How Unpiloted Aircraft Expand the War on Terror They are like the camel’s nose, lifting a corner of the tent. Don’t be fooled, though. It won’t take long until the whole animal is sitting inside, sipping your tea and eating your sweets. In countries around the world—in the Middle East, Asia Minor, Central Asia, Africa,...
Much of life may come down to a choice between the respective views of Lord Chesterfield, who urged his son always to excel at whatever he did, and G.K. Chesterton, who once wrote that, “If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.” The issue, of course, is what the “thing” in question is. ...
Politics obsess Americans. Everything from a child’s education to medical care for the aged is now a political question—indeed, a national political question. Once upon a time, families chose how to educate their children and care for elderly parents, but in modern America this freedom is fast becoming passé. Trapped in the ephemeral world of...
“If you would know what the Lord God thinks of money, you have only to look at those to whom He gives it.” —Maurice Baring “Who is John Galt?” again rings throughout the land. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s doorstop novel chronicling a general strike of the productive against the “looters,” gains resonance during times of...
An Arab-Israeli peace agreement is like a moderate Syrian rebel or rational leftist: It is possible to visualize, but producing one is daunting. Every attempt has failed. President Donald Trump’s “Peace to Prosperity” plan will be no exception. Hardly the “deal of the century,” it proposes the establishment of a disconnected, truncated Palestinian state with...
There is a fairly long gestation period for alumni wrath, which does not fully come into being until the end of the year. That’s when every organization in the world calls or sends letters asking for a tax-deductible donation. With the chirpy dunning notices and billets-doux come the hard choices: do I send money to...
One of the things that James VI of Scotland liked about becoming James I of England—apart from the money—was that as head of the Church of England he would never be bossed about by a Scotch Calvinist minister again. Moreover, unlike his predecessor Elizabeth I, who never cared much for that aspect of her job,...
Edgar Allen Poe’s famous short story is a memento mori reminding us that we must one day face our Creator.
In his 1935 essay “Religion and Literature,” T.S. Eliot argued that modern literature had become progressively secularized. In response he proposed that “literary criticism should be complemented by criticism from a definite ethical and theological standpoint.” Eliot introduced his arguments with the famous statement, “The ‘greatness’ of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards;...
Russian sexuality and the country’s general mores have become a topic of conversation in the United States, mostly in relation to President Trump’s alleged connections with the Kremlin and his behavior during his trip to Russia some time ago, which is the subject of the infamous “Steele Dossier.” The British press has not ignored the...
“In fourteen-hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean nude.” —Chronicles, 1992 The profusion of the anti-Western virus released by the quincentenary of Columbus’ landfall on the Caribbean island of San Salvador has become the mental equivalent of the AIDS epidemic, fatally infecting millions of promiscuous and incautious intellectuals and subintellectuals. For the literary ghetto, Kirkpatrick...
In 1967, The American Challenge by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber predicted that by the 1980’s American multinationals would have virtually bought up European industry. A decade later, there was another big scare—the Arabs were going to buy up all the US farmland (some farmers now wish this had been true, since the price of farmland subsequently collapsed)....
“Obama and Romney Bristle From Start Over Foreign Policy,” says The New York Times. The illusion that on Monday night a vigorous foreign-policy-centered debate took place in Boca Raton is being perpetuated by countless mainstream media outlets from coast to coast. We were treated to a choreographed, scripted conversation instead, with President Barack Obama and his...
Fifty years ago, Indiana University professor Alfred Kinsey launched what was perhaps the first salvo in the Sexual Revolution. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, the work of Kinsey, Wardell Pomero), and Clyde Martin, hit postwar America like a sucker punch. Claiming that 85 percent of American males engaged in premarital sex, 70 percent had...
The world has always been a place of unexamined terms. Probably it has never been so full of them as it is under modern democratic industrial capitalism, which—depending upon the rigor with which one defines the word democratic—is actually a contradiction in terms. Industrialism, which essentially is applied natural and human power on a large...
