Author: Tom Piatak (Tom Piatak)

British statesman Enoch Powell began his most famous speech with this observation: “The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils.”  I thought of Powell’s cogent dictum often over the last week or so, as Rod Dreher (and others) have been loudly insisting that Trump’s moral failings prevent Christians from voting for him,...

As I sit down to write this, on the Sunday afternoon before the second presidential debate, the media feeding frenzy over remarks made by Donald Trump 11 years ago continues unabated.  The content of those remarks reminded me of one of the more interesting pieces I’ve read about the improbable rise of Trump, an article...

Monday brought the sad news that Phyllis Schlafly had died, at the age of 92. Schlafly was a tireless advocate for conservative causes for over half a century, from the publication of A Choice, Not an Echo in support of Barry Goldwater in 1964, to the successful campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment in the...

A week or so ago, the Never Trump crowd at National Review was chortling that Trump was softening on immigration. The chortling wasn’t prompted by any genuine concern over immigration. After all, NR was a stalwart defender of George W. Bush and had no trouble supporting John McCain as the Republican nominee. Instead, the grandees...

Yesterday brought the sad news that John McLaughlin, the host of the McLaughlin Group for 34 years, had died at the age of 89. McLaughlin managed to create a show that was informative, lively, and friendly to conservatives. When the McLaughlin Group premiered in 1982, political programming on television, by contrast, was mostly an exercise...

The media attacks on Trump have become relentless. For some reason, Washington Post headlines show up in my Facebook feed, and it is increasingly difficult to distinguish the news stories from the opinion pieces—they all merge into a seemingly endless anti-Trump torrent. One example: a news story on Trump’s economic policy team was headlined “Trump’s...

There are some simple rules governing modern American political conventions. If you speak at the convention, you endorse the nominee. If you can’t endorse the nominee, you don’t go. You certainly don’t use a prime time speaking slot to try to sabotage your party’s fall campaign. A number of Trump’s foes have refused to endorse...

On Monday night, I had the good fortune to attend the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, thanks to the generosity of a friend who gave me a guest pass.  There has been much media-generated doom and gloom about this convention, but the negative expectations generated by a hostile press were not confirmed by what I...

When I awoke on Friday morning, I picked up the copy of the Cleveland Plain Dealer delivered to my house and read the headline on the front page, above the fold: “Killing of black men ‘troubling.'”  The article referred to President Obama’s comments in Poland on the police killings of two black men in Louisiana...

The founders sought more than political independence from Europe. They also sought to secure America’s economic independence. To that end, the second bill enacted by the first Congress was the Tariff Act of 1789, the stated purpose of which was “the encouragement and protection of manufactures.” The end result of America’s reliance on the tariff...

As some of you may have heard, the Cleveland Cavaliers defeated the Golden State Warriors on Sunday, June 19 to win the NBA Championship, making the Cavs the first Cleveland team to win a major sports championship since Jim Brown and Frank Ryan and Gary Collins and the rest of the Cleveland Browns defeated the...

Cam Newton’s petulance after the Carolina Panthers lost to the Denver Broncos largely eclipsed the splendid season Newton had had before the Super Bowl. Since Donald Trump essentially clinched the GOP nomination after winning over 50% of the vote in seven consecutive primaries, a number of conservative pundits and Republican politicians have begun emulating Newton’s...

Four years ago, Mitt Romney lost the industrial Midwest, and the White House, in large part because the Democrats successfully used Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital to portray him as a champion of outsourcing American jobs. Bizarrely, Ted Cruz has chosen as his running mate Carly Fiorina, whose stint as CEO of Hewlett-Packard makes Romney...

It is by now a familiar pattern. The left begins targeting a conservative figure for promoting “hate.” Soon, organized protests pop up, designed to prevent the promoter of “hate” from speaking in public and to prevent the public from hearing him. Any opposition to the concerted attempt to silence the conservative figure is then cited...

National Review hasn’t been this fun to read since it used to try to be funny—and succeed—decades ago. Each day brings a new hysterical reaction to the political success of Donald Trump, which NR writers variously predict will lead to the end of conservatism, or democracy, or America, or perhaps even the universe, with the...

