Category: Web

According to Norway’s The Local English-language news website, Mohammed became the most common male name in Oslo, surpassing Jan and Per, which are in the second and third spots respectively. Apparently, for the last four years in a row, Mohammed was at the top of the list of male names in Oslo. The city itself...

Rabbi Mayer Schiller was a close friend of Thomas Molnar, Sam Francis, and Joe Sobran. I described his life and views in a VDARE column some years ago. Rabbi Schiller is a staunchly paleoconservative Hassidic rabbi living in internal exile in the manner of Soviet dissidents in upstate New York and teaches at a prestigious...

Last week I blogged about a Tennessee high-school classroom banning students saying, “Bless you!” Now the repression has spread to college. According to CBS Atlanta: “BRUNSWICK, Ga.  – One professor at the College of Coastal Georgia has banned students from saying ‘bless you’ in his class. “Campus Reform reports that Dr. Leon Gardner, assistant professor of chemistry at...

I spent last weekend in Tuscany in what was once an abandoned seaside resort, now a glittering showcase for everything that is repugnant about global tourism. I leave out its name because the locals, though no less greedy and unprincipled than other people elsewhere on this venal planet, are hardly to blame for the discovery...

The decisions that determined the fate of the great nations and empires that failed to survive the 20th century are well known. For the Kaiser’s Germany, it was the “blank cheque” to Austria after Sarajevo. For Great Britain, the 1939 war guarantee to Poland. For the Third Reich, it was the June 1941 invasion of...

French author and unabashed rightwinger Gerard De Villiers who passed away last fall at the age of 84 was hardly a household name in this country. The former journalist who became a spy novelist was famous for his 200 pulp fiction novels about the exploits of CIA agent, the Austrian aristocrat Malko Linge. What made...

Among the demands of the “protesters” in Ferguson is that the investigation and prosecution of police officer Darren Wilson be taken away from St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch. McCulloch is biased, it is said. How so? In 1964, his father, a St. Louis police officer, was shot to death by an African-American. Moreover, McCulloch...

“Many of us non-RC traditionalist all over the world had awaited the news from Rome with some trepidation,” I wrote here on March 7 of last year. “In the end it turned out to be rather good. Pope Francis’… election is a compromise which will keep most traditionalists contented, if not exactly enthused, while giving...

According to economists, the US economy began recovering from the recession back in 2009. However, last week brought further confirmation that there has been no economic recovery for many Americans. The United States Conference of Mayors released a report showing that the average wage in the sectors of the economy devastated by the last recession,...

A couple of times in my writings for Chronicles I’ve mentioned “functionally atheist government schools.” That’s what they’ve been since the early 1960s, when several U.S. Supreme Court edicts effectively banned any mention of religion, or anything approaching religion, from public schools. I remember sitting in my 6th grade class at Elliott Elementary School in...

The horrendous murder of James Foley by the Islamic State (IS) is more than just another display of jihadist savagery, reminiscent of the death of Daniel Pearl in 2002. Its strategic purpose is to provoke a wave of indignation at home, and to get the United States directly involved in yet another unwinnable Middle Eastern...

“She was vicious,” commented the Paris Match journalist Dany Jucaud. “She reduced the entire world to rich men wanting sex and poor women wanting money.” Jucaud was speaking of a famous brothel keeper, Madame Claude, to whose life and times the sycophant’s bible, Vanity Fair, devotes hagiographic attention in its September issue. “Her client list,”...

The recent massacres and expulsions of Iraqi Christians are only the latest chapter in the genocide of the ancient and exclusively Christian Assyrians, a continuation of the bloody campaign that took place in the Ottoman Empire, Persia, and Iraq throughout the 20th Century. The Chaldean Catholics who are bearing the brunt of IS attacks in...

“America is on trial,” said Rev. Al Sharpton from the pulpit of Greater St Mark’s Family Church in Ferguson, Missouri. At issue, the shooting death of Michael Brown, Saturday a week ago, on the main street of that city of 22,000, a neighbor community to Jennings, where this writer lived in the mid-1960s. Brown, an...

A week ago American planes were used for the first time to bomb Islamic State (IS) targets in northern Iraq. President Obama’s decision to authorize limited airstrikes has not changed the military balance, however. The IS army of some ten thousand fighters is an easily dispersible, highly trained light infantry force. There are no valuable...

The recent riots in majority-black Ferguson, Missouri have seized the attention of the world. Eighteen-year-old Michael Brown, universally described by the media as an “unarmed Black teenager” was shot and killed by a police officer. According to the police, he participated in a violent convenience store robbery and then resisted arrest, attacking a police officer...

