A new series about the quintessential Hollywood heartthrob reveals the dangers we encounter when we hide our true identities so well, they become forgotten—even to us.
Year: 2023
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Great Fakes of 2023: Buffy, Cat, and the Composite Character
2023 was a year in which great fakery was revealed in show business, even as the fakes within America’s corridors of power continue their deceptions.
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Success Is Not Just About Skill and Talent
Attitude is just as important as skill and talent if you want to succeed in life. It's a lesson we need to learn early in life.
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Streaming Historical Amnesia: ‘Oppenheimer’ Stews in Old Lies
Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” far from offering a careful treatment of a morally complex subject, is instead steeped in the far-left propaganda and clichés of the ’60s.
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Stop Funding the ‘Rights for Migrants’ Legal Scam
As migrants invade U.S. cities, public advocacy lawyers profit big time.
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Toxic Western Wokeness Exacerbates Middle East Conflict
The West will come to regret dismissing the foundations of civilized society as “social issues” and exporting radical, woke ideologies as a means of combatting the pathologies that already exist abroad. Instead of offering liberation, we have only pushed these peoples toward additional grievances and inspired more violence.
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The Magic of Memory and ‘Holiday Inn’
Today we face a serious bout of historical amnesia, be it in the collective sense or as individuals. We all desperately need some connection to the past. Films like Holiday Inn give us an opportunity to become custodians of Americana.
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Answering Pop Music’s Malaise this Christmas
A culture is characterized by its public rites. Western culture today shows itself most clearly in popular song and what we hear is in need of an antidote.
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Archie Bunker Back Stories
Carl Reiner’s son, Rob, takes part in a grand tradition on the left of demonizing normal, religious people after being advanced, personally, by powerful relationships. On the left, it’s all relative and “all in the family.”
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Trump’s an ‘Insurrectionist’—But Hillary Was Exercising Free Speech
When Republicans ask questions about the integrity of our elections it's insurrection. When Democrats do it, it's just politics.
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The Profiteering Migrant-Industrial Complex
Migrants complain about rotten food. The worst rot is inside the Adams administration's handling of this emergency.
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Jill Biden’s Vapid Christmas
Unlike the original Nutcracker Suite, which is a Christmas story of good triumphing over the evil of narcissism, the only moral to First Lady Jill Biden’s recently released Christmas video is the triumph of narcissism.
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Trump’s Country Party Roots
Aristocracy is the problem, and Americans will fight it with any weapon at hand—including Donald Trump.
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Global Implications of U.S. Failure in Ukraine
After Ukraine, Beltway grandees will have to choose between accepting that America is but one great power among other great powers in a multipolar world, or continuing to pursue their insane obsession with America being the world’s “benevolent global hegemon.”
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Great American Musical Artists in their Roaring Nineties
Great musical artists approach the coda, without the recognition they deserve. As the year closes, we’d do well to remember (or discover) their work.
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The Life-Affirming Song and Dance of ‘Bundle of Joy’
Norman Taurog’s Technicolor comedy-musical Bundle of Joy (1956) is a radical film that makes the use of Christmas joy to hold up the life-affirming and true love of a mother, father, and grandfather as both the pinnacle of Christian morality and the Christmas spirit.
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What the Border Crisis Reveals About Our Leaders
Instead of taking the responsible approach of admitting sanctuary policies are a failure and reversing course, mayors have taken absurd steps to appear to be leading while maintaining their good standing among those adhering to the anti-borders orthodoxy.
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Elite Colleges Defend Anti-Semitism
Colleges profess openness, tolerance, and a commitment to diversity. But when it comes to ideological diversity, they sing a different tune.
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Charles Schumer: Jewish Bourbon
There is little excuse for Schumer’s shock, and his speech on anti-Semitism, delivered in his usual sanctimonious style, was unimpressive. It may have satisfied him. There is no reason it should satisfy anybody else.
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Give Us Educated, Skilled Immigrants Yearning to Support Themselves
Biden is welcoming destitute migrants, instead of newcomers who are educated, have job skills to succeed in today's economy, speak English and arrive ready to provide for their families.
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Congressional Republicans Facilitate the FBI’s FISA Abuse
The FBI has mastered the art of intimidating elected leaders with its FISA surveillance power.
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What Happened to Ron DeSantis?
When a politician stakes his campaign on a demonstration of how thorough, consistent and philosophically pure he is, he might impress conservative journalists and policy wonks, but they don't pick the nominee.
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Collegiate Anti-Semitism Did Not Start Yesterday
As I look at the Johnny-Come-Lately critics of our anti-Semitic universities, I am reminded of the French Communist Party during and after the fall of France. Why should we now celebrate those who contributed to this poisoning of our culture?
