Once the right allowed the left to frame politics as the avoidance of tragedy, they lost the game. We’d do well to reconsider what Christopher Lasch called the “limits and hope” of politics.
Year: 2024
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Trump’s Sun Belt Hopes and Rust Belt Needs
Trump should do everything he can to win the Sun Belt, and black and Hispanic voters, away from Biden. But his priority must be to win back the Rust Belt states and white voters he lost in 2020.
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Harrison Butker Boots This One Out of the Stadium
The outraged reaction to the Kansas City Chiefs’ kicker’s speech on the “pervasiveness of disorder” exposes how people can’t handle the truth about American culture.
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Meme World Syndrome
The feedback loop of our very online “discourse” knows no end and it is rendering our society insane.
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Rejecting Truth, Justice, and the American Way
The abandonment of common-sense realism destroyed our institutions of higher learning a long time ago. It now threatens to destroy the nation itself.
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My Internet Friends
The less obvious part of the phenomenon of online friendships is that the communities created are often much more than common interest spaces.
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Will Democrats Pay a Price for Their Cynical, Crumbling Lawfare Strategy?
The Democrats’ strategy is failing. But it is up to the American people to make them pay for it.
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Kinkade Konservatism Reacts to Royal Portraits
Insofar as these portraits display Charles and Camilla as they really are, they are good art. But let’s not lie to ourselves about what they are saying about the British monarchy and our times.
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Another Big Lie: Liberals Are More ‘Caring’ Than Conservatives
Conservatives are more generous with their money, and it’s not even close.
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Is Common Sense Realism Making a Comeback?
The real battle being fought in America today is not between the right and the left. It is a battle between common sense and nonsense.
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Shafik and Other College Presidents Have Mission Confusion
American colleges and universities have long been considered tops in the world, but this preeminence won’t last if they operate as mere indoctrination factories, turning out social activists instead of knowledgeable, independent thinkers.
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American Genius: Carver Skateboards, Skateparks, and Resisting the Joy Killers
Plans to build a skatepark in Brooklyn offer a laudable public works improvement to the city but are still not my style. The freewheeling street surfing possible on a Carver skateboard, however, is as American as it gets.
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Abolishing Diversity Statements Is an Empty Gesture at MIT
Until all aspects of DEI are abolished from universities, public gestures like eliminating this or that aspect of the ideology are mostly empty publicity stunts designed to relieve pressure from embattled administrators.
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Michael Cohen Cannot Save Alvin Bragg’s Absurd Case
Bragg’s case against Donald Trump is a two-legged stool, unable to stand on its own merits. His attempt to shoehorn in testimony from Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen is absurd and a sign of desperation.
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What Trump Sees in Doug Burgum
Trump’s VP contest isn’t really about the contestants; it’s about investing the audience in the drama of choosing and the man making the choice. Burgum is just plausible enough to extend that drama.
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American Women Don’t Need a ‘Momala’s Day’
The cringeworthy appearance of Kamala Harris on “The Drew Barrymore Show,” highlights the low regard in which the Biden administration holds both women and motherhood.
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The Making of a Banana Republic
Now that the Rubicon has been crossed and we have entered a world in which politicians attempt to not merely defeat their opposition at the ballot box but also prosecute and incarcerate them, there is no going back.
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The Imperfect Nostalgia of ‘Unfrosted’
Jerry Seinfeld’s otherwise genius combination of childhood nostalgia and comedy is marred by a lack of political temperance that deflates the experience for at least half the audience.
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Packers QB Aaron Rodgers vs. the White Coat Supremacy of Dr. Anthony Fauci
As the football standout has learned in his confrontation with the medical establishment, the struggle against white coat supremacy is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
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The Loud, Shameful Haitian Migrant-Whipping Hoax Dies Quietly
After five border patrol agents had their lives turned upside down in a sickening, agenda-fueled hoax, with their bosses were leading the charge, the government now quietly seeks to memory-hole the incident by giving one of them an award.
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MSNBC Host: Donald Trump, Like Richard Nixon, Is Racist
Trump and Nixon promoted policies that disproportionately benefitted blacks, but this doesn’t stop Democrats from promulgating the fiction that Republicans are racists.
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Press Cowards’ Hypocritical Lament Over Media’s Lack of ‘Balls’ and ‘Swagger’
Mainstream press critics whine about the demise of journalism’s good ole days, while carefully avoiding writing anything that would offend their paymasters.
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Suicide Permitted
In coming to grips with why suicide and suicidal ideation have become so widespread in the West, we tend to overlook one central fact: We no longer consider life sacred.
