Category: Web

Heather Mac Donald is a very good journalist, and conservatives are in her debt for her work dealing with immigration, crime, and the realities of urban life. But Mac Donald, an atheist, is puzzled by religion. Last Sunday, this puzzlement took the form of a short piece at the Secular Right website, where Mac Donald...

Many American Jews suffer culture shock when they first visit Tel Aviv.  Having grown up watching reruns of the movie Exodus, they imagine Israelis as yarmulke-wearing cowboys valiantly defending their land against attacks from vicious tribes of Arab terrorists.  Arriving in Tel Aviv, they find a bustling city full of secular, middle-class Israelis practicing their...

What, no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?  This development has resulted in the sort of newsroom hand-wringing that one usually finds only when a reporter for the nation’s most prestigious newspaper is caught fabricating quotations in scores of news stories. Where is the liberal media when we need it?  There is no question that...

There are days and places in history when time seems to stand still and, in the space of a moment, the fate of future centuries is decided.  At dawn on October 7, 1571, the spectacle would have made a strong impression on anyone who looked out at the waters breaking upon the straits that join...

For over a thousand years, Western civilization was defined by the shifting religious frontier between Christianity and Islam, and the Muslim religion was the ultimate enemy. Whenever Western Christians wished to condemn a person or a movement, the obvious tactic was to compare it to Islam. When a medieval French king wanted to justify his...

In one of the first episodes of the latest Star Trek series, Enterprise, the crew, a few weeks out from Earth on the ship’s maiden voyage, has become homesick. Suddenly, an inhabitable planet appears off of the port side. There are no signs of humanoid life, but the captain sends a small team down to...

Appropriately, it was 1984. The Reagan-Bush ticket had won reelection. The U.S. Olympic team had destroyed everyone else at the Summer Games in Los Angeles. The HIV virus had been identified, and a cure for AIDS would surely follow. Hezbollah terrorists had bombed the U.S. embassy northeast of Beruit, and the CIA was busy training...

“Truths would you teach, or save a sinking land? All fear, none aid you, and few understand.“         —Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Man” Although the raw figures from Census 2000 have been in the public domain for months already, the American public’s response to the latest decennial survey is still not...

It has happened. Whites have been reduced to a minority in California. By whites, I mean, of course, “non-Hispanic whites,” because most of the illegal aliens who have poured across the border from Mexico during the last 30 years to change dramatically the composition of California’s population are mestizo, a mixture of Spanish and American...

A fish starts rotting from the head, it is said. That a society starts rotting from its head needs to be much better understood. Blaming the decline of Western society on a “revolt of the masses” absolves elites, who must bear the brunt of the blame. Catering to popular tastes is not the result of...

In the “Prologue” to his massive biography of Sen. Joe McCarthy, historian Thomas Reeves describes a scene that took place in Milwaukee, in the senator’s home state, in November, 1954, only a month before his colleagues voted to condemn him and thereby effectively to terminate his career. The scene was a mass celebration of McCarthy’s...

In his seminal work, Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville noted that the nobility of medieval Europe reckoned martial valor to be the greatest of all the virtues. The feudal aristocracy, he said, “was born of war and for war; it won its power by force of arms and maintained it thereby. So nothing was...

A story long popular in London tells of a foreign visitor losing his bearings while walking along Whitehall and politely asking a passerby, “Excuse me, sir, which side is the Foreign Office on?” Hearing the visitor’s accent, the Brit despairingly replies, “Yours, probably.” This story comes to mind when we read the histories of Western...

A number of years ago, when I was teaching a ninth-grade religion class (in Switzerland, where religion is taught in public schools), one of the boys said to me, “All religions teach the same thing.” Although only 15, he was, without knowing it, a witness for multiculturalism—not in the descriptive sense, in which one recognizes...

“By Tre, Pol, or Pen ye may know most Cornishmen.” This simple rhyme was known to nearly everyone in the mining camps of the Old West and probably to much of the general population in America during the 19th century. Treloar, Trevelyan, and Tremaine were especially common names on the mining frontier, as were Penrose,...

