Quality of writing is no longer the standard for literature, as the busybodies of the left go about canceling all our best authors for their various sins of political incorrectness.
Category: Columns
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Labor Left in the Lurch
It became clear on Labor Day 2022 that the American left has no use for Americans who make a living with their hands, particularly if those hands are white and masculine.
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Horsing Around
Two films, new and old, that feature horses: Jordan Peele's Nope a pointless waste of time. Black Stallion, albeit predictable, is beautiful, compelling, and worth seeing again.
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A Brutal Muse
The golden age of American popular music was an amazing time to be alive. Taki reminisces about his encounters with the composers of great American musicals.
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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 World Poised Between Orders
The realignment of global forces resulting from the war in Ukraine is certain to confront American hegemony and to undermine the status of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
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A Stubborn Love of Honor
For the Ancient Greeks, the concepts of courage and honor were indivisible. Both are necessary to fight for what is most important.
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Amnesia of the Weather Alarmists
Hot weather is nothing new. The climate alarmists would be less alarmed if they knew history.
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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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Top Men at Work
Top Gun-Maverick is predictable and predictably Tom Cruise, but Our Man in Havana is just the opposite: what starts as espionage satire turns sharply and creatively to spy thriller.
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The Last Temptation of The King
Baz Lurhmann's new film about Elvis Presley asks us to adulate The King, but in reality, he was given too much, too soon.
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The Long Decline in the Middle
The "Welch Effect" has laid waste to American companies on American soil and, in the process, has sacrificed the economic well-being of the American middle class as well.
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NATO’s Road to Perdition
NATO's recent Madrid Summit reveals a hardening, monolithic West that is likely soon to be challenged by a rising China and a multipolar world.
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Ode to a Canceled Gay Nightingale
Assuming everyone in the Western canon is gay might be the safest way to ensure their survival among waves of woke culling.
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The Real Cost of Electric Vehicles
For all their use in green virtue-signaling, electric cars have enormous hidden costs, both financial and humanitarian.
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End of Empire, End of Manners
The imperial world offered an elevated ideal that has been lost, along with good manners.
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A Fork in Europe’s Road
European leaders have a decision to make: treat Russia as an integral part of Europe with legitimate security concerns, or treat her as an Asiatic pariah to be crippled.
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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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Allies on the Transatlantic Right
Conservative nationalists in Europe face the same uphill struggle against the dominant left as do their American counterparts.
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Protecting Democracy from Voters
Barack Obama and other self-professed champions of democracy want tech companies to continue suppressing "dangerous" political speech on their platforms.
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Wounded Warriors
Reviews of two new films: The Contractor, directed by Tarik Saleh, and The Northman, directed by Robert Eggers.
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We CAN Have a Blacker Math
Since woke academics insist on imposing equality on math history, there is one thing left to do: declare the ancient Greek mathematicians to be black men.
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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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Merian Cooper, Conquering Hero
With the war in Ukraine dangerously close to Poland, the specter is raised of the forgotten Polish-Soviet War of 1920. American pilots came to Poland's aid in that war, most importantly World War I veteran and King Kong director Merian C. Cooper.
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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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Battier and Battier
An extra moody, extra dark new installment of The Batman franchise asks its audience to believe the world would be a better place if the have-nots took by force from the haves in order to make a more equitable society.
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A Ukrainian Tragedy
Having designated a traditionalist, conservative, overwhelmingly Christian Orthodox Russia as the enemy, the rulers of an Orwellian "Great Reset" West will be free to cancel conservatives of all stripes even more radically than before.
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Disillusioned by Vlad
Putin’s war on "woke" had me cheering, especially when he urged nationalists, conservatives, and traditionalists to unite and reject multiculturalism. But as his army shells Ukraine, it is hard to blame anyone but him for the situation there.
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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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Death Becomes Bond
No Time to Die Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga ◆ Written by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and Cary Joji Fukunaga ◆ Produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer ◆ Distributed by Universal Pictures The James Bond film series that began in 1962 is still going strong in this, its 25th edition. The latest installment is definitely a winner,...
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The Mental Health Alibi
Like a strange melody that keeps playing in my ear are four letters, PTSD, which seem increasingly to afflict American criminals. I suppose some shrink invented post-traumatic stress disorder; then ambulance-chasing lawyers picked it up, and finally the criminals themselves have discovered it. It is the quickest get-out-of-jail scheme since habeas corpus. We are...
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Winning the War Against War
One recent morning an opinion piece by Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post arrived unbidden in my email inbox. “Should Putin act, it would arguably be the greatest provocation since the end of the Cold War,” Rubin claimed. “Like the Berlin Wall and the blockade of Berlin before that, movement into Ukraine would be...
