There are hundreds of Mexican restaurants in the United States named for the revolutionary Pancho Villa. Photos of the Durango native line the walls, and his raid on the small American hamlet of Columbus, New Mexico, is celebrated. Nowhere is mentioned the many atrocities Villa and his forces regularly committed. Torture, rape, and murder were...
François Mitterrand’s socialist administration has become so scandal-ridden and financially precarious that the year-long celebration of the revolution’s bicentennial is now nothing but a hypocritical farce. Yet Mitterrand’s reference to 1789 is an ideological obligation, since the “leftist myth” is the number one legitimizing factor that makes the regime credible in the eyes of a...
Richard Brautigan was a familiar American type that has been with us since the days of the Yankee peddler: the self-appointed Job who wants to take on the powers that be from his chair behind the cracker barrel, the freshman who writes a history of the world without a bibliography, the guttersnipe journalist who runs...
The much-ballyhooed young conservative movement of the early 1980’s may soon come to an inglorious and grinding halt. While the early 80’s were marked by a certain gusto on the part of conservatives fighting to overthrow entrenched liberals, the middle 80’s are a time of unwarranted complacency. One can almost hear cries of “Reagan is...
Excessive insecurity and widespread aversion to commitment are driving our country’s toxic dating culture off a cliff.
Every school has a playground for its pupils; English schools provide a playground for politicians, too. Children seek security, regularity, and continuity: The games they play in the schoolyard observe rules that do not change. Change, though, is the contemporary politician’s reason for existence: He seeks not to hold fast to that which is good...
“America First,” he said, whereupon the skies opened, the thunder cracked, the rains came . . . who knew the empire was so sensitive? The corporate-media response to Patrick J. Buchanan’s A Republic, Not an Empire—and when is the last time a presidential candidate wrote his own campaign book?—rivals the Two-Minute Hates directed at Goldstein...
Letter From Turkey The city of Istanbul reflects Turkey’s transformation over the past decade. Almost eight years after my previous visit I am greeted by an impressive new international terminal at the Atatürk International Airport—Europe’s seventh busiest—and by the massive office towers and apartment complexes surrounding it. According to ...
NATO has three new members: Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. The event has taken place at a time when Europe is as stable and unthreatened as it has ever been in history. The Russians—regardless of political persuasion—are profoundly disturbed at the shift eastwards of the limit of NATO’s Article 5 guarantee, which postulates that...
What do we take away, then, from the earthquake on the Senate floor last week, with wisps of smoke still rising from the ruins of Republican efforts to do something—anything—likely to rationalize the health care mess? We take away, or should, the lesson that government can’t do everything, and when it tries to, you get...
President Bush was back in Yuma, Arizona, in early April, one year after making promises to secure the border in exchange for a “comprehensive” immigration-reform bill that would increase legal immigration, open the door for up to 20 million illegal aliens to remain in the United States, and encourage yet another surge of illegal aliens...
[The discomfort of light skin.] Barack Obama has said that his mixed-race heritage would serve to make him a uniter. But the violently militant roots of Obama's church of 20 years, which advocate “the destruction of the ...
Aleksandr Zhukov’s April 7 arrest in Sardinia was played up by the Italian DIA (an anti-Mafia investigative unit) as having eliminated an important arms-trafficking channel to the war-torn Balkans. The most intriguing aspect of the story, however, involves NATO, the struggle between Russia and the West for influence in the former Soviet republics, and the...
What is the meaning of the election of 2004 for the American Hard Right? The question, of course, presupposes that there is such a thing as a “Hard Right” distinct from the Mossad’s Station Pentagon, or the “moral values” evangelicals, or the Girly Boys’ Jamboree. By “Hard Right,” in this context, I mean neither what...
Most Americans agree that the greatest problem America faces right now is a faltering economy. One would never know that by looking at NRO’s Corner from 4:54 pm to 6:21 pm on Thursday, February 26. A visitor to the Corner at that time would conclude that the greatest threat to the Republic is the appointment...
When Booker T. Washington delivered his “Atlanta Compromise” speech in 1895 at the Cotton States and International Exposition, nearly 15 years after the founding of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, the effect was galvanizing. Frederick Douglass, until then the most prominent black American leader, had been in his grave only six months. Washington, now ascendant,...
