Professional Democrats, like the proverbial dog who returns to his vomit, cannot quit the idea that their grotesque caricatures of those who hold traditional views of marriage and family, men and women, borders and citizenship, and meaningful employment will appeal to enough of the electorate to return control of the government to them. Donald Trump...
Mikhail Gorbachev was perhaps the most abject failure among late 20th-century leaders. He let a destructive genie out of the bottle that led to NATO’s eastward expansion and laid the groundwork for the war in Ukraine.
The Ozark Mountains make up an area that American literature has largely passed by, leaving it the province of folklore and song, of homespun stories that seldom make their way to the lowlands. Ken Carey’s fine new book about the region, Flat Rock Journal, fills a great void, and not simply because with a literature...
Most Americans agree that the greatest problem America faces right now is a faltering economy. One would never know that by looking at NRO’s Corner from 4:54 pm to 6:21 pm on Thursday, February 26. A visitor to the Corner at that time would conclude that the greatest threat to the Republic is the appointment...
Hard cases make bad law, and since 2002 the exposure of some ugly criminal cases has stirred legislators in several states to contemplate dreadful legal innovations. However far removed these crimes may appear from regular mainstream American life, the legal principles involved threaten to wreak havoc in the coming decades. As all the world knows,...
Given the spread of violence across America, and the unfortunate politicization of these events, I’ve written a statement that virtually any Protestant or Catholic pastor could release, or deliver from the pulpit, in the wake of the next outrageous attack on innocent life using guns. As a public service to Christians in America, I’ve written...
St. Petersburg is coldly beautiful even on overcast late-winter days. There’s still ice on the Neva and the canals, with the wind-chill factor dropping to the lower 20’s in the evening—a reminder that Russia’s imperial capital is a mere 7° south of the Arctic Circle. Its façades look fresher than when I was here last...
Cases like the one involving Laken Riley cause us gradually to acquiesce to a new, less safe America where social trust is becoming a thing of the past.
No one paying attention with even one eye and half an ear can be ignorant of the fact that when it comes to this year’s election the MSM are lying shills for Hillary. But now it seems they’re all suffering from amnesia too. The latest “OMG, Trump said that!” moment is The Donald’s claim that...
The Berlin Tagesspiegel recently went after a young Protestant theologian whom naïve readers might have mistaken for a polite, unassuming scholar. This figure was outed by an academic colleague who discovered that he wrote for “new Right” publications, a term that in the German context should be understood quite broadly. One of the venues of this putative extremist...
Move over, Ashley Madison—there’s a new scandal in town. At least, that’s what the media is desperate to have you believe. In late October, the “hacktivist” group Anonymous, usually referred to oxymoronically as a “collective” of anarchists, announced that they had obtained the membership rolls of several Ku Klux Klan organizations. They planned to release...
“How beastly the bourgeois is,” sneered D.H. Lawrence, “especially the male of the species.” What courage and imagination a writer must have to revile a social class that has been under attack for over a generation! Aristocrats (and would-be aristocrats) look down their noses at the bourgeoisie’s convention-bound moralism and dismal commitment to hard work...
This book is a powerful example of Faulkner’s wisdom that the past isn’t dead—it isn’t even past. Mortar shells falling on Heathrow’s runways, even when they fail to detonate, effectively remind us of the Troubles they are designed to remind us of by causing so much trouble. And they recall for us Joyce’s Stephen, who...
Llewellyn Rockwell’s article “How the Market Stamps Out Evil” in the December issue was challenging. But whereas his superb philippic on the presidency in the October issue (“Down With the Presidency“) left me baying at the moon, this time I was unconvinced. Can capitalism really be set against a tyrannical government as a force for...
“My religion defines who I am. And I’ve been a practicing Catholic my whole life,” said Vice President Joe Biden in 2012. “I accept my church’s position on abortion as . . . doctrine. Life begins at conception. . . . I just refuse to impose that on others.” For four decades, Biden backed the...
Critics have long considered H. L. Mencken to be impossible, meaning stubborn, difficult, exasperating. But today the appellation takes on a different meaning: His career and ideas simply would be impossible today.
Now that the American empire has become explicitly leftist—committed to gay rights, feminism, abortion, and “democracy”—the left has become bloodthirsty cheerleaders for its wars.
