A stunning new film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s science fiction epic, Dune, recently graced America’s silver screens. The talented Quebecois director Denis Villeneuve has fully utilized modern cinematic technology to bring to life Herbert’s bizarre story of a far-flung neofeudal humanity existing some 20,000 years in the future. Villeneuve’s adaptation of these best-selling science fiction...
A cowboy is scalped and cannibalized by Indians. A villain’s head is stomped from his shoulders into the squat hole of an ancient, grim prison. A beautiful woman is executed with a machine gun blast to the face. Not everyone has the stomach for the violence that abounds in the movies of dissident director S....
That Soviet agents successfully infiltrated the Roosevelt administration is a matter of historical fact. Among others, United States counterintelligence efforts identified Alger Hiss in the State Department and Harry Dexter White at Treasury. As I showed in my book, Stalin’s War (2021), their presence partly explains the administration’s bias toward Soviet interests in Europe and...
Over the last 30 years, especially since the spring of 2020, Critical Race Theory (CRT) and its accompanying obsessions with “whiteness” and “white privilege” has almost overwhelmed discussion about race and racism in Western society. CRT “recognizes that racism is engrained in the fabric and system of the American society,” declares a definition from...
If I were committed to wiping the United States from the face of the earth—and I am not—I might begin with defacing statues and memorials with graffiti. My graffiti would be more literate than most. I imagine the Statue of Liberty’s base with the plaque bearing Emma Lazarus’ poem that begs the ancient world...
Pro-immigration research papers published by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, are not independent, but designed to meet the needs of lobbying clients, according to allegations in a Telegram message obtained by Chronicles. Aman Kapoor, president of the advocacy group Immigration Voice (IV), alleged that Cato Research fellow David Bier was paid by IV...
Peruse left-wing media reports and Twitter trends and one will discover that claims that “Trump won” are labeled as misinformation. Polling numbers, however, show that many Americans hold exactly the opposite view, and think that Biden’s claim to the presidency is questionable. Underlying such contention is the thorny question of who is and who...
The Tale of Joe Biden’s Election Night Spike In the early morning hours of election night, the release of final vote counts was delayed in some battleground states. There were various reasons for the delays, including a suspicious report of a burst water pipe in an Atlanta polling site, but generally the reason given...
Eleven months after the 2020 American presidential election, the official results remain so incongruous, they merit an empirical exegesis. The political establishment’s narrative is that Biden won an unexpectedly close race, and the outcome requires no further examination. Yet, Biden’s victory is so statistically suspicious, so riddled with ahistorical outcomes, that a detailed data examination...
Students and teachers silently gawked up at a television screen showing smoke billowing wildly out of the smoldering ruins of the Twin Towers. A woman held her hand over her mouth, eyes wide and filling with tears as a look of horror overtook her face. I was in a middle school classroom then, but it...
We told ourselves we would never forget. We put bumper stickers bearing that slogan on our cars, we hung flags in front of our homes, and we repeated the names, deeds, and last words of the day’s heroes. We read books and watched movies about what happened. We gave the impression of a people grimly...
Fifty-three years ago, in the fall of 1968, I was among a gaggle of idealistic first-year students sitting in a classroom at the Harvard Law School, where a crusty old professor advised us to study international law. In that discipline, “the dew was still on the grass,” he said. In those days, when many budding...
On May 5, President Joe Biden left out the word “God” in his proclamation on the annual National Day of Prayer. Some critics on the right claimed Biden was the first president in American history to do so. Of course, those detractors fail to mention that the National Day of Prayer commemoration only dates back...
The great Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn understood more clearly than most that the revolutionary spirit born in France was a perpetual revolution, one that would spawn revolutionary movements across the political spectrum and around the globe. During his exile in the West from 1974 to 1994, he recognized that among these new political religions was...
The term “political religion” designates the infusion of political beliefs with religious significance. Political religions involve grand plans to transform society into a new sacral order unrelated to how humans have lived beforehand. Political religions also typically divide people into the righteous and the evil based on whether they conform to its transformational vision. They...
In these troubled times of pandemics, racial conflict, and economic instability, disagreements over American conservatism may not sound particularly important. Yet, when “cancel culture” tactics are being applied to the right, the meaning of conservatism is no longer just an academic talking point. This hostile climate has rekindled robust debate on what exactly conservatism means....
Anyone paying attention knows the American government is broken. Whether we understand the Constitution or not, we know intuitively that something isn’t right. We may grouse generally—“Government spends too much money,” or “Government should be doing X”—but it’s hard even to begin explaining why the system isn’t working. There are several major trends that explain...
