I write with bittersweet excitement to reveal the new interim editor in chief of Chronicles. As our readers know, Aaron Wolf was to become the editor in chief this year, but passed away suddenly on Easter Sunday. Aaron was an exceptional man and a wonderful, loyal editor for Chronicles, serving the institution for 20 years....
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The Emperor’s Tattoo
“A monarchy that’s tempered with republican equality.” Who would have thought, 100 years ago, that by the end of the American Century the great burning public issue would be the Confederate flag? Back in 1900, Americans were eager to put their quarrels behind them. Rebs and Yanks had fought side by side in Cuba, and...
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Surprised by Believers
St. Patrick’s Church is now a modern structure consisting of two red-brick tetrahedrons sprung up, like some poisonous mushroom, over the transformed landscape. The original building, Old St. Patrick’s, is down the street from the usurper, crouching in the shadows, dreaming of the days when a Roman Catholic church could never have been mistaken for...
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Here Comes the Parade
This past summer, a headline appeared in the Louisville Courier-Journal: “Kentucky terrorist arrests shouldn’t jeopardize refugee program, advocates say.” The first paragraph ran: “As U.S. authorities recheck intelligence gathered on refugees, resettlement agencies say the arrest of two suspected Iraqi terrorists in Kentucky should not jeopardize programs that have helped tens of thousands of persecuted...
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Conservative Inc. Pretends to Discipline Its Own
During the last few days, those of us who have questioned Conservatism Inc.’s willingness to stand up to the cultural left seem to have received new allies. David Marcus at The Federalist, Thomas D. Klingenstein at the Claremont Institute, and the commentator Mark Steyn on Tucker Carlson’s program have all been taking shots at the...
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The Penitential History of Vichy France
Accepted scholarship on Vichy France has evolved as Anti-fascist sentiment penetrates historiography like never before. Penitential historiography has arrived.
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Wings of Icarus
From 9,000 feet the triangulating mountains, snow-covered and hazy with spring, showed on three horizons bounding the broad brown desert of the Green River. Leveling at 9,475 feet we saw the steam plume from the power plant. Lake Viva Naughton, and the white scratch of clay road running toward the mountains north of town. The...
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Goodbye, Mr. Bond
Casino Royale Produced by Barbara Broccoli, Andrew Noakes, and Anthony Waye Directed by Martin Campbell Screenplay by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and Paul Haggis Based on the novel by Ian Fleming Released by Columbia Pictures It is with great trepidation and some sadness that I must announce that James Bond is dead. Granted, there is...
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Holding On to a Culture
For a political party that celebrates diversity, it is certainly an odd choice. The Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Party of Minnesota, like the Democrats nationwide, has celebrated its role in promoting multiculturalism and massive immigration. Yet the ticket the DFL has nominated to run for governor and lieutenant governor this fall—State Senate Majority Leader Roger Moe and...
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Beyond “Immigration”
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...
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Nationalism to Confront Globalism in Glasgow
“Extraordinary, isn’t it? I’ve been hearing all about COP,” said the queen to the duchess of Cornwall. “Still don’t know who is coming. … We only know about people who are not coming. … It’s really irritating when they talk but they don’t do.” Queen Elizabeth II was expressing her exasperation at the possible number...
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30 Years Fighting the Culture War—July 2006
PERSPECTIVE Violent Revolution by Thomas Fleming Women in bondage. VIEWS Hollywood Blues by George Garrett A culture of grand illusions. Culture War by Clyde Wilson Fighting on. Dressing for Progress by Andrei Navrozov A culture of lovelessness. An American Dilemma by Tom Landess The Episcopal Church (1976-2006). RUOK? AWHFY? by James O. Tate Communication in the vast wasteland. O Literature, Thou Art Sick by Catharine Savage Brosman The consequences of theory. INTERVIEW Rendering ...
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On Saving Canada
Kevin Michael Grace begins his profile of Conrad Black (“The Fall of Lord Blackadder and Lady Manolo (of Blahnik),” News, June) with a piece of hearsay—an observation that “Canada isn’t worth saving,” supposedly uttered by David Frum to me and by me to Mr. Grace. David has never said such a thing to me, and...
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The Un-Magnificent Obsession
Almost precisely a year after the name of Monica Lewinsky began to displace those of Princess Diana and Jackie Onassis from the headlines of supermarket tabloids, the one-time object of Miss Lewinsky’s more tender affections emerged triumphant over his foes in what are still laughingly called the “conservative movement” and the “Republican Party.” The conservative...
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Young People Are Right to Hate the Office
Don’t blame the 40-hour work week or youthful laziness for the increasing frustrations young people are voicing about their lives and their jobs. Blame today’s woke workplace and a culture that pushes phony self-actualization over fulfillment.
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Inconvenient Children
Never Rarely Sometimes Always Directed and written by Eliza Hittman ◆ Produced by BBC Films ◆ Distributed by Focus Features These Wilder Years (1956) Directed by Roy Rowland ◆ Written by Frank Fenton ◆ Produced and distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer In the guise of a documentary treatment of abortion, Never Rarely Sometimes Always tells us quite...
