Suddenly, Sunday, a riveting report came over cable news: The U.S. embassy was urging all Americans to “leave Afghanistan as soon as possible.” Message: Get out while you can. Adding urgency was news that three northern provincial capitals, including Kunduz city, had fallen to the Taliban, making it five provincial capitals overrun since Friday. The...
“We don’t have anyone else from the third congressional district. We need you to fill out our slate,” said the voice on the other end of the phone, a dispatcher from Pat Buchanan’s national headquarters. I couldn’t believe it. The third district of Wisconsin stretches over a sizable portion of the western part of the...
On March 18, President Bill Clinton tested the waters on the foreign trade issue. These waters had been heated up by Republican contender Patrick Buchanan’s attacks on “unfair trade deals,” which had hurt Americans for the benefit of transnational corporations. Speaking in New Orleans, Clinton defended his “free trade” policies, quoting John F. Kennedy and...
On April 1, the Litcritological Subcommittee of the multiracial, multicultural, multidisciplinary Re/Visioning Committee for a 21st-century Doctorate presented the English Department with a plan that will make Lagado University the first in the United States with a doctoral program fully adapted to the needs of the 21st-century American graduate student. The plan integrates our copyrighted...
“Harry’s gone mad,” yelled Mrs. Barnes. “I just saw him running around the side of the house with a gun, muttering something about the plumbers.” Young Robert ran outside, and there found his dad, distinguished historian and man of letters, lying on his belly, blasting away with his old Army rifle at the foundation of...
The Silicon Valley censors have struck again. This time it’s against James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas for sins related to the practice of journalism, namely publishing documents allegedly exposing anti-Christian bias on the social media platform Pinterest. Veritas earned a temporary suspension from Twitter. This should come as no surprise. In recent months the technology giants...
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...
Despite all the media attention devoted to it, Russia’s incursion into Ukraine poses no threat to the United States. Soviet Russia was a mortal threat to the United States because she embodied a communist ideology with aspirations of global hegemony. The threat died with that ideology, which is why Americans who believe that the goal...
Over at NRO, Mona Charen announces that she will be attending a rally to support Israel in front of the Israeli embassy today, and she asks NRO readers to “please come and help demonstrate that millions of us passionately support Israel’s right to exist in peace and security.” One wonders how it would be possible...
Was Japan’s sneak attack on Pearl Harbor out of character for the chrysanthemum nation? Her actions at Port Arthur, nearly 38 years earlier, suggest otherwise. In 1898 Russia began leasing the Liaotung Peninsula, which juts into the Yellow Sea between China and the Korean Peninsula, from the Chinese. On the southern tip of the Liaotung...
The British Conservative Party’s defense policy remains frozen in a time warp as we head toward a general election in the United Kingdom this spring. The party is opposed to the European Reaction Force on the grounds that it undermines NATO and the alliance with America. For a party that has been in opposition, it...
National Reviewhas been the flagship of the conservative movement for almost 30 years. From the very beginning, its editors set the agenda for American conservatism. NR’s peculiar mixture of capitalist anticommunism with the concerns of traditional Catholicism defined the movement. Even before being cursed with the name “fusionism,” it was a potent combination. Where else...
beyond the revolution Our Sacred Anticanon by Thomas Fleming views The Triumph of Nice by Philip Jenkins The King James Bible at 400: Love’s Labor’s Lost by Aaron D. Wolf news Glenn Beck, the Straight Dope by W. James Antle III A Saint Is Born: An Interview With Roland Joffe by Matthew A. Rarey reviews The Robot’s Focus by Derek Turner A Journey: My Political ...
A transcript of the conversation Donald Trump ought to have had with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his visit to Mar-a-Lago.
Chaos dominates the political scene today thanks to the success of the Trump campaign and the Trumpsteria that has accompanied it. This chaos is the subject of myriad essays, commentaries, and—most significantly—power grabs both brand new and repackaged. It was, in many senses, inevitable. Donald Trump is attracting large crowds, and his poll numbers are...
