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....
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...
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...
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,...
On the evening of Dec. 6, I watched the debate between Sen. Kelly Loeffler and the Reverend Raphael Warnock, who are running against each other for a U.S. Senate seat from Georgia with the runoff election scheduled for Jan. 5. As a non-leftist I am anxious to see the Georgia Senate seats now up for...
The fate of Betsy Fresse, an evangelical Christian who refused to don a gay pride shirt in accordance with instructions from her manager in a Starbucks store in New Jersey is explained with remarkable concision in a recent Reuters article: A former Starbucks Corp barista in New Jersey sued the coffee chain on Thursday, claiming she...
Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times’ “1619 Project” has explained on Twitter—which apparently doesn’t mind communicating her racist views as long as they are left-wing—why the majority of Cuban-Americans in Florida voted for Trump. It seems, according to Hannah-Jones, that the term Latino is a “contrived ethnic category” that throws together white Spaniards from Cuba with...
The Politics may be the most influential study of political theory and political practice ever written. Aristotle put the book together while investigating different regimes in the Greek world and elsewhere. The philosopher denies the existence of an ideal government applicable to all societies; instead, he looks at various governments that are appropriate for different peoples in...
Despite Pat Buchanan’s record as a Trump-supporter sans pareil, his most recent column, on why Trump’s challenges to the Biden victory are both futile and possibly harmful, is profoundly unsettling. It is also based on questionable assumptions. “It seems a certainty that not enough electoral votes could be flipped from Biden to Trump to overturn’s Joe Biden’s...
Is the current left Marxist? In a provocative commentary, Bill Lind explores this genealogical question, and, unless I’m mistaken, the left and much of its media opposition would second his conclusions. Since Antifa describes itself as Marxist, when it’s not calling itself anarchist, and since leading figures of the Democratic Party, like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria...
One sometimes feels obliged to contextualize a disagreement, because the point in dispute has still not been clearly stated. I have written critically more than once about the works of C. Bradley Thompson, first about his study of neoconservatism, Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea (2010), and more recently, about a book he completed on America’s Founders, America’s Revolutionary...
The Politics may be the most influential study of political theory and political practice ever written. Aristotle put the book together while investigating different regimes in the Greek world and elsewhere. The philosopher denies the existence of an ideal government applicable to all societies; instead, he looks at various governments that are appropriate for different peoples in...
Two long established Trump critics have recently berated the President quite differently. One, National Review Editor Rich Lowry, offered constructive criticism of the way Trump has handled himself in the closing weeks of his campaign; the other critic, a National Review Online Founding Editor and syndicated columnist Jonah Goldberg, offered more of the same dyspeptic...
Having forced myself to listen to most of the Republican National Convention (RNC) orations in late August, I was struck by what my daughter, who had done such work professionally, characterized as the program’s “underlying marketing strategy.” The GOP’s advisers seem to have pitched their message at the demographics among whom Trump has had the least...
Recently C. Bradley Thompson responded obliquely to my critical comments in Chronicles about his book and subsequent observations on the American Founding. Contrary to Thompson’s asides on Facebook and Twitter dismissing my criticism, I did read some of his tome, The Revolutionary Mind, and even commented on it—but I found its discussion of our state-builders so...
In a remarkably disjointed, bombastic defense of “the liberal order,” C. Bradley Thompson writes in American Mind about the dangers posed by “Pajama-Boy Nietzscheans” and the supposedly surging “neo-reactionary movement on the Right.” According to Thompson, “radical Left and Right have now merged” in a virulent form of anti-Americanism—the essence of which consists of not agreeing with...
Right-wing critics of Christianity often quote from The Hour of Decision, the last work of a once widely read German historian of philosophy, Oswald Spengler. This short, graphically composed book was published in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler took power in Germany. Although it has never been proven, there is a suspicion that the Nazi government disposed...
Russian Conservatism, by Paul Robinson (Northern Illinois University Press; 300 pp., $39.95). Canadian historian Paul Robinson has written a highly accessible study of Russian conservatism that extends from the early 19th century down to the present time. According to Robinson, defenses of the Russian homeland as a spiritual entity and the accompanying rejection of Western late modernity...
Characteristic of Conservatism Inc. for several decades now has been the practice of having politically correct spokespersons expressing its talking points. Fox News is full of black guests who are encouraged to say what the white hosts are terrified of stating lest they be accused of racism or sexism. Candace Owens, a very attractive black...
The extravagant tributes conferred by the conservative establishment on the onetime civil rights leader and longtime Atlanta Democratic congressman John Lewis are as ineffectual as they are utterly tasteless. Lewis’s moments of fame came when he accompanied Martin Luther King, Jr., on his March on Washington in 1963, demonstrating for what became the Voting Rights Act....
Although I have spent much of my scholarly life warning against inappropriate comparisons between Nazis or fascists and the pet peeves of academics and journalists, I myself am now using the F-word (as in fascist) or really the N-word (as in Nazi) with growing regularity. The antifascist left, about which I have just finished writing a...
Like many historical questions, critical reassessments of the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and then Nagasaki 75 years ago have moved generally from right to left. In the 1950s and even later, when National Review was unmistakably on the right, challenges to this decision were almost the orthodoxy of the day. The first time I saw...
I had to double-check recently that the Civil War actually did end in 1865. I wondered whether this was still the case after hearing Republican spokesmen and Conservative Inc. celebrities demonizing Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and other 19th century Southern leaders. American history seems to grow more hateful to our establishment conservatives as the...
During the last few days, those of us who have questioned Conservatism Inc.’s willingness to stand up to the cultural left seem to have received new allies. David Marcus at The Federalist, Thomas D. Klingenstein at the Claremont Institute, and the commentator Mark Steyn on Tucker Carlson’s program have all been taking shots at the...
I have a passing interest in a first-century rhetorician and Hellenized Egyptian named Apion, who is the target of a famous polemic by Flavius Josephus, a member of the Jewish priestly class who became the court historian of the Flavian emperors. Published in Greek but known by its Latin name Contra Apionem, Josephus’s diatribe faults Apion for...
Socialism is cool again in America, but it’s not your father’s socialism. It is no longer “the rival but the patsy of state capitalism,” as Nathan Pinkoski writes in a penetrating article in Law & Liberty entitled “The Strange Rise of Bourgeois Bolshevism.” The villain of this new socialism “is not the bourgeois but the...
My new anthology, The Vanishing Tradition: Perspectives in Conservatism (from the Cornell and Northern Illinois University presses) does not paint a flattering picture of the present conservative movement. The general impression conveyed by the contributors to this volume is that the movement is driven by the demands of sponsors who do not have a single...
T-Mobile and ABC, owned by Disney Company, will stop advertising on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show in view of his scandalous comments on the Black Lives Matter movement. Or so I’ve just learned. On Saturday, the news host referred to the protests as “Black Lives Matter riot.” Carlson also asked why he was “required to...
Allow me to express my displeasure bordering on nausea over the predictably gutless way in which Conservative Inc. and its most prominent representatives have responded to the riots in American cities. Although our authorized conservatives have indicated that vandalism, mayhem, and killing should not be tolerated on our streets, and although they generally accept President...
A debate unfolded in March last year in American Greatness between Chronicles contributor Mark Pulliam and the Claremont Institute’s Edward Erler, a devotee of Harry Jaffa. According to Erler, Robert Bork and others who adhered to strict constitutional originalism were essentially moral nihilists because they would not apply natural law standards to our governing document....