To call something “Victorian” is, in left-liberal parlance, to say that you don’t like it. The fact that hardly anything routinely called “Victorian” accurately characterizes the era of Queen Victoria’s long reign, from 1837 to 1901, is one of the great historiographical tragedies of the 20th century. Thus, when a large number of African bishops...
Henry Regnery (1912-1996), as Jeffrey Nelson observes in his introduction, was “one of the unsung heroes of the last half-century of American cultural life.” Henry Regnery Company (now Regnery Publishing, Inc.), which he founded in 1947, gave America’s nascent conservative movement a beachhead in the monolithically liberal publishing world: The breakthrough was the publication of...
The featured theme of this month’s magazine is focused on a particular task, namely retrieving conservativism and conservative thinkers from the past and explaining their continued relevance to the present. The current conservative movement, as a form of media entertainment and as a partisan PR machine, has undergone sweeping change in just about every respect...
No doubt Gorbachev has been entirely misunderstood in the West, and continues to be. The primary myth is that glasnost and perestroika represented fundamental change from the Soviet past. They did not establish Western-style economic or political freedom, as the media led Americans to believe. Instead, each was designed to “improve and perfect” the workings...
United Airlines’ December 9 bankruptcy filing came as no surprise to those who understand the airline industry, in which even America’s most successful living investor, Warren E. Buffet, could not turn a profit. Buffett once observed, “In a business selling a commodity-type product it’s impossible to be a lot smarter than your dumbest competitor.” Mr....
Homosexuals coast-to-coast have been doing the slow burn in the past few months because their jug-eared leader, Barack Obama, has delayed fulfilling a key campaign promise: to scrap the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule. The policy is actually federal law, and it’s very simple: Keep your mouth shut, and you can serve. Ten months...
Recently, the New York Times ran an article that described, at some length, California’s latest tourist attraction, a “theme park and dinner theater” called Tinseltown Studios. Located, appropriately, just a stone’s throw from Disneyland, Tinseltown is a $15 million complex that exists for the purpose of “simulating fame.” Purchase your $45 ticket (“designed to look...
The USA regime will soon recover from the embarrassments created by the massive release of diplomatic documents onto the Internet. There will be investigations and prosecutions. There will be ironic attempts by Madame Clinton and her colleagues to pretend that personal attacks on heads of state and foreign diplomats are de rigueur in the business...
Arrival 21 Laps Entertainment Directed by Denis Villeneuve Screenplay by Eric Heisserer based on Ted Chiang’s novella Distributed by Paramount Pictures Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk Produced by Film4 and TriStar Pictures Directed by Ang Lee Screenplay by Jean-Christophe Castelli from Ben Fountain’s novel Distributed by Sony Pictures Releasing When is the last time you...
Presidential immunity, judicial immunity, and legislative immunity are essential to a system that allocates power through a democratic process.
Russian-American relations, commentators warned, would be damaged by NATO’s war in Yugoslavia, but the Clinton administration dismissed the idea. Russian anti-Americanism seemed a passing phase that would dissipate when media attention turned to the next international crisis. Events like Boris Yeltsin’s August 25 meeting with Jiang Zemin, in which Russia’s president accused NATO of “trying...
No studies indicate, let alone demonstrate, that a significant percentage of ordinary white people “hate” black people, or black white, or indeed that an appreciable number belonging to any race in America today “hates” members of any other race. But there’s no question that a great many people who subscribe to any one of the...
With the upcoming Easter in mind, I could not help but to share a Twitter observation reposted by Scott Richert: “Advertisers now call an Easter ham a “holiday ham”. You know, so as not to offend all those celebrating Passover with a ham” Funny? Of course. Sad? Even more so. As someone who actually observes...
From the June 2015 issue of Chronicles. It seems to me that in the present phase of European history the essential issue is no longer between Catholicism, on one side, and Protestantism, on the other, but between Christianity and Chaos. . . . Today we can see it on all sides as the active negation...
Saying “I told you so” is never very polite, but sometimes, especially when trying to explain things to the Republican Party, it’s advisable to say it. For the last year or so, the Republicans and their pet eggheads have been telling each other that they had just better shut up about immigration, immigration reform, and...
