I have been receiving so many requests lately for lifestyle advice, tips on public relations and media etiquette (not to mention recommendations about health and beauty maintenance), that I just haven’t been able to keep up with them all. And let’s face it, it’s pretty obvious why so many people ask me. That’s why there’s...
The late and great Sam Francis famously described the Republicans as the “Stupid Party,” pointing out that its leaders were always shooting themselves in the foot or chickening out and defeating their own declared positions. Actually, although in general not terribly bright, Republican leaders are smart enough to take care of their own power and...
This summer’s border crisis—the near total collapse of any controls or security at our southern border, especially in South Texas—was manufactured by the Obama administration as a means of forcing through a mass amnesty, either via Congress or by executive fiat. Legalizing millions of illegal aliens now resident in these United States is the immediate...
Amid the disasters happening in America today, there’s some excellent news. Homeschooling has won a solid place among roughly 1.5 million children and is mostly protected by law. It has become a refuge for families sick of their local public schools and the many copycat private and parochial schools. Even where decent private and parochial...
If a man breaks into your house while you and your family are sleeping, intending to steal your things, and you catch him, you have the right to shoot him dead. Seems simple, no? Everyone but a grasshopper-worshiping Hindu would agree, wouldn’t he? After all, “A man’s home is his castle.” Clearly, that widely accepted...
Much of the blame for the deplorable state of higher education in America today must be traced back to the baneful influence of America’s most revolutionary educationist, John Dewey. In his enormously influential Democracy and Education (1915), Dewey defined education as “a freeing of individual capacity in a progressive growth directed to social aims.” In...
It wasn’t supposed to end like this. We were all going to “get along” in a diverse, multicultural paradise, led by our brilliant universities. But in a pattern sure to spread across America, the ethnic strife in California is increasing, not decreasing, as the state becomes even more diverse. And public universities are at the...
On June 2, FOX News’s The Five were discussing the Harvard commencement speech of ex-mayor Michael Bloomberg, in which he pointed out that something like 95 percent of the faculty had supported Obama. Their discussion ended with Bob Beckel, the program’s voice from the left, wondering why so few conservatives went into college teaching, and...
Texas attorney general and gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbot committed what is commonly called a political gaffe earlier this year when he said what every thinking person this side of the Rio Grande already knew: Mass immigration from Mexico means the importation of Mexican corruption and the steady erosion of law and social trust that too...
The modern world abounds in modern heresies. One might say that modernity itself is a heresy—modernity understood in the broadest possible terms as the antithesis of the traditional: the fundamental distinction, as Claude Polin recently argued in this magazine, overlying all subordinate political and cultural oppositions, beginning with liberalism and conservatism, right and left. Modern...
For years, the media and Hollywood have sent the message that anyone who wants to be fashionable should eschew American products and buy foreign ones. Recently, Mike Rowe, the host of Dirty Jobs, put a different message on Facebook: “If you want to live in a country that builds things, you have to buy things...
I once sat on the honors orals of an economics major who had applied a standard mathematical model to immigration. The mathematics and data collection were well done, but the thesis was premised on the assumption we can understand immigration by analyzing a sufficiently large sample of economic data with a reputable mathematical model. Were...
History may be a series of more or less contingent events, whose only connection to the preceding or following ones is that men react to what others do. Such events are basically disjointed because each one depends on the more or less unpredictable behavior of those men who are able to attract enough followers to...
No admirer of George F. Kennan’s should be surprised by the angry tone of the reviews his recently published Diaries has been receiving. Of the several I have read, in the British as well as the American press, all were, to some extent or another, willfully unsympathetic. That is only to have been expected, Kennan...
There is a disturbing pattern over the decades in Washington’s negotiations with countries deemed to be adversaries. It is a tendency to adopt a rigid stance marked by unrealistic demands that make achieving a settlement virtually impossible. Often, harsh economic sanctions against the target country reinforce the provocative diplomatic posture. Most recently, that conduct has...
William Ball was just shy of 19 and living in the town of Souris on the prairies of Canada when war erupted in Europe in August 1914. The region was still something of a frontier, devoted to trapping and trading with Indians, and inhabited by hearty, adventurous types, Ball among them. On a bet, he...
Is the development of the modern sciences and related technologies a good or a bad thing? The question is by no means a recent one. Not only was it raised at the inception of such development by its very promoters, like the humanist Rabelais, but it dates back to the beginnings of Western civilization, since...
