I live in amity with the Southern Baptists, whose general tolerance for my fellow “Whiskeypalians” I take kindly. I wouldn’t dream of joining the media whoop-de-do over who among the Baptist faithful did what to whom, and when, and what to do now. You have read it all; I will not recount the imputations of...
In December 1982, Dr. Jack Yoffa of Syracuse, New York, took Zomax, a painkiller, just before driving to the hospital for minor surgery. About halfway there, Yoffa began to itch and turn red. Within 60 seconds, he was unconscious. His car hit a guardrail, crossed a three-lane highway (narrowly missing several cars), knocked over a...
Obama is by nature a booster—like the first stage of the missile lofting its payload into the upper atmosphere. A huge bang, a mighty whoosh and then a few miles up, a fizzle as the Obama-booster burns out and drops back to earth. Who knows what happened to the payload? He doesn’t seem to have...
Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. Speaking from experience, rather than poetic frenzy, I say both. The spring winds blowing white at home in Wyoming blow red down here in New Mexico, a howling gale that seems to be returning to the Dustbowl the errant Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas...
The Last Confederate Produced by Strongbow Pictures Directed by A. Blaine Miller and Julian Adams Written by Julian Adams and Weston Adams Firetrail Produced by Forbesfilm Written and directed by Christopher Forbes Like it or not, movies are the main art form of our time, the storytelling medium that reaches the largest audience and...
Under laissez-faire capitalism, government is limited to armies, which keep foreign bad guys from attacking us; police, to quell local criminals; and courts, to determine guilt and innocence. This is roughly the position of minimal-government libertarians, or minarchists. The foundation of law in this system is the non-aggression principle (NAP). The NAP provides that anyone...
Dismissing President Donald Trump’s claim that the 2020 election remains undecided, Joe Biden has begun to name his national security team. Right now, it looks Democratic establishment all the way. Antony Blinken, a longtime foreign policy aide, is Biden’s choice for secretary of state. Jake Sullivan, one of Hillary Clinton’s closest aides, is said to...
A generation arose and took its place in the life of Russia, which did witness Boris Nemtsov as a political heavyweight. The governor of the Nizhny Novgorod region, vice-premier, who was seen as an heir to Yeltsin, breathtaking ascension in his political career, and an ability to make country-wide policy—all this left Boris Nemtsov together...
On even-numbered years, particularly the ones coinciding with a presidential midterm, my Deep South home county undergoes the grotesque onslaught of local elections. For a few months in the spring and summer (and also in the fall, although this is tempered somewhat by Alabama being a “Red State,” which usually means the winner of the...
Once again, Church historian Aaron D. Wolf slanders evangelicals with his essay “The Christian Zionist Threat to Peace” (Views, May). Using the classic ploy of quoting from a dictionary-type source in his introduction allows him to set up his own dispensationalist straw man to knock down in the rest of his polemic. Mr. Wolf does...
Emmanuel Macron’s victory in the French presidential election provides conclusive proof that no major European nation can save itself from demographic and cultural suicide through the electoral process. That outcome is not merely a victory for status quo politics, which millions of lower-middle-class French people prefer, but a triumph of the globalist establishment. Macron is...
“Hillbilly.” The earliest recorded use of the word is from the New York Journal of April 23, 1900. As you might guess from that publication’s city of origin, the term was not intended as a compliment. The journal defined a hillbilly as “a free and untrammeled white citizen of Alabama, who lives in the hills,...
Glasnost in Chile? Pinochet is getting no credit for it. Yet at the same time General Secretary (and now also President) Gorbachev’s policies are being hailed as major breakthroughs, departures from the previous (Brezhnev) era. They are deemed to hold out great promise for the people of the Soviet Union, if only they can succeed....
The frequency with which American politicians—and Republican ones in particular—habitually neglect or pass up obvious chances to score a telling hit on their opponents is really amazing. An immediately recent example is the claim made on the campaign trail by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the leading candidate for the Mexican presidency in the forthcoming election...
Matt Walsh, famed for questioning leftists on gender, now questions leftists on race in his wildly popular documentary, "Am I a Racist?"
My dear Hobson, The bleak tone of your email has distressed me. You report waking on the morning of November 7 convinced that a vast majority of politicians—Republicans and Democrats—are certifiable lunatics. According to your somewhat incoherent letter—were you inebriated, or are all those sentence fragments and dangling prepositions the dismal product of your recently...
