It is almost inevitable that a reader of my interests and disposition should slightly miss the point of this book, described in a Daily Express blurb as “a good spy thriller,” and that is precisely what I propose to do. Spy thrillers are plentiful; they are summer reading at its Sardinian beachiest. To review one...
The Wisconsin primary could be an axle-breaking speed bump on Donald Trump’s road to the nomination. Ted Cruz, now the last hope to derail Trump of a desperate Beltway elite that lately loathed him, has taken the lead in the Badger State. Millions in attack ads are being dumped on the Donald’s head by super...
“Whatever starts in California unfortunately has an inclination to spread.” —President Jimmy Carter On a Sunday afternoon late in June, Tony Bologna was driving home with his sons, Michael and Matthew, from a family barbecue. In San Francisco’s Excelsior district Bologna got stuck in an intersection, temporarily blocking a car from making a left-hand turn. ...
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...
Return to Remedial Physics Silkwood; Directed by Mike Nichols; Written by Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen; ABC Motion Pictures/Twentieth Century Fox. One of the latest causes of self-righteousness, posturing, and enlightened indignation is not a person or place, but a thing: a group of heavy metals that disintegrate and emit various rays (alpha, beta, gamma),...
Cause can’t you see You’re torturing me Torturing me. —“Torture” by Kris Jensen, 1962 While reading “His-Panic” by Ron Unz in the March issue of The American Conservative, Kris Jensen’s moderately successful 1962 recording of “Torture” kept running through my brain. Please, Ron, you’re torturing me with the most convoluted arguments imaginable; ...
Well, after 50 years and more in New York, I have heard the fat lady sing, and I know what that means. There have been some issues as the decades have zipped by, I must say; and I have dealt with the problems seriatim—riots, street crime, altercations, the murder of an elderly benefactor, and other...
Not long after the conviction of Alger Hiss, Professor James Burnham, Karl Hess, and I met in my apartment on Riverside Drive to discuss a matter that had concerned us for some time. Jim Burnham was then working on his book The Web of Subversion. Karl, like me, was a Newsweek editor, and he had...
“There is no salvation to he extracted from the Holocaust, no faltering Judaism can he revived by it, no new reason for the continuation of the Jewish people can he found in it. If there is hope after the Holocaust, it is because to those who believe, the voice of the...
Looks like the British government will finally be able to rid its long-suffering citizens of the Muslim terrorist preacher (what a string of redundant adjectives!) Abu Qatada. After almost a decade of trying to throw out this troublemaker, who called for the murder of Jews and apostate Muslims and their families, Britain and Jordan...
Two members of the Kappa Alpha Psi chapter at Florida A & M have been sentenced to two years imprisonment for a violent hazing they inflicted on a fraternity pledge, who suffered a punctured eardrum and bruises on his buttocks. Michael Morton, 23, and Jason Harris, 25, were convicted under a 2005 Florida law making...
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...
Ron DeSantis is a decorated Navy vet who served in a war zone and, among other commendations, earned a Bronze Star. So, how about a little respect?
“What the president’s campaign did was focus on certain members of his base coalition, give them extraordinary financial gifts from the government and then work very aggressively to turn them out to vote, and that strategy worked.” Thus did political analyst Mitt Romney identify the cause of his defeat in a call to disconsolate...
One evening in the fall of 2015, with the unlikely Donald J. Trump already dominating the race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, I ran into Ross Perot, Jr., at an exclusive charity event in Dallas. Perot is a billionaire real estate developer and the only son of H. Ross Perot, who campaigned for president...
President Clinton’s fall tour of South America raised an important question: What has happened to the adversarial role of White House television journalists? ABC’s John Donvan reported that the President’s photo-op tour of Caracas left Venezuela glowing. He said the President was greeted warmly and that his speech was an overwhelming success. There was a...
It has been ten years since the death, at his home in the village of Mecosta, Michigan, of Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind and one of the main spokesmen for organized American conservatism as it was known throughout his life. While there were other architects of conservatism who were Kirk’s contemporaries, almost all...
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...
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...
The stars of the dance floor, a bantam couple, whirl to the “EE-II-EE-II-OO Polka,” a tune that would be obscure to almost anybody but the Mellotones. Their feet, tiny to start with, push each between the other’s with the precision of a sewing-machine needle working a button foot. Around and around they twirl, not with...
President Obama is being hailed for toughness in his firing of Gen. McChrystal and brilliance in his replacing him as Afghan field commander with Gen. David Petraeus, who managed the George W. Bush “surge” in Iraq that saved this nation from an ignominious defeat. Herewith, a dissent. By firing a fighting general, beloved of his...
In addition to endorsing the overturning of Roe, Justice Thomas's concurring opinion on Dobbs threatens other due-process legal precedents, such as those that have guaranteed a fundamental right to homosexual behavior and gay marriage.
The distinctive regional "America," composed of Midwestern German and Scandinavian enclaves, lasted barely four decades, dying as a coherent entity sometime in the early 1950s.
In Great Britain as in the United States, terrorism has provided the perfect pretext for assaulting liberties enjoyed for centuries. Torture, detention without charge, wiretapping, international databases of citizens’ private information—all have been enthusiastically pursued in the United Kingdom as in the United States. Yet even as the bloated Labour government has begun to flounder...
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...
