In a rebuke bordering on national insult Sunday, Emmanuel Macron retorted to Donald Trump’s calling himself a nationalist. “Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism; nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism.” As for Trump’s policy of “America first,” Macron trashed such atavistic thinking in this new age: “By saying we put ourselves first and the...
After four years and three months of unprecedented carnage, the Great War—the most catastrophic event in all of history—ended one hundred years ago, on November 11, 1918. That war destroyed an effervescent civilization, unmatched in its fruits and vigor. A decent and on the whole well-ordered world was wrecked for ever, thrown into the abyss...
The war in Washington will not end until the presidency of Donald Trump ends. Everyone seems to sense that now. This is a fight to the finish. A postelection truce that began with Trump congratulating House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi—”I give her a great deal of credit for what she’s done and what she’s accomplished”—was...
One can almost hear an audible sigh of relief from the rogues’ gallery of criminal conspirators behind the phony Russiagate collusion story cooked up in the bowels of the US-UK Deep State with the aim of overturning the 2016 election. Now, after two years of the GOP’s dithering in the area of investigations and hearings...
Armstrong is a rollicking work of alternate history that doesn’t sacrifice accurate details or historical nuance for the sake of your entertainment. Have you ever wondered what might have happened if General Custer survived the Battle of the Little Bighorn? Wonder no more, for this is the premise of Armstrong. H.W. Crocker III immerses you...
From the October 2015 issue of Chronicles. “Every great man nowadays has his disciples,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “and it is always Judas who writes the biography.” Even conceding that Wilde was writing for effect, it is nonetheless true that biographers often betray their subjects with either a kiss or a curse, and that the kiss...
Did former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg just take a page out of the playbook of Sen. Ed Muskie from half a century ago? In his first off-year election in 1970, President Richard Nixon ran a tough attack campaign to hold the 52 House seats the GOP had added in ’66 and ’68, and to...
Angela Merkel announced on October 29 that she would make a two-stage exit from the political scene. She is first giving up her chairmanship of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which will select a new leader at its party congress on December 7-8. She is to step down as chancellor next, but not before the...
“The curious have observed that the progress of humane literature (like the sun) is from the East to the West. . .” —Nathaniel Ames As both a reality and an interpretive problem, the American West has retained its long-established hold on the attention of our scholars. And the same is true of Western American literature:...
Among the reasons Donald Trump is president is that his natural political instincts are superior to those of any other current figure. As campaign 2018 entered its final week, Trump seized upon and elevated the single issue that most energizes his populist base and most convulses our media elite. Warning of an “invasion,” he pointed...
Eight years ago, I made the case in this magazine that Pat Buchanan has been a “visionary.” That case is even clearer today, with the White House occupied by a man who got there by running on the issues Buchanan had championed for decades and who is now remaking the GOP along populist and nationalist...
The ugliness displayed by the media and Democrats during the fight over Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court is yet another indicator of how far we have come from Hamilton’s conception of the federal judiciary as “the least dangerous branch.” Kavanaugh was nominated to replace Anthony Kennedy, who used his perch on the...
Downsizing Produced and distributed by Paramount Pictures Directed by Alexander Payne Screenplay by Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor I’m late commenting on Alexander Payne’s Downsizing for the simple reason that the film became all but unavailable within what seemed a couple of weeks of its opening in December 2017. It had disappeared from theaters and...
Are we tired of winning yet? This is the question Donald Trump kept telling us we’d be asking ourselves if he succeeded in taking the White House—and I have to confess the answer is an emphatic “No!” Join me on a journey through the past, when the editors of Chronicles and the friends and followers...
Italian journalists are forbidden these days from using the Italian word for foreign migrants who have stolen their way by subterfuge into Italy. By controlling which words people can use you can control their thought. It is a thoroughly fascist idea and therefore much adored by the liberal left. You use the law to criminalize...
Many years ago, as the luncheon speaker at a meeting of the John Randolph Club in Rockford, Illinois, Tom Sheeley gave a thought-provoking lecture interspersed with a splendid performance of classical guitar. His main theme was the need for form in art; and all these years later, one line stands out in my memory: “What...
As a means to a brief escape from the (so far) miserable 21st century I picked up and began reading The Reason Why, an excellent work of nonacademic history published in 1953 by Cecil Woodham-Smith (in England, the sexes share the name “Cecil,” as they do “Evelyn”) that tells the background story of the famous...
