Category: Editorials

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

The pro-life movement has made great strides in recent years, though many people who consider themselves active pro-lifers may not realize it.  That’s because the good news has all happened at the state and local levels.  State laws combining health-code restrictions on abortuaries with reasonable waiting periods and required ultrasounds have given local pregnancy-care centers,...

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,”...

When people compare politics to sports, they do not mean the comparison to be flattering.  Voters, we are told, treat politics as irrationally as sports fans do football, baseball, basketball, and hockey.  (The less said about soccer, the better—a good principle for life in general.)  In this analogy, the Democratic and Republican parties are the...

The only way the American political class will ever accommodate itself to the reality of post-Soviet Russia would be if that country succumbed to the second leftist revolution it has been trying for years to incite.  Whether the revolutionaries called themselves communists or “liberal democrats” would make little or no difference so long as the...

Gilbert & Sullivan’s enduring operetta The Mikado is funny because it skewers Victorian British society by allowing us to laugh at the absurdities of the fictive Japanese town of Titipu, where flirting is a capital offense, according to the autocratic rule of the emperor (Mikado).  Nanki-Poo loves Yum-Yum, who is pledged to Lord High Executioner...

“Crony capitalism” is the new buzzphrase, now that Donald Trump is cutting deals to keep jobs in the United States.  When previous presidents cut deals to allow companies to build new factories in Mexico and overseas while shutting down factories here, no one called it crony capitalism, even though it was; we called those deals...

In the immediate aftermath of their drubbing on November 8, and following Hillary Clinton’s career-ending injury, the Democrats faced the question every rebuilding team faces: Who is the quarterback of the future? DNC interim chairperson Donna Brazile is not the answer.  She’s still undergoing the concussion protocol, after a helmet-to-helmet collision with WikiLeaks in October,...

The country is near unanimous in feeling that the elections of 2016 were unique in American history.  Some say for the unlikability of the two principal candidates; others, for the rhetorical violence and vitriol on all sides.  Still others cite the general volatility of the political year from its beginnings, in its wide swings left...

Christmas is a time of wonder, when the best and the worst of our sputtering culture is on display.  For every magnificent four-part rendition of Stille Nacht, we seem destined to endure umpteen episodes of godless grinches screaming about tolerance and diversity in order to keep authentic Christmas symbols out of the public square during...

Whichever candidate wins the presidency on November 8 (this issue went to press on November 2), the American political establishment—the Democratic and Republican parties combined as America Consolidated—will have decisively lost the presidential elections.  That is the meaning of the director of the FBI’s public decision to reconsider the agency’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email...

On September 22, a giant of Catholic journalism died—and genuine Catholic journalism might well have died with him. Paul Likoudis was a crack reporter for The Wanderer, America’s oldest national Catholic newspaper—founded in 1867, published in German until 1954, and banned by Hitler in the 1930’s. Likoudis joined the paper in 1986 and immediately began...

British marriage is on the rocks.  No, this is not a press release from James Dobson.  Rather, it is the consensus of the entire media establishment of the U.K.  What is harming the most fundamental institution in the history of humanity—the very basis of civil society? Is it divorce, infidelity, loss of faith, pornography, drugs,...

People whose families did not arrive in America yesterday or the day before yesterday are likely to discover, some time or another, among their parents’ and grandparents’ effects small, faded campaign buttons advocating Coolidge for President, or FDR, and later larger and more elaborate buttons promoting Eisenhower-Nixon, or Stevenson-Kefauver, Kennedy-Johnson, Goldwater-Miller, Reagan-Bush, and perhaps Clinton-Gore. ...

Phyllis Schlafly, in the spring of 1973, squared off in debate at Illinois State University against archfeminist Betty Friedan.  The subject was the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, at the time just a few states short of ratification.  Those were the years when feminists went out of their way to look bad: frumpy clothes;...

Donald Trump’s surprise visit to Mexico on August 31 has been analyzed every which way, except for one—the one that may, in the long run, prove most important.  While every journalist and political pundit felt compelled to speculate on what Trump hoped to gain from the visit, and whether it would help or hurt him,...

Liberals say they believe in democracy, meaning government that represents and listens to the people whose instrument it is supposed to be.  Yet democratic governments today clearly do not listen to the people, if “listening” means trying to understand what they have to say. The most obvious current example of Western politicians’ willful deafness to,...

A vast, under-populated Western country.  A densely populated neighboring one and member of the quasi-Third World immediately south of the border.  Human labor in demand in the north, an overabundance of it in the south.  A lazy, somewhat dissipated and decadent, aging northern population facing an energetic, youthful, and entrepreneurial one southward across a riverine...

Starting January 1, every abortion clinic in Illinois will be required to refer those who come seeking its services to one of the many nonprofit pregnancy-care centers in the state, established to help pregnant women understand that there are alternatives to abortion, and to provide those alternatives.  Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner signed the bill into...

The Southern Baptist Convention finally had its Appomattox, surrendering the flag of its ancestors at its annual meeting of messengers (representative delegates) held in mid-June in St. Louis.  Reportedly, an overwhelming majority of messengers voted in favor of Resolution 7, in which they determined to “call our brothers and sisters in Christ to discontinue the...

The tenor—and temper—of the debate leading up to the British referendum on the United Kingdom’s continued membership in the European Union on June 23 hardly suggested the rhetorical and emotional violence of the response by the proponents of Remain to their substantial defeat by a margin of 52 to 48—a figure some of them pounced...

In every presidential election since 1992, complaints about subpar Republican candidates (George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney: The names speak for themselves) have been met with a common refrain: This is the most important election in our lifetime, because of the Supreme Court!  Hold your nose and vote for...

For four decades now, pro-life voters have been wedded to the national Republican Party by the vows of politicians whose actions, upon election, have proved that they had no intention ever of fulfilling them.  Every two or four or six years, they would swear to defend the lives of the unborn, and then, after taking...

One of the ways in which Bill Clinton presented himself as a “New Democrat” was his insistence that he wanted abortion to be “safe, legal, and rare.”  Twenty-four years after Clinton’s election to the presidency, the national Democratic Party has given up any attempt to claim that they believe abortion is anything other than a...

A frequent English correspondent from Stratford-upon-Avon who contributes regularly to this magazine wrote recently to express the frustration mockers of Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Wall have been causing him.  Hadrian’s Wall, he pointed out, begun in a.d. 122 by the Roman Emperor Hadrian to keep the Picts and other barbarians from invading England from the...

A substitute teacher in a public school in what is, by today’s standards, still a relatively socially conservative part of the country uses “an anatomical word during a teaching lesson.”  She is fired, and the story goes viral. Just another battle in the never-ending culture war, right?  Yes—but not in the way you might think....

Well, shootfire: That didn’t work. U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) is against requiring women to register for Selective Service in our Brave New Military.  Accordingly, he proposed an amendment to the 2017 defense-spending bill that accomplishes the opposite of what he believes. The idea, Hunter claimed, was that he didn’t want the executive branch to...

To the extent that a man may be judged by his enemies, Donald Trump is a very good man, indeed.  And the more extended and successful his campaign becomes, the more it proves that everything he has ever said about the conjoined political and media establishments in America is spot on, beginning with his charge...