The Ukrainian invasion may not have happened if the American government had not tried to push NATO to the borders of Russia. Conflict happens in international relations and does not require woke ideological hysteria as a response.
Author: Paul Gottfried (Paul Gottfried)
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Mayor Pete and the Politics of Woke Advertising
Pete Buttigieg was not elevated to his cabinet post because he has tested experience with transportation. He was put there as a woke advertisement by a less-than-principled president trying to appease the culturally radical demographic in his party.
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Conservative Gatekeeping
Conservatism Inc. has a long history of purging undesirables who challenge its party lines, but those in charge of the movement typically hide this practice.
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Opening the Window to Real Historical Debate on the Right
The true dividing lines on the right lie on the terrain of American history—the Civil War, Reconstruction, World War I, and the Civil Rights Era—but the conservative establishment's narrative about these topics has grown stale.
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A Double Standard for Santos
Listening to the Democrats and their media lapdogs complain about George Santos’s embellished résumé gives chutzpah a new meaning. They are blatant hypocrites, and too many Republicans are happy to endorse the double standard.
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The Right That Is Left
The so-called University of Austin, founded by Bari Weiss and Douglas Murray, is an attempt to create a safe space for a renamed left that has rebaptized itself as the moderate right.
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Virtue-Signaling Ourselves to Death
Republicans seem perfectly content to repeatedly proclaim the mass exodus of black voters from the Democratic Party’s “plantation,” only to be proven wrong time and time again.
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Kevin McCarthy, House Panderer
Kevin McCarthy's recent groveling before the Israel lobby and condemnation of any criticism of a foreign government confirmed his reputation as an unprincipled opportunist and panderer. The Republicans deserve a more honorable House Speaker.
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Onward, Christian Nationalist
Self-described Christian nationalists should be focused on repairing the disastrous mistake of liberalism and returning to objective moral foundations.
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A Midterm Reality Check
With the Georgia runoff results in, the midterms represent a remarkable achievement for the Democratic Party. They've held their own despite failing grades in all polls on inflation, crime, foreign policy, and immigration, and a mostly senile president.
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In Defense of Italian Nationhood
What makes a nation? In the case of Italy, it was a linguistic and cultural nation long before it became a political one.
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Marching on Rome: The Mortal Struggle for Western Culture
Mussolini may be a deeply flawed national hero, but he also stands for something necessary in this age: resistance to a socially and culturally destructive left.
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Of Opposite Minds: Maistre and Mill
Joseph de Maistre, a brilliant wordsmith, was an elegant defender of the old order, while John Stuart Mill, in his plodding prose, helped to usher in welfare democracy and the modern administrative state.
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Monuments Matter
The impending removal of Moses Ezekiel’s magnificent monument from Arlington National Cemetery follows well-laid out guidelines for obliterating the non-woke past everywhere in the culturally revolutionized West.
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The Fate of Moses Jacob Ezekiel and His Memorial to the Confederate Dead
Just a few years ago, a monument to post-Civil War peace and reconciliation sculpted by one of America’s most gifted Jewish artists was universally acclaimed. Now a woke military commission and left-wing activists plan to destroy it.
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Meloni’s Normality Is Too Much for the New Totalitarians
The “fascist” label is now used by the real totalitarians to attack anyone who does not toe the woke line to the T. New Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is the latest recipient of the left’s favorite misnomer.
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Electoral Franchise Blues
If you want to create and preserve a constitutional republic, you must be careful about who gets to vote. Once this sacred right is granted, it can never be withdrawn.
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Frank Meyer’s Fusionism and the Search for Consensus Among Conservatives
Frank Meyer’s attempt to codify a conservative consensus must be understood in the context of his day, when remnants of the Old Right were marginalized and conservatism was dominated by anti-Communism.
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The Democrats’ Stay-at-Home Campaign Strategy
For the Democrats, it is no longer even necessary to produce sentient candidates. Our media will invent made-to-order “progressives” and, if necessary, carry them across the electoral finish line, while their opponents are belittled or kept from public view.
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What We Are Reading: September 2022
In La Guerre D'Espagne, historian Stanley Payne delivers an even-handed collection of scholarly essays on the Spanish Civil War.
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Equality’s Rising Flood
The obsession with equality or "equity," transgenderism, racial politics and the rest of Western social wreckage since the 1950s was foreshadowed by the events of the French Revolution.