Arnold Schwarzenegger marched into the Orange County Register’s lobby wearing cowboy boots and confidence. He was mobbed in the lobby by women who wanted him and men who wanted to be him. He cheerfully signed autographs. He then came up to our offices to meet the editorial board. The celluloid dream became a physical reality...
North Korea’s “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il is rumored to be ailing or even dead. Given his furtive ways and the nature of his regime, denials from Pyongyang are meaningless unless ...
During the Second World War the German High Command issued regular bulletins about the situation on various fronts. They had a triumphalist tone in 1940, when France fell, and in 1941, when it looked like the Red Army would collapse, but the core information remained reliable throughout the war. These Wehr machtberichten adopted a sober...
All of the presidents of the 21st century—Bush, Obama, Biden, and yes, even Donald Trump—seem a cut below the gravitas and statesmanship of the founding fathers. The first three were—and are—globalists, and as anyone with eyes can see, Joe Biden and his crew are busy taking a wrecking ball to our liberties. Regarding Donald Trump,...
“All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States . . . ” Thus run the first words of Article I, Section 1, of the U.S. Constitution, clearly laying out the Framers’ understanding of the nature and the role of Congress. Everything else enumerated in Article I—the various powers...
Asserting a legal and constitutional authority he himself said he did not have, President Obama is going rogue, issuing an executive amnesty to 4 to 5 million illegal aliens. He will order the U.S. government not to enforce the law against these 5 million, and declare that they are to be exempt from deportation and...
The riots in France were occupying my thoughts at the end of a long day, when the telephone rang. It was a friend who lives in Metz, a quiet town that is a long train ride away from Paris. “I’m looking out my window,” he said, “watching an apartment building going up in flames. A...
“Apologize for what? Cory should apologize. He knows better. There’s not a racist bone in my body.” Thus did a stung Joe Biden answer rival Cory Booker’s demand he apologize for telling contributors, in a southern drawl, “I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland, He never called me ‘boy.’ He always called me...
If the recent passage of the $395-billion Medicare prescription-drug bill teaches us anything, it is that just electing more Republicans to the House and Senate accomplishes very little. We have a Republican House, a Republican Senate, and a Republican President. Yet over 200 House Republicans voted for the biggest expansion of the Great Society welfare...
I always had the general impression that radio shock-jock Alex Jones was a huckster—basically an entertainer, as opposed to a serious person. I’d never bothered to listen to his broadcasts, and all I knew about him was secondhand. My recent encounter with Jones gave me the chance to find out the truth for myself. The...
Lucrative Lying John Barth: The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction; G.P. Putnam’s Sons; New York “For the writer intent on truth,” Solzhenitsyn observes, “life never was, never is (and never will be!) easy: his like have suffered every imaginable harassment—defamation, duels, a shattered family life, financial ruin or lifelong unrelieved poverty, the madhouse, jail.”...
My relationship with Barnes & Noble is fraught with emotion simply because it is a big bookstore, among other things. And I am one of those types—an inveterate reader—who is easily hooked. I was once embarrassed when a lady told me that she had caught herself reading soup-can labels: As one who had done the...
C. Vann Woodward, Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University and a contributing editor to The New Republic, is the leading liberal historian of the South. For three decades his encyclopedic knowledge and detailed historical investigations have produced works that have set the pattern for subsequent historians. Woodward accepts the title “liberal,” if somewhat...
When I delivered Liberty: The God That Failed into the hands of my publisher, I did so with no little trepidation. Supported entirely by Protestant, secular academic, and other non-Catholic sources, including the work of numerous historians of the first rank, its detailed, 700-page counternarrative of the rise and fall of what the moderns call...
There’s no way a man can sidestep trouble writing about the prospect of women as combat troops. You know, mowing the enemy down with machine guns; blowing up things, not to mention people; cutting, slicing, jabbing, stabbing, whatever it takes. For such is war, the elements little different in a high-tech age from those prevalent...
Cultural genocide is a legal term sometimes used to describe the planned destruction of an ethnic or religious identity. The English, in solidifying control over their islands, did their best to obliterate the historical memory of Scottish Highlanders and Irish Catholics, and the national socialists of Bill Clinton’s party are doing the same thing here...
My grandfather spent most of his days underground, as a cutter in his cousin’s coal mine in Imperial, Pennsylvania, outside Pittsburgh. At night, he would arrive home looking like he had been through an explosion. Outside the kitchen door, my grandmother kept a large metal tub full of water to soak the coal dust off...
