Black mischief continues to bubble in the Caribbean, and the Reverend Jesse Jackson, U.S. Representative Charles Rangel (Democrat, New York), the American Bar Association, the Church World Service, and the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights have demanded that the Bush administration grant temporary political asylum to the 14,000 Haitian refugees taken off small boats by...
10961 search results for: Post-Human Future
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The Real Fight Is Here at Home
On our refrigerator door, we have posted photos and stories of Marines who have lost their lives in the Iraq war. Among them are Cpl. Jason Dunham and Lance Cpl. Aaron Austin. Dunham was 22 when he dived onto a grenade to protect his buddies in K Company, 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines. A top high-school...
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Fritz Lang’s Liliom: Less Catholic, still Christian?
“. . . there are three things that last for ever: faith, hope, and love; but the greatest of them all is love.” 1 Corinthians, 13:13 (The New English Bible with the Apocrypha, 1970). On February 7, 2011, Art Livingston posted to this blog a discussion of the early Hollywood talkie, Liliom (1930), based on the...
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A Lot of Nerve
It was an editor’s dream: poems of this caliber, unsolicited and unexpected, in my post office box. The verse was assertive, muscular, practiced but never unsurprising. Who was this man? Everyone else knew, it seemed. Richard Moore’s poems and essays had been widely published for more than 15 years before the publication of his first...
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Strangers in a Strange Land
Regarding my last post on working class support for Trump, a Breitbart report on a Reuters poll tells us something important about America’s state of mind: According to the Reuters survey, 58 percent Americans say they “don’t identify with what America has become.” While Republicans and Independents are the most likely to agree with this...
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Losing the War—February 2005
PERSPECTIVE Selling Muhammad the Ropeby Thomas Fleming Cutting off our nose . . . VIEWS War on the Home Frontby Wayne AllensworthReal homeland security. Is There a Khilafah in Your Future?by James George JatrasThe coming Islamic revolution. NEWS The Saudi Presence in the United Statesby Robert SpencerThe most lethal terror front of all? Islam: Africa’s...
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Afghan Lies: Continuity of Deceit
[above: Office of War Information research workers, 1943] The Afghanistan Papers, published by The Washington Post on Dec. 9, have demonstrated that successive U.S. administrations have deliberately and systematically disinformed the nation about the nature of the conflict, its course, and prospects. This should be no surprise to those who have studied the modern history of foreign affairs...
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Bombing Won’t Save Iraq
The panic that engulfed this capital after the fall of Mosul, when it appeared that the Islamist fanatics of ISIS would overrun Baghdad, has passed. And the second thoughts have begun. “U.S. Sees Risk in Iraqi Airstrikes,” ran the June 19 headline in the Washington Post, “Military Warns of Dangerous Complications.” This is welcome news....
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Muslim Pressure and Christian Appeasement
From time to time I go to Oxford, the city of dreaming spires, the home of what Gladstone called “the God-fearing and God-sustaining University of Oxford.” For Catholics it is revered as the home of Cardinal Newman, that most human and subtle of converts, and for Protestants it is the place of the Martyrs Memorial...
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The Logic of the Map
Soon after his election in 1844, James K. Polk sat down with the historian George Bancroft and, before offering him the Cabinet post of secretary of the Navy, sketched the four objectives of his presidency. They were to lower the tariff, restore the independent treasury system, extend American sovereignty over the vast Oregon Country (claimed...
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How Not to Write a Direct-Mail Package (Or, Their Mistake Is Your Gain)
I’m a direct-mail junkie. It’s not that I admire those who kill trees and fund the U.S. Postal Service in order to sell magazines no one in his right mind would read and that future historians will not even bother to reference in a footnote. No, it’s a pragmatic kind of addiction. It’s my...
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Preparing for a Turbulent Four Years
During the campaign for the presidency, the major media were relentless in their attacks on Donald Trump. Reading the Washington Post daily I couldn’t believe the news coverage. It was one anti-Trump story after another. The reporters didn’t even bother to disguise what clearly were opinion pieces, passing them off as news. “Racist,” “sexist,” “anti-Semite”—these...
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Will War Derail Trump’s Reelection?
“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future,” Yogi Berra reminded us. But on “The McLaughlin Group,” the TV talk show on which this writer has appeared for four decades, predictions are as mandated as was taking Latin in Jesuit high schools in the 1950s. Looking to 2020, this writer predicted that Donald Trump’s...
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The Jihadist Fifth Column: The Cure
Contrary to numerous optimistic assurances from high places, three years after September 11, the reach and operational capability of Islamic terror cells remain strong. They are present in areas previously closed to the recruiters of future “martyrs”—notably in Iraq—and in countries where, only a decade ago, they did not have a significant presence (e.g., Indonesia). ...
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On Martin Luther King, Jr.
In “Revolution and Tradition in the Humanities Curriculum” (September 1990), Thomas Fleming repeats the false story that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. plagiarized his Boston University doctoral dissertation. The charge has been made several times in the last year and appears to be spreading like whooping cough among the unvaccinated. Allow me to introduce some...
