[This review first appeared in the November 1994 issue of Chronicles.]
“Wisdom is neither inheritance nor legacy.”
—Thomas Fuller
In his keynote speech to a meeting of the John Randolph Club, Murray N. Rothbard exhorted his colleagues to take
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[This review first appeared in the November 1994 issue of Chronicles.]
“Wisdom is neither inheritance nor legacy.”
—Thomas Fuller
In his keynote speech to a meeting of the John Randolph Club, Murray N. Rothbard exhorted his colleagues to take
…
The man who loves other countries as much as his own stands on a level
with the man who loves other women as much as he loves his own wife.”
—Theodore Roosevelt
Hailed
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To say I was a difficult child is something of an understatement: I was a wild child. In retrospect, I can only feel sorry for my poor parents, who had no idea what to do with me. I was simply
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The latest fad among leftist historians, according to the New York Times, is the study of the conservative movement. “By marrying social and political history,” the Times announced, “this new wave
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Trump’s decision to walk away from the Hanoi Summit in February and reject the terms of a possible deal—ending all sanctions in return for a partial denuclearization—was a disappointment for his supporters. But it is only the beginning of a
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We often hear opponents of U.S. action abroad denounced as “anti-American.” On the other hand, these alleged anti-Americans present themselves as anti-interventionists—opponents of the policy and not the country.
So how to tell the difference? One sign of anti-Americanism is
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The enormity of what we’re up against is something I acknowledge in the abstract, but blank out of my consciousness 99 percent of the time. It’s only when I come across an article like Alexander Rubinstein’s and Max Blumenthal’s recent
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It came as a bolt of lightning out of the blue. One moment the Trump administration was besieged on all sides. The media were accusing him of treason, and the Democrats, having just taken control of the House of Representatives,
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Is it really necessary to explain why President Trump’s proposed Space Force would be a boon to humankind? Do I have to contrast such a noble project with the other possible uses to which our tax dollars would be put?
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At a raucous campaign rally in Houston, President Trump laid his ideological cards on the table for all to see. If the Democrats take the House and/or the Senate, he told the crowd, they’ll carry out the agenda of “corrupt,
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Are we tired of winning yet?
This is the question Donald Trump kept telling us we’d be asking ourselves if he succeeded in taking the White House—and I have to confess the answer is an emphatic “No!”
Join me on
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At the end of Garet Garrett’s Rise of Empire, the grizzled old prophet of the dystopia we’re living in held out hope to his conservative comrades and their intellectual descendants. Although pessimistic by nature (at least so it seems
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The very idea of dual citizenship is downright absurd. It’s a contradiction that cannot be resolved. The concept of citizenship is based on the expectation of loyalty to the country, and this, in turn, means that citizens owe their exclusive
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The photo went viral: a little girl crying after she’d been separated from her mother at the U.S.-Mexican border. Time photoshopped it so that the little girl was crying while the Evil Donald Trump looked down at her, looming over
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As I write this the news of Tom Wolfe’s death is breaking. The stylish author of The Right Stuff, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and the progenitor of the “New Journalism,” Wolfe was one of the last of
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You never know what Lady Fortuna has in store for you next.
Having quit college—after all, I knew what I wanted to do, and didn’t need lessons from some hippie in how to do it—I was shuttling between New York
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I am writing this very close to March 20, the 15th anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, and I’m wondering: Have we learned anything from that experience?
One has only to look at the headlines to understand that
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Whatever happened to the libertarian movement?
Since the age of 14 I have been a self-conscious libertarian. That’s when I started reading libertarian tracts (Rand, Mises, Hayek). I say reading, but at least in the case of Mises, reading
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I took the diagnosis of non-small cell lung cancer (Stage 4) quite well, I thought. Except for occasional bouts of hysterical self-pity and thankfully rare gestures of melodrama.
Oh, I’d resisted it, denied it, although I knew all along that
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As we gathered in the gazebo, sitting on the hard white benches with the paint peeling off in strips, nursing Marlboros—the girls wielding cigarette-holders, like scepters—we decided then and there who and what was the main obstacle to our goal.
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To say I was a difficult child is something of an understatement: I was a wild child. In retrospect, I can only feel sorry for my poor parents, who had no idea what to do with me. I was simply
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“The mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation.”
—William McKinley
In his classic study of “isolationism,” Not to the Swift, Justus Doenecke takes note of a phenomenon called “Asia Firstism”—the
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The country is currently suffering through a series of moral panics—or, more precisely, the coastal elites are, while the rest of us go about the business of ordinary living.
