Although we didn’t know it at the time, the incidents in Charlottesville, Virginia on Aug. 12, 2017 would soon develop into a narrative for the left to repeat and then recycle in the summer riots of 2020 and eventually the events at the U.S. Capitol in January 2021. Anne Wilson Smith unpacks this narrative in...
Homo Americanus, by Zbigniew Janowski (St. Augustine’s Press; 250 pp., $24.00). Polish American political thinker Zbigniew Janowski examines the reasons that modern American democracy has taken a totalitarian turn. Contrary to the happy talk coming from establishment conservatives about the need to spread America’s so-called liberal democratic values everywhere, Janowski paints a dark but compelling...
That Donald Trump bothered to challenge the official outcome of the November 2020 election was an annoyance to a number of congressional Republicans, representatives and senators alike. Remarks issued on Jan. 6 by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell as the Senate was about to confirm the election of Joe Biden reflect these views: We cannot...
Homo Americanus, by Zbigniew Janowski (St. Augustine’s Press; 250 pp., $24.00). Polish American political thinker Zbigniew Janowski examines the reasons that modern American democracy has taken a totalitarian turn. Contrary to the happy talk coming from establishment conservatives about the need to spread America’s so-called liberal democratic values everywhere, Janowski paints a dark but compelling...
It seems that capitalists, woke zealots, and street gangs are joined at the hip right now. This idea is fleshed out by writer Michael Anton in an enlightening interview with IM 1776. Anton offers this chilling thought: Certain folks will howl at this, but if you listen to the woke left, they think it’s not merely fine...
In discussions of World War II, much emphasis and critical attention has been conferred on German forces and actions. What is often overlooked, however, are the Soviet deeds during the same time period. Author Sean McMeekin, a historical studies professor at Bard College, seeks to slay this sacred cow of the historical profession and...
The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition (1995) by Willmoore Kendall and George W. Carey Catholic University of America Press 168 pp., $19.95 Ask the average American what his country stands for and he will likely answer “equality.” If that person studied a bit of American history, he or she would then cite the...
Impassioned attacks on critical race theory (CRT) are the subject of AMAC Magazine’s August issue. A publication of The Association of Mature American Citizens, a Republican alternative to the American Association of Retired People, the magazine’s lead editorial by Robert B. Charles described CRT as an “anti-American … rebranding of Marxism.” This is equally true...
A devastating leftist critique of Mark Levin’s bestselling book American Marxism was posted by Zachary Petrizzo at Salon the other day. After reading Petrizzo’s remarks, I am left wondering about the colossal foolishness of Levin, who set out to write a book—which his celebrity would push to the top of the New York Times best seller list—on something it seems he never bothered...
Conservatives are malcontents who feel alienated from an American politics and culture controlled by the left, Zack Beauchamp declares in a recent Vox article entitled “The anti-American right.” Such dissatisfaction has most recently manifested itself during the Olympics, Beauchamp declares, as these conservatives have even dared to root against Olympic contenders technically representing the U.S. but spewing hatred for...
Despite repeated claims to the contrary by American elites, slavery is not a uniquely American, or even a uniquely white enterprise. Peoples of all nations and colors have engaged in the institution throughout history. One such example is easily found in the compelling history of the Seminole people. Joseph Cotto, of Cotto/Gottfried podcast fame, has self-published an...
That political ideology and activism have become a new religion is something the average individual sees signs of nearly every day. A black man is killed in an altercation with police and his face instantly becomes an icon to be carried in protests, his name a phrase to be repeated with adoration. A slogan such...
The term “political religion” designates the infusion of political beliefs with religious significance. Political religions involve grand plans to transform society into a new sacral order unrelated to how humans have lived beforehand. Political religions also typically divide people into the righteous and the evil based on whether they conform to its transformational vision. They...
On July 21, President Joe Biden held a townhall in Cincinnati, taking questions from gushingly friendly CNN “journalists.” The room in which he spoke was half empty. From all appearances, Biden confirmed the suspicions of his critics that he is failing mentally and that what his “advisers” told him to say parroted the views of the left...
Decades before the electronic media giants rose to their dizzying heights of power and began canceling those whom they decided to bully, a man named Leopold Tyrmand, the future founder of Chronicles magazine, exposed the false self-image of the media as they claimed to defend our freedoms, when they were really aiming for absolute social control. Today,...