Donald Trump has upended the GOP presidential primary process and turned it into the most entertaining reality show yet. If The Donald’s road to the White House is blocked—either by the Republican elites or by his own tendency to go too far—and he returns to TV land, he’ll have a hard time topping this one....
When the United States government was seeking to retaliate for the terrorist attacks last year, it was not too difficult to name the obvious targets: Afghanistan (of course), Iraq, Somalia, and the rest of the world’s bandit states. Opponents of military intervention could make few effective arguments, but one point that was quite widely raised...
When I was invited last spring to be a judge at the Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest some envious backbiters put it about that it wasn’t because I’m well known as a discriminating ami de swine, but because my sister knows the woman who picks the judges. I have just one thing...
Apparently, the threat is both serious and specific. The United States ordered 22 diplomatic missions closed and issued a worldwide travel alert for U.S. citizens. The threat comes from Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, AQAP, the most lethal branch of the terrorist organization. “After Benghazi,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., “these Al Qaida...
American conservatives used to be fond of saying that the United States have entered a decadent period something like that of the Roman Empire. Since American conservatives do not read history, they were never very clear on the period they had in mind, but let us assume they mean the third century, when the empire...
A blood-red sun is setting on the horizon, distant but familiar, dull but glowing, like the bloodshot eye of a wounded Titan. Layers of pasty-blue, thin, translucent clouds drape the blood-eye image, as if they themselves were the misty, cloudlike shimmerings of heat rising from the sunbaked pavement, cooled by a late-summer rain. I stand...
Here in Rockford, as across the country, many Tea Party activists spent the latter part of the summer with their eyes figuratively fixed on the former site of the World Trade Center—or, rather, two blocks away. The controversy over the Ground Zero Mosque generated much sound and fury, but in the end, what did it...
The statistics that break down the consumption of music into types and groups are not very comforting to consider. But if we really want to know what the musical situation is, rather than to entertain a fantasy of what it ought to be, we would have to acknowledge the realities of musical art in our...
Overly committed as he was to supposedly universal political ideals and to the spread of American liberal democracy throughout the world, William F. Buckley, Jr., was not my kind of conservative. He could be tactless and cruel, as when he wrote in an obituary for Murray Rothbard that “Rothbard had defective judgment” and “couldn’t handle...
Having designated a traditionalist, conservative, overwhelmingly Christian Orthodox Russia as the enemy, the rulers of an Orwellian "Great Reset" West will be free to cancel conservatives of all stripes even more radically than before.
Oriana Fallaci, R.I.P. Back in the 1960’s, Oriana Fallaci was a “brave,” leftist, feminist hackette. Her iconoclastic interviews were praised by the chattering classes for bringing the genre to the heights of postmodernism: She was lauded for doing for journalism what Susan Sontag was doing for fiction. But whereas the latter progressed to become an...
Jim Jarmusch’s Down By Law opens with rolling shots of New Orleans townhouses) tenements, the down and out on a crummy side-street. From there we enter into two variations on the theme of domestic disharmony, Jack’s and Zack’s, and on to a story set in a South that never was, by a film maker who,...
It is sad to contemplate what the American Melted Pot and Deweyite education have done to the language of Shakespeare—which was also the language of the founders of America—the most beautiful and utilizable of all the tongues of man. In our country in ...
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...
Paul Krugman is a professor of economics at Princeton University who, in his eagerness to obtain appointive office in a future Democratic administration, has moonlighted for some years now as a columnist for the New York Times, where he has worked assiduously to develop talking points for Democratic candidates. His ambition is transparent, and it...
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 ...
“The high-minded man must care more for truth than for what people think.” —Aristotle While being interviewed on William Buckley’s Firing Line, Harry Ashmore remarked that he had allowed the subject of his Unseasonable Truths: The Life of Robert Maynard Hutchins to tell the story of his life and work through the numerous quotations that...
The Hobbit Produced by New Line Cinema, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and Wingnut Films Directed by Peter Jackson Written by Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens Distributed by Warner Brothers Pictures For this month’s column, I’ve enlisted my son Liam to write the review, since he knows far more than I do about J.R.R. Tolkien and Peter Jackson’s film...
