should be a time of celebration for his many fans. However, my advice to Darwin’s admirers is: Don’t pop the corks yet. The last couple of years of “woke” culture have cast a pall over the legacy of the...
With Tom Bethell’s death in February, those who refuse what Orwell called the “smelly little orthodoxies contending for our souls” have lost an eloquent and redoubtable champion. Over the course of Bethell’s five decades as a writer (consisting of seven books and hundreds of essays), the malodorous certitudes of political correctness have piled up to...
Happily Directed and written by BenDavid Grabinski ◆ Produced by Common Wall Media ◆ Distributed by Saban Films The Father Directed and written by Florian Zeller ◆ Produced by Film4 ◆ Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics Goodbye Again (1961) Directed and produced by Anatole Litvak ◆ Written by Samuel A. Taylor ◆ Distributed by United...
I met my mother’s fourth husband last fall. Now retired, they were traveling cross-country, from South Carolina to California, to be with my sister as she gave birth to her first child. My mother brought me a present, which included a coffee cup imprinted with the slogan “Life is About Creating Yourself.” My parents have...
A French woman who met the American poet Allen Tate (1899-1979) in the 1930s remarked, “Monsieur Tate is so conservative that he’s almost radical.” Etymologically, “radical” fits Tate well; his conservatism entailed returning, in the face of destructive social practices, to fundamental truths and the established customs embodying them, many immemorial. He espoused the primacy...
Most of us objected to The New York Times’ notorious “1619 Project” because it trashes the great achievements of Americans (creating free institutions and conquering a continental wilderness), substituting a story of supposed victimization as the core of our history. Alas, Professor Hall, in his speculations in the March issue (“Slavery and the American Founding”)...
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...
In the opening pages of The Future of Christian Marriage, Mark Regnerus notes a troubling truth well known to anyone who has set foot in an institution of higher education in the last several decades. “To talk seriously about marriage today in the scholarly sphere is to speak a foreign language: you tempt annoyance, confusion,...
Identity Capitalists: The Powerful Insiders Who Exploit Diversity to Maintain Inequality, by Nancy Leong (Stanford University Press; 240 pp., $28.00). Nancy Leong recounts her chagrin at a friend’s wedding to start her jaundiced polemic, Identity Capitalists. The tipsy bride, gushing with thanks for Leong’s attendance, hugged her before joking indelicately, “I mean if you hadn’t...
The Mystery of Charles Dickens By A. N. Wilson Harper Collins 319 pp., $32.50 It’s no secret that Charles Dickens was in an unhappy marriage to his wife, Catherine, and that the great author was verbally and emotionally abusive to her. In his 1939 essay, “Dickens: The Two Scrooges,” Edmund Wilson tries to mitigate this...
The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working- Class Revolution; By David Paul Kuhn; Oxford University Press; Hardcover, 416 pp., $29.95 Mayday 1971: A White House at War, a Revolt in the Streets, and the Untold History of America’s Biggest Mass Arrest; By Lawrence Roberts; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Hardcover,...
The Education of John Adams; by R. B. Bernstein; Oxford University Press; 368 pp., $24.95 It is not fashionable these days to admire the Founding Fathers, and yet the flood of books, articles, and even Broadway musicals devoted to them has not ceased. Attention is usually focused on George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jeff erson,...
“All politics is on one level sexual politics.” —George Gilder Extremists break out of the margins and take power when they fool opponents into advancing their agenda. By politicizing the family and sexuality, the left duped conservatives, and all of us, into becoming their accomplices. Since last fall’s electoral coup, the United States has been...
All recorded history can be viewed as a long record of the use of force, or threats of force, in relations between human communities. This applies to all epochs, civilizations, and geographic spaces. Violence is immanent to man. Its constant presence is indicative of the immutability of his nature, regardless of the cultural context or...
Arguing with my liberal high school teachers did not endear me to them. It got worse when a day or two after one of these disagreements I brought to class material demonstrating the teacher had been feeding us a false narrative. The teacher was not doing so intentionally but simply out of ignorance, having accepted a...
If the American right feels pinned down by an enfilade coming from the institutions it has traditionally identified with and defended, that’s because that is precisely what is happening. Pressed up against the berm, the only way out for the right is through a place it has avoided. With the fall of academia, the ideological homogenization...
Broad swaths of conservative opinion today would have it that the enemy of the right is some variant of Marxism. But this does not accurately describe people like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, or CNN’s Jeff Zucker. All the tech and media executives who are censoring and deplatforming voices on the right can hardly...
General Robert E. Lee, Charles Lindbergh, and Ernest Hemingway were among the names of great Americans I listed in a London Spectator article quite a long time ago. Needless to say, if one were to mention these names today in an American publication or news program, all hell would break loose, and the name-dropper would instantly become a...
Through the long Memorial Day weekend, anyone who read the newspapers or watched television could not miss or be unmoved by it: Story after story after story of the fallen, of those who had given the “last full measure of devotion” to their country. Heart-rending is an apt description of those stories; and searing are...
My mother’s older sister Sadie and her husband Roy spent a lifetime concealing a secret: both had been in earlier marriages that ended in divorce. My aunt wanted no one of the younger generation— not even her children—to know about this source of embarrassment and only told me about her first marriage when I was...
Politics abound with oddities, but perhaps none is greater than the elite’s disproportionate reaction to the Jan. 6 Capitol mayhem as opposed to their response to the largely black rioting following George Floyd’s death. While the black rioting drew tens of thousands of participants, lasted months, and was indisputably violent with billions in property damage,...
