Is it still possible to believe that the rule of law prevails in the United States of America? That concept—that we are governed by our laws and Constitution, and not the arbitrary power of dominant individuals or groups—is endangered as never before, especially after the 2020 presidential election, the loss of two Republican Senate seats...
In this issue we present two views of the “conservative” news media giant Fox News. The essay by Douglas Burton verges on the celebratory and recounts the merits of the Fox News enterprise and the bold vision of Rupert Murdoch, the Australian press baron, who launched this 24-hours-a-day American news service on Oct. 7, 1996. Murdoch...
The American electorate split strongly along class lines in the 2020 election, as revealed by a Bloomberg News data chart that correlated campaign donors with their professions. This data map looks like an inverted triangle made up of circles in varying shades of blue and red. At the top are large circles in deep blue, denoting...
Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times’ “1619 Project” has explained on Twitter—which apparently doesn’t mind communicating her racist views as long as they are left-wing—why the majority of Cuban-Americans in Florida voted for Trump. It seems, according to Hannah-Jones, that the term Latino is a “contrived ethnic category” that throws together white Spaniards from Cuba with...
One sometimes feels obliged to contextualize a disagreement, because the point in dispute has still not been clearly stated. I have written critically more than once about the works of C. Bradley Thompson, first about his study of neoconservatism, Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea (2010), and more recently, about a book he completed on America’s Founders, America’s Revolutionary...
In one of the most important acts of his Presidency, on Sept. 26, 2020, Donald J. Trump announced his pick to fill the United States Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Amy Coney Barrett. The Supreme Court has recently been divided 4-4 in terms of judicial philosophy, with Justices Ginsburg, Stephen...
Having forced myself to listen to most of the Republican National Convention (RNC) orations in late August, I was struck by what my daughter, who had done such work professionally, characterized as the program’s “underlying marketing strategy.” The GOP’s advisers seem to have pitched their message at the demographics among whom Trump has had the least...
In a remarkably disjointed, bombastic defense of “the liberal order,” C. Bradley Thompson writes in American Mind about the dangers posed by “Pajama-Boy Nietzscheans” and the supposedly surging “neo-reactionary movement on the Right.” According to Thompson, “radical Left and Right have now merged” in a virulent form of anti-Americanism—the essence of which consists of not agreeing with...
The radicals under the flags of Antifa and Black Lives Matter who are trashing our cities and destroying our monuments say they are fighting against “white supremacy.” BLM, on its website, lists as chief among its goals to “end white supremacy forever.” The prominent Rose City Antifa chapter lists on its site white supremacy as...
Although I have spent much of my scholarly life warning against inappropriate comparisons between Nazis or fascists and the pet peeves of academics and journalists, I myself am now using the F-word (as in fascist) or really the N-word (as in Nazi) with growing regularity. The antifascist left, about which I have just finished writing a...
In the last weekend of May, I was horrified and astonished that my hometown and current residence of Minneapolis became the locus of a wave of violent rioting, fires, and property destruction that soon spread to the rest of America and throughout the Western world. I’m in my forties now and living relatively safely in...
Socialism is cool again in America, but it’s not your father’s socialism. It is no longer “the rival but the patsy of state capitalism,” as Nathan Pinkoski writes in a penetrating article in Law & Liberty entitled “The Strange Rise of Bourgeois Bolshevism.” The villain of this new socialism “is not the bourgeois but the...
A debate unfolded in March last year in American Greatness between Chronicles contributor Mark Pulliam and the Claremont Institute’s Edward Erler, a devotee of Harry Jaffa. According to Erler, Robert Bork and others who adhered to strict constitutional originalism were essentially moral nihilists because they would not apply natural law standards to our governing document....
The late Joe Sobran used to refer to liberal high society as “the hive.” What Joe was highlighting were certain qualities that he associated with the fashionable left, e.g., extreme clannishness, the exclusion of those who deviated from authorized political doctrines, and a sense of moral superiority. Without having to deny that such a “hive”...
As I write, political factions left and right are sparring over the right approach to the coronavirus. I don’t envy President Donald Trump or the members of his coronavirus response team, for they appear to be in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation. If they continue a general societal shutdown for too long, the economy will teeter...
After people gather into groups they formulate their own founding myths. The veracity of these stories is of secondary importance to their ability to tie people to a sense of noble purpose, shared sacrifice, and confidence that their activities have had some meaning over the passage of time. Thus I suppose it would be devastating...
Diana West should be a familiar name to anyone who has studied the operation of the American Communist movement. Two of her books, America Betrayed: The Secret Assault on our Nation’s Character (2013) and The Red Thread (2019) examine the influence of Communist party members and fellow travelers on American politics and civic culture, and...