Contrary to popular belief, political parties are not democratic institutions. They are extraconstitutional instruments of elite control, machines for corralling and pacifying the voters with platitudes. The appearance of advertising, public relations, and polling has strengthened this aspect of their character. This has particularly been the nature of the Republican Party, as should be evident...
Horace Greeley may have had it right for his 19th-century compatriots, but the proper direction for the ambitious voyagers of this century has too often been eastward. Just ask New Mexico’s own Samuel Andrew Donaldson. No one asked her, but Chloe Hampson Donaldson thinks she knows why her son strayed from the straight and narrow...
Among the reasons Donald Trump is president is that his natural political instincts are superior to those of any other current figure. As campaign 2018 entered its final week, Trump seized upon and elevated the single issue that most energizes his populist base and most convulses our media elite. Warning of an “invasion,” he pointed...
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...
When I awoke on Friday morning, I picked up the copy of the Cleveland Plain Dealer delivered to my house and read the headline on the front page, above the fold: “Killing of black men ‘troubling.'” The article referred to President Obama’s comments in Poland on the police killings of two black men in Louisiana...
Viviane Reding is a woman on a mission. She believes Europe’s major companies are run by an old boys’ network that excludes female colleagues from top jobs. And since Reding is the E.U. commissioner for justice, fundamental rights, and citizenship, she is in a position to do something about it. She has proposed a quota...
“Poetry is the most overproduced commodity on the market, next to zucchini.” —Judson Jerome, Writer’s Digest poetry columnist since 1960 According to a 1985 study cited by Writer’s Digest Books, 23.3 percent of all people who think of themselves as writers—or “more than two million people“—write poetry for publication. It follows that there are then...
“And a few men talked of freedom, while England talked of ale.” —”The Secret People” G.K. Chesterton In 1136, Bishop Henri de Blois, grandson of William the Conqueror, founded the hospice of St. Cross, in Hampshire, to provide for “thirteen poor men, feeble and so reduced in strength that they can...
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...
As far as I know, my friend Sissy has never written anything, although she probably reads more widely than most people I know with graduate degrees. She’s at first and probably second glance an archetypical ranchwoman. That first glance would be the outsider’s. Sis is in her mid-30’s, tall, taller than I am, and strong,...
The Democratic leadership and its “woke” leftist allies have been held together thus far by their hatred of both the right and of normal people. But the glue that binds that coalition is starting to dissolve, Chronicles editor-in-chief Paul Gottfried argues in a recent article for American Greatness. He suggests that the conflicting interests and loyalties of the intersectional left, with...
Robert A. Taft, in a speech delivered at Kenyon College in October 1946, expressed strong opposition to the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials that were just ending. Taft argued that the defendants, the architects of the Nazi regime who had been found guilty of waging a war of aggression and had been sentenced to death, were...
The dust had barely settled at the Washington Navy Yard on Monday when a barrage of lies began to fly from the usual suspects on the left. For once, the religion of the crazed shooter, Aaron Alexis, was not buried or ignored completely, since he was publicly connected not to Islam but to Buddhism....
Politiqueros Pelosi and Newsom ramp up bribes for America’s imported electorate.
What does it mean to be an American? Major debates over legislation and proposed constitutional amendments raise the question. Without stretching a point too much, it is easy to see the American identity as the underlying question on the immigration issue, the Equal Rights. Amendment, and perhaps even in the debate over abortion. It comes...
My hometown in central Pennsylvania has long had a naked public square. Today the most noteworthy buildings on the square are the Colonial Bar and Grill, a Seven Eleven, and a barbershop. Religion is nowhere to be seen. I am not, I must confess, embarrassed about this, except aesthetically. It reflects a tradition going back...
In the words of a 19th-century British nursey rhyme: If wishes were Horses, Beggars would ride; If turnips were watches, I would wear one by my side. There is, it seems, a fairly influential group of rather strange persons out there who are wearing turnips and telling time; what’s unfortunate is that these persons, many...