Ever since I committed the blunder, nearly 30 years ago, of signing up with the “conservative movement” during my first year in graduate school, a certain pattern of behavior has enforced itself on my decreasingly callow mind. The pattern, as a colleague of mine once remarked to me, is that there seems to be no...
“Let us gamble with reason in the name of life,” urges Pascal in his celebrated statistical proof for the existence of God. “Let us risk it, for the sake of a win that is infinitely great and just as probable as the loss, which is to say nonexistence.” With the cynicism of an inveterate gambler,...
Trump has taken massive hits for his years in public service. Now he’s survived an assassination attempt and got up and walked away. He is a legend.
There have been strong empires with weak currencies, but not often and not for long. The Soviet Union, Spain after Philip II, the Ottoman Empire after Suleiman, and an impoverished Britain after Versailles all come to mind. That financially fragile states cannot support ambitious political and military ventures is obvious to common sense and confirmed...
The Eagle Produced and distributed by Focus Features Directed by Kevin Macdonald Screenplay by Jeremy Brock There’s this to be said for director Kevin Macdonald’s The Eagle, set in Roman-occupied Britain circa a.d. 140: It’s remarkably unpretentious. It was made for a mere $24 million at a time when even the most ordinary Hollywood...
Sacré Coeur (Sacred Heart) Basilica draws your eyes from every point in Paris. The white Romano-Byzantine domes of this marvelous church dominate the skyline of the grittier neighborhoods of northern Paris. Observed from atop the Arc de Triomphe, Sacré Coeur’s domes seem to levitate above Paris. I decided to save Sacré Coeur for my last...
W. B. Yeats: The Poems; Edited by Richard J. Finneran; Macmillan; New York When Yeats died in 1939 his poetry had not been completely collected and there was some doubt over the right text. His widow was involved in the editing of his work and she had strong and sometimes wrong ideas about...
With the able assistance of Jack Hunter, Sen. Rand Paul has written a must-read book for conservatives wondering why we continue to send Republicans to Washington, D.C., who say all of the right things when running for office and then quickly fall in line with the “inside the Beltway” political elites who have controlled the...
On balance, would you say you are for or against gun violence? How about motherhood? Pro or con? How about keeping firearms away from children? I know that these are all contentious debates nowadays, and that most of us have to think awfully hard before deciding such questions. Somehow, though, I suspect that a decent...
Several recent letters from readers outside the South have contained clippings and firsthand reports about the progress of Our Nation’s cause. I hope my correspondents don’t mind, but I’ve come to think of them as a sort of intelligence service, even sometimes as a Fifth Column. One expatriate, for instance, sent along a brochure for...
Warren Zimmermann was the last American Ambassador to Yugoslavia (from 1989 to 1992), and his memoir is of historical interest, but not for reasons the author intended. When Warren Zimmermann arrived in Belgrade in 1989, Yugoslavia was still a federation of six republics with a federal cabinet and government. Because of the changes brought about...
The United States recently came under an attack by an activity so insidious that Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and his Wisconsin colleague Tammy Baldwin joined forces in an effort to demand it be “reined in.” Massachusetts’ Elizabeth Warren, the Senate’s modern-day firebrand who never tires in her perpetual imitation of the maniacal abolitionist John Brown,...
Total strangers hug one another. People dance for joy in the streets. Tears pour down their faces. It is Germany, November 1989. The Berlin Wall has fallen and for the first time in decades people can move freely back and forth in Germany’s old capital. A people feels its solidarity, in the truest sense of...
I arrived in Poland just as the television announced the tragic death of President Lech Kaczynski, his wife, Maria, and many of Poland’s military and political leaders in an airplane crash at Smolensk in Russia. A week of mourning followed throughout the entire country. The president had been traveling to Smolensk for a joint commemoration...
Right wing politicos should focus on protecting alternative networks and institutions from the current, corrupt regime. As for scaling down or ousting said regime, that's not happening.
On Dec. 14, 1825, following the death of Alexander I—who had seen off Napoleon—his brother, the grand duke, who had just taken the oath as Czar Nicholas I, was confronted by mutinous troops and rebels in Senate Square before the Winter Palace. For hours, the czar stood at the end of ...
“Courts of justice cautiously abstain from deciding more than what the immediate point submitted to their consideration requires.” —Mr. Justice Nicholl In what was probably the most laudable achievement of his administration, President George W. Bush placed on the Supreme Court two justices, Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito, who believe...