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Team Donkey in Rebuild Mode
In the immediate aftermath of their drubbing on November 8, and following Hillary Clinton’s career-ending injury, the Democrats faced the question every rebuilding team faces: Who is the quarterback of the future? DNC interim chairperson Donna Brazile is not the answer. She’s still undergoing the concussion protocol, after a helmet-to-helmet collision with WikiLeaks in October,...
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Mark Levin’s Mistakes Hurt Conservatives
A devastating leftist critique of Mark Levin’s bestselling book American Marxism was posted by Zachary Petrizzo at Salon the other day. After reading Petrizzo’s remarks, I am left wondering about the colossal foolishness of Levin, who set out to write a book—which his celebrity would push to the top of the New York Times best seller list—on something it seems he never bothered...
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Francophile Pursuits
Jacques Chirac, in the last week of October, called off the Anglo-French summit scheduled for December after angrily accusing British Prime Minister Tony Blair of speaking to him with extraordinary insolence over the future of the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and Africa. The French president told Mr. Blair, “You have been very rude,...
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Scare Quotes II
Last week, Organized Leftism twisted its knickers into a knot over something someone said, and it used the usual tactic — scare quotes — to suggest that what the person said is false, even though it is obviously true. That person was Geraldo Rivera. Media Matters posted a video of Rivera’s appearance on Fox News with no...
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The Beltway Conspiracy to Break Trump
At Mar-a-Lago this weekend President Donald Trump was filled “with fury” says the Washington Post, “mad—steaming, raging, mad.” Early Saturday the fuming president exploded with this tweet: “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!” The president has reason to be...
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Defending the Family Castle, Part I
Everyone has heard the expression: “An Englishman’s home is his castle.” The most memorable expression of this proverb was given by the elder William Pitt, the future Lord Chatham: “The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail, its roof may shake; the wind...
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On Quebec
While working up to his conclusion that “the first task of a moral human being is not to play the stranger to our friends and judge the world as if we were gods,” Thomas Fleming (“Other People,” March) finds it necessary to issue this stirring proclamation: “It is time for Anglo-Americans, in Canada and the...
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Well, Naturally, We’re Gullible
I love Sarah Palin. That’s not necessarily because of anything she believes or advocates, but because of the pleasure I derive from watching the apoplexy she causes in liberals, especially in a university setting. Not only is Palin a strong conservative, but she has a regular middle-class background and a passionate religious commitment. This combination...
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In Memoriam: Mary Kohler
Chairman Ray Welder remembers fellow board member and longtime Chronicles supporter Mary Kohler.
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Bush’s New “Axis of Evil”
George W. Bush must have been the despair of the history department of every school his daddy managed to get him into. Consider his latest excursion into the history of the republic, at Southern Methodist, where the Great Man's papers are to be housed. What's interesting about our country, if you ...
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Trump’s In-Kind Contribution to Bernie
The directed killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s blood-soaked field marshal in the “forever war” of the Middle East, has begun to roil the politics of both the region and the USA. A stunned and shaken Iran retaliated by firing a dozen missiles at two U.S. bases in Iraq. Yet, before launching the attack, Iran...
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Muddling the Missile Crisis
The Abyss, a pop history treatment of the Cuban Missile Crisis, revives unhistorical myths in an effort to chalk the whole thing up to American hysteria, and to portray the bumbling JFK as having masterfully handled the crisis.
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At An All-Time High
Voter cynicism and apathy are at an all-time high, and as such we can expect the unexpected come November. Those Middle American Radicals whom Sam Francis has been writing about will either revolt at the polls or sit at home, disgusted. Thus far, during the primary season, someone has been staying home, since turnout has...
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Hawks Win
The Pentagon’s National Defense Strategy, which Defense Secretary James Mattis presented on January 19, envisages aggressive measures to counter Russia and China and instructs the military to refocus on Cold War-style competition with them, away from terrorist threats and “rogue nations.” This is in stark contrast to Barack Obama’s 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review, which called...
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What We Wish Donald Trump Would Say to Prime Minister Netanyahu
A transcript of the conversation Donald Trump ought to have had with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his visit to Mar-a-Lago.
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The New Racism on Campus
Having done four years of graduate work at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, I was distressed to learn that there, as elsewhere, a few radical activists can rout a weak administration and faculty by crying “racism.” Last February a special Task Force on Race Relations released a report to justify the subordination of education to racial...
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The Agenda Worse Than Critical Race Theory
Few notice what is taught in school until it is too late. Today’s push for Critical Race Theory (CRT) is extraordinarily ambitious, and it is hard for defenders of traditional education to imagine anything more toxic than this theory that has seemingly burst on the scene. But, as bad as it may seem, CRT is...
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America’s Forgotten 400th Anniversary
We seem to hear little this year about the arrival of the Pilgrims in Massachusetts in November 1620. Perhaps the coronavirus is the cause, or maybe the ugly mess and turmoil of our presidential election has overshadowed its remembrance. Or maybe political correctness has claimed another victim. Whatever the case, the 400th anniversary...
