Category: Web

The outcome of the United Kingdom’s EU referendum on June 23 stunned the London-based elite class. It laid bare the deep chasm between Britain’s political and media machine and the alienated, angry and disillusioned majority of “left-behind” citizens. Thanks to David Cameron’s miscalculation, hoi polloi used the opportunity to express their abiding dislike not only...

The founders sought more than political independence from Europe. They also sought to secure America’s economic independence. To that end, the second bill enacted by the first Congress was the Tariff Act of 1789, the stated purpose of which was “the encouragement and protection of manufactures.” The end result of America’s reliance on the tariff...

In Tuesday’s indictment of free trade as virtual economic treason, The Donald has really set the cat down among the pigeons. For, in denouncing NAFTA, the WTO, MFN for China and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, all backed by Bush I and II, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, Trump is all but calling his own party leaders...

In the final weeks of spring the Islamic State finally seemed to be in serious trouble. Its capital of Raqqa came under simultaneous pressure from forces supported by the Syrian government advancing from Palmyra in the southwest, and from the U.S.-supported (mainly Kurdish) Syrian Democratic Forces to the north. The scene was set for a...

Some of us have long predicted the breakup of the European Union. The Cousins appear to have just delivered the coup de grace. While Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain in the EU, England voted for independence. These people, with their unique history, language and culture, want to write their own laws and rule...

As some of you may have heard, the Cleveland Cavaliers defeated the Golden State Warriors on Sunday, June 19 to win the NBA Championship, making the Cavs the first Cleveland team to win a major sports championship since Jim Brown and Frank Ryan and Gary Collins and the rest of the Cleveland Browns defeated the...

The news was spread far and wide last weekend that George F. Will is no longer registered as a Republican and is now politically “unaffiliated,” owing to the GOP’s acceptance (however grudging) of Donald Trump as its  presidential nominee. “Far and wide” is probably a good deal further than the columnist’s reputation, or even name...

“Peers v. People”: the EU referendum campaign appeared as a remake of the great debate a century ago, and like most remakes it was not up to the original. The recast Peers certainly filled their roles, and robes. “The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters, / The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and...

Stripped of its excesses, Donald Trump’s Wednesday speech contains all the ingredients of a campaign that can defeat Hillary Clinton this fall. Indeed, after the speech ended Clinton was suddenly defending the Clinton Foundation against the charge that it is a front for a racket for her family’s enrichment. The specific charges in Trump’s indictment...

“I am prepared to stay here until hell freezes over,’’ declared Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) on Wednesday. Apparently, hell froze over at 2:05 PM Eastern on Thursday, when the Occupy Washington Democrats who call themselves the people’s representatives walked out of the House chamber to refresh their deodorant and head home to their districts for...

Some 50 State Department officials have signed a memo calling on President Obama to launch air and missile strikes on the Damascus regime of Bashar Assad. A “judicious use of stand-off and air weapons,” they claim, “would undergird and drive a more focused and hard-nosed U.S.-led diplomatic process.” In brief, to strengthen the hand of...

by Edward Lozansky and Jim Jatras Since the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy could almost have been designed to undermine our national interests. Whether under Republican George W. Bush or Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, we have seen “regime changes” and “color revolutions,” facilitation of global jihadism while claiming to combat...

If the cliches hold—nothing succeeds like success, the past is prologue—this generation will not likely see an end to the jihadist terror that was on display at Pulse in Orlando on Sunday. For terrorism has proven to be among the most cost-effective and successful strategies of war that the world has ever seen. Consider. The...

The neocons are gloating that Donald Trump’s poll numbers have slumped. “Donald Trump is in the midst of a fairly dramatic collapse in public opinion polls,” enthuses Peter Wehner in Commentary. “What seems to be happening isn’t that Hillary Clinton is on the rise. Rather, Trump’s popularity is dangerously low for a presumptive presidential nominee...

President Barack Obama’s tirade on June 14 was filled with angry passion. His rhetoric was not directed against the perpetrator of the Orlando attack and his ilk, however, but against the (unnamed) GOP nominee and others who do not subscribe to Obama’s fundamental views on the nature of Islam and his “strategy” of confronting the...

On Saturday night, Omar Mateen was a loner and a loser. Sunday, he was immortal, by his standards, a hero. Mateen had ended his life in a blaze of gunfire and glory. Now everybody knew his name. He had been embraced by ISIS. His face was on every TV screen. His 911 call to Orlando...

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a U.S. citizen and the son of Muslim immigrants, was investigated by the FBI for connections to Islamic radicals. They dropped the investigation. He and his brother killed three people and injured 264 others at the Boston Marathon in April 2013. Syed Farook, a U.S. citizen and the son of Muslim immigrants, was...

