If Madonna were a standard white person, her appearance at the August 2018 MTV Video Music Awards—at which she delivered a rambling, self-referential soliloquy about the influences she’d absorbed from Aretha Franklin while costumed in an alarming getup that might, in Hollywood parlance, be described as “Bride of Frankenstein Meets Ancient Egyptian Concubine”—would have brought...
Let’s conduct a thought experiment. Imagine that you have just landed at New York’s JFK International Airport after a 15-hour flight from Mumbai. Although you splurged for a business-class ticket, the extra-large seat, constant parade of food, and infinite selection of video entertainment didn’t help you forget you were trapped in a steel tube 35,000...
Midway through Billie Holiday’s plaintive 1941 recording of “Jim,” there is a short piano solo barely 25 seconds in length—not even a full 32-bar chorus—by Teddy Wilson. “Jim” is largely forgotten today, but Wilson’s lightly swinging interpretation of the melody is typical of his elegant, rhythmic playing, exemplary for its Swing Era sensibility, and neatly...
Heralding the rise of the daily newspaper in 1831, French poet and politician Alphonse de Lamartine declared journalism would emerge as “the whole of human thought,” but that thought itself “will not have time to ripen, to accumulate into the form of a book.” The book, Lamartine proclaimed, “will arrive too late.” “The only book...
The United States recently came under an attack by an activity so insidious that Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and his Wisconsin colleague Tammy Baldwin joined forces in an effort to demand it be “reined in.” Massachusetts’ Elizabeth Warren, the Senate’s modern-day firebrand who never tires in her perpetual imitation of the maniacal abolitionist John Brown,...
My wife and I obey a simple rule regarding our leisure travel: She makes the plans; I follow them. Since she enjoys researching hotels and locations, and my tastes overlap with hers, we find it easier for her to do all the planning without any inputs or complaints from me. This system has worked well...
Recently I read of a 67-year-old woman who wanted to run in a marathon. She had never run for exercise in her life, but her desire and passion led her to put on a pair of sneakers, leave the house, and walk a mile. Every day she walked through her neighborhood, extending the distance a...
Rafael Palmeiro has ED. How do I know? He told me. He told you, too. Heck, he told the whole country about 15 years ago. He went on national television (while intermittently swinging a big bat—Freudian subtlety is lost on the Madison Avenue types) to say that he was having a bit of trouble with...
Life changed forever for me and my family on June 19, 2015, when tragedy struck suddenly. In the aftermath, I turned to an old mentor. In the ashes of our loss and dismal emptiness, I opened A Grief Observed, by C.S. Lewis. The first line: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like...
Just two days after the alleged April 9 chemical attack in Douma, Syria, TV host Tucker Carlson asked Mississippi Republican Sen. Roger Wicker, “What is the American national security interest that would be served by regime change in Syria?” Wicker responded, “Well, if you care about Israel you have to be interested at least in...
There is a scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 classic North by Northwest in which the characters look out at a brooding Mount Rushmore from the dining-room terrace of the Sheraton-Johnson Hotel in Rapid City, South Dakota (since renamed the Hotel Alex Johnson). There are Lincoln, Jefferson, Washington, and Theodore Roosevelt peering back, and shortly after...
One of the subjects that most self-styled conservatives seem incapable of discussing in any depth—indeed, it is one they often flee from like mice before the hungry house cat—is race. The general feeling always seems to be that anything a prominent conservative might say on the topic—unless he is offering some sort of fearful confirmation...
In the aftermath of the U.S.-led air and missile strikes on Syria for the April incident in which Bashar al-Assad’s government allegedly used chemical weapons against innocent civilians, calls are growing for the Trump administration to deepen U.S. military involvement for the explicit purpose of ousting Assad. Those pundits and politicians who advocate a regime-change...
Facts ruin bad arguments. So let these facts sink in for a minute. According to the FBI, in 2016 murderers using handguns killed 7, 105 Americans. That same year, murderers using any kind of rifle—muzzle-loading, breech-loading, lever-action, bolt-action, or even the left’s dreaded AR-15—killed only 374 Americans. The FBI’s long-term data also reflects this unsurprising...
In March, Americans braced for the nationwide “March for Our Lives,” and what they witnessed was the latest battle in the culture war, with children paraded through the capital as nouveaux Jacobins. “This is the beginning of a revolution,” declared anti-Second Amendment activist David Hogg, a teenage peddler of leftist propaganda who has taken on...
While America’s attention remains focused on the North Korea crisis, another dangerous East Asia confrontation has re-emerged. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is taking new steps to intimidate Taiwan and force the island’s leaders to move toward political reunification with the mainland. The latest measures aim to make it clear to Taiwanese officials and...
