The revelation that Planned Parenthood is selling body parts from children that they have aborted in their clinics is shocking, even though it is hardly surprising. Pro-lifers have argued for years that Planned Parenthood is less concerned with the lives of the women that they claim to “help” than they are with making a profit....
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On Evangelism
I find it hard to share Doug Bandow’s enthusiasm for the minimal religious freedom allowed Christians in Kuwait (“Letter From Kuwait: Religious Freedom in the Gulf,” Correspondence, November 2002). While Kuwait does allow Christian clergymen to minister to their flocks, it is those who have never heard the Gospel who primarily need the evangelist. Is...
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Unsmearing Warren G. Harding
In The Jazz Age President, Ryan Walters sets the record straight about the often-misrepresented Warren G. Harding, who, in his brief time as president, led the country out of a crisis.
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The Price of Empire Globalism and Its Consequences
From the June 1997 issue of Chronicles. I know it will strike many people as odd to call the current foreign policy of the United States a form of “empire building” or “imperialism,” and of course none of our leaders would ever call it that. They would prefer some such term as “peacekeeping” or “spreading democracy”...
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Letter from Russia (II): Gloomy Economic Picture
This year’s Moscow Economic Forum (MEF) opened on Thursday at the Lomonosov State University under the slogan A New Strategy for Russia. The panelists—prominent academics, businessmen and senior managers—were brutally blunt in their diagnosis of the causes of Russia’s economic woes, and especially critical of the country’s Central Bank for continuing to follow a neoliberal...
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Tongues of Fire: America’s Phony Immigration Religion
We now add immigration amnesty to the arsenal of styrofoam clubs Republicans use for beating Democrats and driving voters to the polls. “We need immigration reform,” so we hear, “but the President has violated the Constitution!” For most Republicans, the “path to citizenship” is not a question of “if,” but of “when.” They talk of...
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Books in Brief
Open Every Door: Mary Mottley-Mme. Marie de Tocqueville, by Sheila Le Sueur, translated by Claudine Martin-Yurth (Mesa, AZ: Dandelion Books, 340 pp., $26.95). Alexis de Tocqueville’s wife was Mary Mottley, an Englishwoman. His biographers have never written more than a couple of sentences about her. This is regrettable because Mary was an extraordinary woman, because...
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The Impoverished Debate
Politics, said Henry Adams, “has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.” In recent months, best-seller lists have helped to prove Adams’ point, by featuring many vituperative political tracts from the left and right. The undisputed queen of the genre is Ann Coulter, whose overheated book Slander sold like hotcakes in 2002; lately, she has...
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Cops on Camels
This is the best news I’ve had since both the governor of the state of New York and a congressman from the depraved city of New York had to resign because of sex scandals. The latest good news is that Saudi Arabia will not have Uncle Sam to kick around much longer. Unfortunately, the kicking...
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Fiddling While Rockford Burns
There’s a big brown cloud in the city, And the countryside’s a sin. The price of life is too high to give up, It’s gotta come down again. When worldwide war is over and done, And the dream of peace comes true. We’ll all be drinking that free Bubble Up, And eating that rainbow stew....
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Yugoslavia, R.I.P.
On February 4, the Federal Assembly in Belgrade formally dissolved the state known as Yugoslavia and replaced it with a loose union of its remaining two republics, Serbia and Montenegro. On February 25, the separate parliaments of Serbia and Montenegro voted to nominate deputies for the new joint legislature that was then slated to elect...
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The Worst O-limp-ics Ever
Never have so many won so many accolades for so few real achievements on the world stage. That about sums up the Olympics 2021 — or, as I call them, the O-limp-ics 2021. Indeed, the time has come to retire the hallowed motto of the Games: “Faster, Higher, Stronger.” In our modern age, it’s: “Woker,...
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Politics as Mutant TB
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...
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MacChrystal’s Stunt
This came from C Bowen, as we were working the bugs out: Fallon pulled the same stunt with Esquire but he at least gives the appearance of respect. Gen. McChrystal may well be one of the best and at least he has no Waco in his past like that Boykin character, but he has the...
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Frontier Fantasies
Folklore is not history, and mythmakers hate complications. Finally we have a reliable life of Boone through the considerable efforts of John Mack Faragher, a professor of history at Mount Holyoke College whose earlier book Women and Men on the Overland Trail (1979) won the American Historical Association’s prestigious Frederick Jackson Turner Award. Daniel Boone...
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What Price for My Soul?
What price would you place upon your soul? For the people of Mississippi, this question recently became more than a mere philosophical or theological inquiry. True enough, all of us face this question in small, unnoticed ways as we move through life. Thankfully, most of us can make our choice quietly, in private, and away...
