Donald Trump's announcement speech for his 2024 presidential bid raised more questions than answers about what he did or did not learn as an executive in his first term.
Author: Pedro Gonzalez (Pedro Gonzalez)
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Florida Challenges the Feds on Election Monitoring, Huey Long Style
The future of the Republican Party will require more than merely asking people to vote in person on election day and hoping for the best.
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Polemics and Exchanges: November 2022
Senior Writer Pedro Gonzalez responds to a reader regarding public sentiment toward the FBI.
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‘Compact’ Makes an Impact
Michael Lind was a good fit for Compact magazine’s first event in New York City. Neither Lind nor the magazine has shied away from confrontation and challenging the managerial state.
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A Conspiracy Against the People
The establishment has all but guaranteed the rise of a force in the future that will be as bad—or worse—than what they pretended Trump was.
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A Day of Infamy in Europe
The destruction of two Russian gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea fits into a suspicious pattern of U.S. economic sabotage, and will have disastrous long-term consequences for both Europeans and Americans.
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Meloni Contra Mundum
The election of Italy’s new right-wing nationalist prime minister, Giorgina Meloni, is a rebuke to the woke liberal democratic system and its political-theological nerve center in Washington, D.C.
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Where Is the Right’s Marc Elias?
The right has no moral stomach for a ruthless fight, but in politics, that is what it takes to win.
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“America First” In Name Only
The America First Policy Institute is the latest group of swamp creatures masquerading as America First populists.
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DeSantis, Trump, and a New Right Comfortable With Power
Unlike many on the right, Governor Ron DeSantis is not afraid to use political power.
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Revolt Against the Rainbow RINOs
The recent clash between the Texas Republican Party and the Republican National Committee exposes the growing divide between grassroots conservatism and the establishment GOP, especially with regard to the LGBT agenda.
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Media’s Self-Induced Demise
The media ultimately stokes a revolt against itself. The disgust it instills with its fake narratives turns men against it.
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It’s the Culture, Stupid
National Review’s decision to side with Disney against Florida Governor De Santis’s parental rights law demonstrates its capitulation to the left.
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Western Hypocrisy Created Putin
Vladimir Putin is easy to blame but the truth is that the Russian leader is a symptom of the rot in the leadership of the Western world. The liberal interventionists in charge of Western foreign policy are the real threat to world peace.
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Trans Tyranny in Public Schools
Schools across the country have adopted a controversial policy of hiding the LGBT statuses of students from their parents. Sold to the public as an effort to protect children from abuse, the policy effectively circumvents parental consent and notification about their children’s health, safety, and well-being. One Texas family told Chronicles how they fought...
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The Military-Industrial-Critical Race Theory Complex
The Pentagon affirmed its commitment to critical race theory on Wednesday, pointing to a talk delivered by Bishop Garrison, senior advisor to the secretary of defense for human capital and diversity, equity, and inclusion. Garrison joined a panel at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), which has received funding from every major defense contractor, Wall...
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With Friends Like These
British author Douglas Murray recently wrote what he calls a “bit of self-criticism” about the American right in the online magazine UnHerd. Murray builds his argument around what he considers a very serious problem: “Bill Maher, Bari Weiss and a slew of other liberals who have fallen out with their own tribe have chosen not to...
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The New American Genocide
The political hostility of the United States today is directed at no one more than America’s European-descended whites—the group whose ancestors are largely responsible for settling, building, and defending this country. That is not to say others contributed nothing, but that the largest contributions and, indeed, the central elements of America’s political and cultural institutions...
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Texas Gov. Abbott Fumbles on Border Security
Two Texas National Guardsmen sat in a “non-tactical” vehicle near the Mexican border and south of Laredo, Texas on the morning of Jan. 18. The Army Times reported that the men got out to assist Border Patrol in stopping a Chrysler 300 after it was seen picking up six migrants. As they approached, the driver, a suspected smuggler,...
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The Sordid Legacy of Dr. King
After he left the Church of Scientology, Hollywood screenwriter Paul Haggis recalled a discussion he had had with his fellow Scientologists. If great leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. can err, Haggis suggested to his zealous peers, so too can the cult’s leader, David Miscavige. “How dare you compare a great man like David Miscavige...
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Waukesha Massacre Undermined the Charlottesville Myth
The sound of screams replaced the music as a red Ford Escape slammed into the crowd, killing six people and wounding more than 60 in Waukesha, Wisconsin, on Nov. 21. Amid the bloodbath that evening were dead and dying victims as old as 81 and as young as 8. Their killer, Darrell Brooks, a 39-year-old...