Back in August, The New Yorker ran a less than flattering article about Donald Trump.  In it, the author recounted why two middle-aged New Hampshire residents, Nancy and Charlie Merz, were supporting Trump. Both had lost jobs: Nancy, when the furniture industry “went down the tubes,” and Charlie, whose job building household electricity meters was...

Ever since the end of the Cold War, the standard of respectability in politics has been clear.  Respectable politicians are those who believe in international trade agreements, sing the praises of mass immigration, and insist that military force should be used to advance some abstract notion like democracy—whether under the auspices of the United Nations...

So far, the presidential campaign has not gone as the experts had predicted. One of the reasons for this is that many Americans are anxious about the economy, an anxiety that those ensconced in the recession-free DC bubble have a hard time understanding. And one of the reasons for this economic anxiety is the damage...

Two years after Sam Francis’ untimely death, Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote a long essay about Francis titled “The Castaway.” The title came from an email Francis sent to friends (including me) after William F. Buckley described him as one of the “castaways” from the conservative movement. This was Francis’ response to Buckley:  “As I have...

Angela Merkel’s decision to allow hundreds of thousands of Islamic migrants into Germany won her praise from the press last year, with the Guardian reporting that grateful migrants had dubbed her “Mama Merkel” and TIME naming her Person of the Year. The migrants are still looking up to Merkel—one of those arrested after the mass...

Like many Americans, I spent Sunday evening watching the beginning of the final season of Downton Abbey. The show has become a huge hit, at least by PBS standards, with some 25,000,000 or so American viewers. At first glance, this success is surprising. A few years ago, The Daily Mail ran a piece claiming that...

I first wrote about the War on Christmas in 2001, when Chronicles published my essay “Happy Holidays!  Bah Humbug!: in the December 2001 issue. Peter Brimelow, the editor of VDARE.com, republished that essay. Since then, I have written at least one article each Christmas on the topic. What follows is the piece Peter Brimelow asked...

Christmas is the preeminent musical holiday. As the conductor remarked at a Cleveland Orchestra Christmas concert I attended some years ago, more music has been written for Christmas than any other holiday. And a variety of other songs have become associated with Christmas, sometimes by quite circuitous routes. The story of how some of the...

Paul Ryan hasn’t been Speaker of the House long, but he already knows how to get favorable press in the New York Times. Sunday’s edition of the Times pictured Ryan as fighting what the paper terms “polarizing populism” and the “angry insurgent refrain blasting into the winter primaries.” In contrast to all this anger, Ryan...

Antonin Scalia has been a public critic of affirmative action since at least 1979, when the Washington University Law Review published his modest proposal of a “Restorative Justice Handicapping System.” Scalia’s position, simply put, is that the government should not engage in racial discrimination, a position reflected in numerous opinions authored by Scalia. There are...

For much of American history, it was understood that no one had a right to immigrate to America, that Americans had the unfettered right to decide who should come to America, and that immigration should be judged on whether it benefited America and Americans, not on whether it was good for immigrants. Applying these principles,...

President Obama was in Paris yesterday, when 14 people were murdered in San Bernardino. Obama cited the shooting as illustrating the need for stricter gun control, telling reporters that “The one thing we do know is that we have a pattern now of mass shootings in this country that has no parallel anywhere else in...

I have seen news reports stating that French authorities are concerned about the hundreds of French Islamists who have gone to Syria to fight for ISIS and have returned to France. This is misleading. Such people are not French, whatever their citizenship may be. They are unassimilated Moslem immigrants, or the descendants of unassimilated Moslem...

In some quarters on the right, drug legalization is the cause du jour. These persons see drugs as harmless, or at least less harmful than laws against drug use, and also frequently claim that legalizing drugs will prove politically popular, particularly among younger voters. This Tuesday’s crushing defeat of Ohio’s Issue 3, which would have...

Last week I was busy preparing for the upcoming meeting of the John Randolph Club in Cleveland. But on Wednesday of that week, I came across an item promoting another event being held in Cleveland on the Friday the Randolph Club began that I knew I needed to attend. This event was a Mass to...

A friend recently sent me a piece by economic reporter Michael Snyder that provided more evidence of the decline of the American middle class. As Snyder notes, a recent report from the Social Security Administration shows that 51% of all American workers make less than $30,000 per year, and 38% make less than $20,000. These...