The left now roundly denounces anyone to the right of Jeb Bush as a “white nationalist,” which it appears is now being equated with “white supremacist,” with the apparently immortal Adolph Hitler acting as the once-and-future ringleader of a group of bad guys and gals that includes everyone from George Washington and Betsy Ross to...
In a widely noted commentary on the achievements and failures of Sam Francis in the October issue of First Things, author Matthew Rose offers this conclusion: Francis claimed that he sought only to defend Western culture. It is impossible to believe him. He displayed no feeling for literature, art, music, philosophy, or theology. He did...
If anyone hasn’t heard about it by now, “our” government has been lying about the lack of progress being made in the seemingly eternal war being fought in Afghanistan. In the 18 years of the longest war in U.S. history, more than $1 trillion has gone down the drain, along with thousands of lives, in...
At 10 p.m. on Dec. 12, the TV screen flashes up a summary of British voting exit polls, showing a landslide victory for the Conservatives. The spectre of a Marxist government under Jeremy Corbyn vanishes, and Boris Johnson now rules the land. He has what no other Western leader has: a guarantee of nearly five...
On Nov. 18, the Rupert Murdoch-financed New York Post ran an opinion-piece by its star columnist, Karol Markowicz, on left-wing anti-Semitism. Like the rest of the Post editorial staff, Markowicz is upset that at least part of the Jewish left has turned emphatically against the Israeli Likud government and is demanding the return of the West...
In a recent Townhall commentary, the young author Michael Malarkey marvels over “the resurgence of refined paleoconservatism.” Supposedly Donald Trump has absorbed quintessential paleoconservative positions and is now putting them into practice. This now triumphant creed is “a political stance that posits the importance of strong borders, economic protectionism, and vehement anti-interventionism.” According to Malarkey,...
In late October, Turning Point USA (TPUSA) founder Charlie Kirk took the stage at Ohio State University prepared to “own the libs,” as he and other establishment conservative speakers had been doing profitably on college campuses for the last two years, offering to debate all comers among the university’s typically leftist student population. Sitting in...
In criminal law, there are times when a crime has clearly been committed, but it’s not clear whether the perpetrator had criminal intent. The impeachment effort against Donald Trump is the opposite situation: a case where there is no high crime or misdemeanor, but the president’s intentions are said by his enemies to be so...
Joshua Tait, who is completing a dissertation on the American conservative movement at the University of North Carolina, is a virtue-signaling expert on his object of study. Never does Tait hold back in judging past conservatives by his super-duper progressive standards. For example, he offers this on one particularly revered conservative icon: “[Russell] Kirk was...
Comedy has long been under the left’s control, as just one province of the U.S. entertainment empire centered in Hollywood—which is itself a bastion of leftist control over mainstream culture. But comedy is a rebellious province by its nature, as what comics and their audiences find funny is often the opposite of what the left...
According to the official narrative, on Aug. 10, 2019, Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire playboy charged with sex-trafficking minors, committed suicide in his jail cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City. Only a third of Americans actually believe this narrative, according to polling. What’s captured the public’s attention is the combination of Epstein’s...
The field of Democrats aspiring to be their party’s presidential nominee resembles what the Republican field of four years ago would have been, had Donald Trump not entered the race. With more than 20 contenders, Democrats have had to break up their first two presidential debates into two sets of ten candidates, each airing on...
Many years ago, Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson was challenged by a mathematician to name a single proposition in all social science that was both true and nontrivial. Samuelson proposed the principle of comparative advantage, first developed by economist David Ricardo in 1817. It was true, Samuelson argued, as a matter of mathematical deduction, and yet its...
During Russell Kirk’s fruitful lifetime I regularly took his sage advice concerning books I ought to read. Dr. Kirk had seemingly perused everything worth perusing. Thus, on his say-so in 1968, I read, marked, learned, and inwardly digested T. S. Eliot’s The Idea of a Christian Society (1939). I hate to tell you, but many...
As President Donald Trump starts his reelection campaign in earnest, a major segment of his 2020 platform remains ambiguous. In the field of foreign and security policy, the next five or six months present Trump with the last opportunity to become his former self: to reverse some of his many surrenders to the neoconservative agenda,...
The Silicon Valley censors have struck again. This time it’s against James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas for sins related to the practice of journalism, namely publishing documents allegedly exposing anti-Christian bias on the social media platform Pinterest. Veritas earned a temporary suspension from Twitter. This should come as no surprise. In recent months the technology giants...