“Do not seek to become a god.” —Pindar Once we begin to see that we are all God, that we all have the attributes of God, then I think the whole purpose of human life is to reown the Godlikeness within us; the perfect love, the perfect wisdom, the perfect understanding, the perfect intelligence, and...
Possibly the best reason for not understanding what’s in the Senate health care bill is that no senator knows for sure, not even Harry Reid, without whose subservience to the Obama White House we might have some idea what’s up; but let that go . . . Few legislative spectacles of our time, and there...
The 75th anniversary of the publication of I’ll Take My Stand ought to cause traditionalist Southerners and other Americans to look closely not only at the current state of our society but at their own personal spheres of community, family, and church. The authors warned that the South was in danger of being snatched from...
Boris. Only one politician in the land is universally known by his first name. “Boris Johnson” is unnecessary. He is now the center of a political storm, since he wrote in his Daily Telegraph column last week that burka-wearers looked like letter-boxes and bank robbers. They do, actually, but this truthful observation did not save...
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande came to Moscow last Friday night to discuss the outline of what was heralded as their peace plan for Ukraine. They spent five hours talking to President Vladimir Putin, but left for the security conference in Munich early Saturday without making a breakthrough. Their effort will...
As the new French President, Emmanuel Macron seems determined to hitch opposites together, combine like with dislike, compatibles with incompatibles, and otherwise fudge his policies as he did during the electoral campaign. As a candidate for the office, he praised Angela Merkel’s decision to accept a million “refugees” from the Middle East and elsewhere—but has...
When I called Mike Rafferty to arrange a meeting to discuss a possible symposium on the demise of the local community, I had to choose a different date from the one I?wanted because Mike was busy that night. He was boxing at the Spectrum. Like Rocky Balboa, Mike Rafferty lives ten minutes from the Spectrum. ...
Vladimir Putin’s surprise firing of the Russian government on February 24 and his appointment of “technocratic” Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov on March 1 had Western officials and observers buzzing about another round of “reform” and Russian cooperation with the West, while Western investors were optimistic that the new government would favor them. Nevertheless, Washington should...
Words like liberal and conservative have been losing whatever meaning they once had. An old Tory would not have seen anything very conservative in free trade, and Senator Bob Taft would certainly have had reservations about America’s role as international policeman. But liber al still has discernible significance in ethics, where the great liberal traditions of Locke, Adam Smith, and the Utilitarians...
Russian relations, in mid-November, were potentially on the verge of a sea-change, at the conclusion of two days of smiles, handshakes, bear hugs, and the usual feel-goodisms we have come to expect of “summit meetings,” especially from American presidents. (President George W. Bush, for instance, insisted that “the more I get to see” Russian President...
President Obama’s nationally televised speech announcing an increase in troop levels in Afghanistan was everything we have come to expect from one of his speeches: vapid, dishonest, puerile, and–most of all–confused. Speaking grandly of an exit strategy he never defined, he did not once address the more serious question of an entrance strategy. What possible...
Poor Augusto Pinochet! Try to imagine Fidel Castro flying to England on private business and getting arrested for alleged crimes against humanity. Within hours, every talking head on this planet would be up in arms, demanding British blood and Castro’s freedom. It hardly needs stating that Fidel would be better suited to incarceration at Her...
Before the largest audience of his political career, save perhaps his inaugural, Donald Trump delivered the speech of his life. And though Tuesday’s address may be called moderate, even inclusive, Trump’s total mastery of his party was on full display. Congressional Republicans who once professed “free-trade” as dogmatic truth rose again and again to cheer...
An interesting debate on the right concerning the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution neglects to consider that the founder’s Constitution may no longer be our framework of government.
As the summer before the first anniversary of the September 11 attack drew to a sweltering end, the Bush administration desperately sought some plausible reason for the war against Iraq that its chieftains so desperately wanted to wage. The appeal to the “weapons of mass destruction” that Saddam Hussein supposedly harbors and which he was...
William Pitt the Elder, in his Speech on the Excise Bill delivered before the House of Commons, encapsulated our Founding Fathers’ view of property rights when he said, “The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the force of the Crown. It may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may...
