Category: Under the Black Flag

The Republic is in crisis. America’s intellectual class is working to discredit our past. The media is waging war against the middle-class values of hard work, religion, and family. In order not to be outdone, Hollywood’s message is more violence, vulgarity, and unbridled hedonism. So, as the ship is starting to list, why would I...

Ten years or so ago Stephen Fry, English polymath, writer, TV personality, stage and screen actor, and many other things, gave a Spectator-sponsored lecture at the prestigious Royal Geographical Society. His theme was appreciation for America, where he said he would choose to live “in a heartbeat.” I know Stephen and paid extra attention to...

Sailing in Homer’s wine-dark Aegean Sea, and traipsing all over the Acropolis and the marvels of antiquity, is the best antidote I know to the brouhaha over “The Squad.” It makes these four publicity-seeking, opportunistic mental dwarfs seem even pettier than they are. Mind you, these petulant females wouldn’t know the difference between Corinthian and...

A wise man recently said: Our youth love luxury, they have bad manners, contempt for authority, they show disrespect for their elders, and no longer rise when a lady enters the room. They chatter instead of exercising, gobble up their food, and tyrannize their teachers. That was Socrates, 2000 years ago, which I suppose qualifies...

Some years ago my friend and neighbor Baron Philip Lambert had my wife and me to dinner in his chalet in Gstaad, Switzerland, and the talk turned to Belgian history. Philip’s grandfather, a banker, had lent money to King Leopold II of Belgium to buy real estate in Africa. He bought the Congo. Then paid...

“Woke” is the concept that everything must be inclusive and inoffensive. Oh dear! Being hyperaware of everyone’s sensitivities makes one a hell of a bore. I recently flew down to Charlottesville, Virginia, where I had gone to university, to speak at a memorial service for my friend Willy von Raab. The other speaker was P.J....

OK, sport fans, get your wallets out and start giving.  That’s the latest brainstorm from a New York Times columnist who makes an unconvincing case for reparations to black people.  For slavery, that is.  And that means you, whitey, or brownie, and I guess that goes for yellow ones also.  He wants these reparations to...

Hold the presses!  More Germans trust Vladimir Putin’s Russia than Trump’s United States.  This is earth-shattering news, a scoop like no other.  If this were 1969, the moon landing would be a smaller headline.  And who came up with the scoop?  None other than the New York Times, the paper that first told us that...

Everyone’s rather angry nowadays.  Women, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, blacks, Hispanics, American Indians, college students, college professors, Hollywood stars, Democratic politicians—you name them, they’re upset.  The Donald seems finally to have united the United States.  Everybody hates Trump and, of course, men.  Toxic masculinity has replaced the evil Nazis and their goose-step, and Trump the loathsome...

Here’s a question for you: Could the “monster” of the #MeToo movement get a fair trial anywhere in these United States?  Is there a potential jury member that has not made up his mind that Harvey Weinstein raped, mistreated, and oppressed women?  Since last October to be exact, every news organization in America has been...

August is the time for cruising.  Once upon a time, cruising the Med was fun, especially around the French Riviera.  Now the sea is full of garbage, the ports packed with horror megayachts owned by horrid Arabs and eastern oligarch gangsters, while most Italian, Spanish, and French resorts are overrun by sweaty tourists covered in...

I recently had a spirited discussion with the British historian James Holland, brother of Tom Holland, also a distinguished man of letters, about FDR, his oil embargo of Japan, and the root causes of World War II.  We were in Normandy, inspecting the battle scenes of D-day, with James giving us the kind of briefings...

I have been a member of a private club up in the Alps since 1959.  Its name is the Eagle Ski Club, and I joined it when I was 20 years of age.  Sixty years later I’ve resigned as a life member because of an incident I won’t go into, as things that happen in...

London summer parties are a dime a dozen.  The moment the weather turns hot, Englishmen cast aside their brollies and head for a garden party.  This year was no different.  I spent from the latter part of June until mid-July in England, and went to more parties than there are Trump haters in New York...

Once upon a time the American Establishment enjoyed business paragons such as David Rockefeller, Daniel Ludwig, William S. Paley, Henry Ford II, not to mention Thomas Watson and his son Thomas Watson, Jr.  Toward the end of the 20th century, that old power elite had gone with the wind, replaced by people that Hilaire Belloc...