Lately I’ve been hearing from colleagues and friends that Leo Strauss helped birth neoconservatism and that Straussianism and neoconservatism belong together rhetorically and conceptually. Supposedly neoconservatism would not have existed in the form in which it took over the conservative movement in the 1980s if Strauss had not provided its essential ideas. Thus, so goes...
Members of the establishment conservative media are wimps when it comes to responding to the left’s accusations about white American “systemic racism.” Whether it’s refusing to stand for the national anthem at sports events, substituting the Black National Anthem for the Star-Spangled Banner on PBS, announcing fireworks shows on Independence Day are a “racist” activity, or...
Compared to today’s woke left, Hitler’s methods for seizing power look like something out of the technological Stone Age. This statement is not to dismiss the horrors unleashed by Nazi rule. It is rather to focus attention on how much easier it is for today’s totalitarians to operate compared with their musty-looking predecessors. The fashion...
American institutions have been allegedly occupied by Marxists who are waging a war against the “American Revolution,” according to conservative commentator Mark Levin. Demonstrating how this alleged occupation occurred is at the core of Levin’s American Marxism, a work driven to the top of the bestseller list by conservative book clubs and Fox News. ...
We are living in a political culture in which anyone identified with the now-vaguely-defined “right” can lose his fortune, reputation, and possibly his freedom. Meanwhile, the racist, vandalizing left can do what it wants with total impunity. A professor lecturing at the Yale School of Medicine dreamt aloud about “shooting white people,” and has not suffered...
The civil rights movement is often placed on a pedestal today with an almost religious fervor, with its own Christ-like figure in the form of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Such an attitude is on display in a recent, generally incisive critique by Victor Davis Hanson on the breakdown of lawfulness and the eruption of crime in...
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...
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...
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,...
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....
As recent events have caused the eyes of the nation and the world to focus on Minnesota, a question I’ve wondered about has resurfaced: Why is Minnesota so politically radical? That Minnesota’s politics are radical is seen in a simple survey of the state’s prominent politicians. Both of Minnesota’s two U.S. Senators, Amy Klobuchar and...
My establishment conservative acquaintances are still swooning over an anti-Biden tirade that Mark Levin delivered on his TV program last week, when we learned that our current president is the most racist person who has ever occupied the Oval Office, a charge that was then qualified with the phrase “since Woodrow Wilson.” Only two points in...
With tensions rising between nations such as Taiwan and China, as well as between Russia and Ukraine, many are wondering how involved the Biden administration will be. Should the United States leave these nations alone, or should they interfere? A look at the past through Stephen Wertheim’s new book, Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S....
The reincarnation of Hitler in some national leader and the heroism of Churchill, both stand-by props of neoconservatives, rear their head again in a recent commentary by Daniel Gelernter. Expecting neocons to abandon their continual reference of these props would be comparable to asking the Democratic Party to stop talking about “systemic racism” or Mike Pompeo to...
In 2015 Michelle Malkin wrote a column, praising the wife of distinguished neurosurgeon and later Trump Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Ben Carson. Malkin appropriately designated her subject as the “anti-Michelle Obama.” Her description encapsulates some of the merits of Candy Carson, who graduated from Yale with a triple major in music, psychology, and pre-med,...
Recently The Michelle Obama Podcast revealed shocking information that should concern all white people. “When I’ve been completely incognito during the eight years in the White House, walking the dogs on the canal,” Obama explained, “people will come up and pet my dogs, but will not look me in the eye. They don’t know it’s me.” She further...
America’s Revolutionary Mind, by C. Bradley Thompson (Encounter Books; 584 pp., $32.99). Thompson’s examination of colonial America’s natural rights political culture and the effects of the Declaration’s oft-quoted passage about unalienable rights is not likely to please members of the traditional right, and as such I consider it required reading. Thompson presents copious evidence that those...
A Somalian feminist and well-known critic of Islamic patriarchy, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, expressed the following critique of Black Lives Matter in an interview with the Hoover Institution last summer: What we are seeing now is this mishmash of people who call themselves Black Lives Matter have found the hook. They found a way of going about the...
Recent broadsides from the French government, and most conspicuously from French President Emmanuel Macron, against the American woke Left and U.S. cancel culture drew a mixed reaction from me. Frankly, I find no reason as a European historian to believe that French journalists and academics are any less infected than our own with political correctness....
Nearly every Wednesday night for the past seven years I’ve watched Married at First Sight, a reality show which finds expertly matched couples meeting each other at the altar. My wife finds it inexpressibly tasteless, and two of my daughters who watched it with me, each once, expressed irritation that I made them sit through...