The priest had just closed the volume by Thomas à Kempis on the bookmark and put away what was left of the bottle of wine when the telephone rang. He answered it reluctantly and recognized Mrs. Corelli’s voice on the line, begging him to hurry and saying that the doctor was already on his way....
“I have found little ‘good’ about human beings. In my experience, most of them are trash.” —Sigmund Freud An old professor of mine once joked that ecumenism was a case of “the bland leading the bland,” an epithet that could just as appropriately describe contemporary humanism. Cast your net at Google, and you will haul...
The Washington Post is best known outside the newspaper business for the investigative reporting of Woodward and Bernstein—not to mention Janet Cooke. But in the long run, the Post‘s most enduring achievement is that it pioneered the modern newspaper feature section. Until the late 1960’s, most features sections were called “women’s pages,” but when Post...
“PEN international is working for your release,” my lawyer told me. In the bare, mean interview room of the Belgrade District Prison he smiled at me, and I smiled back, because the mikes could not pick that up. There were no TV cameras there, yet, to monitor our winks and nods—the language of slaves, as...
Peter Hitchens, writing in The Spectator last March, asked why we should be concerned with stopping several thousand homosexuals from getting married when heterosexual marriage is so threatened by dysfunction and divorce. The social conservatives’ obsession with the subject is, he argued, simply “a stupid distraction from the main war,” like the battle of Stalingrad. ...
In these days of political correctness and multiculturalism, the surprising thing is that there was so little controversy when the board of School District 205 awarded a $40,000 contract to revisionist historian Michael Hoffman, author of They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of ...
We have it on good authority that the peacemakers are blessed, and that’s only fair, because we sure catch hell in this world. Not long ago I suggested that most Southerners who display the Confederate flag are not bigots and got some hate mail to the effect that only a bigot could believe that. Last...
Patricia Highsmith is a peculiar taste, nasty and unpalatable to many. Readers who like her, however, tend to like her enormously. She was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, the unwanted daughter of a graphic artist who attempted to abort her by drinking turpentine. Her father left home before she was born, and she...
Last Thursday President Donald Trump announced that his administration would impose a 10 percent tariff on $300 billion of Chinese imports starting September 1, in addition to the existing 25 percent tariff on $250 billion in goods introduced last spring. Virtually everything the Chinese export to America may soon be subject to some level of...
George W. Bush was lauded in the pages of the Wall Street Journal in the summer of 2003 by Fred Barnes, editor of the Weekly Standard, for promoting a new brand of “conservatism.” According to Barnes, President Bush is a “big government conservative,” and his administration believes “in using what would normally be seen as...
It’s a Charlie Hebdo world—a place where “free speech” means the freedom to depict the Pope in drag with the caption “Ready for anything in order to win some clients?” Where “liberty” means crude drawings, of the sort one might see on a men’s room wall, showing the Holy Trinity in a series of sexual...
You have seen them on the evening news, the long weary lines of Christian refugees: Serbs streaming from the Krajina, Bosnia, Kosovo; Russians from Chechnya, Dagestan, and Kazakhstan. These are not the victims of some short and bitter war that strews exiles across the map of Europe for several years until they can make their...
As Joe Biden and the elites push a sham narrative surrounding everything from Jan. 6, the principles of American constitutionalism, and even the nature of “the people” itself, Donald Trump stands as a rebuke to them and exposes their hypocrisy and wickedness.
I have always disbelieved those who would argue that the topography of a country, that is to say its purely geophysical characteristics, is dominant in the shaping of the personality of its people. Stalin used to call them vulgarizers of Marxism and shoot them, but we in the West may simply murmur that they exaggerate...
“They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Ben Franklin is much quoted in today’s debate on the trade-off between freedom and security, as we learn about the National Security Agency’s easy access to our phone records and emails. Yet we Americans have often...
Whenever a high-profile general disparages Trump, his opinion makes headlines. The sentiments of ordinary soldiers, and veterans, get much less attention.
Lewis Namier liked to tell the story of an English schoolboy who was asked to define “imperialism” on an examination paper. “Imperialism,” the budding proconsul wrote, “is learning how to get along with one’s social inferiors.” In the Edwardian twilight of the British Empire, that answer might have sufficed to win a scholarship to Balliol,...