In early June, border agents near San Diego did what they do a lot these days. They collared two previously deported sex criminals who had re-entered the United States illegally. Both men were convicted of sex crimes against children, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reported. Yet the two are somewhat unusual in one respect: they...
Trump’s decision to walk away from the Hanoi Summit in February and reject the terms of a possible deal—ending all sanctions in return for a partial denuclearization—was a disappointment for his supporters. But it is only the beginning of a protracted peace process that must accompany this historic opportunity. In any case, Trump wasn’t buying...
Politics are over in America. Political maneuvering will go on, of course, but the old civics-class view of American political life was based on a set of assumptions that are no longer operative. America was once far more homogenous than she is today. But the passing of the 1965 Immigration Act and the political and...
After two years and tens of millions of dollars, the Mueller investigation ended in a shattering anticlimax for Democrats. On March 22, Special Counsel Robert Mueller sent Attorney General William Barr his report, and Barr promptly informed Congress that Mueller found no collusion between Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia. Mueller recommended no prosecutions—though Barr’s...
Pro-democratic ideological think tanks that evaluate the future of democracy by the extent of its global spread and the fortunes of relatively insignificant countries around the world (the Third one, especially) should be far more concerned with events currently occurring in the Mother of Parliaments in Westminster and with present political trends in one of...
Now here’s a headline: “Blackface, sexual assault scandals don’t appear to have tarnished Virginia’s image,” the Washington Post declared on March 3. The story referred to controversies surrounding each of the commonwealth’s three top statewide officials—all of them Democrats. Gov. Ralph Northam came under pressure to resign after the conservative website Big League Politics discovered...
Michael Jackson is the mirror of the children of liberal America, even though he is dead. Obsessed with their appearance, they keep hacking away at their features until they are unrecognizable as humans. Sexualized as pre-adolescents through pop culture, they fetishize their own children by exposing them to pop culture in equal or greater measure....
Washington never made any particular secret of its jaundiced view of Brexit as suggested succinctly by President Obama when he warned that Great Britain, if she voted to leave the European Union, would need to go to “the back of the queue” of countries wishing to cut trading deals with the United States. J’ai tiré...
The state of the Union is divided, as we were reminded not only after but during the President’s speech of February 5. Republicans chanted “USA! USA!” several times in response to lines delivered to elicit the same; Democrats (upon whom the camera lovingly lingered) competed for the honor of “best sour expression/sneer by an elected...
Dr. Ralph Northam, the Democratic governor of Virginia, aetat. 59, is under enormous pressure to resign his position after a conservative website revealed the fact that his page in his medical school yearbook from 1984 carries a photograph of two men, one in blackface and the other in the robes of the KKK, standing side...
It seems that a part of Donald Trump’s base—the part that writes and otherwise comments on him, anyway—is angry with the President for having reopened the portions of the federal government he had shut down for 35 days after failing to obtain congressional funding for his Big Beautiful Wall. Some of these people saw this...
The way foreign-policy mavens in Washington, D.C., talk about Afghanistan, you would think that country had successfully launched a ballistic-missile attack against us on 9/11. We have occupied Afghanistan for over 17 years now, but still we cannot leave because the Taliban could then return to power and once again grant haven to terrorists who...
Tucker Carlson shook the punditariat, liberal and conservative alike, with his incisive analysis, delivered during one of his show monologues, of the breakdown of the American family, a genuine four-alarm crisis that cannot be exaggerated. In it, he fingered long-standing economic policies pushed by Swamp residents and their donors for the benefit of a rootless...
Because of the Internet, old-fashioned travel agents are nearly as obsolete as ocean-going passenger liners. In their place a new sort of agent is arising: the migrant or asylum agent, formerly known as the people smuggler. The phenomenon has recently become a well-known one in Europe especially, as smugglers respond to the desires of their...
As the new Congress was sworn in early in January, the Republican Party unveiled a plan for its own assisted suicide. In fact, Mitt Romney got started before he was even seated as the latest senator from Utah. On January 1, he published an op-ed in the Washington Post in which he accused President Trump...
Following the death of President George Herbert Walker Bush at age 94, the mainstream press and the television punditariat began treating the occasion as the passing of America’s grandpa. The narcissistic grandchildren who flew in just in time for the funeral and preferred to stay at a hotel regaled us with personal stories of the...
The left can nearly always be relied upon to recognize a new and unprecedented situation when it arises, and to propose that it be met resolutely and “creatively,” as it likes to say. The exceptions come when holding fast to the status quo and “backing down from a challenge” are in its interest. An illustrative...