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The Creation of an American Everyman
Frank Capra’s film, Meet John Doe, makes clear—especially as Christmas Day approaches—that man is not the measure of all things. It is only when God’s wisdom is the foundation of man’s being and existence that we can live authentically in both words and deeds.
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Israel vs. Hamas: Where Have All the Feminists Gone?
As so often is the case, victim advocacy groups only voice concern for victims when their attackers are considered political opponents.
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Against ‘Progress’
Is today’s life of convenience really better, more human, and more fulfilling than the kind of lives our forebears lived in which the struggle of everyday life pointed always to the sacred?
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Hamas Advocacy Exposes Phony Sloganeering of the Left
The left’s hashtag activism about sexual violence is just pure politics meant to manipulate female voters into believing that Democratic policies protect women.
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Tuberville Showed Courage in Facing Down Pentagon Abortionists Despite Little Help From the GOP
While Sen. Tuberville failed in his effort to curtail the Pentagon’s new plan to subsidize soldier abortions, his willingness to stand alone in opposition to the deep state juggernaut is inspiring.
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Stop the #MeToo Lawsuit Carnival
Statutes of limitations are necessary to ensure defendants get fair trials. Politically motivated suspensions hurt more than just their intended targets and are incompatible with justice.
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Con Inc. Tries to Smear Pat Buchanan as an Anti-Semite Once Again
The United States is not Israel. Understanding that does not make you an anti-Semite or even hostile to Israel. It’s just reality: a concept that appears increasingly elusive to GOP leadership and establishment conservatives.
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Biden Looks Doomed—But Is He?
Political scientists say presidential elections are referendums on the incumbent. If that’s the case next year, none of the Biden team’s grounds for optimism will matter.
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Professional Sports, Sport-Betting, and Hypocrisy
Leagues like the NHL have made their moral stances clear—their millionaire star players may not engage in sports gambling, but hockey fans are subjected to over two hours of gambling propaganda during each broadcast.
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Kissinger’s Legacy
One of Henry Kissinger’s greatest virtues was his political realism and his resistance to America’s messianic urge, relentlessly promoted by both neoconservatives and neoliberals, to dominate the world as global hegemon.
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A Not So Radical Documentary
Ironically, a new documentary about Tom Wolfe, “Radical Wolfe,” lacks the radical thrust it laments is missing today and that Wolfe himself had.
Issue
December 2023 Chronicles
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Polemics & Exchanges: December 2023
Chronicles readers discuss and critique recent articles on the U.S. dollar, immigration, and "therapism."
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What We Are Reading: December 2023
Short reviews of Broken Record, by Roy Campbell, and The World Crisis, by Winston S. Churchill.
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Remembering Paul Elmer More
Paul Elmer More was one of several notable independent-minded scholars who criticized America from a broadly traditionalist perspective during the first half of the 20th century.
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Scalia Gets the Biography He Deserves
James Rosen’s biography shows Justice Scalia’s greatness in bucking the prevailing liberalism of the Supreme Court.
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When Prayer Left Public Life
Sixty years ago the Supreme Court struck down school prayer. This hastened the process of overturning the Western tradition in which Christianity played an integral role in the life of nations.
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Countering the Racial Revolutionaries
Heather Mac Donald documents the absurdities imposed on America by those who put racial equity above all else.
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A Divide in the Oregon Trail
The socio-political divide in Oregon is so dramatic that the red rural areas are continually trying to break-off from the rest of the state.
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Two Bad Choices: Assimilate or Die
In resurrecting the melting pot as the antidote to multiculturalism, Heycke neglects a better option: the return to American tradition.
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Conservatism After Defeat
Edmund Burke’s statement of government as a compromise and a sharing of power is no longer relevant today. The world has been remade since Burke's warnings, unfortunately.
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Books in Brief: December 2023
Short reviews of Character in the American Experience, by Bruce P. Frohnen and Ted V. McAllister, and From Here to Eternity, by Randall B. Smith.
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Is 18th Century Liberalism to Blame for All Our Problems?
Many conservatives insist that some distant, long-past event supposedly causes all our current woke silliness. I call this the "inverted Whig interpretation of history."
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The Death of Satire
The absurdity of the modern left, and rise of victim culture, make quality satire impossible. Absurdity is now taken seriously and cannot be mocked.
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Burke on our Crisis of Character
Abandoning our tradition-based constitutional republic, whether for a mythical medieval shire, an idyll of Lockean abstractions, or even a Church militant, is neither necessary nor prudent.
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The Age of Reason and the Age of Fear
There are uncanny similarities between the 18th and the 21st centuries. The whole concept of liberty, equality and fraternity in the last two decades of the 18th century was as much based on a lie as it is in the first two decades of the 21st.
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A Very Special Ally
America’s political class is far more zealous about defending Israel than it is about defending America.