How much do you remember about 9/11? Almost certainly—unless you are quite young—you know the basics: Islamic terrorists hijacked planes and flew them into targets in New York City and Washington, D.C. But do you remember how many American victims were murdered that day? In Mitchell Zuckoff’s book published last year, Fall and Rise: The...
Tom Ditzler, a veteran, buys 30 acres of rural farmland. For 50 years, he and his wife, Jan, live there, rearing two children, Cassandra and Christina. Tom comes to know the contours of his property by heart—the creek that runs across his land, the wetlands surrounding the creek, the hills and woods that rise up...
During the late winter and early spring of 2013, yet another crisis involving North Korea occupied the attention of U.S. officials and much of the news media. Not only did Pyongyang conduct a nuclear test, but the government of Kim Jong-un issued shrill threats against both South Korea and the United States. South Korea’s new...
The 25 short essays on a variety of “Christian classics” collected in this book originally appeared in the Neiv Oxford Review between November 1979 and October 1982. Collected here, in their total economy, James J. Thompson’s essays remind us of the maturing legitimacy of the interdisciplinarv relations between literature and religion. Christian Classics Revisited shows...
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...
It’s a story told regularly in the conservative media. A student pleads for advice: The professors at his college or university are left-wing, and he must choose between regurgitating the leftist propaganda in class discussions, term papers, exam answers, and essays for an A, or telling the truth for a low grade. What to do?...
Since woke academics insist on imposing equality on math history, there is one thing left to do: declare the ancient Greek mathematicians to be black men.
When Desert Storm commander General Norman Schwarzkopf thanked President Bush for letting the military fight the Gulf war on its own terms, he was expressing an idea deeply felt in the Pentagon for over twenty years: “No more Vietnams.” Both Schwarzkopf and his boss, General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, experienced...
What do super rich people with multi-million dollar summer homes in the Hamptons and similar enclaves think about today’s troubled, often violent politics? Frank answers are seldom forthcoming given that an impolite answer might invite social ostracism and exclusion from A-list parties. But actions often speak louder than words, and a recent article in AVENUE lets the...
We once had a book about Eastern Europe at home, in between the encyclopedias and Robinson Crusoe. I do not remember its title nor the author’s name, but it contained highly atmospheric black and white photographs of Rumanian scenes. There were baroque chateaux, sturgeons, eagles, wolves, bears, wild boar, bends in the Danube, flowered meads...
A defense of drug addicts another one, in the pages of our family magazine? But defend them we must; this time from prohibitionists who would carry on the fight in utero. Recent cases in Wyoming and Michigan have seen pregnant women being brought up on charges of delivering drugs and alcohol to a minor—not through...
In 1922 The Literary Digest asked selected American poets and novelists to name “the most important” living American writer: Joseph Hergesheimer finished first and Eugene O’Neill Second; Sherwood Anderson edged out Willa Cather for third. For fifth place James Branch Cabell tied Robert Frost, who first gained wide attention in 1915 with the American publication...
It looks like the economy is in for hard times and that we plain folks are facing a decline in our standard of living. But you can be sure that the politicians and financiers who ...
The History Book Club has done us a good service by reprinting Leon Wolff’s Little Brown Brother, published originally in 1960, before we had learned to be politically correct or had figured out that we were building an empire. In fact, in 1960, most of us had not realized that our foreign policy had been...
Which is the main bastion of institutional liberalism: government or the corporate boardroom, which in addition to its own leftist philanthropy also funds multimillion-dollar foundations? With a cutback in public spending possible, due to voter disenchantment, the answer may be the latter, for universities and special interest groups intent on spreading secularism and nihilism are...
At the declaration by Donald Trump that he is a candidate for the presidential nomination of the Republican Party, media elites of left and right reacted with amusement, anger and disgust. Though he has been a hugely successful builder-businessman, far more successful than, say, Carly Fiorina, who has been received respectfully, our resident elites resolutely...
Many of the prominent characteristics of our culture—venal politicians, callous and stupid bureaucrats and police, promiscuous and perverted clergymen, debased currency—were inherited from the Old World, where they have a long history. However, we Americans are proverbially an inventive people and we have made many innovative cultural contributions of our own to the world. Like...
Roger Stone is a longtime political operative who has worked for every Republican president since Richard Nixon, and numerous presidential and other candidates as well. Stone retains great admiration for Ronald Reagan, but now has only disdain for the Bush family. The Making of the President 2016 recounts what he saw during the Trump campaign,...