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Transgenderism Stems From Feminism’s Failure to Deal With Marilyn Monroe
Had I told Democratic friends around the turn of the 21st century that in 2021 their party would insist that a biological man identifying as a woman should be treated as a woman in sports competitions, they would have laughed me under the table. Yet here’s Joe Biden, their man in the White House, claiming that...
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Gone to Pot
It is seven o’clock on a peaceful late-summer evening here in suburban Seattle, and I’m sitting in my back garden smoking marijuana. Passively smoking, I should add, lest I shock any reader by this sorry lapse, but smoking nonetheless. This time of year, my property is especially fragrant with the acrid smell of pot, and...
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One Crisis Averted
Barack Obama’s re-election, while socially, culturally, and morally disastrous for the country, may prove the lesser of two evils when it comes to foreign policy, according to some pundits. Perhaps, but only because Obama’s primary focus is on irreversibly changing the character and ethnic composition of the United States. Republicans, in the meantime, learn nothing...
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The Search for Salvation
There is a popularly held belief that the promise of theater resided throughout the country. According to the theory, if Broadway was dying, then American theater was thriving west of the Hudson and south of the Delaware Water Gap, nurturing not only the talent but also the audience. There has been a problem, of course,...
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The Shepard Case
Matthew Shepard, a young homosexual man murdered in Laramie, Wyoming, in October 1998, is the new “messiah” figure of one of the most evocative contemporary mythologies created by our ostensibly anti-religious rulers. As far as we can tell, Shepard seems to have been a quiet person who had the ill fortune to encounter a pair...
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Western Is as Western Does
“People first, place second,” William Faulkner wrote; J. while Ford Madox Ford—whose last book was The March of Literature, described by its author as a survey of world literature from Confucius to Conrad—believed that great writing transcended not only national and cultural boundaries but those of time itself. There is, nevertheless, describably such a thing...
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Deployments in Kosovo
American troop deployments in Kosovo were the subject of a debate in the House of Representatives on March 11. A resolution authorizing President Clinton to contribute U.S. ground troops to a NATO peacekeeping mission in the troubled province was supported by 219 members, just one more than a majority. While the vote cut across party...
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How Killing Libyans Became a Moral Imperative
“Who would be free themselves must strike the blow.” So wrote the poet Byron, who would himself die just days after landing in Greece to join the war for independence from the Turks. But in that time, Americans followed the dictum of Washington, Adams and Jefferson: Stay out of foreign wars. America “goes not abroad...
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Dixie Peaceniks?
People don’t like it when you mess with their heritage. The Bolsheviks tried to destroy Russian nationalism, in particular massacring Russian Orthodox bishops, priests and nuns. But when Hitler invaded, not enough Russians fought for Marx, Lenin and dialectical materialism. So Stalin allowed Metropolitan Bishop Sergius to be elected patriarch, brought some of the surviving...
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Is Trump Facing a 1960s’-Style Revolt?
Sunday morning, President Trump announced that the world’s worst terrorist, the head of the ISIS caliphate who had raped an American woman, had received justice. About to be captured and carried off in a helicopter by U.S. special forces, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi blew himself up with an explosive vest in a compound in northwest Syria....
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A Few Modest Suggestions for the Trump Administration
Order withdrawal of troops and materiel from Afghanistan and Iraq. (Without bringing the indigenous population with you.) Perhaps a small CIA presence might be maintained just for intelligence-gathering, which is what they are supposed to be doing anyway. Join with Russia to destroy ISIS in preparation for a withdrawal from Syria. This will allow the...
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More Observations and Lamentations on the Way We Are Now
Are you enjoying your New American Century? You may as well enjoy it. It is all you are getting instead of your “peace dividend.” Justice Ginsberg has recently invoked the laws of some foreign states in justification of her Supreme Court decisions. The Founding Fathers and subsequent generations would have found this impeachable and treasonous. ...
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High On the List of Priorities
Illegal aliens rank high on any social reformer’s list of priorities. At the very time millions of tax dollars are being spent to patrol our borders and to prosecute the illegals, CUNY—the City University of New York—announced in August that not only will it continue to welcome illegal aliens into its fold, but it will...
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Putin: Trump Understands
Transcript of Srdja Trifkovic’s RT interview in the immediate aftermath of President Putin’s press conference in Hamburg at the end of the G20 summit in Hamburg on Saturday afternoon, July 8. [Watch video] RT: President Vladimir Putin has addressed the media after two days of talks with the world leaders at the G20 summit in...
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Serbia Humiliated
On October 5, 2000, in an almost bloodless coup by the security forces staged against the backdrop of massive street protests, Slobodan Milosevic was removed from power in Serbia. Ten years later, many of those who cheered his downfall then (this author included) have nothing to celebrate. In the run-up to “Peti oktobar” they...
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That Bestial Visor
“Every good poet includes a critic, but the reverse will not hold.” —William Shenstone In the popular memory the interwar years in Western Europe were a period of instability, inertia, and poverty or, as Auden described the 1930’s, “a low dishonest decade.” One seldom hears about the interesting fact that during those interwar years, in...
