Tom Piatak

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

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

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

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

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,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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,

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,

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. 

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

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,

Earlier this week, Michael Gerson, formerly a speechwriter for George W. Bush, now a scribbler for The Washington Post, trained his sights on those he termed “Rust Belt revivalists.” These are the Republicans who have noticed that “the GOP

During oral argument on the cases challenging the definition of marriage upheld by the voters in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee, Justice Anthony Kennedy remarked, “I don’t know how to count the decimals when he talk about millennia. The definition

Last week, Dylann Roof walked into the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston and slaughtered nine of the innocent people he found there. Roof’s act of slaughter has rightly been greeted with universal revulsion. But the media and politicians from both

A recent New Hampshire poll showed Jeb Bush in first place, at 14%. In second place was Donald Trump, with 11%. Bush, of course, represents the Republican Establishment. Trump represents disenchantment with that Establishment, and he is likely to climb

Thomas Piatak: You contrast our approach to Israel’s immigration policy. Israel has built a fence to keep out illegal immigrants and deported those who managed to get in before the fence. Israel did that because changing the ethnicity of Israel

Last week saw the publication of Ann Coulter’s new book on immigration, Adiós America!

This is an important book. Although Coulter sounds a number of themes that will be quite familiar to Chronicles readers, she also breaks new ground, particularly

Seventy years ago today, Chapman & Hall published Brideshead Revisited, written by Evelyn Waugh while he was on leave from the British Army during World War II.  The book became Waugh’s most popular, and the 1981 British television adaptation

It is hard to see how a country that hates its past can have much of a future. If that is so, the gay marriage referendum in Ireland last week suggests that Ireland has no future. 

In the aftermath of

One of the basic political problems of today is the increasing tendency of political leaders to ignore the views of those who elected them. Across the board, political leaders advance the interests of the wealthy elites who bankroll their campaigns

One of the more absurd, not to mention offensive, aspects of political correctness is the increasing tendency to treat the Confederacy as the equivalent of Nazi Germany. An ad currently running on TV shows the now middle-aged actors from The

Today brings the news that 15 Moslem migrants seeking to enter Europe illegally are under arrest by Italian police for throwing 12 Christian migrants to their deaths in the Mediterranean. No doubt this incident will be downplayed or ignored by

Late last week, I saw a small piece from AFP reporting that, on a visit to South Africa, Zimbabwe’s de facto dictator Robert Mugabe said, “I don’t want to see a white man.”  Of course, if a European leader had

Last week’s furor over the version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act approved in Indiana and awaiting only the governor’s signature in Arkansas was illuminating. Once again, the contemporary left demonstrated that it values conformity, not tolerance. Indeed, the left

One of the many unfortunate trends in today’s American politics is that being wrong on significant matters seems to carry little penalty, while being right on significant matters seems to carry little reward.

Consider those who told us that the

Earlier this week, Democratic Congressman Tim Ryan of Ohio wrote an opinion piece in the Akron Beacon Journal announcing that, after much soul-searching, he no longer considered himself pro-life. Ryan wrote that listening to constituents who have had abortions convinced