Every year at midsummer, the secret rulers of the world meet in solemn conclave down the street from me. In the down-at-the-heels resort town of Monte Rio, on the banks of the Russian River in California’s wine country, is the Bohemian Grove, a 2,700-acre “encampment” that houses the members of the Bohemian Club, founded in...
10957 search results for: Post-Human Future
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The Gate to Quagmire
A team of Yugoslav journalists from Narodni Telegraf recently visited Camp Bondsteel, invited as guests to what used to be their country. Bondsteel is the largest U.S. military base in the Balkans, and in what seems a bad omen, the biggest that the U.S. military’ has constructed since Vietnam. It is being erected in the...
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Turkey: The AKP Regime Is Not in Trouble, But Erdogan Is
Hundreds of Turkish police officers backed by armored cars moved in on Istanbul’s Taksim Square early Tuesday morning and reclaimed the site after pulling out on June 1. By midday bulldozers had removed barricades of paving stones and corrugated iron. The crackdown surprised protesters, hundreds of whom had been sleeping in a makeshift camp...
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Living With Lenin
An interesting sidelight on our current ruling regime is its changed attitude toward Russia. From the time of the Russian Communist takeover until quite recently, American leftist “intellectuals” sympathized with the Russian regime and gave it every benefit of the doubt. During the Cold War leftists pushed for unilateral Western disarmament, beating down those who...
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Later, Not Better
The work of a longtime author on social problems, on the deteriorating relations between blacks and Jews, and on Philadelphia civic life who also served as a Reagan appointee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, Murray Friedman’s history of the neoconservative ascent to power is neither scholarly nor balanced. Nor is it a book I...
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Laborious Hedonism
In America, speaking out against work was once like saying nasty things about motherhood. Even now that attacks on motherhood have become common. Perry Pascarella makes it clear in The New Achievers that work is still sacred to the yuppie mentality. No longer, however, is work the spiritual exercise it was in Calvinism; restraining the...
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John Yoo, Totalitarian
John Yoo stands outside the Anglo-American legal tradition. His views lead to self-incrimination wrung out of a victim by torture. He believes a president of the United States can initiate war, even on false pretenses, and then use the war he starts as cover for depriving U.S. citizens of habeas corpus protection. A U.S. attorney...
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How Trump Wins the Debate
On one of my first trips to New Hampshire in 1991, to challenge President George H. W. Bush, I ran into Sen. Eugene McCarthy. He was returning to the scene of his ’68 triumph, when he had inflicted the first crippling wound on Lyndon Johnson. “Pat, you don’t have to win up here, you know,”...
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Lincoln’s Slaves
A West Hollywood “Gay” Bar has announced it will not serve California legislators who stand up to the LGBT lobby’s demands. Bar owner David Cooley defended his no-entry list saying: “I want to send a message to all those people out there who conflate Christian values with discrimination: we don’t want your kind here,” Cooley said....
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Dining With The Donald
When Donald Trump started making noise about running for president, I knew next to nothing about him. Since I don’t watch television, I’m not sure whether I could even have identified him in a lineup. I knew only that he was a New York-based real-estate mogul and had a series of beautiful wives. So it...
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The Pathetic Individual
Perfection of the life or perfection of the art? The imperatives of art being what they are, Yeats thought that the writer could not have both. With the completion of Richard R. Lingeman’s two-volume biography of Theodore Dreiser, it seems evident that Dreiser was fated to attain neither. Born in 1871 in Indiana, Dreiser managed...
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Ireland’s Forgotten Genocide
Despite much handwringing about British colonial misdeeds in Africa and the Caribbean, the systematic, purposeful extermination of more than a million Irish during the potato famine of the 19th century gets little attention.
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Graham Crackers, Corn Flakes, and Other Grrrrreat American Heresies
“Dad,” the inquisitive youngster is bound to ask, “where do corn flakes come from?” In today’s economy, where farms are something you drive by on your way to Disneyland, the most common answer might be “Kroger” or “the 7-Eleven” instead of “from the farm, son, from cornfields.” The real answer, which you would most certainly...
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U.S. Politics Gives Brits a Bad Trip
“Covering American politics is like crack,” a veteran British journalist told me last year. “Once you’ve had a taste nothing else gives the same high.” I now think I know what he meant—though LSD might be a more apt comparison. In the age of Trump, it’s hard to watch American politics without wondering if you are...
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Ici On Parle Anglais
When Canada’s federal government committed the country to two official languages, it set the scene for the social revolution that has since been foisted upon the Canadian majority. That was in 1969, when Pierre Trudeau’s Official Languages Act declared English and French to be the official languages of Canada, possessing and enjoying “equality of status...
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The Establishment
We need a word for the forces that govern our lives. Establishment, a term popularized by Henry Fairlie in the 1950’s, is common currency. He meant by it “the whole matrix of official and social relationships within which power is exercised.” Ralph Waldo Emerson is held to be the first to use the word in...