At a recent dinner party someone remarked that the two secure careers remaining in America are business and science. There are also education and academia, but since both have been for several decades now radically inhospitable to anyone to the right of Howard Dean, no one thought it necessary to mention them. I thought at...
My first face-to-face interview with Krista took place on a Friday afternoon in a local coffee shop. We had “chatted” several times on Facebook, and since she lived in my area I suggested that we talk in “real” time. I explained that I was gathering material on how the proliferation of social media was reshaping...
Tanks make good pictures—the idea of an invasion of Ukraine sends shivers down the spines of most of Europe—and keeping the tanks at bay is what the political class is expected, indeed offers, to do. The price, however, will be for nations to surrender just about everything else. And that price is now about to...
Andrew Crocker did not attend his graduation exercises at Michigan State University in East Lansing on May 2. He was home dealing with family matters. So he missed the honorary doctorates. Shirley Weis, a graduate of MSU’s College of Nursing, received a doctorate of Science as the first woman and first non-physician to serve as...
Is the past really a foreign country? Did they do things so differently then? Or is it that the past isn’t dead after all—and isn’t even past? In Washington, it is always 1939. But the Crimea isn’t the Sudetenland, and Vladimir Putin isn’t Hitler. No Blitzkrieg threatens Europe, or even Kiev. Then it’s the 1950’s,...
Liberalism’s Glorious Age of parliamentary democracy, nation building and national consolidation, free trade, and empire, of which Great Britain was the chief power and paramount symbol, reached a catastrophic close in 1914. After 1945, liberalism in renovated form attempted to launch a modern Glorious Age dominated by the Pax Americana and the United Nations and...
The recent Brown Revolution in Ukraine, which saw the overthrow of the legitimate (if corrupt and bumbling) Yanukovych government, is a triumph of Western Ukrainian nationalism—an ideology characterized by a violent Russophobia and antisemitism. The rabid neo-Nazis of Oleh Tyahnybok’s Svoboda (“Freedom”) party and Dmytro Yarosh’s militant Right Sector are just the latest manifestation of...
On January 1, something like 20,000 people marched by torchlight through the center of Kiev to celebrate the 105th anniversary of the birth of the Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera. Some of the older participants even wore their old uniforms from the Ukrainian National Army. In Western Ukraine, Bandera is regarded as the founder of...
Bruno Gentili passed away in Rome on January 8. He was Italy’s most distinguished scholar of ancient Greek language and literature. His contributions ranged from composing a popular textbook of Greek lyric poetry and the basic introduction to Greek meter for Italy’s classical high schools to editing scholarly editions of the texts of the Greek...
A French writer argues that “humanity” has become the accepted “version of the universal” in contemporary Western thought, functioning as the “action” of modern democratic polity. While Pierre Manent’s thesis is a convincing one, political and social occurrences in the past decade seem to indicate that the West’s humanitarian “version” is becoming discredited at an...
When speaking to Moses on Mount Sinai, Jehovah gave explicit instructions on the Year of Jubilee. Once the people came into the Promised Land, every 50 years they were to observe the Jubilee. Loans were to be written off, slaves freed, and land that had been sold returned to the original owner. Those who had...
In the spring of 1981, conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives cried. They cried because, in the first flush of the Reagan Revolution that was supposed to bring drastic cuts in taxes and government spending, as well as a balanced budget, they were being asked by the White House and their own leadership to...
When I was growing up in England 50 years ago, the newspapers still periodically caused a certain amount of mirth by “outing” a national figure as not some impeccably Eton-reared patrician, as his public image seemed to imply, but a horny-handed son of the soil who had gone to the local state school and taken...
Last May, Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, two Muslim converts, both Christian apostates, deliberately ran down an off-duty British soldier, Lee Rigby, in their automobile on a main street in the London suburb of Woolwich. In front of eyewitnesses, they then repeatedly stabbed him and tried to behead him with a machete. Their trial and...
I’ve no more desire than the next Anglophile with a framed colored engraving of the queen-empress on his office wall to pull down the aristocracy; to take away their estates and paintings and seats in the Lords and ancient Rollses resting on blocks in stables where the racing stud used to breed. And yet I...
Paradoxically, Westerners of every faith and political opinion seem perennially unhappy with Western society, despite the West’s assurance that it is the best, most fair, most free, most enlightened, and most humane way of life in human history. The left faults Western institutions because they seem to it insufficiently fair and progressive, too much influenced...
Fifty years ago James Burnham warned Westerners: Trying to come to terms with communism instead of resolutely fighting it amounts to committing suicide. Whether the communist ideology is dead or still alive under a new guise remains, in spite of current opinion, an open question, but in any case only the blind or the deceitful...
