Category: Web

Not for the first time the government of Germany is acting as if it owned Europe. On two occasions in the 20th century it sought to occupy most of Europe; this time, with almost equal arrogance, it is trying to bully the rest of Europe into not resisting the ongoing Muslim occupation. The consequences of...

Republican front runner Donald Trump has been criticized for not being “conservative” in the manner of the Beltway Right, for changing his positions (especially on abortion), and for his past associations with Democratic politicians. Trump-haters frequently claim that The Donald has no fixed views, is merely opportunistically taking advantage of popular anger with political elites,...

Forrest McDonald, the great historian of the American founding and early Republic, passed away on January 19 at the age of 89.  Born in Orange, Texas, McDonald earned his doctorate from the University of Texas-Austin in 1955, and taught at Brown University, Wayne State University (Michigan), and the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.  He retired to...

Reports that North Korea tested a hydrogen bomb in early January caused consternation bordering on panic in both Washington and the East Asian capitals.  That reaction appears to have been a bit excessive.  The available evidence indicates that the explosion was far too small to be a thermonuclear device.  Most likely, it was the test...

Aaron D. Wolf’s “Drafting Our Daughters” (Heresies, January) is an excellent article.  Having served three tours in Vietnam as an artillery surveyor, forward observer, and civil-affairs team chief, I’ll make some additions. On December 3, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter demonstrated an incredible ignorance of infantry combat reality and a possible hatred of 18-year-old females. ...

The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding, by Eric Nelson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press; 390 pp., $29.95).  Historians have long noted the seeming paradox that the Framers of the U.S. Constitution invested the office of the American president with greater powers than those enjoyed by the English king, whose “yoke” they had just thrown...

In his article on his trip to Rome (“Buried in History,” Correspondence, January), Jeff Minick comments on the apparent decline of attendance at Mass.  Italians for centuries have avoided the Mass, puzzling other Catholics when Italian immigrants began arriving in the United States.  Italians expressed their faith mainly in large public processions such as those...

Is rock music truly an art?  This question has never met with a straightforward answer, either by the musicians themselves or the many who venerate them, and it hangs over the massive bulk of the Experience Music Project and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame here in Seattle.  The EMP is a 140,000-square-foot...

To Guvner J.E.B. Bush Floridy or maybe Conneckticut Dear Guvner Bush, I know we have not always seen I to I, as they say, but fair is fair, as they say, and I feel it is my duty to let you know that one of your opponents has been making fun of you and misreporting...

The Big Short Produced by Plan B Entertainment  and Regency Enterprises  Directed by Adam McKay  Screenplay by Charles Randolph  and Adam McKay  Distributed by Paramount Pictures  In the 90’s of the last century, I used to supplement my academic income by coaching investment bankers and corporate CEOs.  My job was to help them prepare presentations...

The reports of China’s pending economic collapse have been greatly exaggerated.  There are signs that the world’s second-largest economy is entering a period of long-term restructuring marked by a slowdown, but the process is neither unexpected nor chaotic.  A sober look at China’s economic transition will allow us to assess its impact on the country’s...

Virtue signaling is a term that has recently caught on in Britain.  Coined in The Spectator (the magazine I work for) by James Bartholomew, it refers to the way that people seem to think that being good means expressing fashionable liberal opinions.  To be considered—or to consider yourself—virtuous, you don’t have to do; you just...

The year was 1964.  I was 13 years old.  Sitting in the family room of my parents’ home in Yorktown Heights, New York, with the TV on, I picked up the envelope that had arrived in the mail that day.  I had sent away for information to all sorts of political parties and organizations in...

In an essay first published in Chronicles in 2006 and collected in the Chronicles Press volume Life, Literature, and Lincoln, the late Tom Landess relates a story about Arizona Sen. John McCain.  While stumping in South Carolina for the Republican presidential nomination, the Mad Bomber encountered a textile-mill worker who was not a fan of...

Recently, I watched The Maltese Falcon (1941), featuring Bogart, Greenstreet, and Mary Astor.  This prompted me to reexamine, after many years, the work of Dashiell Hammett, on whose novel the film is based.  I was unable to find Falcon in my library, but I did discover The Glass Key and The Continental Op, so I...