We are a nation and people at war with itself. Politically, this war plays out over issues of electoral irregularities, progressive dictates, and the questioning of COVID lockdowns. Yet this division is more than a political divide; it represents a fundamental shift in the character of our people or, rather, our splitting into two separate...
While President Joe Biden was supposed to turn down the temperature and restore normalcy to our political life, rhetoric from those in power increasingly echoes with dark references to “homegrown terrorists” and “extremists” emerging from a process of radicalization. For months after the inauguration, the ruling class maintained Washington, D.C. as a fortress city, complete...
“All politics is on one level sexual politics.” —George Gilder Extremists break out of the margins and take power when they fool opponents into advancing their agenda. By politicizing the family and sexuality, the left duped conservatives, and all of us, into becoming their accomplices. Since last fall’s electoral coup, the United States has been...
In the opening pages of The Future of Christian Marriage, Mark Regnerus notes a troubling truth well known to anyone who has set foot in an institution of higher education in the last several decades. “To talk seriously about marriage today in the scholarly sphere is to speak a foreign language: you tempt annoyance, confusion,...
The right’s failure in 2020’s election may herald the start of a new conservative ascension. But it cannot happen under the current Republican Party leadership. The problem is greater than the Republican-in-Name-Only politicians ignoring the legitimate charges of election-rigging and jumping Trump’s ship. For years, the established conservative political class has looked away from...
The latest election cycle did not deliver happy results for the political right. Our dismay is compounded by the strong impression of an unfair result. Whatever you think of the integrity of last November’s elections, it cannot be denied that in the months prior a great many very big thumbs—Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the...
In January, Donald Trump’s President’s Advisory 1776 Commission released its 45-page “1776 Report,” which, according to The New York Times, is “a sweeping attack on liberal thought and activism that…defends America’s founding against charges that it was tainted by slavery and likens progressivism to fascism.” Joe Biden scrapped it the day he entered office, and...
The New York Times’ “1619 Project” is a series of articles published in 2019 to mark the 400th anniversary of the first enslaved Africans to arrive in America. In an introduction to the series, New York Times Magazine Editor-in-Chief Jake Silverstein claims that slavery “is the country’s very origin.” He writes: Out of slavery—and...
Many years ago, Samuel Francis, that keen critic of American politics and culture, coined the term “anarcho-tyranny” to describe a condition that would seem at least paradoxical, if not self-contradictory. When we think of anarchy, we imagine rioters in the streets, looting, setting fires, and spraying the neighborhood with bullets; Chicago on steroids, beneath...
So many Americans, particularly on the right, have taken Fox News for granted over the past 20 years. It has become a fixture as an alternative to what is known as the mainstream media. In confirmation of the old saying, “You never know what you’ve got til it’s gone,” Fox’s abrupt change during the era of Donald...
And the woman answered him, saying: Of the fruit of the trees that are in paradise we do eat: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of paradise, God hath commanded us that we should not eat; and that we should not touch it, lest perhaps we die. And the...
At first glance, Niccolò Machiavelli’s books The Prince and Discourses on Livy seem at odds. The former is chiefly a revolutionary guide to power, reveling in a ferocious spectacle of violence. The latter is a kind of manuscript on good governance that takes ancient Rome as its subject and model. Machiavelli’s aims in The Prince are at once revolutionary and conservative....
Prominent figures on the intellectual and political right are increasingly questioning the superiority of markets over government. In the cultural realm, that argument has a long history, with traditionalists arguing that market forces undermine morality and cause an ever-increasing vulgarization of culture and society. Libertarians agree that this is true but celebrate the outcomes, or at...
My strongest impression from the United States’ 2020 general election is that the process by which we record and count votes is an unholy mess, wide open to fraud. Counting was suspended for hours without explanation; great tranches of mail-in votes appeared out of nowhere; vote monitors were denied access; and the counting process continued for...
Is the current left Marxist? In a provocative commentary, Bill Lind explores this genealogical question, and, unless I’m mistaken, the left and much of its media opposition would second his conclusions. Since Antifa describes itself as Marxist, when it’s not calling itself anarchist, and since leading figures of the Democratic Party, like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria...
Can a culture celebrate those who want to destroy it and still stand? We are about to find out in this fateful November. Until recently, I thought the word “demonic” no more than a figure of speech. It carried a chill dislodged from religious myth and absorbed into literary aesthetics. As an accessory to prose, I...
A shadow haunts the world. Over the last 75 years it has spread its errors over everything: art, education, music, architecture, manners, morals, and thought itself. What is this colossal Harpy? Cultural Marxism. Commonly known as political correctness or multiculturalism, cultural Marxism is an ideology that serves as a religion among America’s elites. You cannot...