As we speed along the information highway at the close of one millennium and the beginning of another, it might be wise to stop for a moment, if not by woods on a snowy evening, at least at the next rest area. When Robert Frost slowed his mare to a halt that December night a...
Presbyterians have a particular reputation. We are a rather staid bunch, more comfortable in the environs of the country club than those of the chicken farm, more atuned to the hoity-toity, less to hoi polloi. We’re called the frozen chosen, more for accuracy’s sake than for endearment. We read old and dusty books about doctrines...
It’s moments like this one—our Health Care Moment, we could call it—that make numerous friends of democracy and good government want to pull the covers over their heads and leave a wake-up call for next month. The health care charade has gone on for a year. Polls suggest most Americans don’t want the measures now...
We need the truth about what saved lives and what actually ended up killing our loved ones and neighbors.
Yes, yes, curse the defensive genius and pedophile* Jerry Sandusky (author of Touched) and Coach Joe Pa (who continued to employ him). But what about the grad assistant who happened to lock eyes with ol’ Sandusky when the latter was sodomizing a ten-year-old boy in the Happy Valley showers of Penn State? According to the grand jury report,...
“Then unbelieving Priests reform’d the nation, And taught more pleasant methods of salvation.” —Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism On April 22, 1950, I published in the London Tablet an article entitled “The American Catholics Revisited,” which provoked an avalanche of letters to the editor, wildly protesting against my observations. Nearly all of them came...
Skyfall Produced by Metro-Goldwyn Mayer and Eon Productions Directed by Sam Mendes Written by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and John Logan Distributed by Columbia Pictures Lincoln Produced by 20th Century Fox and Dreamworks Pictures Directed by Steven Spielberg Written by Tony Kushner Distributed by Touchstone Pictures No less an authority than Vatican City’s daily newspaper,...
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton started her two-day Balkan tour in Sarajevo on Tuesday by issuing a fresh call for Bosnia’s centralization. She urged “reforms that would improve key services, attract more foreign investment, and make the government more functional and accountable.” Hatreds have eased, she went on, “but nationalism persists. Meanwhile the promise of...
First things first. In the briefly intersecting histories of rock and roll and Pentecostalism, it is recorded that Jerry Lee Lewis, at age 15, was expelled from Southwestern Bible Institute in Waxahachie, Texas, for unrepentantly playing a boogie version of “My God Is Real.” In view of the depth and breadth of the Jim Bakker-PTL...
If you had told me at Christmas that by March the whole office would be working remotely due to a state emergency order to combat a global pandemic, I wouldn’t have believed you. But here we are. Without a doubt, this is a situation 99.9 percent of Americans have never experienced. Many cities appear abandoned,...
Does the United States Constitution still exist? There is one simple way to answer this question. Read any article or section of the 200-year-old document written to provide the citizens of a free republic with a short and simple guide to what their government can and cannot do and ask whether the language you have...
The Center for Immigration Studies recently issued two reports that show how transformative mass immigration has been in recent decades. The first study focused on the number of immigrants now living in the United States. Recent data from the Census Bureau show that 3.3 million immigrants, both legal and illegal, came to America between July...
After half a century of fighting encroachments upon freedom in America, journalist Garet Garrett published The People's Pottage. A year later, in 1954, he died. The People's Pottage opens thus:
When Donald Trump defeated Ted Cruz in the 2016 Indiana presidential primary, the race for the Republican Party nomination was over. The prize was Trump’s. The next day, House Speaker Paul Ryan announced that he was not yet ready to endorse the standard-bearer. George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Jeb Bush quickly followed suit,...
I agree with Professor W. Bruce Lincoln (“The Burden of Russian History,” March 1994) that Russia’s economic and political system is prone to break society into two parts: “them,” those responsible for making decisions and managing the country, and “us,” the simple people deadly indifferent to everything that doesn’t touch them immediately—i.e., high politics. I...
Two questions immediately suggest themselves regarding this work: Who was (or is) Pandora (and her box), and do we really need yet another book on World War I, detailing its causes, alliances, generals, battles—replete with maps, photos, charts and so forth? Yes, 2018 is the 100th anniversary of the war’s end (November 11, at 11:00...