Tempus Fugit.  A recent ABC program on the death of Princess Diana reminded me that 20 years have gone by in a jiffy.  She died August 31, 1997, following a car crash in the underpass of Place de l’Alma, and sent a nation, and the world, into mourning. Mind you, Princess Di is no longer...

As I’ve often written, The Spectator of London is not only the oldest magazine in the English-speaking world but the most elegant by far.  (As, of course, is Chronicles.)  I’ve been fortunate to have a column in the Speccie, as readers lovingly refer to it, for 40 years, a lifetime when it comes to journalism. ...

William F. Buckley, Jr., spent his adult winter months in Rougemont, an alpine resort next to its chicer neighbor Gstaad, now the Mecca for the nouveau riche and vulgar.  Throughout the 60’s and 70’s, however, the area was known for its music festival run by Yehudi Menuhin, and for celebrity writers like Buckley, my mentor,...

Who was it who said that behind every great fortune lies a great crime?  The answer is a Frenchman by the name of Balzac, known in his time as a pretty good novelist.  Well, is stealing an idea and making untold billions as a result a great crime?  I suppose if it were my idea...

Hollywood is in a snit.  Hollywood is very angry.  Hollywood is having a nervous breakdown.  The Donald is in the White House, and Hollywood types cannot take it any more.  Ditto for the New York Times and the TV networks, except for FOX.  Madonna, that aging show-off whose vocabulary consists mainly of the F-word, said...

Call me old fashioned, and I will thank you for the compliment.  Call me a fool for rosy nostalgia, and more thanks will be in order.  Yes, Fred and Ginger are my favorite movie couple, and last year while recuperating from a broken leg, I watched four of their movies back to back, shown on...

It had the same effect on them that a man sitting in a front-row seat and banging a gong has on the lead flutist in a Mozart concert.  “Them,” needless to say, are the “elites,” a poor description if ever there was one of the rabble that is Hollywood types, engaged ladies who lunch, cheap...

American writers are on a roll.  Bob Dylan wins the Nobel Prize for Literature (for backward children), and Paul Beatty the Booker Prize, the first American to do so because only Brits were considered in previous years. Beatty was the unanimous choice, and it’s easy to see why: He’s a black American, the book is...

A bunch of charlatans and clowns met in Athens, Greece, at the end of September and, to use an old Greek expression, managed to make a hole in the water.  In other words, they accomplished nada, but they stuffed themselves with feta and tasty Greek food, stayed at the best hotels, accepted honorariums, pumped up...

I recently wrote a column for the London Spectator extolling the beauty of one of the Olympic competitors, a British high jumper.  She was 19, café au lait, and did not win any medals.  But she had wonderful poise, looked very feminine, and had an innocent way about her.  Her name is Morgan Lake, and...

The Negresco is a beautiful rococo, belle époque hotel built around the turn of the last century on La Promenade des Anglais in Nice, in the south of France.  Even under today’s plebeian standards, when backpacking and sandal-wearing tourists invade its elegant quarters, it stands as a monument to a world that no longer exists. ...

Dancing around an unpleasant reality is what politics is all about nowadays—Donald Trump excluded—with political correctness the enveloping cloud that hides truth and the facts.  There are boundaries that are set by those faceless gray men and women none of us ever see, those who control the networks, the newspapers, and the academy—in other words,...

Things have never been grimmer.  Wall Street wolves have become billionaires while rigging the system, rats like William Kristol are showboating on television and spreading lies about The Donald, and the most dishonest couple since Bonnie and Clyde are getting themselves ready to reinhabit the White House. In times like these, there is only one...

E.M. Forster infamously said that, if he had to betray his country or a friend, he hoped he would betray the former.  He was cheered for it by Oxford swells who had seen their elders slaughtered in the trenches during World War I, and by fellow homosexuals whose proclivities were illegal at the time.  This...

Once upon a time, the New York Times called herself the Old Gray Lady; now, truth be told, she’s much closer to a Bitter Old Bag.  Long-winded, overexplained, tendentious, and biased against anything normal, the Times is more to be pitied than loathed.  And like a festering boil on an old bag’s backside, Donald Trump...