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Colleges Side With Radicals, Their Students Be Damned
The public knows what they are seeing on campuses is not freedom of expression—a sacred American right—but lawlessness and dangerous disorder.
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Biden, Trump, and the False God of Democracy
Conservatives would do well to remember that a political system of democratic leveling will always find new depths of evil, and fresh bodies to swell its ranks.
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FBI Bungling May Collapse Mar-a-Lago Case Against Trump
The government’s evidence about what it found during its raid on Mar-a-Lago may be contaminated and the case seems ready to implode.
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The Vietnam Era Never Ended for Biden’s Party
The Democratic party only has papered over its contradictions ever since 1968. Today’s campus protests have ripped off the wrapper, and they’re forcing on Biden a choice he can’t, or won’t, make.
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Columbia University’s Commencement Cowardice
Columbia’s decision to cancel its 2024 general commencement is a capitulation to all the worst elements of campus and global radicalism.
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Delusion Is Killing the American Republic
More Americans are mentally ill than ever before. It’s no wonder we are seeing signs of it in our politics.
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Recognizing the Enemy Within
John Frankenheimer’s “The Manchurian Candidate” illuminates timeless and timely truths about the relationship between freedom and authoritarianism, as well as the that between illusion and reality. It’s a perfect film for our times.
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Confused Ivy League Presidents Should Look to the Sunshine State
America’s vaunted Ivy League has proven totally incapable of dealing with pro-Hamas protestors. They should learn from the balanced approach to free speech taken by Florida’s thriving universities.
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How a U.S. Federal Government Default Might Play Out
The recent tax rebellion by the Canadian province of Saskatchewan may provide a model for how U.S. states could push back against a federal government that has spent far beyond its means.
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The Case for Ben Carson and the Return of American Goodness
As the vice-presidential nominee, Dr. Ben Carson would benefit Donald Trump enormously—both personally and politically.
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Bragg’s Prosecution Makes Trump a Martyr
It is difficult to imagine that Trump’s alleged dalliance with Stormy Daniels will be his undoing. If anything, this show trial may have been the thing he needed to remind America of his peculiar virtues.
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‘Remember Us’: How to Fight Media Bombholing
A victim of media “bombholing” explains how the media drive their ratings and profits by publishing an unending series of wild, unsubstantiated stories, never stopping to correct the ones that came before.
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Every State Is a Border State Now
The death of Jacques Price serves as a reminder of just how thoroughly our institutions have been turned against Americans at every level.
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Trusting China in Inviting Another Pandemic
The U.S. should not be funding or collaborating to make the next China-created killer.
Issue
May 2024 Chronicles
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Polemics & Exchanges: May 2024
Chronicles contributors and readers tussle over Japanese culture, slavery, and NATO!
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Buckley Revisited, Again
William F. Buckley, for all his strengths, left behind a deeply flawed magazine and movement, which was very much to his demerit.
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The Neoconservatives’ Latest Purge
The recent neoconservative attack on Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson shows what happens when conservatives dare question U.S. support of Israel.
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The Hate That Dare Not Speak Its Name
The grand strategy of the Democratic Party has become to exploit the growing diversity of the American electorate to construct a Coalition of the Fringes. One result has been the cultural acceptance of anti-white racism.
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The Unprotected Class
To combat anti-white discrimination is not something we should do for whites but for all Americans, because if we don’t change the course we are on, we are all going to suffer.
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The Anti-White Totalitarians
The end game for the anti-white elites is to maintain control, marginalize and, if necessary, wreak destruction upon those who challenge their sway.
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Remembering Edward C. Banfield
For decades, Edward C. Banfield taught within the Ivy League environment despite being a right-winger who favored empirical investigation over theories and feelings.
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What We Are Reading: May 2024
Short reviews of The Unheavenly City by Edward C. Banfield, and Beethoven: His Spiritual Development, by J.W.N. Sullivan.
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Fate, Tragedy, and Repentant Imperialism
Robert Kaplan has distilled the lessons of a life spent in pursuit of tragic knowledge into two books of differing size and scope: The Tragic Mind and The Loom of Time.
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A Pastime Made Politically Correct
Joe Posnanski gets out his sackcloth and ashes and mournfully chants the litany of baseball’s historic racist sins.
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A Book That Needs No Sequel
Rachel Maddow plays up the danger of a reemergence of America’s 1930s and 1940s domestic fascist movements to an absurd extent.
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Books in Brief: May 2024
Short reviews of Bartleby & Me by Gay Talese and Southern Poets and Poems, 1606 -1860: The Land They Loved by Clyde N. Wilson.