There was the tearing down of the statues, an “antiracist” campaign
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America’s descent into banana republicanism continues apace, and on two fronts. To begin with, we learn that President Trump’s much-disdained assertion that Trump Tower was being wiretapped during the election campaign turns out to be absolutely true. On September 19,
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Sheriff Joe Arpaio, hated by the open-borders crowd but loved by those who want to uphold America’s immigration laws, has always been surrounded by controversies—they whirl around him like dust storms in the Arizona desert. Now an even bigger storm
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History not only repeats itself but inverts itself. When these things happen simultaneously, the result is precisely what is happening today, as conservatives return to their “isolationist” roots and progressives return to their warmongering ways. That’s the repetition. The inversion
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“It is a sort of a disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything,” confessed George Soros to a British newspaper, “but I feel comfortable about it now
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Kathy Griffin, “comedienne,” posts a photo of herself holding up the bloodied head of President Trump, gore dripping down his face.
A Central Park production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar features an assassinated Caesar as Trump: The audience roars its approval
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Politics is all about hatred. Never mind who you’re voting for: It’s who you’re voting against that really counts. And that’s why any disagreement I may have with Donald Trump’s actual policies
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The media frenzy that greeted the victory of Donald Trump is now reaching a pinnacle of manic hysteria. Every single day, it seems, there is some new toxic, trumped-up accusation: He’s a Russian agent! He’s obstructing justice! He’s wants to
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My local newspaper is now unreadable, and I’m damn mad about it.
In order to understand the earthshaking significance of this turn of events and its emotional impact on me, you have to understand the role my paper, the Santa
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I got a call from a Washington-based journalist the other day who wanted to know if Pat Buchanan had any influence on the platform of our current President.
What a question! The guy sounded fairly young—at least, younger than me—so
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They call it Cascadia—a land of plunging waterfalls and snowcapped mountains, a mythical kingdom of towering trees and raging rivers. Here in Seattle, capital of this Arcadia, the sleekly modernistic Space Needle rises up against the backdrop of Mount
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They liken him to Rasputin and Svengali: He’s the éminence grise of the Trump administration, the hard-line ideologue who represents and multiplies all the darkest impulses of that man in the Oval Office.
But who is Steve Bannon, really?
The
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It was a clarion call to his supporters and a hard slap in the face to his adversaries—the latter being gathered just a few feet behind him as he delivered his Inaugural Address. Donald J. Trump never minces words, and
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As I write, the attempted CIA coup against the Trump administration is ongoing. Yes, you read that right: We’re getting awfully close to Seven Days in May territory. Through a series of leaks to the “mainstream” media, the Langley spooks
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For the first time since the Reagan years a Republican took Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and even Michigan. After years of waiting for the rise of the MARs (Middle-American Radicals), I hear the ghost of Sam Francis chortling with unrestrained mirth.
Trump
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As the nation prepares to go to the polls to elect the 45th president of these United States, two flashpoints may determine the outcome.
The first is Islamic terrorism. It was almost funny to listen to New York City Mayor
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The national media campaign against Donald Trump is unprecedented. All pretense to “objectivity” has been thrown out the window in an effort to keep the populist wing of the GOP out of the White House. Nary a day goes by
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Democracy isn’t freedom—and in today’s Turkey some people realize that, as amazing as that may seem. Not ordinary folks, but the mid-level officers of the Turkish army, who have been watching with a jaundiced eye the steady Islamization of
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Attorney General Loretta Lynch attempted to censor the three 911 calls Omar Mateen made as he was slaughtering his 49 victims at an Orlando nightclub. All references to Islam and the Islamic State—to which he pledged allegiance as he was
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It was the first meeting of The John Randolph Club, held somewhere in the wilds of Texas. I was there at the urging of Murray Rothbard, who was enthusiastic about this gathering of libertarians and paleoconservatives in the wake of
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The stunning success of the Trump campaign has upended what has passed for conservatism lo these many years and opened up new vistas for the American Right.
Many if not most readers are familiar with the story of how the
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As Donald Trump moves closer to the magic number of 1,237 delegates, the panic of the political class is a wonderful sight to behold.
GOP donors meet in secret conclave, plotting various scenarios designed to steal the nomination. A “brokered”
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While it looks like the much-touted Libertarian Moment has passed—if it was ever here to begin with—we can say with some degree of certainty that the Paleoconservative Moment has arrived. And we can pinpoint the date of its arrival with
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The year was 1964. I was 13 years old. Sitting in the family room of my parents’ home in Yorktown Heights, New York, with the TV on, I picked up the envelope that had arrived in the mail that day.
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With Donald Trump continuing to rise in the polls, the neoconservatives are in a lather. Bill Kristol, who initially declared he was “anti-anti-Trump”—in the same sense that his departed father declared he was “anti-anti-McCarthy” (Joe, that is, not Eugene)—recently tweeted,
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The publication of a special “Stop Trump” issue of National Review was heralded in a blaze of publicity. Editor Rich Lowry appeared on Fox News and was interviewed by Trump nemesis Megyn Kelly, where he proceeded to denounce The
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“Quarantine the aggressors!” That line out of Franklin Roosevelt’s famous speech signaling the beginning of his open road to war with the Axis powers was much criticized by anti-interventionists, who correctly saw that the President was trying to undermine the
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