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‘Post-Liberals’ Look the Other Way Rather Than Address Antiwhite Racism
Catholic ‘post-liberals’ like Patrick Deneen give the impression of wanting to burnish their conservative credentials while avoiding sticky subjects. A real defense of Western civilization should not turn a blind eye to the evil of the left’s antiwhite racism.
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The Difficult Task to ‘Dewoke’ American Universities
Nothing will stop woke control of American universities short of the complete replacement of those in faculty and government who support it.
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Blacks on Abortion
The U.S. black population has been disproportionately devastated by the practice of abortion, yet many black leaders have been cajoled into dutifully mouthing the abortion politics of their white leftist overlords.
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Rediscovering the French in Early Florida
Long-forgotten is the early struggle between the Huguenots and the Spaniards for colonization of Floridian territory, where the Timucuan Indians dwelt.
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More Hand-Wringing About the Radical Right
In A World After Liberalism, Matthew Rose displays an excellent prose style, but his ideas about the so-called radical right are unrealistic, inconsistent, and not well-grounded in a historical understanding of liberalism.
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Bourgeois Liberalism
The current concept of what is "liberal" is a far cry from the classical liberalism of the bourgeoisie.
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Are Conservatives Fair Game?
Should members of the political right criticize one another for their faults, or band together out of solidarity against the left? Is it fair to consider a conservative public figure’s personal life when judging his moral pronouncements? I attempt to answer these questions in response to a critic.
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Faux Conservatism at Fox News
Fox News talking heads like Pete Hegseth are engaging in blatant hypocrisy when they blast the Frankfurt School and cultural Marxists as moral radicals. In many cases they are just as bad, or worse, than the people they criticize.
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Halting the Leftward Lurch
The centrist right has capitulated to the triumphant march of the left, but true conservative opposition, such as Sam Francis offers, is attacked as far-right extremism.
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Media Windbags
Emotional outbursts and misleading rhetoric from our political class and TV opinionators leave Americans confused about everything from Putin's motives to Caitlyn Jenner's degeneracy.
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No Capitulation: A Call to Southern Conservatives
The following speech critical of the conservative establishment is one that I did not give at The Charleston Meeting, in Charleston, S.C., whither I was invited by its organizer Gene d’Agostino, as a speaker for the evening of April 14. After espying copies of my book on antifascism for sale on a table in the...
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Radosh’s Rant Against the Old Right
A recent posting on neocon-lite website, Quillette, by its go-to authority on foreign affairs, Ronald Radosh, makes unkind references to Pat Buchanan, Pedro Gonzalez, and me: The current issue of Chronicles, meanwhile, includes an article by Pat Buchanan condemning President Biden’s “vilification” of Putin, while in another, Paul Gottfried cries “Long Live Orbán!” and elsewhere...
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Long Live Orbán!
When Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz-KDNP alliance swept to victory on Sunday, thereby guaranteeing the Hungarian premier a fourth term with a large parliamentary majority, it proved that a national conservative could win in a Western country. It is the greatest victory of national democracy that we may see in our lifetimes and a deserved...
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How Neocons Turn “Democracy” Into Grotesque Ideological Imperialism
Senator Lindsey Graham’s recent comments about wishing to see someone assassinate Putin, just as he wished Hitler had been taken out, reminded me of why I would never want neoconservatives like Graham running American foreign policy. And I don’t regard Graham’s remarks as an isolated opinion. I’ve heard numerous Republicans and Fox News celebrities seconding...
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Let’s Not Forget Our Racist Past!
My reaction to crazy, infuriating things that woke leftists do is often softened and even evaporates when I notice how the conservative establishment responds to the same situations. I am certainly no fan of Jussie Smollett and was as offended as most non-woke Americans by his shenanigans in Chicago in 2019, when he pretended that...
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Germany, Harbinger of the Abyss
Finis Germania is a posthumous collection of melancholy writing by German ecologist and sometime academic Rolf Peter Sieferle, who took his own life in despair in 2016. Sieferle regreted the disappearance of a recognizably Western civilization and deplored the likely ecological effects of a European continent thrown open to almost unrestricted Third World immigration. ...