All societies regulate personal behavior: That is part of what makes them societies, instead of mere aggregations of isolated individuals. Societies differ enormously, though, in just how they perform this regulation, how much they rely on law and the state, rather than informal or private means. If I walk into a crowded room wearing a...

“Southerners live in the 18th century.” This common charge is not altogether false, since the peculiar habits, customs, and meanings of words found often in the American South are found also in 18th-century English authors. Most English-speaking people use the word “manners” now only in the senses designated by the Oxford English Dictionary as current:...

Having been invited to address the topic of manners, I can only do so with a certain embarrassment, for I have been known to have behaved deplorably. Indeed, I was once even called “reprehensible” by a woman of repellent aspect, remotely connected with education, but, all things considered, I felt more honored than not. I...

        “So spake the Fiend, and with necessity, The tyrant’s plea, excus’d his devilish deeds.” —Milton, Paradise Lost The locus classicus of all informed discussion on the subject of the political essence of totalitarianism is the following passage from Plato’s Republic: If you are caught committing any of these crimes on a...

How often we must reflect today that the salt hath lost its savor. At a “reading” at Queens College not long ago, I saw and heard Norman Mailer reading “poems” to his audience. He showed all the innocent delight of a child, and he was well received. But Mailer, rich and approaching his 80’s, had...

Former Vice President Al Gore distinguished himself by a number of colorful claims, including his invention of the internet, his status as inspiration for the plot of Love Story, and his crime-busting investigations that pulled the covers off Love Canal and the villainy of both the internal-combustion engine and flush toilet. During last year’s presidential...

“Behold,” said the Lord, “I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves.” With this statement and by the Testament of His Own Blood, Christ inaugurated the Age of Martyrs—the first 300 years of the Christian era during which, in Jesus’s words, “They will deliver you up to the councils, and they will...

For Englishmen, the Roman Forum was nearly as much a part of their political heritage as the Tower of London or Westminster Abbey. Since Colonial America was a part of British culture, educated American colonists shared in the British reverence for antiquity. Eighteenth-century Englishmen (and those Americans who could manage it) traveled to Italy—Rome in...

In the summer of 1943, as Allied forces reached Italy, U.S. Army counterintelligence warned GIs, “You are no longer in Kansas City, San Francisco, or Ada, Oklahoma, but in a European country where espionage has been second nature to the population for centuries.” That “second nature” extends all the way back to early Rome and...

Somewhere deep in their bones, Americans recognize that property is the paramount civil right—perhaps the paramount human right. Anyone who seriously studies American history, particularly that of the late 18th century, will discover that property, along with virtue, provided the foundation for American government. Indeed, the preservation of properly is arguably the chief reason we...

The interplay of race and economics in America has produced a new variant of political economy that we might call “multicultural capitalism,” a system in which property is, for the most part, privately owned, but its ownership is conditional on the race, sex, and—in some cases—the sexual orientation of the owner. In the pursuit of...

Tom Ditzler, a veteran, buys 30 acres of rural farmland. For 50 years, he and his wife, Jan, live there, rearing two children, Cassandra and Christina. Tom comes to know the contours of his property by heart—the creek that runs across his land, the wetlands surrounding the creek, the hills and woods that rise up...

There are many conservative, intelligent people who will happily tell you that there is no such thing as the absolute truth of history, only different, mutually complementary versions. History, they will say, is a mutable, fluid continuum, whose multiple truths are constantly undergoing revision and revaluation in one another’s reflected light, as well as in...

Once, before giving a speech in Cincinnati, I met the chairman of the history department at Xavier University. I told him that I was going to talk about the sexual revolution and how it had been used to destroy Catholic political power in the period following World War II (the thesis of Part III of...

Any conversation about conspiracy theories inevitably turns to “the Jews.” On one hand, the critics of “international Zionism” claim that U.S. foreign policy (or the world’s resources) are being devoted to promoting Israel’s interests; on the other, there are those who warn against an “international Jewish conspiracy.” The second group can be traced at least...

Our common European civilization—of which the old American Republic is an integral part, or else it is nothing —is rooted in “the glory that was Greece.” Our spiritual and intellectual mentors are to be found among Greek thinkers, scientists, and artists. This inheritance is reflected even in the way we repeat the political follies of...