America’s Revolutionary Mind, by C. Bradley Thompson (Encounter Books; 584 pp., $32.99). Thompson’s examination of colonial America’s natural rights political culture and the effects of the Declaration’s oft-quoted passage about unalienable rights is not likely to please members of the traditional right, and as such I consider it required reading. Thompson presents copious evidence that...
Amid an eloquent diatribe against the “woke” left and its friends in the Deep State, Fox News host Tucker Carlson attributed to American Deplorables a sentiment that may more accurately reflect his own feelings: “All they want to do is go back to how things were in 2005.” I heard myself responding out loud...
History—be it that of 1619, or 1776, or some other significant year or event—is often abused in this day and age. One of the latest victims of such historical misrepresentation are the Spartans, whom Lee Smith in a column for Tablet treats rather unfairly. Smith describes the blood-curdling behavior of the antidemocratic Spartans at the end of...
Last Sunday, Chris Wallace solemnly called attention to what he regards as a growing embarrassment in Congress: A Georgia representative, Marjorie Taylor Greene, whom Democrats have now stripped of all assignments in their august body because she refuses to keep her mouth shut. Congresswoman Greene thinks the presidential election on Nov. 3 was full of...
The Berlin Tagesspiegel recently went after a young Protestant theologian whom naïve readers might have mistaken for a polite, unassuming scholar. This figure was outed by an academic colleague who discovered that he wrote for “new Right” publications, a term that in the German context should be understood quite broadly. One of the venues of this putative extremist...
Gun rights activist Dana Loesch recently complained that she had been denied the right to respond to her critics on Twitter, according to a story reported in the New York Post. Unlike her adversaries, who are free to swing away at her, Loesch is not allowed to use Twitter’s fact-checking platform to correct their misstatements. Loesch...
For years I’ve been listening to the hot air produced by Conservative Inc. about the political conservatism of Martin Luther King, Jr., who was dedicated to “self-government based on absolute truth and moral law.” Supposedly King was also a proud member of the GOP. This last claim is not even remotely true, as Alveda King,...
“Jan. 6, 2021, is not over, but it already lives in infamy. A sitting president of the United States, having lost re-election, incited a mob to storm the Capitol as the Congress sat in joint session to certify the Electoral College vote. This act was without precedent. It was based on a lie, fed by...
Fraser Myers recently asked at Spiked how blacks and Latinos could vote for Donald Trump and in some cases enthusiastically join demonstrations for him, given the supposedly obvious fact that that Trump is a white supremacist. According to Myers, New York University professor Cristina Beltrán answered this troubling question in the Washington Post in a memorable gloss on “whiteness”:...
National Review has found yet another reason to hate Trump, whom it has attacked relentlessly for over four years. It seems that among his multiple shortcomings, according to Frank Lavin, a supporter of Republican Voters Against Trump in 2020, Donald Trump was not the Gipper. In fact, he caused the Republican Party to deviate grievously from Reagan’s...
It is hard to understand the continued presence of Jonah Goldberg as a conservative icon. Goldberg has the right to criticize Trump, yet he has turned himself into a nonstop Trump-hating machine, who manages to condemn anyone who still defends the president as a lunatic or criminal. Nietzsche once said mischievously that a good war...
Sasha Johnson, a prominent Black Lives Matter activist, tweeted the last day of 2020 her highest hope as a black nationalist: “The white man will not be our equal but our slave. History is changing. No peace without justice.” I kept this statement in mind as I looked at USA Today and our look-alike local newspaper on the newsstand...
In this issue we present two views of the “conservative” news media giant Fox News. The essay by Douglas Burton verges on the celebratory and recounts the merits of the Fox News enterprise and the bold vision of Rupert Murdoch, the Australian press baron, who launched this 24-hours-a-day American news service on Oct. 7, 1996. Murdoch...
I was recently gifted The South Was Right, by James Ronald and Walter Donald Kennedy, an updated version of a work originally produced in 1994. Seeking an antidote to the PC historiography in which our universities are now awash, I happily plunged into this printed gift. The present “leftist ideologues,” more than their predecessors, hate...
Perhaps I’m going crazy, but I thought I just heard NBC News and other respected information sources report that the recent burning of two Black Lives Matter (BLM) signs is being investigated as “potential hate crimes” by the Washington, D.C. police. Apparently these alleged hate crimes occurred as BLM and its sister organization (or rather,...