After nine people were shot to death by a public transit worker, who then killed himself in San Jose, the latest mass murder in America, California Governor Gavin Newsom spoke for many on the eve of this Memorial Day weekend. “What the hell is going on in the United States of America? What the hell...
President Joe Biden’s $302 billion higher education plan seeks to usher in a new era of free community college for all Americans. This is on top of the more than $1 trillion the federal government spent on higher education, as of 2018. According to the left, completely funding two years of every American’s higher education via community...
An Intellectual Takeout reader posted a comment about my recent article, “Debunking the Myths About WWII,” asking why I didn’t “write about the biggest myth of all the myths, the systematic killing of Jew’s [sic!] while fighting a war on four fronts?” While this reader’s syntax is convoluted, his question seems to imply that Germany was too busy fighting...
When did the civil rights movement go off the rails? The answer is when proponents went from justly demanding equal rights to unjustly demanding equal results. As to exactly when this occurred, that’s more difficult to answer. But consider statements, made five years apart, from the Kennedy brothers, John F. and Robert F. Neither brother was...
The Democratic leadership and its “woke” leftist allies have been held together thus far by their hatred of both the right and of normal people. But the glue that binds that coalition is starting to dissolve, Chronicles editor-in-chief Paul Gottfried argues in a recent article for American Greatness. He suggests that the conflicting interests and loyalties of the intersectional left, with...
The swear words “Marxist” and “revolutionary” are now thrown around by conservatives, such as those at Heritage, the New York Post, and Fox News, with the same abandon with which the left speaks about “human rights” or “marriage,” particularly in relation to the concept of Critical Race Theory (CRT). But as someone who has studied Marxism extensively,...
When the U.S. created NATO, a primary purpose of the alliance was to serve as a western wall to defend Germany against the 400,000 Russian troops on the eastern side of the Elbe River. Seventy years later, Germany has decided to double its dependence on Vladimir Putin’s Russia for the natural gas needed to run...
There’s a new censorship scandal afoot: it involves school yearbook pictures, a little too much skin, and some lousy Photoshop skills. Blond, smiling ninth-grader Riley O’Keefe was one of the “victims” of some aggressive photoshopping of her yearbook pictures by high school administrators. O’Keefe’s original school picture featured a gray sweater over a low-cut black...
Only those of very hard hearts can fail to admire Beth, the heroine of Walter Tevis’s magnificent novel, and now a popular television series, The Queen’s Gambit. We love the idea of her, a girl who makes good, starting off from very modest beginnings. She overcomes alcohol and drug addictions and rises to the very top...
“The U.S. Can Neither Ignore nor Solve the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” was the headline of Martin Indyk’s May 14 article in Foreign Affairs. Washington may not be able to end that conflict, he wrote, but must actively manage it. Indyk, a former U.S. Special Envoy for Middle East Peace under President Barack Obama, and who served two separate...
When he took the floor of the Senate to reject the Democrats’ Jan. 6 Commission, Mitch McConnell may have salvaged his party’s chances to recapture the House in 2022. For that commission, being spun as a “bipartisan” effort to learn what “really happened” in the Capitol that fateful day, is a Democratic scheme to have...
The city that witnessed the death of George Floyd is seeing more deaths this year, only this time they aren’t those of a full-grown man arrested for passing a counterfeit bill: they are the deaths of children caught in crossfire. The most recent death was that of six-year-old Aniya Allen, who was shot in the...
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed a great deal about America and Americans. Most have acquiesced to anything and everything government bureaucrats asked for in the name of public safety. Masks have been donned, churches have been shuttered, and many of us stayed at home for months, working remotely. This last item may end up being...
Did “America First” conservatives really “win” the battle over the GOP’s congressional leadership last week? Old-guard Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney may be out of power as the House Republican Conference chair. But her replacement, New York GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik, is a swampy shape-shifter whose campaign coffers are filled with open borders, radical social liberal,...
Like nearly all Americans, President Joe Biden believes that a college degree is the ticket to both individual economic advancement and uplifting the poor. To put his money where his mouth is, he has proposed $256 billion in government funding to cover two years of public community college plus cash for living expenses. In an instant, an...
Blacks are intensely devoted to the Democratic Party and to corrupt Democratic machines in urban areas, at least partly because they hate Republicans, the white man’s party. It makes no difference how often Fox News tells blacks they are living on the “Democratic plantation,” or that the Democrats are the party of slavery defender John C....
At my elbow is a letter from President Biden that came in the mail this past weekend. It’s torn in half, dotted with coffee grounds, and slightly soggy, because I just now retrieved it from my kitchen wastebasket. I rescued this letter from the banana peels, other junk mail, and a chicken carcass to read...
“Israel is Winning Battles, Hamas is Winning the War.” So ran the headline in the Jerusalem Post atop an analysis of the Gaza war, which began, “The IDF is registering great achievements in Operation Guardian of the Walls, but meanwhile the house appears to be collapsing from within.” Hard to disagree. Consider this New York...
The belief that law enforcement is infused with systemic racism is a myth. As the evidence demonstrates, blacks are not disproportionately killed by the police. Moreover, the perception of white officers as trigger-happy is also baseless. Here is a rebuttal of five popular lies. Myth 1: Blacks are disproportionately killed by the police. Blacks are 13.4...
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, Excellent...