Category: Web

The twin scandals that enveloped our glorious military are proof of its degradation and the ineptitude of the Obama administration. First, there is the 115 day waiting period at the Phoenix, Arizona VA hospital, which officially resulted in 40 deaths (the real figure is probably in the hundreds). Seventy-one-year old Navy veteran Thomas Breen died...

Sephora, a multinational chain of cosmetics stores owned by the luxury behemoth LVMH, operates over 1700 branches in 30 countries worldwide, generating over $4 billion in revenue as of 2013. Their flagship emporium in the Champs Élysées in Paris attracts over six million people a year, and even the smallest town in Italy boasts a...

Back in 1988 Michael Kinsley (in the Times of London) famously defined the gaffe as the occasion when “a politician tells the truth.” Kinsley himself immediately watered down his elegant definition by adding “some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say,” as if the code of the politician did not require him to be uniformly...

“We needed to get him out of there, essentially to save his life.” So said Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, an Army sergeant in Vietnam, of Barack Obama’s trade of five hard-core Taliban leaders at Guantanamo for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, a Taliban prisoner for five years. The trade speaks well of America’s ‘s resolve to...

President Barack Obama’s commencement address at West Point on May 28 managed to displease pretty much everyone in the nation’s commentariat. Before making an overall assessment of its significance, it is necessary to examine the validity and implications of Obama’s individual statements. “[B]y most measures America has rarely been stronger relative to the rest of...

The recent passing of Maya Angelou generated a predictable panoply of gushing grief from the mainstream media. “The definition of a phenomenal woman” gushed CNN; “Commanding Literary Voice” enthused The New York Times; “A Hymn to Human Endurance”, raved Time Magazine. The latter characterization is actually the most accurate, just not in the way the...

The hatewatch business has grown in recent years from a large but solo operation known as the Southern Poverty Law Center into a major industry that includes an array of outlets that also retail gratuitous contumely, scurrilous innuendo and naked lies. Say something the left doesn’t like, and any number of disreputable websites will declare...

Check out the following chart of Real Median Household Income, which declined 9 percent nationally from 1999 to 2012.  Find your state’s decline and meet me below.                         Notice the place at the top of list, which had no decline in Real Median Household...

An evident characteristic of the neoconservatives is that they are forever seeing the light. Leon Trotsky, Martin Luther King, Leo Strauss, and George Bush are just some of the splendid aurorae that, in decades past, have shone upon them at the end of philosophical tunnels and through the clearings in political clouds. It’s just that...

Russian traditionalist conservative writer and publicist Elena Chudinova recently gave a lengthy interview to Srdja Trifkovic and was the subject of my article in the latest issue of this magazine. Her recent article, “Eurovision’s Blue Beard” describes the current atmosphere in Europe with the author’s characteristic verve and bluntness. Chudinova’s friend, a religious Christian mother...

The way to have the foreign policy you want is first to figure out what kind of foreign policy you want. It is a task at which American leaders grow less and less adept, possibly on account of Americans’ general inability to figure out what they want: involvement, isolation or variations of the two? What,...

In recent years, there has been much media attention given to “bullying” in schools, with the lion’s share of attention given to a particular type of bullying, that directed at youngsters identified as “gay.” The schoolyard scorn directed at students who are fat or unathletic or unattractive or unpopular for a myriad of other reasons...

The Front Nationale is expected to get at least 18% of the vote in the ongoing European Parliament elections and with eleven new cities in France resulting from a “breakthrough” (the BBC’s words, not mine) in the recent local elections. The best forecast of Le Pen’s triumph is the change of the mainstream European media’s...

Serbia’s foremost writer Dobrica Cosic (Dobritsa Chossich) died in his sleep on May 18 at the age of 93. He was a complex man with an interesting life. A Partisan commissar during World War II and a Communist Party senior oficial and approved writer until the early 60’s, by the end of that decade he...

Two important recent events – Narendra Modi’s landslide victory in India last week and the massive energy and trade agreement which Russia and China signed in Beijing on Wednesday – have the potential to alter Asia’s strategic landscape. Modi is an assertive politician unafraid to take risks, a market-oriented reformer, but also a Hindu nationalist....

Beware fields of endeavor with the surname “science” tacked on to their names. Astronomy, for instance, has done very well for itself without being called “astronomic science,” as have mathematics, chemistry, zoology. Even philosophy and psychology – and yes, even that bastion of grasping mountebanks, sociology – have managed to get along fine with just...

The fiftieth anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education generated several articles in Chronicles outlining the noxious legacy of that dubious decision. But there were hundreds (if not thousands!) of other decisions by the judiciary that misinterpreted the Constitution, disregarded millennia of Western traditions and laws, and spat in the face of American voters....