Not only is Father Rutler one of the most brilliant priests in the country; he is also one of the finest writers of the English language today. In this collection of predominantly short essays, many or most of them reprinted or adapted from Crisis Magazine, he shows to his absolute best. His elegant and rather...
In the wake of the August 20 toppling of Silent Sam, a monument to North Carolina students who volunteered to become Confederate soldiers in 1861-65, our television screens were filled with images of scraggly, rough-bearded Millennial men and unkempt women screaming profanities and shouting imprecations about racism, white supremacy, and the dangers of “fascism.” Which...
In Europe some time during the 17th and 18th centuries the class of people who were known after 1789 as “the left” made the shocking discovery that the world is not perfect: not even all it might be but should be and, indeed, can be. To the leftist mind, this imperfection was unnatural, and therefore...
About a hundred years before the Civil War, two British surveyors, Jeremiah Mason and Charles Dixon, with a crew of ax-men, marked out 270 miles of wilderness. They set a stone at every mile, and another grander one embossed with the arms of the Penn and Calvert clans every five miles. The resulting map pacified...
We somehow owe it to ourselves to contemplate the useful word sinfonia, one that once denoted the overture to an opera and suggested a pleasing combination of sounds. So yes—the term that denotes the tradition of symphony is derived from another musical convention which we think of as not symphonic, but rather related to opera. ...
“Our expectation hath this day an end.” The dolorous admission of the citizens of Harfleur, that Henry V’s siege cannot be withstood, is the judgment on last Thursday’s meeting of the 1922 Committee, which consists only of backbenchers. Over the previous weekend a very strong campaign had been mounted in the Daily Telegraph stable to...
On even-numbered years, particularly the ones coinciding with a presidential midterm, my Deep South home county undergoes the grotesque onslaught of local elections. For a few months in the spring and summer (and also in the fall, although this is tempered somewhat by Alabama being a “Red State,” which usually means the winner of the...
Back in June, a belligerent New York City attorney briefly became a symbol of “xenophobia” for those who make it their business to deconstruct what’s left of American identity. Viral video of his tirade in a restaurant over staff speaking to customers in Spanish served as but the latest example of what the media portray...
President Donald Trump’s speech to the U.N. General Assembly on September 25 was met with audible disrespect from some of the assembled globalist cognoscenti (representatives of many barbarous regimes included), and with blind hostility from the media and commentariat. This was unsurprising, because the opening segment of his half-hour address sounded like the summary of...
At present, two themes dominate British political news. One is Brexit, which never ends. The other is antisemitism in the Labour Party, which sucks up enormous amounts of media oxygen. It is not clear how much the public cares that much about either. Journalists talk of little else. Over the summer, many an otherwise dull...
From the August 2013 issue of Chronicles. One of the greatest Olympians of all time, Bob Mathias, is all but forgotten today. He was born in 1930 in Tulare, in the heart of California’s San Joaquin Valley. Robert Bruce Mathias was his name, but everyone called him Bob. Bob had extraordinary coordination from infancy onward. ...
Saturday, in Pittsburgh, a Sabbath celebration at the Tree of Life synagogue became the site of the largest mass murder of Jews in U.S. history. Eleven worshippers were killed by a racist gunman. Friday, we learned the identity of the crazed criminal who mailed pipe bombs to a dozen leaders of the Democratic Party, including...
From the December 1991 issue of Chronicles. In 1920, when Rose Wilder Lane met Dorothy Thompson, Lane was 33 and working in Paris, writing publicity stories for the American Red Cross. She had started out in California at the San Francisco Bulletin; written biographies of Herbert Hoover, Henry Ford, and Jack London; and she would...
By Thursday, the targets of the mailed pipe bombs had risen to nine: George Soros, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Maxine Waters, John Brennan, Eric Holder, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Joe Biden and Robert De Niro. That list contains four of the highest-ranking officials of Barack Obama’s administration: the president himself, his vice president, his secretary of...
It is the duty of every Muslim to emulate the example of his prophet as recorded in the Hadith. By ordering the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, Prince Mohammad bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud has only acted in accordance with that orthodox, 14-century-old principle. It would have been eminently un-Islamic, in fact, for “MbS” to...
There is something about “column” that alerts the mind. It is not the same as “crowd,” and is active, purposive. My Chambers dictionary gives for column “a body of troops forming a long, narrow procession,” reminding us that the word is quasi-military. Napoleon’s infantry always attacked in columns. The Honduras column now commanding the news...