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Republicans Celebrate Critical Race Theory This Kwanzaa
The GOP launched a seemingly coordinated campaign to celebrate Kwanzaa this year. “Wishing you a happy and prosperous Kwanza!” tweeted the official account of the College Republicans. It was a theme echoed by numerous other official GOP channels. In wishing his followers a happy Kwanzaa from the balmy state of Florida, Republican Rep. Byron Donalds was simply following...
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Don’t Like Twitter’s New CEO? Blame Paul Singer
Thousands of user accounts vanished from Twitter shortly after new Chief Executive Parag Agrawal took the reins in November from the outgoing CEO, Jack Dorsey. The tech giant claimed that the purges focused on eliminating bots and propaganda accounts, mostly from China. In reality, however, Twitter’s digital street sweepers cast a much broader net, purging...
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What We Are Reading: January 2022
What makes a prince? Machiavelli had some ideas. “Above all he should do as some excellent man has done in the past who found someone to imitate who had been praised and glorified before him,” he wrote. “[One] whose exploits and actions he always kept beside himself, as they say Alexander the Great imitated Achilles;...
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S. Craig Zahler’s Shotgun Safari
A cowboy is scalped and cannibalized by Indians. A villain’s head is stomped from his shoulders into the squat hole of an ancient, grim prison. A beautiful woman is executed with a machine gun blast to the face. Not everyone has the stomach for the violence that abounds in the movies of dissident director S....
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Warning Signs for Virginia Populists
A lot of good people are rooting for Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin to save Virginia. Although he initially did not campaign as a populist, Youngkin tapped into popular anger against irresponsible school boards pushing radical race and gender ideologies. His victory is seen as an affirmation of the potency of culture war issues. But there are...
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Welcome to the Texas GOP’s Potemkin Village of Conservatism
Republicans hold America’s reddest large urban constituency in Tarrant County, Texas. The locals consider its seat, Fort Worth, a “Mecca for conservatives.” If any place in America should be beyond the reach of progressivism, it is these 900 square miles of Lone Star land. And yet, a recent incident within the Keller Independent School District...
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Lobbyist Alleges Cato Institute ‘Mercenaries’ Are Paid to Push Pro-Immigration Studies
Pro-immigration research papers published by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, are not independent, but designed to meet the needs of lobbying clients, according to allegations in a Telegram message obtained by Chronicles. Aman Kapoor, president of the advocacy group Immigration Voice (IV), alleged that Cato Research fellow David Bier was paid by IV...
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The Impending Mass Firing of America’s Unvaccinated
Zac Spolar found himself running around in a frenzy amid the COVID-19 surge in December, tending to three or four patients at once and laboring late into the night at a Los Angeles hospital. The hardest part of the job, he said, was having to constantly console people who couldn’t be with their loved ones...
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Parents Against the Regime
Attorney General Merrick Garland recently set his sights on what the federal government considers one of the gravest threats to the political order: parents angry with the promotion of transgender ideology and critical race theory in public schools. “In recent months, there has been a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence...
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A Political Rumble in Wyoming Reveals Divisions Within Trump’s Team
It’s hard to find anyone these days outside National Review’s deluded pages sorry to see Rep. Liz Cheney dragged across the political concrete. Besides rubbing raw the hide of a realigning right with her grating adoration for George W. Bush, Cheney embodies a conservative establishment that has conserved little more than its sinecures and pretensions. The prospect of Donald Trump...
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Learning from Lenin
Vladimir Lenin observed in State and Revolution (1917) that “all previous revolutions perfected the state machine, whereas it must be broken, smashed.” He meant, as Marx had written in The Civil War in France (1871), that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” Power,...
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The Rape of the Afghan Boys
Ainuddin Khudairaham held down the trigger of his Kalashnikov and kept firing on unarmed U.S. Marines until the rifle’s magazine was empty, murdering three and wounding one. The Americans had been working out at a gym on Forward Operating Base Delhi in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province when the teenaged boy attacked on Aug. 10, 2012. “I...
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Kristi Noem Puts New Lipstick on the Old GOP
South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem became a GOP darling seemingly overnight, captivating conservatives with a pretty smile and the aesthetic of a Western freedom fighter. If the GOP decides to run a woman for the White House, it’ll likely come knocking on her door—and everything she does is calculated to that end. Yet her otherwise...
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Purposeful Forgetfulness
Students and teachers silently gawked up at a television screen showing smoke billowing wildly out of the smoldering ruins of the Twin Towers. A woman held her hand over her mouth, eyes wide and filling with tears as a look of horror overtook her face. I was in a middle school classroom then, but it...
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Nation of Renters
There is a storm on the horizon. Rootless corporations, major financial institutions, and the federal government are poised to fundamentally change the way Americans live by separating them from property ownership. The peculiar conjunctures of our time are paving a winding road to villeinage, with each turn bringing to clearer view the future of rent-serfdom...
