Category: Editorials

The New Year is in full swing, and with it new laws and regulations carefully designed to enrich the lives of Americans who are insane. Because the essence of our approach to life together in our degenerate age is that, for every problem humanoids may encounter, there is a potential law that could solve it,...

The nation held its breath in mid-December when GOP candidate Donald Trump dared to suggest that, in the wake of an ISIS/ISIL/IS/Caliphate/Daesh-related terrorist attack on U.S. soil, all Muslim immigration should be halted, until “Congress can figure out what the hell is going on.” When the press finally exhaled, it started screaming and hollering, pausing...

National Review celebrated its 60th anniversary last November.  Its founder, William F. Buckley, Jr., would have been days away from turning 90.  He is all over the anniversary issue, in a somewhat exploitive way—many photographs and reminders of his celebrity status, including an image of the brand of peanut butter he endorsed.  Indeed, just as...

Immediately following the jihadist bombings in Paris, President François Hollande announced that he was declaring a three-month national state of emergency, closing the French borders, and treating the attacks as “an act of war.”  Two nights later French planes began attacking ISIS in Syria, and two days after that Hollande and Vladimir Putin agreed to...

Unlike Osama bin Laden, who chose to launch his attack on the United States on September 11, 2001, as a symbolic reversal of the Ottoman defeat at the Battle of Vienna on that date in 1683, Syed Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, prosecuted their jihad in San Bernardino because that is where they lived...

David A. Hartman passed from this life on November 24, at the age of 79.  Though it has been some time since his writing appeared in these pages, Mr. Hartman’s influence will be felt as long as Chronicles remains in print.  As his close friend, collaborator, and fellow board member Tom Pauken rightly noted in...

The media and the hand-wringing politicians who are dancing on the grave of the career of Columbia, South Carolina, School Resource Officer Ben Fields are pulling a fast one.  They claim that, because “black lives matter,” the young woman who refused to relinquish her smartphone and leave math class at Spring Valley High School should...

The New York Times and Pat Buchanan warn that the United States is being drawn into the Syrian civil war, now a regional conflict.  President Obama is allowing himself to be pressed by Hillary Clinton, Gen. David Petraeus, John McCain, and other hawks who wish the United States to impose a no-fly zone and a...

Move over, Ashley Madison—there’s a new scandal in town.  At least, that’s what the media is desperate to have you believe. In late October, the “hacktivist” group Anonymous, usually referred to oxymoronically as a “collective” of anarchists, announced that they had obtained the membership rolls of several Ku Klux Klan organizations.  They planned to release...

Planned Parenthood Dominatrix Cecile Richards sat defiantly before a congressional panel on September 29, making little effort to conceal her disgust at the perfunctory speeches made in front of her.  She exuded a fierce confidence that dwarfed the resolve of her Republican opponents, presaging the House’s passage the very next day of a gutted stopgap...

Americans invented modern advertising, publicity, and celebrity, three dubious accomplishments of Homo sapiens rapidly adopted by the rest of the world.  St. John Paul II was the first pope to recognize its immense power and put it to work, but it has been left to Pope Francis to perfect the papal technique.  In this sense,...

After decades of massacres on the school grounds of America, theories advanced to explain them come down to two: the ready availability of guns in this country, and the number of “angry white males” among student bodies (though in the case of the Virginia Tech killer, the perpetrator was Asian).  These explanations fit nicely into...

On June 25, one day before the U.S. Supreme Court declared that a man can marry a man and a woman can marry a woman, the Washington Post published an op-ed by Louise Melling, the deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union.  Miss Melling’s announcement that the ACLU would no longer support the...

When Summer of Blood 2015 came to a close, 3,702 people had been killed in the United States by people wielding guns.  That’s according to a website called Mass Shooting Tracker, a left-wing “crowdsourced” collective dedicated to reporting every single incident of “gun violence” and to using phrases like “gun violence” and “killed by guns.” ...

Ashley Madison, the adultery website seemingly named for Honey Boo Boo’s fiercest rival, unwillingly yielded all of her secrets to the prying eyes of a hacker group that calls itself The Impact Team.  At midsummer, the Team informed Ashley Madison’s parent company, Avid Life Media, that they would release all of the immoral website’s data—“all...

When the king of Poland, Jan Sobieski, defeated the Ottoman army at the Siege of Vienna in 1683, that army of 23,000 soldiers did not have scores or hundreds of thousands of hungry and desperate civilians at its back, hoping to find a new life in Europe.  The Ottomans were attempting a military invasion of...

On the last day of August, Judge Richard J. Leon of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia found for March for Life in its suit against the Department of Health and Human Services, among other agencies.  March for Life is a secular, nonprofit organization, founded after Roe v. Wade, that opposes abortion...

In late July, scores of conservative websites erupted with some variant of this headline from Breitbart: “Obama’s Secret Plan to Block Seniors on Social Security from Owning Guns.”  There were only three problems: The plan isn’t secret; it doesn’t affect all senior citizens on Social Security (and, conversely, it will affect some on Social Security...

Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez, who shot five American military personnel to death at the Armed Forces Career Center in Chattanooga on July 16 and was subsequently killed in a firefight with the police, became a naturalized American citizen while still a minor, seven years after his parents immigrated to the United States in 1996.  According to...

The strongest parts of Laudato Si’, the latest papal encyclical, are the first sections of Chapter Three, “The Human Roots of the Ecological Crisis,” where Pope Francis addresses the quest for limitless power that has been the dominant ambition of the Western world since the Renaissance: power over nature, and—since, as he points out, humanity...