Of course it is ludicrous for anyone to consider the government in Washington, D.C., a democracy, no matter how often it is declared to be one. The reason is perfectly obvious: With a population of nearly 330 million people, no nation could have a government with anything resembling a true democracy. Let us consider. With...
Few American objects attract more scorn than the federal Internal Revenue Code. When initially drafted in 1914, it contained 11,400 words, about the length of a long magazine article. Today, the Code weighs in at about four million words, with another six million in supportive regulations. Its garbled syntax is easily ridiculed. Tax attorney Joseph...
This past semester a group of bored yet curious students at my university invited faculty to participate in a lunch-hour debate. When the organizers first contacted me they referenced several of my former students who praised my heretical outspokenness as key to my selection. They hoped I might provoke their classmates into actions more meaningful...
These days, it’s the left that’s pushing states’ rights. And for that we can thank President Trump. As is often the case with America, California is leading the way. First came Calexit, a movement eager to establish a California Utopia, although that was postponed when its organizer, Louis Marinelli, decamped to Russia, his wife’s home. ...
The anti-Brexit hysteria never went away. “How Brexit damaged Britain’s democracy” was the headline of the regular political columnist “Bagehot” in The Economist (March 30). One can hold different views on the value of Brexit—but a referendum is a “threat to democracy”? All subsequent events have pointed to ever-growing economic success. George Osborne’s doom-laden forecasts...
Not content to suffer quietly under a $352 billion state debt, a crumbling post-World War II infrastructure, and a $65 billion unfunded pension liability in its largest city, the state of New York hastened its impending financial devastation this spring by announcing the latest Blue State special: free college tuition. Under its preposterous Excelsior Scholarship...
“It is true that Professor Esolen enjoys academic freedom,” said Madame Lafarge, who now numbers among my former colleagues, “but academic freedom must be used responsibly.” The assembled students, almost all of them from the political left, cheered and clicked their “clickers,” a form of public approbation I had not witnessed or even heard of...
“Make it new!” demanded Ezra Pound. Would he have liked the cover for the outrageous winter 2017 issue of the Sewanee Review, America’s oldest continuously published literary quarterly? It consists of a mustard-yellow ground on which, in addition to the title, in a new font, are scattered six rough parallelograms, blue, as if scissored from...
Healthcare is a problem, and not merely a sociopolitical one. If we are to believe the media pundits, it’s also very much a religious question. Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times berates Paul Ryan for attempting to repeal the Affordable Care Act on the grounds that Ryans’s opposition to ObamaCare is a denial of...
One would expect race-baiting liberals and leftists to try to glorify the “civil-rights movement” and the laws of the early 1960’s, insisting that we view all of it as earth shaking history, more important than the fall of the Roman Empire, the Norman Invasion, the battles of Tours and Lepanto, the Reformation, the American, French,...
The liberal paradigm is dying before our eyes. At twelve midday on March 22, Theresa May announced at Prime Minister’s Questions that she had sent her condolences to the family of Martin McGuinness, who had been the capo di capi of the IRA. She had been preceded at the BBC by a high priest of...
Prof. Akhil Amar of Yale Law School launched a salvo against the Electoral College. In a piece published on December 12 at the website of Time, Amar claimed that the Electoral College has pro-slavery origins. James Madison preferred it to a nationwide popular vote because he wanted Southern slaves to count in the tally of...
What’s with Pope Francis? What has been his effect on the Church? To understand the situation we need to look at secular culture, the state of the Church, and Francis himself. Public culture today is atheistic. It excludes God, natural law, and higher goods; bases morality on individual preferences; and views reason as a way...
“Is it time to reread Brave New World?” asks the distinguished historian Anthony Beevor, in a recent article on Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election. I think it is. Of the two great fictional casts into the future, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Huxley’s imaginative prophecies...
Women’s sports lurch upon a troubled foundation. To throw like a girl is to fail on the grounds of athleticism, and not to throw like a girl is to fail on the grounds of girlism. Worse, the quest for equality cannot reconcile its dogmatic ideal with how its professed adherents live out their faith. If...
One symptom of decline and confusion at the end of an age is the prevalent misuse of terms, of designations that have been losing their meanings and are thus no longer real. One such term is public opinion. Used still by political thinkers, newspapers, articles, institutes, research centers, college and university courses and their professors,...
The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) has over 15 million members. With over 46,000 churches, they are present in all 50 states (as well as several foreign countries). It is the largest Protestant denomination in the United States. Nonetheless, for nine straight years, the SBC has reported a net loss of membership. Last summer, the SBC...