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For the GOP, ‘Limited Government’ Is for Voters, Not Donors
The Republican Party has long sung the refrain of limited government and free markets, reprimanding their constituents about the dangers of intervening in the economy. Big government and boycotts, they say, are for Democrats—we may not like what private companies do, but, hey, that’s capitalism! All of that, of course, is a lie, or at...
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The Eyes and Ears of the King
Armed with a $2 billion war chest, the Capitol Police announced its plan to open field offices outside Washington for the first time. New imperial outposts are planned in California and Florida, with more to come across the country as the Capitol Police intend to monitor Americans from sea to shining sea. As part of this change in mission,...
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The Meaning of Juneteenth
Another holiday overshadowed Independence Day this year. Black Independence Day, also known as “Juneteenth,” took center stage at PBS’s annual televised Fourth of July celebration, as singer Vanessa Williams performed “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the de facto Black National Anthem. “It’s in celebration of the wonderful opportunity that we now have to celebrate Juneteenth,”...
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Latino ‘Guerillas’ and the GOP
There is a picture in our family of my great-grandfather holding a Model 94 lever-action .30-30 carbine—”Treinta Treinta,” as it was affectionately called—with a cartridge belt strapped across his body. He fought in the Mexican Revolution with an American-made Winchester rifle. This little piece of family history pops into my mind now and then. Not...
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American Guerrilleros
If the American right feels pinned down by an enfilade coming from the institutions it has traditionally identified with and defended, that’s because that is precisely what is happening. Pressed up against the berm, the only way out for the right is through a place it has avoided. With the fall of academia, the ideological homogenization...
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‘American Capitalism’ Is the Enemy
Sparked by the Black Lives Matter movement, cities across the United States went up in flames last year, beset with looters, agitators, and killers. As leaves, and ashes, fell softly last autumn, homicide rates began to soar nationwide as $1 billion-plus in claims registered on the insurance industry’s books, making these riots the most destructive in American history. Even so,...
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A Lesson in Power
The unifying strand in conservatism as a movement and the GOP as a political operation is a superficial desire to limit and eschew power. This position is sloganized in exhortations against “big government,” against “socialism,” against the noxious fumes of power. But movement conservatives, like their political counterparts, are quite all right with both the...
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Middle America’s Road to Power
At first glance, Niccolò Machiavelli’s books The Prince and Discourses on Livy seem at odds. The former is chiefly a revolutionary guide to power, reveling in a ferocious spectacle of violence. The latter is a kind of manuscript on good governance that takes ancient Rome as its subject and model. Machiavelli’s aims in The Prince are at once revolutionary and conservative....
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The Poor Man’s Sam Francis
The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Managerial Elite; by Michael Lind; Portfolio; 224 pp., $25.00 A mostly white, cosmopolitan “overclass” rules America with a technocratic fist through the union of public and private spheres after pulling off a “revolution from above,” Michael Lind argues in his latest book. As Lind sees it, the country’s political institutions...
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What Sessions’ Loss Says About the State of America First
I’ve suspected that the America First mandate perished sometime in early 2017. The Alabama Senate GOP primary runoff between Jeff Sessions and Tommy Tuberville, where Trump endorsed the latter and mocked the former when he lost, is something like a nail in the coffin. Sessions, regardless of what Trump’s most devoted followers have to say about his...
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Virginia’s Creeping Authoritarianism
The scene before our eyes resembled something from a disaster film. Roadblocks, fencing, sanitized police checkpoints, sniper’s nests, vehicles loaded with heavy-duty surveillance equipment darting through the streets as an armored vehicle called The Rook lurched onto the field. An armored track vehicle built on a Caterpillar chassis, The Rook is armed with a hydraulic...
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The Hijacking of Nationalist Conservativism
The 2016 election planted a nationalistic, populist battle standard reminiscent of the one that the pitchfork-wielding legions of the Old Right had once marched beneath. Now it appears at risk of being diluted and neutralized, as populist right-wing movements have been in the past. Consider the fate of Michelle Malkin. Malkin, a conservative columnist and...
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Ohio Gets Nice on Crime
In my new home of Ashland, Ohio, there is a sign that welcomes all comers to “The World Headquarters of Nice People.” It seemed to me as if the entire town conspired to make my move as pleasant as could be. This is “Midwestern Nice” in a nutshell. But I’ve found the flavor of American...
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The Broken Promise of American Cities
It was my penultimate summer in California when two friends from Germany crossed the pond to visit. They rented a room in San Diego not far from the beach, nestled in a palm-tree lined suburb. At some point between setting their bags on the curb and checking in to their summer digs, a man was...