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Ignoring Important Stories
After September 11, several important stories continue to be ignored. Here, to a lay observer, is the shape of the past fall’s most overlooked developments. The two biggest sponsors of terrorism in the Middle East are Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The intelligence community has known this for years. The recent kidnapping and slaying of a...
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Fat Henry Is Still Dead
It’s bad enough that yesterday was Earth Day. Over at NRO, Andrew Stuttaford reminded us that yesterday was also the 500th anniversary of Henry VIII’s becoming the King of England. Except that Stuttaford, an English atheist who left England for New York, sees this anniversary as an occasion for celebration, and Henry as a “Liberator”...
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Finito
The Fates are even-handed. Eight years ago, John McCain slipped on his way to the podium, and his tongue protruded involuntarily. The cameras caught the moment, and he looked like an old man. That finished his candidacy. He is still going strong, but that moment froze into a general perception. And now Hillary Clinton, for...
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The Brazilian Cow
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...
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DOMA’s Fifth Column
In February, President Obama directed the Department of Justice to stop defending Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Immediately, many conservatives decried the announcement. Curt Levy of the Committee for Justice described Obama’s decision as “outrageous” and a “power grab that . . . would allow him to undermine any duly enacted...
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Bring on the GOP!
The awful Obama is pushing terrible things on our country like socialised medicine, big spending, corporate bailouts, affirmative action, and amnesty for illegal aliens. He must be defeated so the Republicans can get in and push socialised medicine, big spending, corporate bailouts, affirmative action, and amnesty for illegal aliens. Obama ...
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Is That Russia Troll Farm an Act of War?
According to the indictment by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Russian trolls, operating out of St. Petersburg, took American identities on social media and became players in our 2016 election. On divisive racial and religious issues, the trolls took both sides. In the presidential election, the trolls favored Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein and Donald Trump, and...
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A Cowboy at Caramoor
It’s a long ride to hear Andrea Marcovicci, the Maria Calks of cabaret, in concert after I missed her in Billings a couple of years ago. At Katonah, New York, I checked into the first motel I saw, snubbing the horse between a Lexus and a VW bus covered with flower decals, left over from...
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Vol. 1 No. 3 March 1999
On day two of “Desert Fox” last December, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright declared that she was “gratified” by the “solid” support that the U.S. action against Iraq had received from statesmen around the globe, including those in the Arab world. Her counterpart at the British Foreign Office, Robin Cook, suggested that most Arab regimes...
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Sophistory
Two thousand fifteen was the year that we Americans broke history. By “breaking history,” I do not mean something like “breaking news,” or “breaking records,” or even “breaking the Internet” (though the Internet certainly played a role). Yes, the “historic moments” of the Summer of #LoveWins and #HateLoses—the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v....
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Where’s Kafka When You Need Him?
Like all proper banana republics, the Olive Republic of Greece has jailed some elected members of parliament, charging them with criminality, as obscure and vague an accusation as hooliganism used to be when Uncle Joe Stalin was displeased with some Russian writer. Stalin used dissidents for target practice; the present gang in power in the...
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Clashes of Cultures
Events this past week in Paris remind me of my step-sister Amanda, Lady Harlech, who is usually described—much to her chagrin—as the “muse” of the 85-year-old gay kaiser of the fashion world, Karl Lagerfeld. On Thursday—Thanksgiving Day in America—Lagerfeld switched on the Christmas lights in the Champs-Élysées. He had been invited to do so by...
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Elena Chudinova: Telling the Truth
In the autumn of 2005, I moved to New York City, breaking out of the green confines of bucolic and insufferably boring upstate New York to continue college. I wandered into one of the numerous Russian bookstores on Brighton Beach—a noisy, dirty, and delicious corner of the Soviet Union, preserved on the southernmost tip of...
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Who Is One to Judge?
I found myself aghast that, after more or less favorably reviewing Calvary (“Vocation,” In the Dark, November), which sounds like a disgusting and anti-Catholic movie, George McCartney takes the opportunity to declare that “mandatory celibacy in the Roman Catholic clergy is a benighted institution that’s done much harm to the Church.” He credits the recent...
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A Beautiful Friendship
The story of their first meeting has been told so many times that it has become part of the folklore of modern Southern literature. One day, during the fall of 1924, Robert Penn Warren stopped by Kissam Hall on the Vanderbilt campus to visit his friend and classmate Saville Clark. With Clark was his new...
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Upstarts Like Shakespeare
I’ve no more desire than the next Anglophile with a framed colored engraving of the queen-empress on his office wall to pull down the aristocracy; to take away their estates and paintings and seats in the Lords and ancient Rollses resting on blocks in stables where the racing stud used to breed. And yet I...
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Proposition 187
Proposition 187, California’s famous (or infamous) proposition to deny public services to illegal immigrants and their offspring, encouraged at least one member of Virginia’s General Assembly to propose similar legislation in this year’s session. The stout-hearted fellow’s name is Warren E. Barry, and he represents Fairfax County in Virginia’s Senate. For some time now, the...