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Supremes Refuse to Normalize Sleeping Rough
Municipalities can ban homeless encampments from sidewalks, parks and other public areas. Sleeping in the rough is not a constitutionally guaranteed right.
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What the Sterling Scandal Shows About America
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...
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Solar Keynesianism
Only government thinks it can move the sun across the sky. Like me, you may be suffering from “jet lag” today because of the “lost” hour yesterday when most of the country – excepting only the sensible states of Arizona and Hawaii – switched to Daylight Savings Time. (Excuse me, now it’s spelled “Hawai’i.” We...
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Why Are Americans At Each Other’s Throats? Ask Barack Obama
The man many Americans hoped and expected to be a unifier, from the beginning of his presidency until its end, played one race card after another.
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Our Judicial Dictatorship
Do the states have the right to outlaw same-sex marriage? Not long ago the question would have been seen as absurd. For every state regarded homosexual acts as crimes. Moreover, the laws prohibiting same-sex marriage had all been enacted democratically, by statewide referenda, like Proposition 8 in California, or by Congress or elected state legislatures....
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On Fire
Christopher Check’s review of W.G. Simms’ A City Laid Waste: The Capture, Sack, and Destruction of the City of Columbia (“Total War,” September) was an excellent consideration of that volume’s importance in current topical terms. If Southerners were allowed to know the true story of the invasion and burning of the civilian South by U.S....
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What We Are Reading: August 2023
Immigration proponents make obvious contradictory claims. They repeat endlessly that recent immigrants are integrating just as fully as earlier immigrants did. Yet they also want to turn the idea that “America is a melting pot” into a prohibited microaggression. If it really is happening, why is it a moral crime to mention it? They lose...
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Life as a Picture Postcard
The girls are in dirndls. Usually pink, with a darker apron and neckerchief and a waist-cinching bodice of black velveteen, buttoned up under old-fashioned chests. Puff-sleeves of white starched blouses. They wear this folkloric costume quite unselfconsciously, about their everyday jobs, in bank or supermarket alike. This is a feminist’s nightmare. The apple-cheeked men are...
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Big Macs, A-bombs, and Trump
William F. Buckley, Jr., spent his adult winter months in Rougemont, an alpine resort next to its chicer neighbor Gstaad, now the Mecca for the nouveau riche and vulgar. Throughout the 60’s and 70’s, however, the area was known for its music festival run by Yehudi Menuhin, and for celebrity writers like Buckley, my mentor,...
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Israel’s Counterelites
Conventional wisdom has it that the recent parliamentary election in Israel has swayed Israeli politics further to the political right. After all, the balance of power in the 120-member Knesset has shifted quite dramatically. The political bloc that included the centrist Kadima Party and Labor, which dominated the outgoing government in Jerusalem, was reduced from...
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Pro Patria
The recent passing of Mel Bradford has cast a chastening light upon this latest of his collections. Who had wished to be reminded of the author’s indispensability in this or indeed any other way? Yet reminded we are and must be. This book means much in itself as it stands, and means more as the...
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There Is No Vetting
Back in August, as the Biden administration prepared to dump 82,000-plus Afghan refugees onto U.S. soil, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security assured Americans that it was “working around the clock to conduct the security screening and vetting of vulnerable Afghans before they are permitted entry into the United States” and taking “multiple steps to...
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Censorship: When to Say No
Every April since 1981 the American Society of journalists and Authors sponsors an “I Read Banned Books” campaign. They routinely trot out copies of children’s books like Alice in Wonderland or Mary Poppins and modern classics like Ulysses—all of which have been censored by somebody somewhere. One of them inevitably quotes Jefferson on tolerating “error...
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Letitia James’s Richelieu Routine
If New York’s attorney general can smear and destroy an online publication simply because she does not agree with its contents, there’s no meaningful free speech in America anymore.
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Meditations at Ft. Lauderdale Airport
I arrived at the Ft. Lauderdale airport to a line at the Spirit Airline ticket counter so long that I didn’t even contemplate whether to wait. My flight to Laguardia wasn’t until 3:20 P.M., and it was only 11:00 A.M., so, after a leisurely lunch, I dropped my bags off and decided to look for...
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Overlooking Mass Killers—If They’re on the Totalitarian Left
Imgard Furchner, a 96-year-old resident of a special care facility in Germany, is being investigated as a war criminal. She will appear in court in a wheelchair, which is now her customary way of moving about, the Swiss magazine DieWeltwoche reports. She did try to escape from her accusers in a taxi but was apprehended...
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Our Pushover President
Our Pushover President by Patrick J. Buchanan • November 24, 2009 • Printer-friendly “This state visit is . . . a terrible mistake,” said Rep. Eliot Engel, chairman of the House Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere. “He is illegitimate with his own people, and Brazil is now going to give him the air of legitimacy...