Devin Nunes just set the cat down among the pigeons. Two days after FBI Director James Comey assured us there was no truth to President Trump’s tweet about being wiretapped by Barack Obama, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said Trump may have had more than just a small point. The U.S. intelligence community,...
The horse went down on a horizontal stretch of trail where no sound horse had any business stumbling. The quadrupe-dal rhythm broke suddenly, his near shoulder crumpled, his head sank at the end of the black-maned neck, until the horse seemed to be wanting to kneel and kiss the ground. I let out rein and...
On October 26, 1881, a gunfight erupted in a vacant lot on Fremont Street in Tombstone, Arizona, that would go down in history as the Shootout at the OK Corral. Virgil, Wyatt, and Morgan Earp and Doc Holliday stood on one side, and Tom and Frank McLaury and Ike and Billy Clanton on the other. ...
Kim Jong-il, the North Korean “Dear Leader” (as well as Secretary-General of the Workers’ Party of Korea, Chairman of the National Defense Commission, Supreme Commander of the Korean People’s Army, etc, etc.) is dead at 69. The news that the diminutive leader of the most unpleasant despotism in the world is no longer going to regale us with his...
Samuel Francis’s newest book, composed of 30 essays originally published in Chronicles between 1989 and 1996, is much more than a collection of articles about matters of passing concern. Rather it attests to Francis’s singular efforts in constructing a strategy by which Americans might recapture their nation from the decadent establishment now in power. He...
The Oscar buzz this year is, in large part, about the prospects of Brokeback Mountain, the “gay Western” that has already won four Golden Globe awards and been nominated for eight Academy Awards. A month ago, Brokeback Mountain had all the momentum, but that is now slowing as some have acknowledged that the film is,...
A new round in the U.S.-China trade dispute has started in earnest. Last Sunday (May 5) President Donald Trump tweeted that he would raise the current 10 percent tariff on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports to 25 percent. The President doubled down on his trade war threats with China early today (May 10), just hours after last...
A number of maxims surround the practice of war. The main maxim runs to this effect: When you get attacked, fight back. Unless, to be sure, you don’t care whether you win or lose—an option, to be sure, not given to American presidents and other national leaders, assuming, to be sure, they take with maximum...
Ever since Machiavelli, and probably long before that, successful statesmen have known that a plentiful stock of mendacity, as well as guile, are essential for anyone wishing to get ahead in politics. But what many of them may have forgotten during their arduous climb to the summit is that the often bitter accusations they level...
When I went to pick up my laundry last week, one of the employees, who had just finished folding my clothes, began weeping. “This is the last load I’ll ever do here,” she said in a choked voice. “They’re letting us all go.” That one little stifled sob described more than just one woman bemoaning...
Our Greek host on Santorini, a young hotelier and newly married tour promoter, is trying to sell us a Mount Olympus excursion. “Half the German tourists frown, they are unhappy, and you wonder why,” he explains. “We Greeks, we drink, we dance, we smile, we enjoy life. When you are on holiday, you should enjoy...
When did World War II start? An American is entitled to think it started with Pearl Harbor, as, clearly, the world without the United States is only a world in part. But ask an Englishman, and he will say the world war began some two years earlier, when Britain declared war on Germany. A Russian...
Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald called a press conference on October 28 to announce a five-count indictment against I. Lewis Libby, chief of staff and principal national security advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney. Fitzgerald indicted Libby on one count of obstruction of justice, two counts of perjury, and two counts of false statements, the charges...
Mortality rates for middle aged white Americans are rising, as reported by the New York Times: “Something startling is happening to middle-aged white Americans. Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group, unlike their counterparts in other rich countries, death rates in this group have been rising, not falling. That finding...
In a way, Donald Trump might be called The Great Uniter. Bear with me. No Republican president in the lifetime of this writer, not even Ronald Reagan, united the party as did Trump in the week of his acquittal in the Senate and State of the Union address. According to the Gallup Poll, 94% of...
Michael Wu wants to become an American citizen. He is 25 years old and has lived in San Diego with his Taiwanese parents since 1980. He speaks English and Chinese, works packing newspapers for recycling, and attends school. He loves baseball and swimming and wants to join the U.S. Navy. By all accounts he is...
History not only repeats itself but inverts itself. When these things happen simultaneously, the result is precisely what is happening today, as conservatives return to their “isolationist” roots and progressives return to their warmongering ways. That’s the repetition. The inversion comes into play with the current anti-Russian hysteria, which we haven’t seen since the icy...