Sen. Rick Santorum is the latest Republican political leader to walk down Trent Lott’s trail of tears. Why do Republicans continue to make these gaffes? Most politicians, after all, have spent their entire lives since elementary school telling people what they want to hear, and they ought to realize that the power they hold in...
Whether he realizes it or not, Jon Stewart is the very thing he accuses Tucker Carlson of being: a toady for an oligarchy, but one right here in America.
“Culture does not exist autonomously,” wrote Robert Nisbet in The Quest for Community; “it is set always in the context of social relationships.” The implications of Nisbet’s statement should be obvious, but in the age of “social” media, when we speak of “long-distance relationships” with “friends” we have never met, the obvious too often gets...
Beto O’Rourke’s pullout from the presidential race leaves the Democrats with, oh, a mere dozen and a half or so candidates available to run the country. The country’s corresponding task is to keep awake for the remainder of the race. The pressing question is, or should be, what goes on here? What’s the mission—to can...
“Why,” Sheila Ramus asked, “if there are so many pro-lifers here, does Rockford have an abortion clinic?” Sheila, my wife and I, and our pastor, Fr. Brian Bovee, were waiting to check in at Rockford’s annual Pro-Life Banquet. An hour before the dinner was scheduled to begin, the Holy Family ...
In 1858, as British and French forces pushed their way to Peking in the Opium Wars, Josiah Tatnall, commander of the neutral American naval squadron, intervened to save the British ships from Chinese guns and tow them safely out of range. When asked why he had abandoned his government’s official neutrality, Tatnall replied: “Blood is...
When Charles Causley’s Collected Poems was published in 1975, reviewers in American magazines generally praised his work but somehow managed to relegate him to the limbo of minor poets. By focusing on his mastery of the ballad, they may have given the impression of a Johnny One-Note who, in his idiosyncratic disregard for the main...
President Clinton has vowed to correct portions of welfare reform that are “carried out on the backs of immigrants.” About half of the projected savings from the reform comes from limiting immigrant access to welfare. Refugees, who make up about one in seven legal immigrants, were spared most of the restrictions placed on other immigrants...
Margaret Thatcher enjoyed being who she was. She did not think of this inner bounce as a gift of fortune but as a virtue, as obligatory self-respect. She was a patriot and a Tory in that way. The party was her milieu—the people whose self-respect resembled her own and supported it. The country, too, was...
Leonard Pillay’s 9mm pistol hasn’t left his side since July 9 of last year. “Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration,” the middle-aged mechanic admitted in an interview. “I haven’t got it on me when I sleep. But I promise you, it’s never far away. Never.” Pillay lives in a small house in Phoenix,...
PERSPECTIVE Ted's Timor Mortis by Thomas Fleming Stumbling past the half-truths. VIEWS Americans Don't Die! by Roger D. McGrath Casualties, from republic to empire. Portraits by George Garrett Some notes on the poetry of growing old. The Last Adieu by George McCartney A wake for the living. A Dirge for ...
On the American frontier of previous centuries, the possession of a firearm was often a key to survival. In this regard, the frontier of 20th-century America, although different geographically, is very much like earlier frontiers. As different waves of Europeans arrived in North America, each took a distinct approach to trading guns with the Indians....
This interview took place on September 18 and 19, 1985, at Garrett’s house in Charlottesville, not far from the University of Virginia. It is a sizable stone house, rented, with most of the available wall space covered with hastily erected brick-and-board bookcases. Not quite settled yet, Garrett and his wife, Susan, joked about how they...
I turned forty-one this year. I left a psychological plateau (a crisis would have been way more exciting) and a legal career behind. I suppose an alcohol-fueled bender or an illicit affair broadcast on social media would be what most “folks” (as Barack Obama says) my age might do nowadays, but I opted for sobriety...
When communism collapsed in Moscow, Prague and Belgrade at the end of the Cold War, ethnic nationalism surged to the surface in all three nations and tore them apart into 24 countries. Economic nationalism is now resurgent across Europe. And it is hard to see how a transnational institution like the European Union, run...
In August, the Georgian navy seized a Turkish tanker carrying fuel to Abkhazia, Georgia’s former province whose declaration of independence a year ago is recognized by Russia but not the West. The Turkish captain was sentenced to 24 years. When Ankara protested, he was released. Abkhazia has now threatened to sink any Georgian ship interfering...