The public discourse in both hemispheres seems to be legitimizing the coming of World War III. These are interesting—if not terrifying—times.
Have we ever had a president so disconnected from the heart of America? On Friday night, at a White House iftar, the breaking of the Ramadan fast, Obama strode directly into the blazing controversy over whether a mosque should be built two blocks from Ground Zero. Speaking as though this were ...
Here we go again, sports fans! During a recent tennis match between two professionals in Indian Wells, California, a racial slur uttered by one of the players has the usual suspects up in arms. The first off the bat was, of course, the newspaper that prints only what fits p.c., the dreadful Big Bagel Times. ...
The traitor class seeks to destroy distinct communities by degrading and devaluing citizenship. They want the whole world to share their death wish.
During the Cold War, occasional resorts to war or threats of war by the United States were justified by the need to keep communism in check. This justification had the advantage of being based on a real threat—notably in Berlin in 1949, in Korea in 1950, and during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. The...
Probably, we should drop the whole Dukie mess. After killing enough trees to paper over the Western world and using up enough nonrenewable energy to fight at least a little war someplace, nothing has changed in the Research Triangle. Duke is still as expensive as ever, as “highly rated” as ever, and its lacrosse team...
The Northwest strikes me as a better place than the Southwest to live in—fewer people, better hunting, plenty of invigorating Arctic air and the cold dry snow—but the Southwest, probably, offers greater advantages for the Western writer. The presence of the Spanish and Mexicans, the more developed Indian populations, and the clashes between these and...
According to the 1940 census, Framalopa County had a population of slightly over 8,000. About half of these lived in town, and the other half lived in the country: truck farmers and cattlemen who came to town on Saturdays to buy the few necessities they couldn’t raise themselves. At that time, Florida was the second-largest...
By some measures, the influence of feminist theology peaked in the 1990’s. It is still around, however, acting as a supporting pillar for liberal religion’s latest preoccupation: the elimination of “gender.” Feminist theologians and clergy convened in March 2004 for an annual “Women and the Word” conference at Boston University’s School of Theology, challenging masculine...
At 6:07 A.M. on May 29, 2003, in a BBC Radio broadcast, reporter Andrew Gilligan commented on mounting criticism of the Blair government’s rationale for going to war against Iraq. Citing an anonymous “official” involved in the preparation of the Joint Intelligence Committee dossier used to justify the military campaign, Gilligan said that [The dossier]...
The United States has three large economic problems. The overarching one is that the U.S. dollar’s role as world reserve currency is wearing out from continuous and large trade deficits and from government budget ...
Just outside Tucson, Arizona, lies a foreign country. It is not Mexico, although that is close by, but Tohono O’odham Nation, an Indian reservation the size of Connecticut that is home to some 30,000 people. Larger than many countries, the Tohono O’odham Nation is a place of astonishing and austere beauty. Seldom visited, it harbors...
For several months Republicans and Democrats have been jawing over the nuclear “deal” with Iran. Unlike so many partisan debates, this one may actually involve issues of national security, but only if both sides are serious. The Iranians have legitimate reasons to be afraid of an American Empire that has destroyed Iraq; plunged Syria, Tunisia,...
In a spate of recent books, neoconservatives have rehearsed the drama of their radicalization and subsequent deradicalization. Typically the curtain rises on their active participation in, or engaged sympathy for, leftist movements of the 1960’s, and falls after they have regained their equilibrium and embraced liberal democracy. One thinks, for example, of former Ramparts editors...
Stand by for a barrage of centennials. For some years to come, we will be facing very regular commemorations of the various horrors of World War I and its aftermath, so expect a great many books, documentaries, and newspaper pieces on Sarajevo, the Armenian massacres, the Lusitania, the Russian Revolution, and on through the 2020’s. ...
The theory that “big emerging markets” (BEMs) m the Third Worid will be the driving force of the world economy, and thus of worid politics, has been at the core of the Clinton administration’s foreign policy. As Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade during President Clinton’s first term, Jeffrey E. Garten was the principal author...
The City of Rockford is broke. That does not mean, of course, that it is insolvent or bankrupt; after all, it is rather hard for any government with the power to tax to end up in that position (though some occasionally do). Like so many other cities of its size today, however, Rockford has projected...