The teeming masses yearning to be free . . . The Caravan of Peace approaches. The massive, marching throng grows by the day. It’s an Act of Love. And another is already forming, ready to bring more peace and love our way, thousands ready to sacrifice everything and enter our racist, white supremacist country seeking...
Was the assassination of JFK by Lee Harvey Oswald still getting as much media coverage three weeks after his death as it did that first week after Nov. 22, 1963? Not as I recall. Yet, three weeks after his murder, Jamal Khashoggi, who was not a U.S. citizen, was not killed by an American, and...
The people who voted for Trump weren’t motivated by the allure of tax cuts. They were motivated by a desire to, at long last, secure the southern border. The organized mob now being allowed to march through Mexico is an all too vivid reminder that the wall has not yet been built. These marchers aren’t...
“I wasted time, and now doth time waste me” was Richard II’s lament. It could be echoed by Theresa May, but she doesn’t echo any wording other than the drab officialese of “We are working to ensure there will be no hard border.” She can keep this stuff going all day, and indeed does. Theresa...
In his latest interview with Radio Sputnik International, Srdja Trifkovic discusses President Donald Trump’s recent statement on CBS that the EU was formed to take advantage of the United States and that’s what it has been doing to this day. The first question was whether Trump’s assertion about the EU’s early days was accurate. [Audio]...
Our mainstream media remain consumed with the grisly killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, and how President Donald Trump will deal with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Understandably so, for this is the most riveting murder story since O.J. Simpson and has strategic implications across the Middle East....
In the aftermath of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, the question has been raised whether the U.S.-Saudi alliance can or should be saved. It is based on false premises: there is no such alliance. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is neither a friend nor an ally of America. It...
From the July 1990 issue of Chronicles. This temperate and thorough book commences with a detailed description of President Nixon’s activities on May 8 and 9, 1970, when thousands of young people had poured into Washington to protest the American expedition into Cambodia. This was the most dramatic of the several crises in Richard Nixon’s...
Over the weekend Donald Trump warned of “severe punishment” if an investigation concludes that a Saudi hit team murdered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Riyadh then counter-threatened, reminding us that, as the world’s largest oil exporter, Saudi Arabia “plays an impactful and active role in the global economy.” Message:...
In a panel discussion broadcast live by the top-rated Serbian TV channel on October 9, Srdja Trifkovic discussed the problem of ISIS veterans returning to Europe from the fronts in Syria. The first question was whether this problem was quite as serious as presented by some security experts. [Video (Trifkovic segment starts at 8 minutes 40...
Was Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, and then his body cut up with a bone saw and flown to Riyadh in Gulfstream jets owned by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman? So contend the Turks, who have video from the consulate, photos of 15 Saudi agents who flew into...
Over the past few weeks we have witnessed a rapid and (for the past half-century) unprecedented worsening of relations between the United States and China. It is uncertain, for now, whether this is the result of a deliberate shift in strategy by Washington or the cumulative effect of a series of incremental moves and counter-moves...
The migrant crisis is principally a deep concern for Europe, with the United States increasingly affected. Canada now joins the list of nations involved in migration issues. The province of Quebec has just held elections, and the Parti Quebecois has been swept out of sight. The winner is the Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ), a populist...
From the August 1992 issue of Chronicles. Robert Frost published 11 books of poetry, won four Pulitzer Prizes, established himself as the unofficial poet laureate of the United States, and acquired a national and international literary reputation. Despite his fame as a poet and public speaker, and because of his friendship with such liberal Democrats...
After a 50-year siege, the great strategic fortress of liberalism has fallen. With the elevation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court seems secure for constitutionalism—perhaps for decades. The shrieks from the gallery of the Senate chamber as the vote came in on Saturday, and the sight of that bawling mob clawing at the doors...
I am losing confidence in Vladimir Putin. Time was when I had naive respect for the operations of the KGB or whatever the descendants of the Cheka and Ogpu call themselves these days. Whatever one thought of their moral pond life, these people were serious. Had they not turned any number of British and Americans?...
Four days after he described Christine Blasey Ford, the accuser of Judge Brett Kavanaugh, as a “very credible witness,” President Donald Trump could no longer contain his feelings or constrain his instincts. With the fate of his Supreme Court nominee in the balance, Trump let his “Make America Great Again” rally attendees in Mississippi know...