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Monumental Folly
The other day I got a “Dear Friend” letter from Malcolm Forbes asking for a contribution to the Reagan Presidential Library. It raises all sorts of questions. For instance, does Malcolm Forbes really think of me as a friend? Where has he been all this time? A friend in need is a friend indeed, Mr....
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Faces of Clio
From the October 1986 issue of Chronicles. “The obscurest epoch is today.” —Robert Louis Stevenson Taken together, these three books serve nicely as a kind of group portrait of Clio and her several faces. In reverse order we have the historian as diarist and memoirist, as documentarian, and as reflective sage. As one of the...
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Books in Brief: October 2021
Homo Americanus, by Zbigniew Janowski (St. Augustine’s Press; 250 pp., $24.00). Polish American political thinker Zbigniew Janowski examines the reasons that modern American democracy has taken a totalitarian turn. Contrary to the happy talk coming from establishment conservatives about the need to spread America’s so-called liberal democratic values everywhere, Janowski paints a dark but compelling...
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Clueless in Cuba
The Squad’s recent trip to Cuba shows what happens when the need for illusion is deep.
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Rising Costs
Congress, said H.L. Mencken, or perhaps it was Will Rogers, cost him about twelve dollars a year in taxes to support the institution, which was an unmatched bargain for entertainment. The statement was made during the raucous 20’s, when things seemed to be going along pretty well, and the antics of our leaders did not...
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Sold, Not Bought
If you want to understand our current financial woes, skip the economists and go directly to the premiere analyst of the Great Depression, James M. Cain. His 1943 novel Double Indemnity (originally a 1936 serial that ran in Liberty) explains far better than spreadsheets the moral origins of our present financial misadventure. Cain once remarked...
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Books in Brief
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. ...
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The Ugly Beautiful Losers
“Beautiful losers” was the phrase Sam Francis borrowed from Leonard Cohen to sum up the failure of the American conservative movement. Beautiful or not, American conservatives have been losers from their movement’s inception, and the same can be said for every conservative movement since the French Revolution and going back at least to the Enlightenment,...
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The Puritanism That Dare Not Speak Its Name
Every society places some kind of restriction on personal conduct, and limitations are usually most visible in the areas of sexual behavior and the use or abuse of particular foods or intoxicants. Restrictions might be formal and legal, perhaps enforced by a specialized morality police or vice squad, or there may be informal social sanctions...
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Can the GOP’s Shotgun Marriage Be Saved?
Wednesday morning, Nov. 9, 2016, Republicans awoke to learn they had won the lottery. Donald Trump had won the presidency by carrying Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. All three states had gone Democratic in the last six presidential elections. The GOP had won both houses of Congress. Party control of governorships and state legislatures rivaled the...
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Ignoble Savages—Aaron Wolf Against the Anti-Missionaries
Over the first three issues of this year Chronicles presented an illuminating series of essays by executive editor Aaron Wolf. Titled “Ignoble Savages,” this three-part work took as its starting point the venomous, even celebratory reaction of much of the secular West to the slaughter of a Christian missionary who had sailed to North Sentinel...
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A Good Man Is Hard to Find
The road to hell, I was taught as a child, is paved with good intentions. Surely no one could fault the intentions of the Reverend Ralph David Abernathy—Martin Luther King’s right arm and successor in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference—as revealed in this fascinating and moving autobiography. Inspired by faith in Divine mercy, by a...
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The Impotent Hegemon
“Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind.” Emerson’s couplet comes to mind as the New Year opens with Pakistan, the second largest Muslim country on Earth, in social and political chaos, trending toward a failed state with nuclear weapons. Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, whom the White House pressed to return home from exile...
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Does the Federal Government Protect Private Property?
Thirteen of the British colonies in North America declared their independence in 1776 as the only means of preserving the life, liberty, and property of what was then declared to be the American people. It was generally understood, in light of John Locke’s 1690 Second Treatise on Civil Government (widely recognized in the late-18th century...
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The American Covenant
“It is extremely frustrating to write history today because so much effort must go toward correcting the countless distortions that have been inserted into accounts of our heritage by militant secularists who twist facts to suit their narrow anti-religious political agendas.” So writes Benjamin Hart near the end of Faith and Freedom: The Christian Roots...
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Left Turn In Greece
Security has always been a key issue for conservatives and nationalists worldwide. But that’s not the case in Greece. So voters in the homeland of democracy, displeased by riots and anarchy, the inability of the government to put down the protests, and the effects of the financial crisis, have reacted angrily against the “conservatives” on...
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Everything Old Is New Again
Maureen Dowd, premier columnist for the New York Times, is possessed of a rare professional gift: She can be mean (often really mean) and funny (often very funny) at the same time. What’s more, her potent powers of observation and sheer talent as a writer usually combine to mitigate her predictable Washington cynicism. But with...