“Studying” philanthropy is a new academic enterprise, and one riven by various interests. Though a growing camp of scholars is following grant money, their studies, even when critical, generally confirm the conventional wisdom of foundation leaders. As a permanent supplicant, the academy approaches organized philanthropy with either a tugged forelock or an upraised list. Ellen...
Although Greg Kaza has political pretenses [sic], a recent article in Chronicles (Cultural Revolutions, June 1992) suggests that he has not learned even the most elementary lessons of American politics-least of which that it is “the art of the possible.” The problem with Kaza is that he is an ideologue. Like most ideologues, he would...
Apocalypse Now Redux Produced by Producer Zoetrope Studios Directed by Francis Ford Coppola Screenplay by John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola Re-released by Miramax Films and United Artists I was finishing the original draft of this column early on the morning of September 11 when I received the news. My wife called me from the...
It is sometimes necessary for a great power to keep a distant small country under military occupation—if need be, for a very long time. The Romans could not contemplate an “exit strategy” from Palestine in the first century A.D.—or from a few other hotspots around the empire’s outer perimeter—without compromising their status as the world’s...
The stock market is over 10,000, Michael Kinsley exhorted Pat Buchanan recently, and so America can do as it likes internationally in the exercise of the U.S. mega-military machine that Madeleine Albright has been slavering, throughout her Foggy Bottom years, to activate. America, according to journalistic convention, is fat, happy, and content, having arrived finally...
My mind having regained, in the wake of last week’s contretemps in the airport queue, some of its former suppleness, I turned to the November issue of Chronicles, with its theme of “Politics as Reality TV.” There I was smitten at once by Tom Fleming’s editorial article, which, as one of the speechwriters he derides...
My article “The New Resistance Is Rising” appeared on Intellectual Takeout on Dec. 1, 2020. Since then, we’ve seen even more evidence of fraud in November’s presidential contest, the Supreme Court and other lower courts have refused to look at the evidence of this fraud, and the left will likely take control of our federal government. Should Joe...
President Bush is in Hungary to join the celebrations of the failed 1956 Hungarian Uprising, and this is one Yale graduate on whom the lessons of history are not lost. Bush told the world:
The Cold War may have ended, but Washington policymakers don’t seem to have noticed. America, facing no serious security threats, accounts for roughly 40 percent of the globe’s military spending. Our expenditures outpace those of Russia by three or more to one; America spends twice as much as Britain, France, Germany, and Japan combined. What...
Western media are declaring the million-man march in Paris, where world leaders paraded down Boulevard Voltaire in solidarity with France, a victory over terrorism. Isn’t it pretty to think so. Unfortunately, the massacre at Charlie Hebdo, its military-style execution, the escape of the assassins, and their blazing end in a shootout Friday was a triumph...
In the final days of August the stage seemed set for a major escalation of America’s air war against the Islamic State (IS, also known as ISIS or ISIL). The operation, which started with limited tactical strikes between Mosul and Erbil—initially to save stranded refugees, then to help the Kurds defend their capital—was about to...
While we await the FBI’s seventh investigation into Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s background, some considerations: All four of Christine Blasey Ford’s witnesses to a party where he allegedly attacked her deny the party ever happened. The first narrative having run its course, the Democratic War Room spun out another dubious claim of sexual assault. The second...
To put this volume in perspective, we have to know that the cartoonist was a young amateur who actually considered making a career of the art, but was then drawn to another mode of expression—one which transcended, perhaps, her cartoons, but also sublated them. They were always a part of her imagination; the habit of...
In his opening statement at Wednesday’s Democratic debate in Detroit, Joe Biden addressed Donald Trump while pointing proudly to the racial and ethnic diversity of the nine Democrats standing beside him. “Mr. President, this is America and we are strong and great because of this diversity, not in spite of it. … We love it....
World War II cast an enormous cultural shadow over American life. It provided a backdrop for novels, television shows, and—especially—movies. Like many boys who grew up in the decades after the war, I read about the conflict, traced my fingers across maps illustrating the U.S. island-hopping campaign in the Pacific, watched and rewatched war movies,...
The Last 100 Days: FDR at War and Peace, by David B. Woolner (New York: Basic Books; 368 pp., $32.00). The author of this engaging, highly interesting, and extremely well-written book is senior fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian at the Roosevelt Institute, in addition to holding academic professorships at both Marist and Bard College. ...
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...