Two Oregon ranchers, Steven Dwight Hammond and Dwight Lincoln Hammond, Jr., have been at the center of ethical and cultural clashes for several years.  Even while a standoff purportedly held in their honor between armed militia and the federal government was occurring in January, the ranchers reported to the Bureau of Prisons to serve five-year...

The first four Republican contests—Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada—produced record turnouts. While the prospect of routing Hillary Clinton and recapturing the White House brought out the true believers, it was Donald Trump’s name on the ballot and his calls for economic patriotism, border security, and an end to imperial wars that brought out...

“Beautiful losers” was the phrase Sam Francis borrowed from Leonard Cohen to sum up the failure of the American conservative movement.  Beautiful or not, American conservatives have been losers from their movement’s inception, and the same can be said for every conservative movement since the French Revolution and going back at least to the Enlightenment,...

When I was very young my father would take me to the Panatheniac Stadium, built from Pentelic marble in Athens for the first modern Olympics in 1896.  This was in the late 1940’s, and the stadium, which held 70,000, was packed.  The event was track and field, and only amateurs competed.  My father had been...

The fate of conservatism is thought to be hanging in the balance these days, and with it, perhaps, the fate of the country, of a political party, of presidential candidates, of a movement. Well, good.  Now is the time for reevaluation or, dare I say it, reformation. “Conservatism isn’t just passivity,” wrote Joseph Sobran in...

The December 2, 2015, killings of 14 people in San Bernardino, California, by Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, is the sort of story that garners the label “only in America,” with plot twists that include arranged marriage, Facebook jihad, and irrelevant gun laws.  It also includes Enrique Marquez, Jr., an Hispanic-American. Farook...

Many conservative Christians have reservations, at least, about supporting Republican front runner Donald Trump, and not without reason. He has had a less than completely convincing conversion to a pro-life position; has said (more than once) that Planned Parenthood has done some good (on screening for cervical and breast cancer, for instance), while declaring that...

In a Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump race—which, the Beltway keening aside, seems the probable outcome of the primaries—what are the odds the GOP can take the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court? If Republicans can unite, not bad, not bad at all. Undeniably, Democrats open with a strong hand. There is that famed...

As the returns came in from South Carolina Saturday night, showing Donald Trump winning a decisive victory, a note of nervous desperation crept into the commentary. Political analysts pointed out repeatedly that if all of the votes for Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Jeb Bush and Ben Carson were added up, they far exceeded...

“A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian,” Pope Francis declared on his flight back to Rome last week.The political implications of his statement have been considered in some detail in recent days, but his assertion also needs to be examined in the light...

Another week has come and gone, and here are some highlights and cultural trends. Celebrity Apprentices Here’s a lede you didn’t imagine five years ago: The Pope and Donald Trump are engaged in a public feud over illegal immigration.  Trump is “not Christian,” says the pontiff.  This latest brouhaha comes with Pope Francis’s visit to...

Republican hawks are aflutter today over China’s installation of anti-aircraft missiles on Woody Island in the South China Sea. But do these Republicans, good free-traders all, realize their own indispensable role in converting an indigent China into the mighty and menacing power that seeks to push us out of Asia? Last year, China ran up...

In the days and weeks ahead President Obama will face an important decision: whether to allow the conflict in Syria to escalate by approving Turkey’s and Saudi Arabia’s direct intervention, or to come to terms with the continued survival and expanding area of control of the government of Bashar al-Assad. Informed commentators note that this...

It is reported that a machete-wielding Somali has attacked an Asian in a restaurant owned by an Israeli. In Ohio. All but a few of the baker’s dozen contenders for the Republican presidential nomination advocate warlike measures against Russia, Syria, and Iran. Consequences are not discussed. Most of them want to fight terrorism by increased...

It is a measure of the stature and the significance of Justice Antonin Scalia that, upon the news of his death at a hunting lodge in Texas, Washington was instantly caught up in an unseemly quarrel over who would succeed him. But no one can replace Justice Scalia. He was a giant among jurists. For...

National Review hasn’t been this fun to read since it used to try to be funny—and succeed—decades ago. Each day brings a new hysterical reaction to the political success of Donald Trump, which NR writers variously predict will lead to the end of conservatism, or democracy, or America, or perhaps even the universe, with the...

