Category: Editorials

Paroxysms of liberal outrage gripped denizens of the Swamp when the Commerce Department announced that it plans to find out the citizenship status of U.S. residents by asking them directly via the 2020 Census and the U.S. Mail.  And as with every Census form, “Your response is required by law.”  The addition of the question...

Writing in this issue of Chronicles, Frank Brownlow, the scholar and literary critic, quotes W.H. Auden as having described logic as “a condition of the world,” like aesthetics and ethics.  Auden was right, which makes advanced liberalism’s rejection of logic so dangerous. Five nights a week on FOX News, week after week, Tucker Carlson in...

On any subject other than Russia, unanimity between the United States and her European “allies” has been impossible to achieve since Donald Trump was sworn in as President.  The unsolved poisoning in the cathedral town of Salisbury, England, of a former Russian double agent—exchanged eight years ago in a spy-swap with the U.K.—and his daughter,...

The national Italian elections so feared by Brussels, European liberals, and other would-be unifiers across the Continent have come and gone after having given the officials of the European Union “une mauvaise soirée,” as Marine Le Pen expressed it.  The results are a dramatic victory for the right, for “populism,” and for antiestablishmentarianism generally.  The...

Lenin may or may not have said that the capitalists would sell him the rope by which he would hang them, but the proverb is assigned to him for good reason.  Any revolutionary who dreams of destroying the free-enterprise system can count on a valuable ally within the system itself, in the form of the...

Parkland, Florida, came and went, bringing a new St. Valentine’s Day massacre, another unspeakable horror, and another opportunity for hashtags and political maneuvering over guns in America.  It very quickly became obvious that liberal activists had prepared and somewhat organized a campaign against the National Rifle Association ahead of time, waiting for the next mass...

U.S. employment increased over President Trump’s first year in office, expanding from 145,541,000 in January to 147,380,000 in December, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  Thus, amid the sound and fury of #NeverTrump media coverage, there has been a significant, and overlooked, development.  Donald Trump has avoided an economic curse shared by nearly every...

Student-loan debt in the United States is now $1.48 trillion.  That incredible sum is a heavy drag on the economy and a burden on young people.  And federal intervention in education is the cause. It wasn’t always this way. In June 1965, I began working as a salesman at the Sears store in Knoxville, receiving...

Barack H. Obama left office as the first Democratic president to preside over a net loss of domestic manufacturing jobs since the U.S. government started compiling records in the late 1930’s.  There were 206,000 fewer manufacturing jobs in January 2017 (12,355,000) than in January 2009 (12,561,000) when Obama entered the White House, according to U.S....

The lares and penates of post-Christian (actually postpagan) America are Money, Sex, and Power, not necessarily in that order but rather according to individual taste and proclivity.  Our household gods are grinning and chuckling malevolently from the hearth as they behold the carnival of sexual scandal and hypocrisy that has been unfolding across the land...

Donald Trump’s first year as President is drawing to a close, and it’s been rough.  The Republican Congress proved unequal to the task of repealing Obama Care.  The border wall hasn’t been built.  The administration is packed with generals and hawkish ideologues who push the President toward foreign intervention.  A special prosecutor stalks the land,...

In 1966 a film called Is Paris Burning?, based on a novel of the same name, was a cinematic sensation.  Its subject was the liberation of Paris by the French Free Forces and the French Resistance in 1944.  More than 70 years later Europe itself is afire as a combined Resistance force including rightists, “populists,”...

Step by step America is being primed for war with Iran.  President Trump has not actually torn up the “Iran deal”—the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that is supposed to defer the day the Islamic Republic might seek a nuclear weapon—but he “decertified” it in October, and his administration is under constant pressure from the...

The GOP-controlled Congress has received a report from the Pentagon advocating the conscription of women—the daughters, young wives, and young mothers of America, ages 18 to 25—according to the Washington Times. This is truly unprecedented.  At the tail end of the Obama administration, then Defense Secretary Ash Carter, who opened combat roles to women (with...