A subplot of the 2016 presidential campaign was the Green Party’s ability, for the second time in the 21st century, to achieve balance of power in a close race won by a Republican. Physician Jill Stein, 66, earned 1.4 million votes, or one percent—a miniscule amount, but more than the difference between Republican Donald Trump...
In the Winter 2015/2016 issue of the Claremont Review of Books, William Voegeli argues, Conservatives have been firing shots across the bow of higher education for years, but the Ship of Fools has never turned back, or changed course. It’s time either to surrender or to shoot a round into the engine room. While the...
Just after 6 p.m. on Super Bowl Sunday, February 7, 2016, a tuxedo-clad Alex Smith sat alone on stage at a grand piano near the 50-yard line in Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, set to accompany Lady Gaga as she sang the National Anthem to introduce the championship game between the Carolina Panthers and...
I recently attended a rock concert where the headline act—an artful blend of political correctness and antic comedy dressed in a leopard-skin overcoat under a silver wig—lectured us at some length on the need to respect women. His remarks were repeated at intervals throughout the performance, and at one point were illustrated by images of...
Do great men make history? Or does history make great men? One thing’s for sure: History sometimes smothers great men, as Thomas Gray suggests in his famous elegy written in a country churchyard, and as the rows of endless graves from Arlington to the Somme demonstrate with brutal candor. “Some mute inglorious Milton here may...
President and five-star Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower said that a man must “believe in his luck” in order to lead. Jeff Sessions is such a man. He has not only survived multiple setbacks, considered career ending by many, but has consistently come out ahead. Most recently, his early and conspicuously vocal endorsement of Donald Trump...
Colin Kaepernick, the former star quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, made the decision during the 2016 NFL preseason to kneel during the playing of the National Anthem. Other athletes quickly followed suit, some by kneeling, others by raising a fist to protest “racial injustice” in America. Outrage predictably followed, with opinion polls suggesting that...
In the United States, the forces of the cultural left have been particularly aggressive in seeking to diminish the influence of our Christian heritage on American society. The Obama administration has led the campaign for the complete separation of religion from the public square. It has used executive orders, regulatory rule-making authority, and the bully...
During the late 1950’s, Terry J. Kohler was a jet pilot with the U.S. Air Force, flying T-33 fighters and B-47 bombers with the Strategic Air Command. Like most others of that tribe whom I have met, the experience gave him an almost startling directness of manner. On meeting him, you quickly became aware of...
Is the composition of the Supreme Court the be-all and end-all of important societal conflicts? Are there effective ways that conservatives can address these conflicts—manifest in political battles over such things as affirmative action—apart from the Court? The Supreme Court’s decision in Fisher v. University of Texas, handed down on June 23, means affirmative action...
“For there is no longer Jew nor Greek, neither free man nor slave, neither man nor woman,” says Pseudo-Paul, the apostle to the Americans, “but all are equal in Christ Jesus.” He has been studying his Pseudo-John, wherein the risen Lord says to Peter, “I have been praying for you, Simon, that you might strengthen...
The U.S. media establishment has been up to its usual occupation during a presidential season: harrumphing, growling, tut-tutting at the idea of putting a non-“mainstream candidate”—someone other than a liberal Democrat, that is—in charge of anything more consequential, in Washington terms, than an armchair at the Commerce Department (if that). However, this year, with Donald...
In the winter of 1987-88, Sen. Dan Quayle of Indiana decided that he wanted the VP spot on the Republican ticket as the most “conservative” candidate. He started his quiet campaign by running the idea by my boss, Sen. Jesse Helms. After all, if Jesse wouldn’t support him, it would have been pointless to go...
The blind poet Milton, praying for divine inspiration, tells us what he misses most since losing his sight: Thus with the year Seasons return, but not to me returns Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn, Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer’s rose, Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine. The...
Come November, Donald Trump may go down in flames. Or he might continue to surprise and astonish us. But the Trump children, regardless of whether their father is ever again allowed in GOP polite company, are another matter. The display of warm affection for their father during the Republican National Convention was not merely for...
A few things can be said with certainty of the BBC’s Call the Midwife: None of those babies are swaddled tightly enough. Car births aren’t the greatest, but I’ve seen worse than the one in Season Four. And if Sister Evangelina doesn’t know why Sister Monica Joan paired the ass and the angel in her...
President Obama is keeping his promise of “fundamentally transforming” the nation, especially when it comes to the military. Women have been voluntarily serving in the Army officially since 1901, but today, with new policies being introduced at a rapid pace, the modern major generals in the Pentagon are changing the nature of combat units. To...