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William Morris in Tokyo
Mingei: Japanese Folk Art, an exhibition consisting of 115 paintings, sculptures, ceramics, furniture, lacquers, toys, and other artifacts, opened at the Brooklyn Museum on July 12 and remained on display through September 30, 1985. Most of the art of Japan is imbued with simplicity, directness, and a tremendous sense of design. Japanese work in the...
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Withdraw from NAFTA
NAFTA will fail a thousand times before its advocates beg forgiveness. Not that an apology should be accepted, but justice requires, at least, that they admit their complicity in the century’s biggest intergovernmental financial seam. NAFTA led (thanks to the Republican leadership) to a $50 billion American bailout of Mexico, the loss of the dollar’s...
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It’s a Drag
That characteristic feature of our age, the impressively feckless adolescent indulged by a craven and cynical media, reared its head this past October 15 in the rural community of Randle, Washington. For reasons known only to themselves, the authorities at the 188-student White Pass High School invited their charges to attend class that particular morning...
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Elysian Fields Forever
Elysium Produced and distributed by TriStar Pictures and Sony Pictures Entertainment Directed and written by Neill Blomkamp Neill Blomkamp’s second film, Elysium, is, in a way, a sequel to his first, District 9. This time, however, there are no eight-foot-tall prawn-like aliens accusing earthlings in Johannesburg, South Africa, of the crime of apartheid or insensitivity...
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Intimations of Mortality
The Silence of the Lambs Produced by Kenneth Ull, Edward Saxon, and Ron Bozman Directed by Jonathan Demme Written by Ted Talley From the novel by Thomas Harris Released by Orion Open Doors Produced by Angelo Rizzoli Directed by Gianni Amelio Written by Vicenzo Cerami and Mr. Amelio From the novel by Leonardo Sciascia Released...
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Trivial Spirits
Malcolm Bradbury: Rates of Exchange; Alfred A. Knopf; New York Vassily Aksyonov: The Island of Crimea; Translated by Michael Henry Heim; Random House; New York. Signs of massive political fatuity abound. In the face of more than a decade of relentless Soviet arms acquisition, righteous notables in the West chant for a (virtually unilateral) freeze...
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Leaving the ECLA
The recent decision by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) to ordain active homosexuals and adopt a more permissive attitude toward fornication has put many parish churches in the difficult position of choosing whether to remain in the ELCA. One such church is Prince of Peace Lutheran in Rockton, Illinois, a village of some...
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Days of Rage
The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working- Class Revolution; By David Paul Kuhn; Oxford University Press; Hardcover, 416 pp., $29.95 Mayday 1971: A White House at War, a Revolt in the Streets, and the Untold History of America’s Biggest Mass Arrest; By Lawrence Roberts; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Hardcover,...
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The Sexual Left, the Welfare State, and the Divorce Revolution
“All politics is on one level sexual politics.” —George Gilder Extremists break out of the margins and take power when they fool opponents into advancing their agenda. By politicizing the family and sexuality, the left duped conservatives, and all of us, into becoming their accomplices. Since last fall’s electoral coup, the United States has been...
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Whistleblower Claims ABC News Colluded with Democrats in Debate Prep
Very little is known about the woman who could be elected president in November. ABC News appears to have colluded with Kamala Harris’s campaign to keep it that way.
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What the Editors Are Reading
Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) was one of the most important philosophers and authors of the 20th century. Camus called him, “after Nietzsche, . . . perhaps the greatest ‘European writer.’” Yet he is virtually unknown today, and scarcely ever read, or even referred to or quoted. One needn’t read far in any of his many...
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Night Vision
“I hear thunder,” Ivalene said in a puzzled voice, looking up to the blue sky stretched tight across the great canyon. “How could there be thunder?” Will Ford demanded. “There isn’t a cloud in sight. They must be blasting somewhere close by to here.” “So how could they be blasting, smart-ass?” she retorted. “Blasting isn’t...
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A Methodist Revival
Methodism, America’s third-largest religious denomination, eagerly embraced the Social Gospel nearly a hundred years ago. It supported labor unions, civil rights, and a moderate welfare state. By the 1960’s, the church was supporting Third World revolutions and abortion rights, while opposing school prayer and U.S. military defense efforts. Not surprisingly, Methodist theology became as wacky...
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White Like Me
Race is the American religion, which is why no one can talk about it truthfully. I do not mean that no one speaks his mind on the subject. Well-indoctrinated liberals can talk all day on why race does not matter, why the whole concept means nothing; and racialists can talk even longer on why it...
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In With the In-Crowd: Talkin’ Trash, Spendin’ Cash
A joke going around down here asks why Southern women don’t like group sex. The answer: too many thank-you notes. You know of course that I wouldn’t besmirch the pages of a family magazine with such smut if it didn’t speak directly to this month’s topic. (No, not group sex. This isn’t the Penthouse Forum,...
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What’s in a Naomi?
'Doppelganger' centers around Naomi Klein's personal grievance: Being mistaken for Naomi Wolf.