There were two reasons to support Donald J. Trump in the presidential campaign last year.  The first was the man himself, whom one could trust to deliver a much needed shock to the utterly narcissistic, self-involved American political system that would knock it off stasis and get it moving again in a sane and responsible...

The liberal faith in the power of incantation is but one of many ways in which liberalism reveals its essentially religious nature.  Following the politically complex Dutch elections and the relatively poor showing of the Front National in the French ones last spring, Western liberals were in a hurry to suggest that “populism” in Europe...

When he died on September 27 at the age of 91, Hugh Hefner was no playboy.  He was an old man trapped in what amounted to a factory, surrounded by silicone, plastic, and hydrogen compounds.  Playboy’s circulation had peaked 45 years earlier with its November 1972 issue.  Even before then, Hef’s magazine had long ceded...

The Las Vegas shooter who murdered some five-dozen country-music fans and injured over 500 more had barely cashed in his chips when Democrats, celebrities, and the punditocracy—not yet knowing exactly which guns the killer used—began calling for their favorite gun-control measures and blaming the NRA, Republicans, and even country-music fans themselves for this latest episode...

The unconstitutional Obama executive order known as DACA was rescinded by the Trump DOJ on September 5.  Even as the courageous and unassuming A.G. Jeff Sessions made the announcement, thousands of tweets painted him as a hood-donning white-supremacist Russian agent.  Nancy Pelosi effectively called for more public displays of Antifa violence across the fruited plain,...

No studies indicate, let alone demonstrate, that a significant percentage of ordinary white people “hate” black people, or black white, or indeed that an appreciable number belonging to any race in America today “hates” members of any other race.  But there’s no question that a great many people who subscribe to any one of the...

Decades before Donald Trump vanquished Hillary Clinton, Pat Buchanan heralded the themes that would put Trump in the White House.  Yet despite all that lead time, Trump’s victory was still in one sense premature.  In the interval between Buchanan’s presidential bids in the 1990’s and Trump’s victory last November, the Republican Party paid little heed...

As the new French President, Emmanuel Macron seems determined to hitch opposites together, combine like with dislike, compatibles with incompatibles, and otherwise fudge his policies as he did during the electoral campaign.  As a candidate for the office, he praised Angela Merkel’s decision to accept a million “refugees” from the Middle East and elsewhere—but has...

Since the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990, Germans have debated the question of whether their country can ever be a “normal” one again.  A current best-selling book—Finis Germania, by Rolf Peter Sieferle, a former left-wing intellectual who committed suicide before its publication—argues that since 1945 the German people have made scapegoats of...

Have you noticed?  Newspapers and television channels across the land have discovered a new kind of human-interest story: the business-owning, family-man illegal immigrant who gets deported after living in this country for decades as a productive noncitizen.  CNN’s website headlined the story of one Joel Colindres, “This is the face of deportation: A dad with...

Democracy is under attack, we now hear regularly.  While Donald Trump, the GOP, and (if you ask Rachel Maddow) the weather have all been identified of late as “threats” to our democracy, the Great Satan is, of course, Russia, pop. 144,498,215.  Vlad Putin directs, or winks and nods at, a Red Army of hackers who,...

In The Spectator (June 24, 2016) Charles Moore, the Grand Old Man of British journalism despite his relatively young age, writes, “How much longer can it go on?  Deaths caused by terrorism are always followed now by candlelit vigils, a minute’s silence, victims’ families/government ministers/emergency services/clergy/imams all clustered together, walls of messages, flags at half-mast. ...

Proclaimed political “dynasties” in American history have never persisted beyond two generations.  The Adams family produced two presidents in two generations, followed by an author of significant accomplishments who disdained democracy and never ran for political office.  The Roosevelts, Theodore and Franklin D., came from two branches of the family and later produced several public...

In The Spectator (June 24, 2016) Charles Moore, the Grand Old Man of British journalism despite his relatively young age, writes, “How much longer can it go on?  Deaths caused by terrorism are always followed now by candlelit vigils, a minute’s silence, victims’ families/government ministers/emergency services/clergy/imams all clustered together, walls of messages, flags at half-mast.  Instinctively I...