The case called Planned Parenthood v. Casey was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1992. At the time there was some thought that it might be the vehicle for overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that made abortion a constitutional right. But Casey only made things worse: it reaffirmed Roe, and added an...

Donald Trump isn’t a “conservative” as defined by the Beltway Right. Thank Heaven for that. So what are the defining elements of right-liberal “conservatism” these days? It appears that lining the oligarchs’ pockets (“free enterprise”), unrestrained financial speculation (“limited government”), amnesty/unlimited immigration (so “hardworking” people can “come out of the shadows”), and perpetual war (“protecting...

Another week has come and gone, and here are some highlights and cultural trends. Republicans Want to Draft Your Daughter Whether your daughter ought to be compelled to sign up for spilling her guts in a regime-change adventure that will ultimately bring to power another Islamic regime is a question that has gone mainstream.  And...

On February 9 Sweden’s right-leaning newspaper Nya Tider (“New Times”) published an interview with Srdja Trifkovic which focused on the deepening crisis within the European Union and the ongoing migrant invasion of Europe. Here is the English translation. NT: How do you assess the problems of Europe and the impact of the migrant crisis, terrorism,...

If you believed America’s longest war, in Afghanistan, was coming to an end, be advised: It is not. Departing U.S. commander Gen. John Campbell says there will need to be U.S. boots on the ground “for years to come.” Making good on President Obama’s commitment to remove all U.S. forces by next January, said Campbell,...

The morning of the New Hampshire primary, Donald Trump, being interviewed on “Morning Joe,” said that he would welcome his “friend” Michael Bloomberg into the presidential race. Which is probably the understatement of 2016. The three-term mayor of New York and media mogul whose fortune is estimated at $39 billion, making him one of the...

Back in August, The New Yorker ran a less than flattering article about Donald Trump.  In it, the author recounted why two middle-aged New Hampshire residents, Nancy and Charlie Merz, were supporting Trump. Both had lost jobs: Nancy, when the furniture industry “went down the tubes,” and Charlie, whose job building household electricity meters was...

Donald Trump won more votes in the Iowa caucuses than any Republican candidate in history. Impressive, except Ted Cruz set the new all-time record. And Marco Rubio exceeded all expectations by taking 23 percent. Cruz won Tea Party types, Evangelicals, and the hard right. Trump won the populists and nationalists who want the borders secure,...

Apropos of my blog post yesterday, which noted that the nation’s top soldier and Marine think women must be subject to the draft given their coming role as combatants, a few questions for them: Will pregnancy and/or motherhood be disqualifying conditions that enable a woman to avoid registration for the draft? If so, and given...

The exemption of women from the military draft is soon to end. Top generals told the Senate the other day that women must be drafted: Women should be required to register for the draft if all combat jobs are going to be open to them, the top generals of the Marines and Army said Tuesday....

President Barack Obama’s Wednesday speech at the Islamic Society mosque in Baltimore, a venue tainted by a long history of preacing radicalism, summarizes his thinking about Islam and national security. That address has troubling implications and deserves detailed scrutiny. OBAMA: “[I]f we’re serious about freedom of religion—and I’m speaking now to my fellow Christians who...

Whoever wins the nominations, the most successful campaigns of 2016 provide us with a clear picture of where the center of gravity is today in both parties and, hence, where America is going. Bernie Sanders, with his mammoth crowds and mass support among the young, represents, as did George McGovern in 1972, despite his defeat,...

I first met Lee Marvin in 1964.  I had seen him around town for several years.  He lived on Latimer Road in Rustic Canyon, a part of our then small, quaint hamlet of Pacific Palisades.  He had four children, but his marriage was on the rocks, and he was spending many an evening drinking at...

I have never seen Ireland, but, anchored decades ago aboard R.M.S. Saxonia in a foggy night redolent with the odor of burning peat off Cobh while the tender came and went between the ship and the dockside several miles portside, I have scented her.  Queen Mary 2 does not call at Cobh, and so on...

“Why, I pray, do you accuse me of a weak character?  It is an accusation to which all enlightened men are exposed, because they see the two, or better say, the thousand sides of things, and it is impossible for them to make up their minds upon them, with the result that they stumble sometimes...