Crimes of the Heart written by Beth Henley directed by Bruce Beresford De Laurentiis Entertainment Group When Perseus went to slay the monster Medusa, advice and presents from Minerva and Mercury were not enough; he had to seek out the Graeae—three crones with but a single prized eye they shared between them, which Perseus snatched...
My Downtown is dying. That is perhaps saying too little; Downtown is nearly dead. The neat, grid-patterned, wellpayed streets of the old Baton Rouge, the white hot cement Huey Long pounded Florsheim heel and toe against, the small optimistic stores set up in the 30’s and 40’s and equipped with illuminated signs in the 50’s...
Having written the book on Bill Bryson (literally—for Marshall Cavendish’s Today’s Writers & Their Works series, 2010), I have been looking forward to the film version of A Walk in the Woods (1998) since I first read Bryson’s semifictionalized account of hiking the Appalachian Trail. Robert Redford, who produced the movie and stars as a...
Over the past two decades, Western Europe’s populist right has steadily consolidated its power. According to Professor Betz, the issue that galvanizes supporters of the populist parties is Third World immigration. Whether the right-wing parties will ever muster the popular support they need to win parliamentary majorities depends on how successfully the governments of Western...
I have filled enough pages on same-sex marriage to make a book, at least by the low standards of neoconservative publishing, and only one important question remains to be settled: What is to be done? It is an important question, not only because marriage is a vital part of ordinary life, but also because...
The United States has Mexico, and below her Central America, south of the border. In ¡Adios, America!, Ann Coulter claims that 30 percent of the Mexican population, today over 122 million people, has moved to the United States within the past several decades. Directly south of the European Continent lies the continent of Africa, population...
The limited mobilization of Russian troops in the Ukraine conflict is the natural result of Putin’s hesitant and risk-averse leadership. It makes sense only if it is the first step toward total mobilization, both military and economic.
Rumble Fish; Directed by Francis Ford Coppola; Written by Francis Ford Coppola and S. E. Hinton; Based on a novel by S. E. Hinton; Universal. An individual is the sum of his memories and his dreams. That, of course, is no great revelation; the Greeks were scripting plays about it thousands of years ago. Nowadays,...
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 network news magnates from Manhattan send their cameras to cover small towns in the Midwest, what happens? Well, when CBS News came to my hometown of Viroqua, Wisconsin, the result was a grain of truth wrapped in an inch-thick sour ball of negative hype. When it comes to the Great Fly-Over between New York...
Gerald Russello, an author and editor often associated with Russell Kirk’s life and work, passed away on Nov. 7, 2021. He was 50 years old. Russello’s death took me by surprise, as I wasn’t aware until recently that he was fatally ill and being treated for brain cancer. Since he was around the same age...
Though it gets harder to remember with every passing day, one of the long-established premises of the recently ended Cold War was the notion that both the Soviet Union and the U.S.A. were engaged in an ideological battle for the minds and souls of the world’s population. In line with this the West used powerful...
Do not look for last year’s best novel piled high in a fancy stack at the Books-A-Million or B. Dalton, with the belles lettres of Tom Clancy or John Grisham, because the best novel of 2002 was written 48 years ago. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, by Sloan Wilson (recently deceased), hit the...
I took out the atlas the other day to figure out the routes of the voyagers retraced by Jean Raspail on his first trip to the United States. In the event, it proved impossible to plot a French expedition on a modern map of the United States. Maps are political abstractions. They encourage us to...
When Americans look back on 2020, the year of the virus, they will see multiple transformations. I fear that some of the most sweeping changes will come in the realm of religion, marking a grim turning point in the story of American faith. Historically, pandemics have played a major role in shaping religion, by undermining...
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...
Like all relationships, the special transatlantic one is in a state of constant flux—warmer or cooler at different times, enhanced by empathy, marred by misunderstandings, riven by reality—but always affected by the personal qualities of the incumbents of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and 10 Downing Street. For a short but eventful span between January 1961 and...
Is there anyone who has not weighed in on the Saturday night, Sept. 11, bonfire of the Qurans at the Rev. Terry Jones' Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Fla.? Gen. David Petraeus warns the Quran burnings could inflame the Muslim world and imperil U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Hillary Clinton declares ...