The party of Hillary Clinton has not stopped losing since last November.  This fact is easily overlooked amid all of President Trump’s bad press, but Democrats have reliably come up short in special elections from Montana to Kansas to suburban Atlanta.  Jon Ossoff, the Democrat running in Georgia’s Sixth District, raised over $23 million by...

All immigrants to America demand a good deal of us, some more than others.  Mexican immigrants (and after them the Muslim ones) demand the most. St. Patrick’s Day parades date from the late, prerevolutionary 18th century and have been an American institution ever since as a celebration of Irish history, culture, and cuisine.  Cinco de...

A year ago the op-ed writers who present themselves as tutors to the nation insisted that Donald Trump could not and would not become president.  Progressive pundits were certain of this—after all, they didn’t know anyone who was voting for him.  The Republican wing of the commentariat, however, was equally sure that Trump would fail:...

A visitor to the United States from abroad, ignorant of recent American history, might find himself perplexed by the fact that the further the War Between the States recedes into the past, the larger it looms as the angry obsession of “progressive” Americans—the same people who insist at every turn that the country needs to...

It was said (by Bernard DeVoto?) of America before World War II that it was as if the United States had been tipped to the left and downward, so that, across the rest of the country, whatever was unattached or unsecured slid southwest into California.  Today we might say that the Democratic Party is sliding...

Contrary to what John McCain and others in Washington are saying, North Korea’s nuclear program is not a “Cuban missile crisis in slow motion.”  Nor does tough talk from President Trump mean he’s about to launch preemptive strikes against Kim Jong-un.  Where would be the profit in that?  North Korea is not a cripple like...

It has been seven years since the Democratic members of Congress, ridden herd by their majority leader, Nancy Pelosi, passed the Affordable Care Act, inaccurately nicknamed ObamaCare.  During those years, four things happened: President Obama and his party insisted that the law was proving itself a success, Obama Care developed an increasing number of serious...

It is remarkable how little notice the advent in America of the self-driving car has drawn.  Who would have imagined that mobile, road-obsessed, and by-auto-possessed Americans whose parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents made their prized automobiles the center of their recreational lives and prided themselves on their prowess behind the wheel and their supercharged engines would...

There’s an ancient adage—ancient in terms of our Internet Age, at least: If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.  Do you think Facebook is free?  Take a look at those ads in your Facebook feed, and over on the right-hand side of the page.  Ever wonder why so many of them...

For many decades people—conservatives, especially—have understood the phrase the liberal establishment to mean the social, educational, and economic elite that sits atop the broader community of people who think, act, and vote liberal: the “limousine liberals,” in other words.  “The liberal establishment” meant the liberals at the top of the social hierarchy who dominated their...

In the prison yard, we’re told, men who sexually abuse children are given special attention, and not the favorable kind.  In Euless, Texas, at a public school that bears the unlikely name Trinity, sexual abuse is a celebrated part of the program. In late February, every major newspaper carried the story of Mack Beggs, a...

Throughout the Republican primaries and the 2016 general election, commentators regularly characterized Donald Trump’s campaign as the political equivalent of a reality show.  References to Trump’s leading role on NBC’s The Apprentice were a dime a dozen.  Some on the left, in fact, criticized the 24-hour news networks for providing Trump with the equivalent of...

Donald Trump exploded upon the political scene as a strongly charged individual, not as the head of a faction of the Republican Party or of a movement of his own.  The great question, from the moment he announced his candidacy for the presidency, has been what effect he might have on the party whose candidate...

President Trump’s executive order restricting travel and refugees from seven Islamic countries evoked utter hysteria from the mainstream media, Democrats, some Republicans, and even some church leaders. That it was handed down so abruptly, providing Week One photo and protest ops for leftist demonstrators shouting “f–k Trump,” “not my president,” and “the ban is racist,”...