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The Ultimate Insider
Who are the spear-carriers of government policies? This is a tale that puts pieces together over the course of a few decades. Neocons eat stories like this for breakfast. Like most teachers, I have learned at least as much from my students as they have learned from me. An Argentinian graduate student at St. Louis...
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The New Imperialism
Martin is a Franciscan lay missionary whom I befriended early in my stay in Tuzla. Over beers at the Harley-Davidson, a bar popular with the international crowd, he explained, “A lot of organizations will be pulling out at the end of the year. This year is real important. If the democracy will hold, it has...
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American Gothic
“Do not the seas and the mountains and the prairies and the plains in some manner and to some extent transform men into their own likeness?” —Cyrenus Cole The America First cause of 1959-41 finds a powerful, if unusual and indirect, affirmation in E. Bradford Burns’ Kinship with the Land: Regionalist...
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Throw in the Towel
If you thought comedy was dead, take a look at the newest Napoleon on the block, the one wearing sandals on his feet and a tablecloth on his head, and striking an heroic pose with his hairy legs wrapped around a camel’s hump. This ludicrous figure resides in Riyadh and is fawned over by people...
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Immigration: The Greatest Government Failure of Our Times
Migration is a reality that concerns no more than 200 million people on earth now living outside their country of origin—that is, only three percent of the world’s population. Why should we even talk about it? The reason is simple: Global statistics are worthless; the whole phenomenon is concentrated in Europe and the United States. ...
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Liar From the Beginning
Aaron D. Wolf is absolutely right to argue that, from a Christian perspective, J.J. Rousseau is the fountainhead of political evil in our day (“Ignoble Savages,” January-March, Heresies). Indeed, the Prince of this World has been rejoicing in Christianity’s shameless pandering to the courtesan Mlle Égalité, ever since the catastrophe of the First Republic. Rousseau...
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How the Networks Went into the Drug Peddling Business
When, sometime in the 1960s, the late Frank Stanton, overseeing news operations at CBS, asked his boss William Paley, the network's founder, for more time for newscasts, Paley shook his head.
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Our Little War in Kosovo
After ethnic Albanian guerrillas initially rejected the peace settlement fashioned by U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, a friend of hers told Newsweek that “She’s angry at everyone—the Serbs, the Albanians and NATO.” Another Clinton administration official raged: “Here is the greatest nation on earth pleading with some nothing-balls to do something entirely in their...
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Obstacle to Fresh Vision
Yasser Arafat, the president of the Palestinian Authority, is dead. While he was alive, he was an obstacle to any fresh vision for peace in the Middle East. Vainglorious and shifty (he changed his mind about his place of birth thrice), he was unattractive as the “icon” of Palestinian aspirations. His ineffectiveness as an administrator...
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One Hell For Another
Karlo Štajner spent seven thousand days in Siberia and learned nothing. Of course the reader is moved by the awfulness of spending all that time in the Gulag, but still he is left only with the experience of a man who survived. Yet, for better or for worse, for many of the named victims, Štajner’s...
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Little Bitty Pretty One
The television screen shows five-year-old Tara being awakened from a sound sleep at 6 a.m. She has a beauty pageant to get ready for. To shake off her sluggishness she is given a carb-rich donut and some caffeine-loaded Mountain Dew. After “breakfast” Tara is dressed in a two-piece bathing suit and ...
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I Remember
For some years I have lived in Québec as a friendly alien from the United States, traveling from time to time back to my native Minnesota and other states to practice law in my fields of interest. I am married to a French-Canadian wife who is a member of the bar and mairesse of our...
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Pro-Choice Christians: Shattering Nature’s Glass Ceiling
After eight years of George W. Bush’s “culture of life,” which included well over 4,000 U.S. military deaths in Iraq and an estimated 1.25 million Iraqi deaths, abortion is back on the front burner, thanks to the presence of Sarah Palin on national television. Few were “energized” about John McCain before she entered stage right...
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A Towering Genius, Greatly Missed
On April 1, 1815, Otto Eduard Leo pold von Bismarck was born on the family estate at Schönhausen near Berlin, in what used to be Prussia. He came into this world at the end of a quarter-century of pan-European crisis, which started with the French Revolution and ended with Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. Bismarck’s bicentennial...
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To Arm or Not to Arm
To arm pilots or not to arm—that is, apparently, an even more important question than the debate over whether or not we should allow unions, seniority rules, and affirmative action to hamstring every new effort to preserve national security. George Bush wants a free hand with the unions, but his administration doesn’t want airline pilots...
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Poetry You Can Read
“It seemed so simple when one was young and new ideas were mentioned not to grow red in the face and gobble.” —Logan Pearsall Smith In his introduction to the 1962 Penguin anthology Contemporary American Poetry, Donald Hall wrote, “For thirty years an orthodoxy ruled American poetry. It derived from the authority of T.S. Eliot...
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Who ‘Fought to Preserve Slavery’?
Letter from Pergamum-on-the-Potomac The campaign against memorials to long-dead Confederates seems to have taken a bit of a sabbatical. Perhaps the media have only paused the hype in favor the celebrity groping mania, or maybe pulling down or defacing outdoor art is not a cold-weather activity. In any case, the relative calm was a blessing...