The release of Pope Francis’s second encyclical (and the first that can truly be called his alone, since Lumen fidei was essentially cowritten with his predecessor, Benedict XVI) was anticlimactic.  By the time the final text was released on June 18, there seemed hardly any point in reading it, since FOX News and Rush Limbaugh...

As everyone in America knows, on the night of June 17 Dylann Roof, armed with a .45 Glock, slaughtered nine black men and women in Charleston’s historic Emanuel AME church.  Well before Roof was apprehended the following day, the mediasphere went ballistic.  Hoping to start a “race war,” Roof generated instead what the Rev. Rep....

In the midst of the uproar over the Confederate Battle Flag (America’s latest Two Minute Hate), an odd rumor began making the rounds on the internet.  As far as I can tell, it began on InfoWars, the website of crank conspiracy theorist and talk-show host Alex Jones.  As companies like eBay and Amazon began pulling...

Same-sex marriage still does not exist. Yes, the Supreme Court of the United States issued an opinion, 5-4, covering Obergefell v. Hodges and three other cases, which effectively makes “same-sex marriage” the law of the land.  But five “justices” or 50 million Facebook “likes” cannot change what is woven into the fabric of creation. Of...

The Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia enjoyed a full 24 hours of resurgent infamy before Gay Day came and took it all away. Screaming and shrieking throughout the process was the puerile, facile, and ultimately Manichaean Weltanschauung of our ruling class, which is best summarized in the phrase, “We are on the...

June was a depressing month for genuine conservatives.  Apart from the Supremes putting their stamp of approval on ObamaCare, the horrifying murders of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, unleashed a jihad against the Confederate Battle Flag (Beltway “conservatives” piled on in support of the jihadists), while a majority of the robed Politburo found...

The United States has Mexico, and below her Central America, south of the border.  In ¡Adios, America!, Ann Coulter claims that 30 percent of the Mexican population, today over 122 million people, has moved to the United States within the past several decades.  Directly south of the European Continent lies the continent of Africa, population...

From the welter of democratic hysteria, illogic, historical ignorance, and political self-positioning and posturing, the eminently sensible remark by Tate Reeves, lieutenant governor of Mississippi, regarding the public display of the Confederate Battle Flag stands like a stone wall above the general confusion.  “Flags and emblems,” Mr. Reeves said, “are chosen by a group of...

Several weeks ago I finished reading (studying, actually) David Bromwich’s The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: From the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence.  A detailed and painstaking analysis of Burke’s writings and speeches and perhaps the best single work on Burke I’ve ever read.  (Volume II to follow in time.) Having watched the Masterpiece...

We are all children of the Revolution.  Wherever we look, in the office or at church, whatever professions we examine or traditions we cherish, we are hard pressed to discover a single significant aspect of human experience that has not been transformed by a perpetual revolution that has inverted all the ancient truths and turned...

President Bush’s nomination of Judge John Roberts to the U.S. Supreme Court has caused something just a little short of panic on the left.  The day after the announcement, the New York Times told its readers that Roberts and his wife, Jane Sullivan Roberts, are “devout Catholics.”  The following day, a front-page headline proclaimed that...

President Bush wants to do for churches and Christian charities what the Department of Education has done for pubUc schools; Attach them so firmly to the teat of big government that it would be impossible to unlatch them without financially crippling them. The funny thing is, this does not appear to be a concern for...

The death of a social movement is an instructive and sobering phenomenon. After years of greatness and influence, an idea eventually sickens and dies, until its adherents are reduced to a pathetic handful. Somewhere in history, there must have lived the last Albigensian, the last Ranter, the last native practitioner of ancient Egyptian religion. Somewhere...

Every Aprilsince1981theAmericanSocietyof journalists and Authors sponsors an “I Read Banned Books” campaign. Theyroutinelytrotoutcopiesofchildren’sbookslikeAlicein Wonderland or Maty Poppins and modern classics like Ulysses—all of which have been censored by somebody somewhere. One of them inevitably quotes Jefferson ontolerating”errorofopinion,”andsomeprofessionallibrarianis suretowarnusthatiftheprudeshavetheirway,theywillsoon be removing copies of Shakespeare and the Bible from the library shelves. This year the New York...

This issue brings together a number of discussions of man’s place in nature. Stephen R. L. Clark, Tibor Machan, and jay Mechling explore the implications of the animal rights movement. Debating the “moral status of animals” (to borrow one of Prof. Clark’s titles) is interesting not so much for what it reveals about beasts as...

Leopold Tyrmand founded Chronicles in 1977 to provide a conservative and “value-oriented criticism” of arts and letters, morals and manners. From the very first, Tyrmand’s Chronicles exposed the pretentions of the radical chic culture and subjected the permissive, “anything goes” world view of liberalism to an eloquent and withering scorn. Under his editorship, the magazine...

“Fuimus Troes, fuit Ilium et ingens Gloria Teucrorum. “ (We once were Trojans, there once was Troy, and the vast glory of the Teucrian race.) -Vergil   Peter Ackroyd: T. S. Eliot: A Life; Simon & Schuster; New York. “Ackroyd’s is the most comprehensive full-length critical biography we have of this almost talismanic figure of literary...

Science Fiction in America, 1870’s-1930’s: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary Sources by Thomas D. Clareson; Greenwood Press; Westport, CT. Although the first entry is Flatland and the final is Zamitan’s We, the second and the penultimate are more telling: number two, The Man With the Broken Ear, includes a character who believes that “humans are...