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Night and Day
When I first clambered onto the Italian carousel, at Piazza della Fontana di Trevi, my impressions were a kind of paean to the seriousness of Roman life. Now, some four years later and roughly 400 kilometers to the south, I find myself in Palermo, marveling at the essential childishness of the people. I dare say...
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Hillary Clinton’s Ongoing Bosnian Fixation
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...
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The End of the Berlusconi Era
Silvio Berlusconi has been around for so long that it is hard to imagine Italian politics without him occupying the center stage. The end of his era is nigh, however, to the relief of his opponents as well as many of his erstwhile supporters. Berlusconi announced on Tuesday night that he would resign as...
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Of Martyrs and Men
George McCartney (“The First and Final Command,” In the Dark, June) seems to believe that the Trappists of Tibhirine died as Christian martyrs. I do not. If the film he reviewed, Of Gods and Men, portrays them accurately, they prayed in the local mosque regularly; in other words, they repeatedly and publicly worshiped a false...
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Tax Breaks for Terror?
On June 23, the Italian daily Corriere della Sera reported that Italian police had smashed a Milan-based Islamic terrorist cell that was planning an attack on the Basilica of San Petronio. This church, the most important in Bologna, is dedicated to its patron saint, and it contains a fresco showing Muhammad being tortured by demons...
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The Modern Myth of the Black Cowboy
“Nigger Charley” Tyler rode the range of the Owens Valley in the trans-Sierra country of California during the early 1860’s. He was one of the hired hands of the ranching McGee family, who grazed their beeves in the valley and then drove them north to market at the booming mining camp of Aurora. Paiute Indians,...
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More Power to the Faculty?
“More power to the faculty” is the current rallying cry of academic reformers. This idea pops up with a persistence that goes beyond ideological divides, appealing even to self-described academic traditionalists, who view professional administrators and boards of regents and trustees as philosophically out of tune. This criticism does seem valid if one looks at...
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Health Care Debate—At Last
A new Associated Press-GfK poll that shows Americans evenly divided on the Obamacare repeal is getting big play as the House opens debate on precisely that course of action. Won’t it be amazing to hear Democrats argue—in view of this spectacular turn in public opinion—that House Republicans should now back off? Nope. To Obamacare’s...
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Military Unintelligence
Nothing is riskier in life—at any rate, for those interested in discovering that elusive thing, the “truth”—than to assume that what one has personally experienced years ago can be a useful guide in judging present problems. It is particularly true when the time gap between the two exceeds 50 years. This said, I feel almost...
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End of Empire, End of Manners
The imperial world offered an elevated ideal that has been lost, along with good manners.
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Crashing Under the Fourth Wave
Professional Democrats, like the proverbial dog who returns to his vomit, cannot quit the idea that their grotesque caricatures of those who hold traditional views of marriage and family, men and women, borders and citizenship, and meaningful employment will appeal to enough of the electorate to return control of the government to them. Donald Trump...
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Karl Rove and the Plame Affair
Karl Rove’s favorite president is Richard Nixon. What a twist of fate it would be if Rove were driven from power as Nixon was over what both men would consider trivial matters—the leaking of a CIA employee’s name to reporters by Rove in 2004 and the Watergate break-in of the Democratic headquarters at the instigation...
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California Exodus
California’s November 2010 election results were seen by national pundits as a “firewall” that stemmed the tide of Republican victories sweeping across the country. Actually, this was a Republican disaster long in the making. The main cause of the GOP’s defeat was the large increase in the immigrant population in the last 30 years. Voting...
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America and France Turn Right
In Sunday’s first-round of regional elections in France, the clear and stunning winner was the National Front of Marine Le Pen. Her party rolled up 30 percent of the vote, and came in first in 6 of 13 regions. Marine herself won 40 percent of her northeast district. Despite tremendous and positive publicity from his...
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Wonderful Illusions
“The remembrance of death, like all other blessings, is a gift of God: otherwise how is it that often when we are by the very tombs, we are left tearless and hard?” —St. John of the Ladder More than 20 years ago, I was counseled by an orthodox Roman Catholic professor...
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A Reading List to Drive the ‘Woke’ Crowd Crazy
At the beginning of the year, a couple of my coworkers challenged me to join the yearly book challenge on Goodreads. While I am still wrapping up a few of my selections, I’m on track to finish my goal, and it’s rewarding to see the finish line in sight. Having done this challenge, I took...
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Valor
A review of Valkyrie (produced and distributed by United Artists; directed by Bryan Singer; screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie) and Slumdog Millionaire (produced by Celador Films; directed by Danny Boyle; screenplay by Simon Beaufoy; from Vikas Swarup’s novel; distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures) In Valkyrie, screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie and director Bryan Singer tell the story of Col....