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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Immediately after Emmanuel Macron was elected president of France in May 2017, progressive Americans fairly swooned with envy. If only they could have a president like M. Macron: young, handsome, progressive, cosmopolitan, polished, globally minded and dedicated to the European Union’s dream of uniting all of Europe into a single state! And Mrs. May across...
Foreign policy has been a stumbling block to Democrats for fully 50 years now. In 1968, the party of Lyndon Johnson was the party of the Vietnam War, and replacing Johnson with Hubert Humphrey at the top of the ticket that November was not enough to get Americans to give the Democrats four more years...
As the Midterm Apocalypse was sliced and diced on the Day After, pundits noted the “Kavanaugh Effect,” whereby Senate Democrats who joined in the smear-and-delay campaign against then-nominee Brett Kavanaugh lost their bids for reelection in states that had supported President Trump in 2016. On the other hand, Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia, moistened...
As the Midterm Election returns came in, one thing became clear: There would be no “blue wave.” The Democrats secured the House of Representatives, though not by a wide margin, and the Republicans held the Senate, gaining a few seats. The House Democrats and their GOP “NeverTrump” allies still skulking about the Beltway bubble will...
For over three years Saudi Arabia has been fighting a war in Yemen with little regard for civilian suffering. The war itself has been deadly for thousands of bystanders, but far worse has been the famine the conflict has brought about, which has killed some 50,000 people already and has the potential to kill millions. ...
President Donald Trump is unique among post-NAFTA presidents for rejecting the economic determinism that has dominated U.S. economic policy since 1993. His predecessors took it for granted that, given the exigencies of “free trade,” domestic manufacturing job losses were inevitable. Then they crafted trade policies that fulfilled their own prophecies. During the signing ceremony for...
“A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches,” said wise King Solomon. In the fall of 2018, Democrats pressed with all their might to take Brett Kavanaugh’s good name away, in an effort to retake control of Congress. This was, to say the least, unjust, as the nominee himself—by all reasonable accounts...
Hours after the U.S. Senate voted to confirm Judge Kavanaugh as the 114th Supreme Court Justice, a commentator on FOX News remarked that no winners had emerged from the legislative ordeal. He was wrong, of course. Kavanaugh himself was the primary winner, having survived the fury of Hell itself to prevail over the persons and...
As of October, the U.S. has been fighting a war in Afghanistan for fully 17 years. Young men who were not even born when the war started are now almost of an age to serve and be deployed. And if that’s the case with our forces, you can just imagine how many of today’s Taliban...
A long and distinguished literary career ended on June 23, 2018, with the death of New England poet Donald Hall. A versatile and prolific author, he served in 2006-07 as poet laureate of the United States. Like Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, and Richard Wilbur, fellow poets who settled in the region (though very different from...
“Democracy Dies in Darkness,” declares the Washington Post. With apologies to Alexis de Tocqueville, I reply: Doesn’t something have to live first before it can die? There is one great advantage to the ongoing, interminable, and farcical “Russia investigation” that grips the Establishment and those who choose to be entertained daily by America’s mass media. ...
As of the start of September, it seemed no week was complete without another scandal breaking within the Church of Rome, considered by Her members to be the Mystical Body of Christ. These scandals, as even the Congolese pygmies know by now (assuming any of them remain), have to do with the abuse, pedophilic and...
It used to be said of the Anglican Church that it was “the Tory Party at prayer.” On the occasion of Sen. John McCain’s funeral service in Washington National Cathedral last September 1, the United States and the world were given another opportunity to observe the American Establishment at prayer. For a couple of hours,...
Imagine an economic system in which government pays the wages of workers, but the businesses where they work remain privately owned, and profits accrue to the owners. Could this fairly be called free-market capitalism? It sounds more like socialism, even Soviet-style communism: Workers are maintained at public expense, while the commissars line their own pockets. ...
Many a new genre of journalism has sprung up thanks to President Trump. The latest is the “victims of tariffs” industry profile. As the Trump administration slaps tariffs on foreign steel, aluminum, and manufactured goods of various kinds, trading partners—i.e., rivals—such as China and Mexico are imposing retaliatory tariffs of their own. The problem for...
Pope Francis is wrong to change the Catechism of the Catholic Church to suit his postmodern, antibiblical leanings, making capital punishment utterly “inadmissible” in civil society, like hearsay evidence in court. Pegging his new teaching on the “inviolability and dignity of the person,” he has offended decent people by blaspheming against the Bible, calling evil...