From the November 2015 issue of Chronicles. Politics is all about hatred. Never mind who you’re voting for: It’s who you’re voting against that really counts. And that’s why any disagreement I may have with Donald Trump’s actual policies is completely irrelevant. Because what really matters is that all the people I really hate—the media,...
I begin with a confession. Whenever I receive a new number of The Chesterton Review, I groan inwardly and, from time to time, outwardly. Let me hasten to add that said groan is not a sign of tedium or disappointment—far from it. But opening those pages means that once again, despite myself, I will be...
Everyone to Bernie Sanders’ right gasped in 1994 when radical British historian Eric Hobsbawm argued that Communist regimes who murdered millions “would still have been worth backing” had there been a “chance of a new world being born in great suffering.” The diabolically deranged never connect maniacal theory to deadly results. We can’t psychoanalyze Hobsbawm, who...
It was a late night in the small-town pizzeria, and the owners were sitting at our table drinking the Antinori Chianti riserva that was “too sour” for the local Swedes, who prefer Lambrusco on the rocks when they are not drinking Miller Lite. The husband had come from Italy as a child, but his wife...
It’s springtime once again in Rockford, when a young man’s fancy turns to bailing out his basement. The old downtown and the residential neighborhoods built up through the 1940’s sit on clay soil, on top of rock. The effect, when the spring rains come and the dry clay cannot absorb the water quickly enough, is...
The censorship regime has lowered the bar on comedy so much that it’s not even funny.
Recent broadsides from the French government, and most conspicuously from French President Emmanuel Macron, against the American woke Left and U.S. cancel culture drew a mixed reaction from me. Frankly, I find no reason as a European historian to believe that French journalists and academics are any less infected than our own with political correctness....
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...
HARD RIGHT The Suicide of the West by Thomas Fleming VIEWS The Everlasting Frontier by Chilton Williamson, Jr. Wilderness democracy. The Curious Career of Billy the Kid by Gregory McNamee The man behind the myth. Westerns by Roger D. McGrath America’s Homeric era on the silver screen. The Death of the Western by Clay Reynolds Back-trailing for affirmation. REVIEWS He ...
I begin with a flourish of disclosure, which gives me great pleasure as a gesture of wistful recollection. Professor Baldwin was my roommate at university, occupying the bunk above mine. The wall space over that prisonlike fixture of canvas ticking and rude ironmongery was decorated with an enormous portrait of Karl Marx that would not...
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...
The Fighter Produced by Mark Wahlberg and David Hoberman Directed by David O. Russell Screenplay by Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy, and Eric Johnson Distributed by Paramount Pictures 127 Hours Produced and directed by Danny Boyle Screenplay by Danny Boyle and Simon Beaufoy Distributed by Fox Searchlight Mark Wahlberg produced The Fighter and convincingly plays...
“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,...
Last night, on the recommendation of friends, my wife and I went to see Secretariat. We both thoroughly enjoyed this wholesome, well-made movie, that manages to be suspenseful even though most moviegoers already know that Secretariat won the Triple Crown in 1973. I should have realized that any movie I enjoyed ...
The Report on the Evolution of the Family in Europe 2008, published by the Institute for Family Policies in Madrid, suggests that the family is being closed down and sold off at bargain-basement prices. In Europe there is an abortion every 27 seconds and a divorce every 30. There are nearly one million fewer births...
Times of crisis are not distinguished by respect for rights—although, paradoxically, all revolutions claim to be mounted in the name of rights. During our War of Independence, criticism of the patriot cause was an invitation to a lynching, and Jefferson defined the Tory as “a traitor in thought, if not in deed.” In 1773 George...
When a killer quake ripped through Mexico City last September, it crippled the young theater season then taking shape. In the aftermath of the national tragedy, playhouses went dark for a fortnight. Actors were idled and unpaid, and playgoers turned for sustenance to motion pictures and television drama. But the theater, fabulous invalid that it...
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...
Can it be that a fraud has been perpetrated on the readers and admirers of novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand—a literary and intellectual swindle that veers perilously close to plagiarism? That such a charge could be leveled at the author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged is irony bordering on farce. For the spirit that animated the...
On any subject other than Russia, unanimity between the United States and her European “allies” has been impossible to achieve since Donald Trump was sworn in as President. The unsolved poisoning in the cathedral town of Salisbury, England, of a former Russian double agent—exchanged eight years ago in a spy-swap with the U.K.—and his daughter,...
Millions of Americans are coming to see our incumbent regime, "our democracy," as failing in its foremost duty—to protect and defend our country from enemies foreign and domestic.
What poses the greatest threat today to the Old Dominion—mother of Presidents, a state secure and renowned for precious memories and aspirations? No person or foreign power, but a vast impersonal force already despoiling cities and states around the globe, a force that I call “sploge”: unregulated, unchecked growth, fueled by the three G’s—Greed, Glitz,...
As Chronicles editor Chilton Williamson, Jr., noted, Mr. David Brooks of the New York Times has written an editorial in praise of (and perhaps blaming) our late colleague and friend Sam Francis for accurately describing the American proscenium and providing profound structural analyses of the cultural and economic plight of Middle Americans. Dr. Francis shared...
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...
Bilingual education creates linguistic chaos in the classroom, and it is failing nearly everywhere it is tried.