As everyone knows, when you cross a camel with a mule, you get a member of the Saudi ruling family.  A camel crossed with a snake produces a Qatari ruler, and, finally, a camel that’s made whoopee with a pig conceives a Kuwaiti sultan.  Mind you, I’m being a bit rough on these animals, which...

With every passing day, Europe is turning browner and browner, the Old Continent being overrun by a tide of humanity not seen since the upheavals following World War II.  Just think about it: 3,000 migrants from Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Niger, and Eritrea pass daily through the Balkans on their way to Germany, France, Austria, and...

For those who like to see their name in print, the Hiltons and Kardashians of this world, make sure that, when the man in the white suit visits you, you’re the only one he’s dropping in on.  In fact, even if the white-suited gent visits you within a day or two of having called upon...

Talk about the failure of fundamental journalism!  In any other profession—medical, legal, financial—the guilty party would be struck off.  In journalism, the guilty party—as in Rolling Stone—continues on its merry way of disinformation and downright fabrication.  Some Duke University lacrosse players must be nodding their heads, as in we’ve seen it all before.  Let’s start...

“There is no more potent instrument of fate in 19th-century fiction than the legacy.”  So writes a female columnist in Britain’s best newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, before going on to say some rude things about trust-fund babies.  According to the lady, a will stands as a symbol of the “baleful power of crabbed old age...

The week after the murdering scum of ISIS beheaded 21 Egyptian Christians in Libya—their crime was being Christian—the European Commission opened an investigation of Christian schools in Britain for allegedly “discriminating” against nonreligious teachers.  In other words, the unelected bureaucrats of Brussels want to force Christian schools to stop giving preference to religious staff while...

I am not Charlie, nor will I ever be.  Wearing a Je suis Charlie badge is one sure way of getting attention, but I will leave that to others.  And another thing: Obscenity has no redeeming social value, and Charlie Hebdo was and is one long obscenity.  But let’s start with that famous Parisian march...

If I were a North Korean leader, or even an ISIS head chopper, I’d be reveling in the fact that a former American black basketball star spoke more plainly about race in America than any member of our political class or media.  Charles Barkley doesn’t mince words.  Many of his fellow blacks were not pleased...

I was not surprised that Chuck Hagel had to go.  After all, he was among the very few in governments of late to have ever seen combat, not to mention to have been wounded.  Men of his ilk do not draw their swords at the drop of a hat—unlike neocons, that is, who demand bloody...

Opera has been in the news lately—in Paris and New York, that is.  And no, this doesn’t mean things are culturally looking up—to the contrary, I’m afraid.  Let’s start with the City of Light, where millions of Muslims surround the capital (most of them in the suburbs), waiting for the day they can sweep away...

The latest brouhaha about professional football players beating up their little wimmen has me shocked, shocked! that such a thing could take place in modern-day America, Home of the Depraved.  But before I go on about why black football multimillionaires don’t get enough violence on the playing field but have to bring it home with...

An American friend who is very well connected in Washington, D.C., was telling me he’s worried about Europe. “So what else is new?” I said. “No, I really mean it.  Future generations could grow up under Islamic rule.” It was a John McEnroe moment, as in You can’t be serious.  He assured me he was. ...

Boo to the CIA!  It got caught spying on Germany, and its top man in Berlin has been sent home.  What I’d like to know is what’s so important about Berlin’s open-book policies that we had to play dirty?  Maybe our ex-top man in the German capital should now concentrate on weeding out Israeli spies...

I write this while American unmanned flights and 18 American “specialists” are looking for those 200 unfortunate girls abducted by Boko Haram, a group our very own Hillary Clinton had refused to place on the State Department’s terrorist watch list.  Boko Haram is as bad as it gets and as violent as can be, but...

I never listen to pop music, but I do know the difference between the Rolling Stones and the Beatles.  I even know one of the Stones’ daughters, Theodora Richards, as she went out with the son of a friend who brought her aboard my boat.  (Incredibly, she had very good manners.)  Pink Floyd—it’s a band—I...

One of the great knee-slappers, however perverse, of the so-called War on Terror is the fact that fundamentalist Islamic forces are stronger than ever as a result.  It is like going on a crash diet for a month and putting on 20 pounds.  In the 12 years since George W. first uttered those three little...