Category: Web

In noting that 55% of Donald Trump’s supporters are working class whites, the Wall Street Journal states the obvious: Although the Trump phenomenon has surprised nearly everyone, it becomes intelligible against the backdrop of recent American history. For decades, white working-class men have been the most volatile element in the American electorate. Changes in the...

In his latest RT interview Dr. Trifkovic considers the state of play following the announcement by Russia’s FSB security agency that the plane crash over Sinai was a terrorist attack. RT: Srdja Trifkovic, foreign affairs editor at Chronicles magazine, is in Belgrade . . . What are you thoughts on the new information about the plane...

In the wake of the bloody terrorist attacks in Paris, French President Francois Hollande has asked for extended emergency powers and has promised an intensified assault on Islamic State in Syria. Hollande has further called on the UN Security Council to adopt a resolution on combating terrorism as a basis for forming a “unified” multi-national...

Is Vladimir Putin the new leader of the free world? All we currently know is that the job seems open, and that Putin has seemingly sent in his resume, showing openness to the idea of an anti-Islamic State alliance with British Prime Minister David Cameron. For contrast, see Barack Obama’s demeanor while talking to the...

Among the presidential candidates of the Republican Party and their foreign policy leaders on Capitol Hill the cry is almost universal: Barack Obama has no strategy for winning the war on ISIS. This criticism, however, sounds strange coming from a party that controls Congress but has yet to devise its own strategy, or even to...

Liberalism, as the recent attacks on La Ville Lumière have shown, cannot provide the basis for a sustainable society.  By liberalism, I do not mean Democrats versus Republicans, or the ideology of invite the world versus that of bomb the world.  I mean all of it together. There must be some basis for saying no...

I have seen news reports stating that French authorities are concerned about the hundreds of French Islamists who have gone to Syria to fight for ISIS and have returned to France. This is misleading. Such people are not French, whatever their citizenship may be. They are unassimilated Moslem immigrants, or the descendants of unassimilated Moslem...

Over 8,000 migrants entered Serbia on November 11 on their way from the Middle East to Western Europe. The item went unreported by the major media because it was not newsworthy. Daily totals may vary, not much, as the Great Invasion of 2015 continues unabated. Millions are on the move, with unknown further multitudes tempted...

Rand Paul had his best debate moment Tuesday when he challenged Marco Rubio on his plans to increase defense spending by $1 trillion. “You cannot be a conservative if you’re going to keep promoting new programs you’re not going to pay for,” said Paul. Marco’s retort triggered the loudest cheers of the night: “There are...

The fraternity that Sabrina Rubin Erdely and Rolling Stone smeared in their discredited tale about a gang rape at University of Virginia has filed a $25 million lawsuit against them. This is the third lawsuit arising from the yarn. The first two came from three fraternity members and a dean at the college. And we...

Silence is unhealthy and un-American. Everybody has a right to talk and play their media as much as they want to,  anywhere any time. Every child has the right to a quality education. A college education is the key to a well-paying job. Same-sex couples have the same right to government benefits as everybody else....

No wonder the Obama regime kept the Trans-Pacific Partnership secret as long as it could. It’s far worse than even its greatest critics imagined: 5,544 pages of bureaucratese that will help only international lawyers and big companies, while slamming small companies and middle-class workers in America. Here’s a sampling of what you’ll need to know...

I tell you, it’s great to be alive and cognizant that the greatest thing going on at the University of Missouri, large-domed citadel of learning and culture, is—you guessed it—football! Truly, the U of M Tigers don’t have such a tiger-ish record this season, just four wins against five losses (with four of those losses...

“A modern day mass migration is taking place . . . that could change the face of Europe’s civilization,” warned Hungarian President Viktor Orban. “If that happens, that is irreversible. . . . There is no way back from a multicultural Europe,” said Orban. “If we make a mistake now, it will be forever.” Orban...

As Steve Sailer says, you aren’t supposed to notice some things—like rising mortality rates for middle aged, working class whites that I discussed last week: A startling new study that shows a big spike in the death rate for a large group of middle-aged whites in the United States was rejected by two prestigious medical journals, the study’s co-author,...

What goes up must continue to go up and up. People love us for our good intentions when we tell them to be like us. If a few bad ones resist we can bomb them. We must be right because after every war our enemies want to move to the U.S. Whoever dies with the...

“Dalton Trumbo was a socialist, but he loved being rich.” So says Bryan Cranston, who stars in Trumbo, out this week, and plays the screenwriter who went to prison with the Hollywood Ten in the time of Harry Truman. Actually, Trumbo was not a socialist. Bernie Sanders is a socialist. Trumbo was a Stalinist, a...