“Today is the beginning of the liberation from the European elite, the monster in Brussels.” These are strong words. But they are not surprising coming from Geert Wilders, the leader of the Dutch Party for Freedom and a man known for his rhetorical flourishes. He was speaking at a joint press conference with Marine Le...
The elegant duplex maisonette at 73 East 73rd Street in Manhattan, formerly the residence of the late Mr. and Mrs. William F. Buckley, Jr., was recently bought by Mr. and Mrs. Mark Rockefeller, son and daughter-in-law of the late Gov. Nelson Rockefeller. A writer for the New York Times, describing the architectural and decorative renovations...
“It’s awesome”: A young relative of mine loves the word and uses it profusely. Since she applies it to a restaurant or a vacuum cleaner she finds extraordinary, I doubt she realizes its real meaning. This is a typical instance of the degeneracy of a word caused by the search for quick superlatives, and mainly...
“Hell,” as Thomas Hobbes astutely noted several centuries ago, “is truth glimpsed too late.” As in the case of Barack H. Obama, self-anointed messiah? I should certainly imagine so. By the end of the first year of Obama’s second term, a majority of Americans had pretty much caught on to their President’s unmatched gift for...
“[W]e may expect,” Sigmund Freud wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents, first published in 1930, “that one day someone will venture upon . . . research into the pathology of civilized communities.” This statement directly follows Freud’s suggestion that, if it is true that the evolution of a civilization proceeds similarly to that of an...
“And the next speaker is . . . ,” the chairman pauses as she runs her eyes down a long handwritten list, “the Anti-Defamation League for Yoga and Spiritual Movements followed by ‘Istiqbolli Avlod’ Youth Information-Enlightening Center, Tashkent Branch.” Sitting around a vast table, representatives of 57 states listen to a lady with bottle-blonde hair...
[What follows is a meditation on T.S. Eliot’s poem “Little Gidding.” All indented quotations, with apologies to their author, are taken from Eliot.] What we call the beginning is often the end And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from . . . The first step,...
And Jesus answering said unto them, Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost . . . On February 28, as Pope Benedict...
“Even if you don’t have the authorities—and frankly I didn’t have the authorities for anything—if you take charge people will follow.” So said Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson, Jr., former CEO of Goldman Sachs, to the Washington Post on November 19, 2008, just about two months after TARP (the Troubled Asset Relief Program) passed through...
Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s widow is no longer calling herself “Karima Tsarnaeva.” She is Katherine Russell again. Karima/Katherine is reportedly drifting away from the way of life she accepted when she converted to Islam and married the Boston Bomber, the terrorist killed by police last April following the bombings that left three dead and wounded as many...
“Teachers who teach Western education? We will kill them! We will kill them in front of their students and tell the students to henceforth [sic] study the Koran,” declared Abubakar Shekau, leader of the Nigerian Islamist group Boko Haram, which killed 46 students in a boarding school on July 6 (Time, July 19). Willingly or...
Attacks on constitutional liberties, including the erosion of due-process protections for the rights to life, liberty, and property, tend to soar in wartime. The most egregious assaults have occurred during the Civil War, the two world wars, and, most recently, in the so-called War on Terror. Courageous individuals spoke out against the abuses during and...
A reader not of the Faith who happened, since the installation of Pope Francis, to glance through almost any issue of L’Osservatore Romano, Vatican City’s official newspaper, might well conclude that the conclave that met in the Sistine Chapel last spring elected a social worker instead of a cardinal as the successor to Benedict XVI. ...
Only a few weeks into the latest round of horrors in Syria, we are getting used to the debasement of “intelligence” to serve the crudest political ends. In September, President Hollande showed the U.N. secretary general and journalists round the French military intelligence HQ at Creil north of Paris, where the amazed visitors admired the...
Mercenary (Mer-cen-ar-y): Adjective (of a person or their [sic] behavior): Primarily concerned with making money at the expense of ethics; Noun: A professional soldier hired to serve in a foreign army; Synonyms: adjective venal; noun hireling soldier of fortune Assassin (As-sas-sin): Noun 1. A murderer of an important person in a surprise attack for political...
Contrary to the popular slogan, the September 11 attacks did not change everything. They did, however, transform how Americans, and especially American officials, think about both war and executive power. The resulting “War on Terror” has been under way for a dozen years. In a traditional war, whether formally declared or unofficially fought, the battlefield...