Why do I write? The first answer that comes to mind is: “I don’t know.” On reflection, a second answer emerges with a gravelly croak, like a fat, patriarchal frog among pond lilies: “Because they pay me.” Even though, as anybody with half a brain will tell you, the money in the business of writing...

The last three summers (2011-2013), I indulged in a genre of books, which my Catholic friends found to be curious. As longtime Chronicles reader and fellow New York attorney Fred Kelly said: “You have an interesting reading list for a traditionalist Jew”. What they were referring to was my interest in the topic of exorcism,...

U.S. air strikes since Friday have opened a corridor through which tens of thousands of Yazidis, trapped and starving on a mountain in Iraq, have escaped to safety in Kurdistan. The Kurds, whose peshmerga fighters were sent reeling by the Islamic State last week, bolstered now by the arrival of U.S. air power, recaptured two...

The Rockford Institute has taken a bold step forward in its mission to defend traditional conservatism by appointing Thomas Piatak as Executive Vice President. A veteran of the Culture Wars and a tireless advocate of restoring American jobs and economic prosperity, Mr. Piatak is perfectly poised to raise the Institute’s profile among current and new...

At the end of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama famously wrote that our world may be at the “end of history” where “Western liberal democracy” becomes “the final form of human government.” A quarter century on, such optimism seems naive. Consider the United States, the paragon of liberal democracy. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll finds...

This week brought the unpleasant, but not surprising news that Pope Francis reinstated as priest one Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann (the latter is his mother’s maiden name, added to his surname as customary in Spanish-speaking countries) who served as foreign minister for the Nicaraguan communists (the Sandinistas) from 1979 to 1990, later becoming president of the...

My old compatriot from law school Ann Coulter has a habit of writing columns not designed to advance her interests as a columnist. When Coulter’s friend Joe Sobran died, she wrote a column praising Joe without reservation.  Given the relative power of Joe’s friends and Joe’s enemies, some wondered if this was wise. Indeed, another...

Christian women are being raped and murdered, Christian men are being shot execution-style or strangled or crucified.  And now we have reports of Christian children—it rends the soul to say—beheaded and set on display in public parks.  This is Mosul in the summer of ’14, under the control of ISIS, the Islamic State. A man’s...

Ponzio’s iconic diner (in South Jersey) is turning 50; designer Milton Glaser is creating an iconic environmental logo for his line of eye ware; steel and Domino’s sugar are iconic industries; Smokey Bear is an iconic symbol of wildfire prevention; and Roberts Shoe store—an iconic Chicago institution—is closing its doors. These are just a few...

The events in Gaza since July 7 have shown, not for the first time, Israel’s difficulty in coping with the challenges of asymmetric warfare. The problem first became apparent in Lebanon exactly eight years ago (July-August 2006), when Hezbollah – the weaker party by several orders of magnitude – was able to exploit Israeli political...

I listen to Rush Limbaugh about 15 minutes a day, which is the time it takes by car to go to and from my house for lunch. Fifteen minutes is more than enough time to get the gist of what any “on air personality” will say, over and over repeating himself and ringing the changes...

The cobbler’s son goes barefoot. This English proverb could almost serve to illustrate the entry for “paradox” in a dictionary of philosophy. The paradox of capitalism is that, instead of selling their souls to the devil, its adepts give them away for free. One would think that all those masters of the universe, well used...

Alabama Republican congressman Mo Brooks generated outrage among the usual suspects this week by telling Laura Ingraham that the Obama Adminstration’s push for amnesty for illegal immigrants is “a part of the war on whites that’s being launched by the Democratic Party. And the way in which they’re launching this war is by claiming that...

                        It’s all very well to say, as I do, that you should see the silents because in them you will see every development in film style—except synchronized sound—freshly created and, in most cases, as artfully exploited as they ever have been. But the...

Video posted August 5, 2014: RT: The National Guard is heavily involved in the current crackdown on anti-government forces in the East. So how do you think their training and arming by the U.S. will affect the course of the conflict? ST: It is very important to point out that the National Guard is, in...

After coming back from magnificent (unless you’re talking about the food), yet woefully underrated Prague in late August of 2008, I immediately read Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Švejk, a satirical novel based on the misadventures of a Falstaffian Czech soldier during World War I. Like Druon’s novels, the unfinished Švejk was extremely popular both...