In some quarters on the right, drug legalization is the cause du jour. These persons see drugs as harmless, or at least less harmful than laws against drug use, and also frequently claim that legalizing drugs will prove politically popular, particularly among younger voters. This Tuesday’s crushing defeat of Ohio’s Issue 3, which would have...

Mortality rates for middle aged white Americans are rising, as reported by the New York Times: “Something startling is happening to middle-aged white Americans. Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group, unlike their counterparts in other rich countries, death rates in this group have been rising, not falling. That finding...

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan took a gamble after his Justice and Development Party (AKP) lost its parliamentary majority last June 7: he would call another election, rather than let Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu look for a coalition partner in good faith. Contrary to most preditions, last Sunday the AKP regained its majority with 49%...

By Monday, interestingly enough, the Russian invasion of Syria was receding as a topic of public concern. Apparently there no longer seemed anything explosive in the tidings of Vladimir Putin’s slam-bang entry into that remote theater of conflict. This was notwithstanding those Russian airstrikes against the anti-Assad rebels whom the United States, supposedly, has been...

“The United States is being sucked into a new Middle East war,” says the New York Times. And the Times has it exactly right. Despite repeated pledges not to put “boots on the ground” in Syria, President Obama is inserting 50 U.S. special ops troops into that country, with more to follow. U.S. A-10 “warthog”...

If you’re an old pro-lifer like me, you remember the many battles over China’s one-child policy. Mao actually encouraged large families. He thought population problems would be solved by communist economic planning, a large population would make China stronger—and the 60 million he murdered needed to be replaced. After he died in 1976, his successor,...

Trailed by two Chinese warships, the guided-missile destroyer USS Lassen sailed inside the 12-nautical-mile limit of Subi Reef, a man-made island China claims as her national territory. Beijing protested. Says China: Subi Reef and the Spratly Island chain, in a South China Sea that carries half of the world’s seaborne trade, are as much ours...

Last week I was busy preparing for the upcoming meeting of the John Randolph Club in Cleveland. But on Wednesday of that week, I came across an item promoting another event being held in Cleveland on the Friday the Randolph Club began that I knew I needed to attend. This event was a Mass to...

A friend recently sent me a piece by economic reporter Michael Snyder that provided more evidence of the decline of the American middle class. As Snyder notes, a recent report from the Social Security Administration shows that 51% of all American workers make less than $30,000 per year, and 38% make less than $20,000. These...

Are Catholic truths immutable? Or can they change with the changing times? This is the deeper question behind the issues that convulsed the three-week synod on the family of the 250 Catholic bishops in Rome that ended Saturday. A year ago, German Cardinal Walter Kasper called on the church to change—to welcome homosexual couples, and...

With Jim Webb’s resignation from the presidential race goes a piece of history. Will a moderate to maybe-just-a-little-bit-conservative man—or woman—emerge ever again to offer Democrats a national leadership profile independent of the Hillary or Bernie template? You never know. But I don’t believe I would give long odds on it. Gone are the days when...

Last Tuesday Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu caused a stir when he told the World Zionist Congress that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, inspired Hitler to proceed with the mass murder of European Jews during the Second World War. “Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel...

Three months ago, this writer sent out a column entitled, “Could Trump Win?” meaning the Republican nomination.  Today even the Trump deniers concede the possibility.  And the emerging question has become: “Can Trump be stopped? And if so, where, and by whom?” Consider the catbird seat in which The Donald sits. An average of national...

Barack Obama sought as his legacy to bring an end to the two longest wars in U.S. history. On Oct. 15, he, again, admitted failure. The 9,800 U.S. troops in Afghanistan will remain another year. And, on Inauguration Day 2017, 5,500 U.S. troops will still be there. Why cannot we leave? Because, if we do,...

Reports by various commissions of inquiry – national as well as international – into politically significant tragic events tend to be distorted by politics. The Dutch-led inquiry report into last year’s downing of the Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine, released on October 13, is no exception. The British Lusitania Inquiry, chaired by Lord...

So we now learn that women might be drafted into the military. The news is a fitting coda to Tom Piatak’s post about women in combat, to which I added another. When I served on the first Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces, conservative commissioners warned about this development: that...

The honor of it all aside, Rep. Paul Ryan would do well to decline the speakership of the House. For it is a poisoned chalice that is being offered to him. The Republican Party is not, as some commentators wail, in “chaos” today. It is in rebellion, in revolt, as it was in the early...