Overall, the pro-life cause must be less concerned with short-term tactical disagreements and more concerned with unanimity as to the long-term goal.
If Donald Trump does not wish to collaborate in the destruction of his presidency, he will refuse to be questioned by the FBI, or by a grand jury, or by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his malevolent minions. Should Mueller subpoena him, as he has threatened to do, Trump should ignore the subpoena, and frame...
A California federal judge just provided the very definition of arrogance, in ruling that Proposition 8, the California law codifying marriage as between a man and a woman, lacked even a “rational basis” and was therefore unconstitutional under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. So much for the beliefs that created Western civilization....
I recently had a spirited discussion with the British historian James Holland, brother of Tom Holland, also a distinguished man of letters, about FDR, his oil embargo of Japan, and the root causes of World War II. We were in Normandy, inspecting the battle scenes of D-day, with James giving us the kind of briefings...
“Paleoconservatism” is an awkward word, but then what it purports to describe is an awkward thing. The word in the English language that it most resembles is “paleontology”—the scientific study of fossils—and a fossil is precisely what most of the enemies of paleoconservatism accuse it of being. Coined in 1986 or ’87, the word was...
Nineteenth-century America was an explosively creative country. It opened up new territories to cultivation and poured forth a cornucopia of technical inventions. Its literature ranged from Hawthorne to Mark Twain, from Whitman to Stephen Foster, and its art included the architecture of McKim, Mead and White and the sculpture of Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907). Saint-Gaudens’s was...
A quarter of Canada’s 30 million people live in the province of Quebec. About five million are French Canadians, largely descended from hardy Norman peasants who came here 300 years ago. A quarter of the five million want to secede from Canada. A larger (but indeterminate) proportion favor as much autonomy as possible without risking...
I cannot remember the occasion, but I will not forget the voice—female, authoritative, and poised—that intoned a dismissal of the so-called yuppies as follows: “They oversee the distribution of toilet paper!” I was a bit thrilled by the superior attitude, being even then no young upwardly mobile professional myself. I thought about the matter and concluded...
Throughout our legal history we are familiar with incidents of jury-tampering, the act of buying off or frightening one or more of the 12 men good and true called upon to decide a case. This is done to predetermine a verdict, usually to assure a “not guilty.” We have heard of vicious gangsters, corrupt union...
Actually, to say that Woods replies is a bit of an overstatement; he cranked out 2,078 words overnight (a feat for which Lew Rockwell praises him), but very few of those words address the arguments that Storck raised. In fact, he includes only one quotation from Storck, which he uses to set up a straw...
In the wake of the bloody terrorist attacks in Paris, French President Francois Hollande has asked for extended emergency powers and has promised an intensified assault on Islamic State in Syria. Hollande has further called on the UN Security Council to adopt a resolution on combating terrorism as a basis for forming a “unified” multi-national...
Too many members of my generation (postwar birth, 1960’s student) have a nasty way of ridiculing their juniors for their ignorance of history and their native tongue. Outrage at the students’ ignorance of U.S. history was expressed recently in the newspapers, but most of the test questions published were requests for an ideological opinion on...
As fall turned into winter, there were unmistakable signs of paleoconservative dissatisfaction with President Trump. In various forums, several paleoconservatives expressed displeasure that Trump had surrounded himself with unrepentant Bush Republicans and neoconservatives; that he was listening too much to his daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, who may be even further to the...
Since September 11, I have spent a great deal of time in interviews with all sorts of media people, who range from the well informed to the abysmally ignorant. One question that occurs with deadly predictability concerns the mindset of the terrorists: Just what kind of warped alien creature could possibly crash a plane into...
Did you notice last spring how the national media-the New York Times, Newsweek, NPR, all of them-almost simultaneously began talking about “the Bubba vote”? I seriously doubt that many of these folks have actually met Bubba, much less discussed politics with him, but at the Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Contest they sure could...
Fraud and deception among society’s heroes draw attention to contradictions and inconsistencies in its value systems. Because American culture applauds entrepreneurship, independence, and ambition, for example, scientists have been encouraged to develop independent imaginations and innovative research, to engage in intense competition, to strive for success. Ironically, Americans also want their whitecoated heroes to be...