In a recent discussion with a younger colleague about his book-in-progress on American historian Richard Hofstadter, I learned that, during the student riot at Columbia in 1968, Hofstadter repeatedly likened student radicals to European “fascists.” My colleague found this remarkable, given the fact that Hofstadter had spent decades agonizing over the “paranoid style” of the...
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...
I agree with much of the premise of Clay Reynolds’ piece “The Real Crisis of Higher Education” in the February issue (Vital Signs): Certainly, as he indicates, education at all levels in the United States is failing. High schools no longer prepare students for life and work but “to take standardized tests” for advanced learning....
American Jews may be at unease with the growing acceptance of literal jihadis as a loyal Democratic client base, but they are certainly not turning to the right.
“In the government of Virginia,” said John Randolph in 1830, “we can’t take a step without breaking our shins over some Federal obstacle.” Randolph’s metaphor was a minor exaggeration 160 years ago; today, it would be a gross understatement, because today that federal obstacle has been erected so high, so deep, so strong, that we...
Last week, President Obama named William Daley as White House Chief of Staff and Gene Sperling as the chief White House economic adviser. Last fall, he named Austan Goolsbee as the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. These appointments are significant in part because all three men share a strong commitment to free trade:...
It is a measure of the stature and the significance of Justice Antonin Scalia that, upon the news of his death at a hunting lodge in Texas, Washington was instantly caught up in an unseemly quarrel over who would succeed him. But no one can replace Justice Scalia. He was a giant among jurists. For...
The April bombing in Oklahoma City told us a lot about ourselves and how we respond to adversity. When a bomb destroyed the federal building in that city, politicians and journalists were swift to place the atrocity in some kind of wider context, offering interpretations which ranged from the accurate to the vulgar. In the...
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...
On the fourth floor rotunda of the Oklahoma State Capitol hangs a curious portrait entitled “Carl Albert,” painted in oil by distinguished Sooner State artist Charles Banks Wilson and dedicated in 1977. It depicts the 46th Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Only 5’4” in real life, Carl Albert (1908-2000) looms large in the...
In the middle of the 19th century, Sydney Dobell wrote a poem that contained the following line: “Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!” This excursion into the absurd c. 1850 is readily recognized by readers of American poems or novels c. 1950 as a cry of the soul in torment. The...
Ron English, the self-styled “Robin Hood of Madison Avenue” who specializes in “liberating” commercial billboards and defacing them (albeit artistically) with his anticapitalist messages, has painted a portrait of Obama as Lincoln: The President’s thick lips, crinkled brow, and eyes sparkling with a preternatural intelligence are seamlessly merged with the high forehead, biblical beard, and...
A few blogs ago, my devoted reader Louis from San Antonio asked me to share the mystical secrets of that famous elixir known as vodka. In the former Soviet Union – not only Russia, but even the Central Asian republics, drinking vodka involves a series of preparations and elaborate rituals, not far behind the famous...
Returning from the Abbeville Institute’s conference on Confederate symbols, I began thinking of all the things I failed to say in my talk on the campaign of cultural genocide waged against the South. I had addressed my argument to people who already respected the Southern tradition and quite properly resented the program of demonization and...
Metrics of National Decline by Patrick J. Buchanan • February 16, 2009 • Printer-friendly “Bush Boom Continues” trilled the headline over the Lawrence Kudlow column, as George W. Bush closed out his seventh year in office. “You can call it Goldilocks 2.0,” purred Kudlow. Yes, you could. But what a difference 12 months can make....
In one of the most closely watched cases from the last Supreme Court term, Kelo v. New London, the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 5-to-4 majority, ruled that the city of New London could exercise its “eminent domain” power to condemn several private residences in order to raze them as part of an effort to...
School uniforms are back in the news. The school board of the nation’s largest school system, that of New York City, voted unanimously this March to recommend uniforms for elementary school students. President Clinton endorsed the notion, though Norman Siegel, executive director of the New York City Civil Liberties Union, predictably threatened to sue if...