“Seems the more people you kill, the more you are in the limelight.” That blog post on the email address of Oregon mass-murderer Christopher Harper-Mercer was made after Vester Lee Flanagan shot and killed that Roanoke TV reporter and her cameraman. “I have noticed,” said the blog post, “that people like [Flanagan] are all alone...

The Russian military intervention in Syria, and the creation of a new regional alliance which includes Iran and Iraq, removes one undesirable outcome from the complex equation. The collapse of the government in Damascus, and its replacement by some form of jihadist-dominated Sharia regime which would spell the end of the non-Sunni minorities (including Christians),...

Somewhere over the Atlantic, there is an Islamic militia that has proclaimed an Islamic state. It controls territory in several countries, has kidnapped and murdered many innocent people, including Christians, and openly professes its disdain for Western learning. Despite the undeniably barbarous nature of this militia, no American politician of note has advocated using American...

Having established a base on the Syrian coast, Vladimir Putin last week began air strikes on ISIS and other rebel forces seeking to overthrow Bashar Assad. A longtime ally of Syria, Russia wants to preserve its toehold on the Mediterranean, help Assad repel the threat, and keep the Islamic terrorists out of Damascus. Russia is...

“Do you realize now what you have done?” So Vladimir Putin in his U.N. address summarized his indictment of a U.S. foreign policy that has produced a series of disasters in the Middle East that we did not need the Russian leader to describe for us. Fourteen years after we invaded Afghanistan, Afghan troops are...

Srdja Trifkovic’s live RTTV interview, Sept. 30, 09:09 GMT It will no longer be possible in the new setup – with the Iranians, the Iraqis, the Syrians and the Russians sharing intelligence – for the Gulf monarchies and for Erdogan to get away with the duplicity of pretending to fight ISIS while pursuing their separate...

Last week, the European Union voted to require members to accept a portion of the migrants who have been coming into Europe over the Mediterranean and through the Balkans. Four states voted no—Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Romania—and both Hungary and Slovakia say that they will fight the mandate to accept migrants in the...

Pope Francis’s four-day visit to the United States was by any measure a personal and political triumph. The crowds were immense, and coverage of the Holy Father on television and in the print press swamped the state visit of Xi Jinping, the leader of the world’s second-greatest power. But how enduring, and how relevant, was...

Srdja Trifkovic’s interview with Sputnik Radio International RS: What is your take on the migrant crisis inside Europe, and what’s happening between Serbia and Croatia? ST: “Migrant crisis” is the right term. I wouldn’t use the term “refugees” because, strictly speaking, most of these people had already been safe and sound in Turkey and other countries...

The revolt against the Establishment continues. The three leading contenders for the Republican nomination for president – Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina – never have held political office. Now House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, has been pushed out for a lack of accomplishment. Consider: In 2010, Republicans stormed back into majority status in...

Beliefs matter. “Ideas Have Consequences,” as conservative scholar Richard Weaver wrote in his classic of that title in 1948. Yet, for so believing, and so saying, Dr. Ben Carson has been subjected to a Rodney King-style night-sticking by the P.C. police. Asked by Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press” whether he could support a Muslim...

A few observations relevant to the Navy’s opening SEAL teams to women, and to Tom Piatak’s post about women in combat: As I wrote for Chronicles in 2013, the strongest women are only as strong as the weakest men, according to testimony before the President George H.W. Bush’s Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in...

For what was widely expected to be the grand finale of the Greek snap election campaign—the country’s seventh since 2012—I drove to Thessaloniki, 400 miles south of Belgrade. Greece’s marvellous second city of half a million prides itself on being the country’s cultural and artistic capital, and its diversified economy offers a broader cross-section of...

During the 1950s, the twin pillars of worldwide anti-communism were Dwight Eisenhower’s America and the Roman Catholic Church of Pope Pius XII. During the 1980s, the last decade of the Cold War, Ronald Reagan and the Polish pope, John Paul II, were the pillars of resistance. When Pope Francis arrives in Washington on Tuesday afternoon,...

Notice the Washington Post-ABC News poll on Pope Francis. The results indicate that people over here love him. He throws open doors too long closed. “He’s calming, he’s relaxing, and he’s reassuring,” says one Catholic quoted by the Post. Another—a sociologist at Catholic University—says, “He talks like a person who actually knows something about human...

What Vladimir Putin is up to in Syria makes far more sense than what Barack Obama and John Kerry appear to be up to in Syria. The Russians are flying transports bringing tanks and troops to an air base near the coastal city of Latakia to create a supply chain to provide a steady flow...