Orlando’s Little Sodom was shot up early Sunday morning by a Muslim who thought that pleasing Allah by murdering homosexuals was more important than being a husband, father, or living person.  Before police bulldozed their way into one of the Pulse nightclub’s several spacious bathrooms where Omar Mateen was holed up and shot him dead,...

“Never retreat. Never explain. Get it done and let them howl.” Donald Trump has internalized the maxim Benjamin Jowett gave to his students at Balliol who would soon be running the empire. And in rejecting demands that he apologize for his remarks about the La Raza judge presiding over the class-action suit against Trump University,...

Gerald Celente likes to mock “The Brilliant” Larry Summers, top economic guru to the Clinton and Obama administrations, and therefore a primary architect of America’s economic decay, especially of its middle class. Greg Palast detailed Summers’ long and close ties to Goldman Sachs, the primary beneficiary of the 2008 TARP bank bailout of Wall St....

India’s prime minister Narendra Modi paid his second visit to the White House in two years on June 8. President Barak Obama was greatly pleased by Modi’s stated willingness to proceed with ratification of the Paris agreement to limit greenhouse gases, and this was the theme duly emphasized in the Western media coverage of their meeting....

Before the lynching of The Donald proceeds, what exactly was it he said about that Hispanic judge? Stated succinctly, Donald Trump said U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who is presiding over a class-action suit against Trump University, is sticking it to him. And the judge’s bias is likely rooted in the fact that he is...

“Clinton to Paint Trump as a Risk to World Order.” Thus did page one of Thursday’s New York Times tee up Hillary Clinton’s big San Diego speech on foreign policy. Inside the Times, the headline was edited to underline the point: “Clinton to Portray Trump as Risk to the World.” The Times promoted the speech...

Donald Trump already is the presumptive Republican nominee for president and easily will win Tuesday’s California primary. Yet he has continued to campaign in the state, which has revealed the top issue of this campaign: Trump vs. tyranny. Every rally he has held in the Golden State has been met with protesters trying to shut...

“The Security of the U.S. & the Peace of the World” by Jim Jatras and Anthony T. Salvia One cannot help but wonder if Hillary Rodham Clinton is smart enough to be President. She evidently learned nothing from her attempt a few weeks ago to play the “woman card” against Donald Trump. He responded by...

In his op-ed in the Washington Post, Chris Grayling, leader of the House of Commons, made the case for British withdrawal from the European Union—in terms Americans can understand. Would you accept, Grayling asks, an American Union of North and South America, its parliament sitting in Panama, with power to impose laws on the United...

“Something startling is happening to middle-aged white Americans. Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group . . . death rates in this group have been rising, not falling.” The big new killers of middle-aged white folks? Alcoholic liver disease, overdoses of heroin and opioids, and suicides. So wrote Gina Kolata...

At a press conference at the G-7 summit in Japan on May 26, President Barack Obama declared that world leaders are “rattled” by Donald Trump, “and for good reason. Because a lot of the proposals that he’s made display either ignorance of world affairs or a cavalier attitude or an interest in getting tweets and...

If China begins to reclaim and militarize Scarborough Shoal, says Philippines President Benigno S. Aquino III, America must fight. Should we back down, says Aquino, the United States will lose “its moral ascendancy, and also the confidence of one of its allies.” And what is Scarborough Shoal? A cluster of rocks and reefs, 123 miles...

Today is exactly one month from the day that Brits go to the polls for one of the most important decisions in their modern history: the referendum on membership in the European Union. The question is a dagger looming over the heart of the European Union, as it currently exists, and those paying attention realize...

In his coquettish refusal to accept the Donald, Paul Ryan says he cannot betray the conservative “principles” of the party of Abraham Lincoln, high among which is a devotion to free trade. But when did free trade become dogma in the Party of Lincoln? As early as 1832, young Abe declared, “My politics are short...

“It’s a suicide mission,” said the Republican Party Chairman. Reince Priebus was commenting on a Washington Post story about Mitt Romney and William Kristol’s plot to recruit a third-party conservative candidate to sink Donald Trump. Several big-name Republican “consultants” and “strategists” are said to be on board. Understandably so, given the bucks involved. With the...

Ahmet Davutoglu has served Recep Tayyip Erdogan loyally for over a decade, first as his chief advisor (2003-2009), then as foreign minister (2009-2014), and finally as prime minister until his forced resignation on May 5. Loyalty is no longer enough: Erdogan now demands unquestioning obedience from his team, and Davutoglu’s willingness to provide it has...

“No modern precedent exists for the revival of a party so badly defeated, so intensely discredited, and so essentially split as the Republican Party is today.” Taken from The Party That Lost Its Head by Bruce Chapman and George Gilder, this excerpt, about Barry Goldwater’s defeat in 1964, led Thursday’s column by E.J. Dionne of...