Somewhere over the Atlantic, there is an Islamic militia that has proclaimed an Islamic state. It controls territory in several countries, has kidnapped and murdered many innocent people, including Christians, and openly professes its disdain for Western learning. Despite the undeniably barbarous nature of this militia, no American politician of note has advocated using American...

Last week, the European Union voted to require members to accept a portion of the migrants who have been coming into Europe over the Mediterranean and through the Balkans. Four states voted no—Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Romania—and both Hungary and Slovakia say that they will fight the mandate to accept migrants in the...

Even though FOX was replaced by CNN last night, the second GOP debate had some of the same problems as the first one, with an additional problem all of CNN’s own devising: It was far too long.  Spending three hours watching the candidates swap platitudes, soundbites, and non-sequiturs is more akin to an “enhanced interrogation...

One of the clearest signs of how ideological American society has become is the push to put women in combat. No one argues that our armed forces will fight better if women are put in combat roles. The argument, instead, is that we should put women in combat roles because we believe in “equality,” that...

The latest CNN poll on the Republican presidential race is simply astonishing. It shows Donald Trump with the support of 32% of the registered Republican voters and Republican-leaning independents sampled in the poll, and Ben Carson with 19%. Put together, they have the support of 51% of such voters sampled by CNN. Neither Trump nor...

During the centuries of struggle between European Christianity and Islam, various countries were referred to as “Antemurale Christianitatis,” the bulwark of Christendom. Today, with the torrent of mostly Islamic “migrants” heading toward Europe only increasing, that title belongs to Hungary. Hungary was roundly condemned in the international press for seeking to enforce EU rules, which...

Srdja Trifkovic’s contact within the Dutch Ministry of Immigration isn’t the only one who has noticed that the current flood of “migrants” now heading to Europe resembles an invasion. Catholic World News reports that Edward Luttwak has likened the current wave of immigration to the barbarian invasions that doomed Rome. Luttwak charges that the Islamic...

There is little doubt that the rise of Donald Trump in the polls is a result of widespread disgust with a contemptuous establishment, as I noted back in June and as Allan Brownfeld and Peter Spiliakos argue, from somewhat different perspectives, this week. Brownfeld writes that Trump “seems to realize that the right-wing cliches which are...

Next year marks the 25th anniversary of Desert Storm, the US led effort to remove the Iraqi military from Kuwait. Although the US military had no problem kicking Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, removing ourselves from that troubled region has proven far more difficult. David Stockman recently provided a trenchant explanation of why that is...

I do not know who won last night’s debate, but I do know who lost: Jeb Bush. His comments consisted largely of empty platitudes, weakly delivered. He came across as someone who didn’t really want to be President, or at least didn’t want to work for it. I watched the debate at a gathering of...

On Wednesday morning, I saw an article stating that one third of those surveyed want bags and purses checked before letting customers into movie theaters, and an equal number want metal detectors placed outside theaters. Fourteen percent even want an armed security guard placed in each theater. (This was before the news broke of a...

Allan Brownfeld has written an excellent piece concerning the likely parole of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard in November. As Brownfeld notes, while there may be humanitarian grounds justifying the parole, this is not why Pollard’s supporters began clamoring for his release shortly after his conviction. Contrary to what Pollard’s supporters claim, he is not a...

Last Friday, Texas Senator Ted Cruz took to the Senate floor to accuse Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of lying to him and other Senate Republicans when McConnell denied that he had made a deal over the Export-Import Bank in order to secure the passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. I cannot recall such blunt language being...

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell recognizing a non-existent right to gay marriage in the Constitution, there have been numerous articles stating that America has accepted gay marriage and that social conservatives should now shut up.  A variation of this theme has been taken up by certain social conservatives such as...

On June 17, Dylann Roof walked into the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston and murdered 9 of the innocent people he found there.  Seizing on the fact that Roof had posed in one picture with a Confederate battle flag, many politicians and media personalities immediately demanded that the Confederate battle flag come down.  South Carolina...

Last week, Catholic World Report ran an article by regular Chronicles contributor Jerry Salyer on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The piece is well worth reading. Solzhenitsyn’s name will forever be linked to his rigorous denunciation of the evils of Communism. After Solzhenitsyn, no morally responsible person could ignore the tens of millions murdered by Communists, or pretend...