When Brown v. Board of Education, the 9-0 Warren Court ruling came down 60 years ago, desegregating America’s public schools, this writer was a sophomore at Gonzaga in Washington, D.C. In the shadow of the Capitol, Gonzaga was deep inside the city. And hitchhiking to school every day, one could see the “for sale” signs...

The 60th anniversary of the Brown v. the Board of Education is being celebrated today with far more pomp than has accompanied Independence Day celebrations in recent years. Not surprisingly, Michelle Obama took the occasion to condemn not just the growing trend of resegregation in public schools—a nasty term for neighborhood-based schools—but also the persistence...

The highlight of my time in law school – three years of varying degrees of dreariness and constant irritation was the visit of US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. The great jurist came to my nominally Catholic second-tier alma mater – I cannot help, but shudder at the latter word, so inappropriately used to describe...

“Nado alert! Nado alert!” people were screaming about 1 am outside my room at Michaels Barracks in Hoechst, West Germany, a couple of days after I was posted there on Sept. 12, 1979. My roommate said it likely was just a drill, sending us out in our jeeps and trucks into the Fulda Gap to...

One of the advantages of living is that, as some of those around you pass on, you get to tell funny stories about them – stories they wouldn’t necessarily have wanted told when still alive, vain, and touchy. The down side is that telling such stories rebounds on the storyteller. For instance, when, a couple...

A few months ago, Srdja Trifkovic aptly described the Eurovision song contest as “a political as well as a cultural irrelevance” and an “infomercial of poor taste pop”. He correctly if lightheartedly characterized the only global hit that came out of Eurovision (Abba’s song “Waterloo”) as “a typical example of cheesy tra-la-la europop”. Well, this...

[Srdja Trifkovic’s latest interview with RT] Published time: May 12, 2014 11:48 Those who keep power in Ukraine are a bunch of criminals who will advocate criminal methods in keeping their ill-gotten gains, with the West supporting this farce, Srdja Trifkovic, foreign affairs editor at Chronicles Magazine, told RT. RT: Let’s say Donetsk and Lugansk...

California, once the American Mecca of milk and honey, has fallen on hard times. Though its degradation and decline are largely self-inflicted, California’s condition is nonetheless an American tragedy and a dire portent for the rest of us.   The state is fast becoming a colony and milk cow for Mexico, with a few enclaves...

You wonder what took so long. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which labels any group or person even a smidgen to the right of Al Sharpton a “racist,” “hater” or “right-wing extremist,” is now terrorizing those who indirectly fund “hate groups.” Last week, World Net Daily reported that SPLC is moving against websites through which...

“Get used to it guys. Here in America you will see a lot of these murder cases: children killing parents, parents killing children, siblings rubbing out each other. This might shock you now, but in a few months, you will just glance over it in the paper and forget”. This was the slightly snobbish admonition...

The GOP Beltway establishment is celebrating the victory of Thom Tillis, Speaker of the North Carolina House, over his Tea Party and Evangelical rivals in Tuesday’s primary for the U.S. Senate. But the story ended less happily for the Beltway elite in the Tar Heel State’s 3rd Congressional District. There, the planned purge of Rep....

With little fanfare, in the past week the United States officially became a military dictatorship. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal of a suit brought against the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act that allowed indefinite detention of U.S. citizens. That means the military now can, at any time, “disappear” you, even if...

Some years ago a friend of mine in Venice, whose family had been too influential during the Fascist years for anyone to doubt the source, told me a funny story about Vittorio Cini, an intimate of Mussolini’s. I recently found it corroborated in a memoir by Federico Zeri, the great historian of the Italian Renaissance...

Last week, a brawl between supporters of a federalized Ukraine (known in the Western media as “pro-Russian separatists” and supporters of the neo-nazi dominated Brown revolution (known in the Western media as “pro-government demonstrators”) escalated into a massacre. A crowd of anti-Maidan demonstrators was chased into the Trade Unions building. The building was then torched...

In March, a group of academics released their estimate of the costs of the Iraq war: 1.7 trillion dollars, with an additional 490 billion dollars in benefits owed to wounded veterans. Given that wounded veterans will need a lifetime of care, the estimated costs could rise to 6 trillion dollars over the next four decades....

The events in Odessa and the Donetsk region over the past three days mark a new stage in the Ukrainian drama. The authorities in Kiev are ready to use indiscriminate force, their Western mentors are supporting them while continuing to blame Russia for the rampant violence, the insurgents in the east appear to be on...

Commenting on the Donald Sterling (a grimy shyster lawyer formerly known as Donald Tokowitz), Pat Buchanan asks: “Is America Still a Serious Country?”  Absolutely not and it has not been one for a very long time. Our country has become one big TV show: at best like Oprah and Dr. Phil and at worst like...