Forty-eight hours after Donald Trump wrapped up the Republican nomination with a smashing victory in the Indiana primary, House Speaker Paul Ryan announced that he could not yet support Trump. In millennial teen-talk, Ryan told CNN’s Jake Tapper, “I’m just not ready to do that at this point. I’m not there right now.” “[T]he bulk...

In his latest interview with Radio Sputnik International marking the V-E Day, Srdja Trifkovic discusses the gap between public perceptions of the Allied powers’ relative contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany and historical reality. [Audio file] Sputnik: In recent opinion polls in the U.S. and Europe, only 15 percent of respondents named the USSR as the country...

Cam Newton’s petulance after the Carolina Panthers lost to the Denver Broncos largely eclipsed the splendid season Newton had had before the Super Bowl. Since Donald Trump essentially clinched the GOP nomination after winning over 50% of the vote in seven consecutive primaries, a number of conservative pundits and Republican politicians have begun emulating Newton’s...

“The two living Republican past presidents, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, have no plans to endorse Trump, according to their spokesmen.” So said the lead story in the Washington Post. Graceless, yes, but not unexpected. The Bushes have many fine qualities. Losing well, however, is not one of them. And they have...

From Fr. C. John McCloskey, via the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation: Joe Sobran had a Renaissance mind along with a moral sense, a genial wit, and a seemingly effortless flow of felicitous phrasing. Whatever the topic, he was capable of entertaining while instructing, always conveying to the reader of his columns, articles, and essays (without the...

With his resounding victory in Indiana, the forces denoted by the Twitter hashtag #NeverTrump should fold up shop and accept the inevitable. Some of them will. Senator Ted Cruz had the sense to realize that his play to deny Donald J. Trump a first-ballot victory in Cleveland would find even less favorable ground in New...

From the Selous Foundation: Geoffrey Shaw, author of The Lost Mandate of Heaven, has done us a great service in telling the truth about the American betrayal of Ngo Dinh Diem and the tragic consequences it had for the Vietnamese people and for those Allied soldiers who gave their lives in that war. [Read Tom...

Friday, a Russian SU-27 did a barrel roll over a U.S. RC-135 over the Baltic, the second time in two weeks. Also in April, the U.S. destroyer Donald Cook, off Russia’s Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad, was twice buzzed by Russian planes. Vladimir Putin’s message: Keep your spy planes and ships a respectable distance away from...

I’ve written several stories and blogs for Chronicles on the gold standard, in particular how leaving it in 1971 started an especially vicious boom-boost cycle for the American auto industry. When the dollar inflates, so do oil and gas prices; that tanks sales for trucks and SUVS and increases sales for small cars (as in...

Donald Trump’s foreign policy speech last Wednesday deserves at least a solid B+ and you can read my take on it in the June issue of Chronicles. It offered an eloquent argument for offensive realism, based on the fact that the international system—composed of sovereign nation-states pursuing their interests—is still essentially competitive and Hobbesian. Trump...

Donald Trump claims he will make America great again.  Hillary Clinton responds that America has never quit being great.  Bernie Sanders seems to have his doubts that America has ever been great, but he would be happy to try to make her so if only the American people would give him the power to make...

Whether the establishment likes it or not, and it evidently does not, there is a revolution going on in America. The old order in this capital city is on the way out, America is crossing a great divide, and there is no going back. Donald Trump’s triumphant march to the nomination in Cleveland, virtually assured...

Four years ago, Mitt Romney lost the industrial Midwest, and the White House, in large part because the Democrats successfully used Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital to portray him as a champion of outsourcing American jobs. Bizarrely, Ted Cruz has chosen as his running mate Carly Fiorina, whose stint as CEO of Hewlett-Packard makes Romney...

From Tom Pauken’s article at the Selous Foundation for Public Policy Research: I disagreed with President Lyndon Baines Johnson on many issues, but I respected him for his efforts to prevent a Communist takeover of South Vietnam. What would LBJ or Walt Rostow, the former LBJ national security advisor who was Dean of the LBJ...

In a recent column Dennis Prager made an acute observation. “The vast majority of leading conservative writers . . . have a secular outlook on life. . . . They are unaware of the disaster that godlessness in the West has led to.” These secular conservatives may think that “America can survive the death of...

In Samuel Eliot Morison’s The Oxford History of the American People, there is a single sentence about Harriet Tubman. “An illiterate field hand, (Tubman) not only escaped herself but returned repeatedly and guided more than 300 slaves to freedom.” Morison, however, devotes most of five chapters to the greatest soldier-statesman in American history, save Washington,...