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Books in Brief: 3/1/2022
Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape, by Cal Flyn (Viking; 384 pp., $27.00). In our era of ecological angst, many are desperately seeking strategies to mitigate human damage, but Scottish writer Cal Flyn suggests a holistic new way—one that is simultaneously haunted and hopeful—of seeing these problems. She writes often in sorrow, sometimes in righteous...
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Call It What It Is—an Invasion
With all due respect for a distinction that Chronicles Foreign Affairs Editor Srdja Trifkovic and some diplomats in America and Europe have tried to make, I can’t see how Russian President Vladimir Putin’s marching of armies into Donetsk and Lugansk earlier this week does not constitute a good old-fashioned invasion. Although Russian armies, in a...
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The Right Falls Again for the Left’s Salami Tactics
The furor over contentious symbols is rising again, the latest case occurring in connection with Canadian truckers protesting vaccine mandates in Ottawa. The frightening hate symbols found among the truckers were described thus by Al Jazeera: The convoy was organised by known far-right figures, the Canadian Anti-Hate Network has reported in detail. Confederate flags and...
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The Misguided System Without Historical Precedent
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has pushed neoconservative party lines on foreign policy for decades; the last time I read a dissenting view on that subject in the Journal was when I wrote an editorial for it in 1989. Although my caustic remarks on a global democratic foreign policy were published on the editorial...
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Books in Brief: February 2022
Christianity and Social Justice, by Jon Harris (Reformation Zion Publishing; 160 pp., $14.99). In this slim discussion of social justice and its relationship, or non-relationship, to Christianity, Jon Harris, a Protestant theologian and Baptist minister, addresses the topic long after he observed the “incursion made by the social justice movement” into the Baptist seminary where he...
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Burnham Remains Relevant to the Right
Professor Levine writes knowledgeably about Burnham’s abilities to analyze America during the Cold War and his predications about the American future. Burnham has remained fashionable within the independent American right. The part of Burnham’s oeuvre valued by this segment of the right are his analysis of managerialism as an historical phenomenon and his clear-headed look...
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Biden Voters’ Remorse
There seems to be a widespread belief that Joe Biden has exceeded the mandate for which he was elected. It seems we’re supposed to believe that those who voted for the Biden-Harris ticket craved moderation after Trump’s troubled and unsettling presidency. Writer and commentator Scott Jennings repeats this familiar narrative in a recent interview with...
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Driving Miss Racial Activist
At first blush, the 1989 film Driving Miss Daisy seems innocuous. Its plot centers around the relationship of an aging Jewish matron, Daisy Werthan (Jessica Tandy), and her black chauffeur Hoke Colburn (Morgan Freeman). Yet a recent rewatch caused me to notice irksome elements of the plot I missed the first time around. This has...
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Stop Calling These People ‘Conservative’
Two years ago, Gracy Olmstead, a journalist who writes on farming and farming communities, partnered with Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) to compose a list of those whom she and the Institute view as “conservatives.” Of the now deceased figures who appear on Olmstead’s list, very few of them have any connection to anything identifiably conservative....
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Feminism Left and Right Drove America’s Permissive Abortion Laws
Although the U.S. seems to be as woke and post-biblical as any other transformed Western country, our abortion laws since Roe v. Wade (1973) have been wildly out of line with those of the rest of the West. Betsy Clarke, writing in Chronicles’s sister publication, Intellectual Takeout, offers this well-considered observation on the subject: ...
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Paid to Hate Putin
It seems that National Review Editor Rich Lowry never tires of carrying water for the sponsors of his magazine, whether it’s the high-tech giants who help pay his gargantuan salary, or his neoconservative donors, whom he also faithfully serves. Most recently he honored his patrons with a dutiful denunciation of Russian President Vladmir Putin entitled...
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Leftist Critics Are Misreading Antifascism: The Course of a Crusade
Authoring a book comes with its usual praise and criticism and my latest book, Antifascism: Course of a Crusade, is no exception. One of my critics is the Canadian journalist and columnist at The Nation, Jeet Heer. His review leaves me wondering whether he has actually read my work, which charts the historical roots of the modern antifascist movement....
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Leftist Critics Are Misreading Antifascism: The Course of a Crusade
Authoring a book comes with its usual praise and criticism and my latest book, Antifascism: Course of a Crusade, is no exception. One of my critics is the Canadian journalist and columnist at The Nation, Jeet Heer. His review leaves me wondering whether he has actually read my work, which charts the historical roots of the modern antifascist movement....