It is by now a truism that, in politics today, opposites are converging. Starting out as specks on the underside of a Möbius strip, Europe’s Greens, anarchists, post-Marxist socialists, even a welfare-minded single mother or two, come out on top of the anti-EU agenda, mixing with Roger Scruton and his hunt, resplendent in their pinks,...

Quite a while back I annoyed the readers of this site with a long series of quotations:  “What is History?” My intent was to provide thought on the vast and complicated question of how we understand and best make use of the past. As a kind of belated conclusion to that series, I quote myself—with...

“Race in America is always an inflammatory, volatile thing,” chirped NPR sports commentator Tom Goldman on this morning’s “Morning Edition. Goldman was sounding off to David Greene on the woes of Donald Sterling, owner of the LA Clippers, who expressed himself too candidly on matters of race in a private phone call. The word “always”...

Down with a resounding bang comes the wrath of that great moral institution, the National Basketball Association, upon the noggin of Donald Sterling. Boo! Hiss! Get the hook! And once you’ve paid your $2.5 million fine, Sterling, for the offense of lax language during a private conversation, why don’t you just die? That would be...

A few blogs ago, my devoted reader Louis from San Antonio asked me to share the mystical secrets of that famous elixir known as vodka. In the former Soviet Union – not only Russia, but even the Central Asian republics, drinking vodka involves a series of preparations and elaborate rituals, not far behind the famous...

[Final part of the interview between Srdja Trifkovic and Elena Chudinova that was started in Part I and Part II.] ST: Finally, this is something I have asked others and never got a satisfactory answer.  Why is the Russian intelligentsia so fascinated with the West and why does it still have this inferiority complex vis-a-vis...

Whenever the president of the Rockford Institute and I chat about movies, the conversation always runs into the brick wall of the Japanese cinema. I especially like the films of one of its acknowledged masters, Yasujiro Ozu, whose later movies are his best-known in the West, especially Tokyo Story (1953) and Floating Weeds (1959). “Ach,...

When you hear of something happening in the art world, what comes to mind? What vision does that combination of words, “art world,” conjure up? I will frame my next paragraph as the classic four answers to a multiple-choice quiz, if you don’t mind. A. A bunch of HIV-positive inverts, stuffing their faces with coke...

The Southern Poverty Law Center has weighed in again on Cliven Bundy, the rancher in Nevada at odds with the federal government over grazing rights, fees and endangered turtles on federal land. Having restrained itself from calling Bundy a “terrorist lawbreaker,” as the Daily Kos did, SPLC may be reconsidering. Apparently upset that Daily Kos...

[A Continuation of the interview between Srdja and Elena] ST: One worrying aspect is that Russia has allowed almost uncontrollable immigration from former Soviet Central Asia and this may, in view, of the low birth rates of the Orthodox Russians, change the demographic picture of the country in only a few decades. EC: I always...

Elena Chudinova is a Russian traditionalist conservative author and publicist who is Russia’s leading critic of Islam, mass non-European immigration, and a dedicated proponent of Russia’s engagement with the European Right. Chudinova’s famous bestseller “The Notre Damme de Paris Mosque” – a fast-paced dystopian novel about a 2048 Western Europe taken over by Wahhabi Islam...

As I was still reeling from Tax Day, the Heritage Foundation just emailed me a copy of a letter sent to the IRS by former SecDef Donald Rumsfeld. Heritage also linked to a tweet by Rummy that also attached the letter. He seems to have written it all himself. In the 1960s, Rummy represented a...

At a hastily convened meeting in Geneva last Thursday the foreign ministers of Russia, the Kiev interim regime, the European Union and the United States worked out an agreement on the principles that are supposed to defuse the crisis. It is a flawed document, open to conflicting interpretations and devoid of verifiable benchmarks. The agreement...

Srdja Trifkovic’s Voice of Russia interview posted April 19, 2014 (excerpts) Trifkovic: [ … ] It is obvious from Crimean episode that the gap between the artificial reality created by the western media machine and the tangible reality on the ground is growing by the day. That is what we have seen with the coverage...

American churches cannot make up their minds. Do they serve God or an Uncle Sam who for a long time has been looking a great deal like Mammon? On patriotic holidays the choirs sing that bloodthirsty and nonsensical anthem to war and slaughter ironically titled “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and pastors give sermons...

Twice a year, at least, during Christmas and Easter, some Conservative Christians must feel like the hero of “I Led Three Lives,” a 1950’s television series starring Richard Carlson. The show was loosely based on the memoirs of Herbert A. Philbrick, the American double-agent who infiltrated the Communist Party, I Led Three Lives: Citizen, “Communist,”...