It has been a summer of remembrance. The centennial of the Great War that began with the Guns of August 1914. The 75th anniversary of the Danzig crisis that led to Hitler’s invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. The 70th anniversary of D-Day. In America, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights...

In April 2008 I published this article on our website (the link is no longer available). In view of the crisis in and over Ukraine and the ongoing overall deterioration of relations between “the West” and Russia, its key points are even more pertinent today – over six years later – than they were then....

Instead of celebrating the Jewish Sabbath (the seventh day of the week), the faithful gradually broke with Jewish custom and assembled, instead, on the first day of the week, the Lord’s Day, which they identified with the first day of Creation. They came together to sing hymns, hear the good news preached, make common prayers,...

            Some people can trace the stages of their life by the liquor they drink or the clothing style they adopt. Being very ecumenical when it comes to liquor, I prefer to trace the events of my life by the books I read. Turns out, almost every summer and every...

Tomorrow, July 31, is a great moment in the history of British jurisprudence. Let me explain. If you believe, as do I, that our civilization is spiralling downward, you may agree that – here as in Britain or anywhere else in the West – courts of law are no different in this regard than apples...

With the party united, the odds are now at least even that the GOP will not only hold the House but also capture the Senate in November. But before traditional conservatives cheer that prospect, they might take a closer look at the foreign policy that a Republican Senate would seek to impose upon the nation....

A video, reportedly shot by an Israeli drone over the war-torn Gaza Strip has been circulating on various social networks. The footage shows several Hamas fighters, decked out in kuffiya headscarves, having sexual intercourse with a goat or a sheep. Stunningly revolting, but hardly surprising. After all, zoophilia was always quite common, if not widespread...

The Return of the Barbarians by Vince Cornell My son has started karate classes, and I have taken the opportunity to dust off my old gi and start working out with them at the same time. This renewed interest in hand-to-hand self defense lead me to some research on the internet, mostly through a few...

In the end we may never know with certainty who shot down the Malaysian airliner on July 17, and under what circumstances. My assessment, made in the immediate aftermath of the disaster – that it was engineered by deliberately guiding the airliner into harm’s way – will be further examined in this article. Patrick Buchanan’s...

Iowa is bracing itself for the storm. The danger is not coming from the tornadoes that sweep across the plains this time of year, but from the Central American illegal immigrant “children,” eager to partake of the joys of life here in Middle America. 139 so far have come in, and if Iowa’s Marxists and...

During the early morning hours of Monday, March 31, an unidentified person or persons smashed out the window of a ten-year-old Honda Civic parked on Cumberland Street in the neighborhood of Montford in Asheville. The car is registered in my name. My son, who works here in Asheville, had used the car for several years...

Living in Forest Hills, a predominantly Jewish part of Queens (Simon and Garfunkel, the Ramones, and Jerry Seinfeld all grew up here), I have a fairly good sense of the both liberal American and rightwing Soviet Jewish opinion. Israel’s Gaza offensive of the last few weeks and the anti-Israel demonstrations in Europe, which degenerated into...

Perhaps because I am myself an émigré, I have never “written on immigration,” which is almost a fulltime vocation for many a political commentator whose intelligence and nous are otherwise indubitable. The temptation arises when that perennially controversial issue cuts across others closer to my heart, such as the freedom of speaking one’s mind or...

The Malaysian and Dutch embassies in Kiev are covered with heaps of flowers. But not a single little flower is brought in the memory of the victims of the bombings of Lugansk, which happened on the same day as the downing of flight MH17. And where would the flowers be brought? Kiev does not have...

American boys and men have always taken great pride in hitting targets. Whether that target was a bulls-eye during an archery class at summer camp or a catcher’s mitt in high school baseball, we applaud those who possess the ability to strike a target. The first act of an eleven year old given a BB...

Finally home, albeit without luggage, which is stuck either in Rome, Milan, or somewhere in between. But what can one expect from an industry, which sends people to their deaths over a war-torn region in collusion with the EU/State Department hydra. After bouncing around on three different flights to get home from Rome: the bad...

Silent movies are to movies in toto as classical Greek and Roman drama is to all of European drama. Of course, cinema is one of the latest progeny of the classical dramatic tradition, so one can’t claim the silents invented any wheels in terms of plot and characterization; those haven’t changed since Euripides and Menander....

Following the Master’s instructions, about 120 of Jesus’ followers gathered in Jerusalem under the leadership of Peter. The first order of business was the selection of a replacement for Judas. The method adopted shows us something of the way the Church will operate: The Apostles themselves choose the most worthy candidates and then leave the...