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Middle Kingdom Rising
In 1935 the Nazi regime was two years old, fully consolidated at home, and increasingly assertive abroad. It enacted the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws and announced that Germany would start a massive rearmament program, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Meanwhile, Britain and France were focused on condemning Mussolini’s intervention in Ethiopia and on punishing...
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Real Female Athletes Unite!
I played on the European tennis circuit during the late 1950s, ranking number three in Greece. But don’t be too impressed. Unlike today—when Greek players rank fourth internationally in men’s tennis and sixth in women’s—Greece was hardly a tennis power, and I was ranked among the lowest in Europe. In 1957, the American player...
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The Madness of Russophobia
“Rule One, on page one of the book of war, is: ‘Do not march on Moscow,’” Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery told the House of Lords in 1962. “Various people have tried it, Napoleon and Hitler, and it is no good.” The victor of El Alamein made an understatement. Napoleon’s invasion in June 1812 took...
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Democracy, Real and Imagined
Revisionist-historian and anarchist anthropologist David Graeber insisted in a book he co-wrote before his death last year that agriculture was to blame for the sorry state of humanity. According to the departed scholar, hunter-gatherers lived happily in bands until agriculture was invented, which led to surpluses, population growth, private property, tribes, cities, chiefs, tyrants, bureaucrats,...
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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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Word Games in the NFL
Jon Gruden, an NFL coach with a $100 million contract from the Las Vegas Raiders, was recently forced to resign after making what The New York Times called racist, homophobic, and misogynistic remarks in emails over the last 12 years. Shock! Horror! Pro footballers making misogynistic remarks—why, I never heard of such a thing! It’s definitely...
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A Moviegoer Reflects
I had the good fortune to talk regularly about movies with my good friend and conservative thinker Sam Francis. With intellectual heft, he generously shared what he had learned from his own moviegoing. What follows is offered in the same spirit: a list of 10 movies I have repeatedly enjoyed and unhesitatingly recommend. The Searchers (1956):...
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Global Hot Spots in 2022
Today’s commentariat is prone to ignore history, or to simplify past events to make them fit their current ideological preferences. The discourse of regime-approved conservative intellectuals and their mass media cohorts—such as Victor Davis Hanson and the tedious George Will—remains liberally optimistic and upwardly linear. The notion that our civilization is on a downward course...
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California Exodus
In the 1950s grammar schools of the Golden State we kids substituted “Oh, California!” for Stephen Foster’s “Oh, Susanna!” The tune was the same, but the lyrics came from the pen of John Nichols just before he climbed aboard the bark Eliza in December 1848 at Salem, Massachusetts, for the voyage to California. I come...
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Beethoven’s Skin-Tone Poem
Back in the days when skin tone was not a criterion for worthy art, I used to attend the opera quite regularly, especially when works from Mozart, Verdi, or Puccini were on offer. I mention skin tone because a black American so-called academic, Philip Ewell, claims that Western classical music is rooted in racism. Phil...
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Defaming the Dead
Two years ago, Matthew Rose wrote a lengthy article about Sam Francis in First Things (“The Outsider,” October 2019) that I responded to in these pages (“A Giant Beset by Pygmies,” December 2019 Chronicles). I had hoped that Rose would consider the information I presented and use it to paint a more accurate picture of...
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Sinking Deals, Shifting Alliances
The tectonic change in the Indo-Pacific region is the most important geopolitical event of 2021. The countries along its shores account for roughly two-thirds of the world’s population. They produce the largest share of global gross domestic product, possess the most powerful military forces, and depend on the world’s busiest shipping lanes. It is also...
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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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A Tale of Two Withdrawals
It’s difficult to characterize President Biden’s precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan as anything but a shameful debacle. It’s also difficult to determine who was responsible for the lack of a strategic withdrawal plan. Can the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff be that incompetent or feckless if an immediate and unconditional...
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Uncle Sam’s Obituary
Prick up your ears and listen to the violins: beyond the dreamy adagios and thrilling arpeggios the fat lady has sung. On stage Uncle Sam has been laid to rest, but unlike Don Giovanni, the good uncle’s corpse has not descended into hell. European pundits are lesser liars and hypocrites than American ones, yet they...
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In Afghanistan, America Failed to Know Its Enemy and Itself
The latest episode in an ironic reversal of the roles of the foreign powers that have tried their luck in Afghanistan is unfolding before our eyes. Britain’s profitless involvement (1839-1919) is ancient history, but more recently the Soviet intervention (1979-1989) and America’s subsequent “longest war” (2001-2021) have both ended in strategic failures. Because the United...
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Jihad Undefeated
Events are the building blocks of history. Narrative historians, starting with Thucydides, have focused on what they regarded as significant occurrences in order to present and evaluate the past. The import of some events can be recognized by astute observers almost as soon as they occur. Edmund Burke’s 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in...