The mythical nation dedicated to a proposition is dying, and rioters, looters, and social justice warriors are playing Dr. Kevorkian. Because the United States has not reached their construct of the purest Platonic form of equality, it must be euthanized to make room for a new empire to rise in its place. It’s fitting that activists,...
Despite an entire world of libertarian activists and theorists operating energetically for more than half a century, the idea of a sustainable libertarian movement never shone brightly until the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, which was marked by a severe financial catastrophe and popular frustration with America’s perpetual wars. For the rising generation faced with...
Where then shall Hope and Fear their Objects find? Must dull Suspence corrupt the stagnant Mind? —Samuel Johnson, “The Vanity of Human Wishes” At the time of writing in late August, the coming U.S. election is hard to call, so that dull Suspence must indeed prevail for a few more weeks. One need not let...
In a speech commemorating the 200th anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing at Plymouth, the great orator Daniel Webster lauded these refugees as the authors of American “civil and religious liberty.” A few decades later, French diplomat and writer Alexis de Tocqueville observed that “Puritanism was not only a religious doctrine, but also at several points it...
At first, it may seem Catholicism contributed little to the American founding. The Founding Fathers were Protestants or deists and had themselves mostly arrived from the formerly Catholic kingdoms of England and Scotland, many as dissenters from the initial dissent of King Henry VIII. They had little obvious sympathy for Catholic doctrine or political thought. Among...
Right-wing critics of Christianity often quote from The Hour of Decision, the last work of a once widely read German historian of philosophy, Oswald Spengler. This short, graphically composed book was published in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler took power in Germany. Although it has never been proven, there is a suspicion that the Nazi government disposed...
Japan feared the Soviets, not the bomb For a generation after the Japanese Instrument of Surrender was signed on Sept. 2, 1945, the standard narrative remained fairly straightforward. By deciding to use nuclear weapons—against Hiroshima on Aug. 6 and on Nagasaki three days later—President Harry Truman enabled the realists in Tokyo, also called the peace faction,...
Marching toward imperialism On Oct. 5, 1946, just over one year after the deployment of two atomic bombs in Japan, Senator Robert A. Taft stood in front of an audience at Kenyon College and excoriated his country for dropping the bombs. In doing so, he issued a devastating critique of the developing disconnect between the pursuit...
Unraveling modern confusion about the decision to drop the atomic bomb. There is still a remarkable amount of confusion about one of the last acts of World War II: the use of the atomic bomb. The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was horrible, but not more so than many other episodes of the war. To keep...
Overwhelming force is war’s only mercy Alan J. Levine must be praised for his courage in discussing the United States’ atomic bombings of Japan without the tears, whining, and pleas for international forgiveness that are now requisite. The “confusion” discussed by the author was, of course, present in 1945, but it is now a largely artificial,...
If there is anything that we should have learned from the 20th century, it is that socialism turned out to be a colossal failure. That was not, however, obvious to large numbers of Americans at the time. Though they might not have bought into full-blown socialism, many 20th-century American intellectuals, economists, and politicians insisted that...
The current moment poses a range of social, political, and economic threats. As the institutions of globalism become exhausted, the time is ripe to marry immigration restriction, economic nationalism, and populism into a potent America First program. Globalism is the ideological superstructure and linchpin of ruling class power. In practical terms, it depends upon the...
Christian distributism celebrates the small and the human. It rests on strong home economies and demands the widest possible distribution and ownership of productive property. It favors worker ownership through cooperatives of necessarily larger machines and enterprises. It seeks and reinforces local communities, bound together by ties of kinship, faith, and trade. It welcomes lifelong,...
Under laissez-faire capitalism, government is limited to armies, which keep foreign bad guys from attacking us; police, to quell local criminals; and courts, to determine guilt and innocence. This is roughly the position of minimal-government libertarians, or minarchists. The foundation of law in this system is the non-aggression principle (NAP). The NAP provides that anyone...
The United States unemployment rate reached nearly 15 percent in April, with more than 40 million people out of work. Despite signs that the economy is getting ready to reopen after its long battering by the coronavirus, more than 20 million people have lost their jobs due to the virus as of the last week...
The scene before our eyes resembled something from a disaster film. Roadblocks, fencing, sanitized police checkpoints, sniper’s nests, vehicles loaded with heavy-duty surveillance equipment darting through the streets as an armored vehicle called The Rook lurched onto the field. An armored track vehicle built on a Caterpillar chassis, The Rook is armed with a hydraulic...