A West Hollywood “Gay” Bar has announced it will not serve California legislators who stand up to the LGBT lobby’s demands. Bar owner David Cooley defended his no-entry list saying: “I want to send a message to all those people out there who conflate Christian values with discrimination: we don’t want your kind here,” Cooley said....
10955 search results for: Post-Human Future
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If I Could Turn Back Time
Here's the bottom line of today's SCOTUS decision regarding the incorporation of the Second Amendment, which amounts to an explicit rejection of traditional federalism on the part of the conservative majority. (Full disclosure: I'm of the Hestonian
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All About Trump
Today, all books by liberals really are about President Trump. Such is Playing With Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics, by MSNBC far-left fake-news host Lawrence O’Donnell. This book’s proxy is Richard Nixon and his 1968 victory for president against Aunt Blabby, a.k.a. Hubert Horatio Humphrey. For Nixon, Humphrey, South Vietnam,...
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Dirtiest Campaign in Recent Memory
Campaign 1998 was the dirtiest in recent memory. The bottom of the slime-pit was reached by Al D’Amato and Chuck Schumer, who got into a spitting contest to determine which was the sleaziest politician in the history of the U.S. Senate: Schumer won. Elsewhere, leftist Democrats pulled out all the stops, blaring the message: A...
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The Enduring Face of the Fake Right
It is hard to understand the continued presence of Jonah Goldberg as a conservative icon. Goldberg has the right to criticize Trump, yet he has turned himself into a nonstop Trump-hating machine, who manages to condemn anyone who still defends the president as a lunatic or criminal. Nietzsche once said mischievously that a good war...
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The Cop-Murdering Extremist Who Inspires Pro-Palestinian Campus Radicals
The celebration of Wesley Cook, aka “Mumia Abu-Jamal,” a cop-killing thug and member of a lawless cult of child abusers and anti-social criminals, by today’s campus radicals is telling.
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A Conciliar Critique, Etc.
It is significant but not surprising that Ross Douthat in his book The Decadent Society and reviewer John M. DeJak (“A Decadent Diagnosis,” August 2020 Chronicles) both overlooked the pivotal impact of Vatican II and Catholic social doctrine. These two liberal landmarks changed the religious and cultural focus from duty to freedom; from truth to inclusiveness; from repentance to...
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Loaded With Dynamite
According to his most fervent supporters, George W. Bush’s Second Inaugural Address has already taken its place among the great speeches of modern American politics. Whether history confirms that verdict remains to be seen. For the present, it is not the quality of the oratory but the implications for U.S. policy that deserve attention. On...
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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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Left Implosion
A debate I attended at the Oxford Literary Festival highlighted growing tensions between classical Enlightenment thought and postmodernism—tensions that threaten to cause a fissure on the British left. Hosted each year by the Sunday Times, the festival affords authors the opportunity to discuss and tout their recently published works. This year’s lineup included Richard Dawkins,...
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Trump’s Short Recession
Donald Trump has a better track record of avoiding economic downturn than any Republican president since the GOP was founded in 1854. “A trough in monthly economic activity occurred in the US economy in April 2020,” a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) panel announced in July. “The previous peak in economic activity occurred in...
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The Moral Clarity of the Morally Depraved
Tolerant, kind, generous, forbearing—none of this you’d call our everyday Islamic mass murderer. One thing you may justly call him: discerning. He knows the stakes in the war on terror. He knows the degree to which the Christian, or semi-Christian, West makes impossible the realization of his ideals. Accordingly, he murders explicit Christians, as many...
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Toward a Hard Right
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...
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Hard Bargaining
A U.N. resolution concerning weapons inspections in Iraq made October a month for hard bargaining among Washington, Paris, and Moscow. Washington and London both desired a resolution that would allow the automatic application of force should Iraq obstruct any proposed arms inspections. Paris and Moscow balked, but by mid-October it appeared that both the French...
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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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Aiming Aimlessly
The Hunt (2020) Directed by Craig Zobel ◆ Screenplay by Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof ◆ Produced by Blumhouse Productions ◆ Distributed by Universal Pictures The Most Dangerous Game (1932) Directed by Irving Pichel and Ernest B. Shoedsack ◆ Screenplay by James Ashmore Creelman ◆ Produced and distributed by RKO Radio Pictures The Candidate (1972)...
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The Heart’s Own Instinct
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...
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The Future of Europe
When the king of Poland, Jan Sobieski, defeated the Ottoman army at the Siege of Vienna in 1683, that army of 23,000 soldiers did not have scores or hundreds of thousands of hungry and desperate civilians at its back, hoping to find a new life in Europe. The Ottomans were attempting a military invasion of...
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Are All Men Created Equal?
Forced equality of outcomes is an irrational attempt to save the false assumption that all men are created equal.
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Big Macs, A-bombs, and Trump
William F. Buckley, Jr., spent his adult winter months in Rougemont, an alpine resort next to its chicer neighbor Gstaad, now the Mecca for the nouveau riche and vulgar. Throughout the 60’s and 70’s, however, the area was known for its music festival run by Yehudi Menuhin, and for celebrity writers like Buckley, my mentor,...
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On Pulling the Trigger
My friend (and onetime fellow Episcopalian) David Mills speaks dryly, slyly, of the Episcopal Church’s “usual irrelevance” in “Pulling the Trigger” (Vital Signs, March). Well, you know, the question is: “relevant” to what? In this present case, to the received Christian Faith? Ha and double-ha. Stand Christian morality on its head, as did the Episcopal...
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On the Altar of Empire
The GOP-controlled Congress has received a report from the Pentagon advocating the conscription of women—the daughters, young wives, and young mothers of America, ages 18 to 25—according to the Washington Times. This is truly unprecedented. At the tail end of the Obama administration, then Defense Secretary Ash Carter, who opened combat roles to women (with...
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Off Center On Target
“I should have availed myself of waggery, had not malice been multitudinous.” —Christopher Smart The English are known for their love of the eccentric. Batty dons, hapless clerics, Colonel Blimps, imperious aunts, and addled aristocrats are scattered over the landscape of the English popular imagination. In a society where a high value is placed on...
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A Boundless Field of Power
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...
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Can This Pandemic Usher in a New Era?
To fight the coronavirus at home, France is removing all military forces from Iraq. When NATO scaled back its war games in Europe because of the pandemic, Russia reciprocated. Moscow announced it would cancel its war games along NATO’s border. Nations seem to be recognizing and responding to the grim new geostrategic reality...
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Editors’ Round Table on Sarah Palin: One Catholic’s View
John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin to be his running mate was surprising, but the surprise pales in comparison to the reaction of conservative Christians, especially Catholics. In their race to endorse McCain-Palin, they have cast aside any questions about the complementarity of the sexes, or even the late John Paul II’s theology of the...
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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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Going Green for Goldman
What’s behind the cult of “global warming”? We’ve been hearing about it for years on television, in magazines, from politicians, and from certain corporate entities: Mankind is destroying the earth, and the only solution is to “go green.” Unless we radically change our behavior, the oceans will rise, catastrophe will ensue, and that will be...
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Politics and Economics in America
All things at Rome are for sale. —Juvenal Thomas Jefferson has left us an account of a supper-table conversation in the very earliest days of the U.S. government. Vice President John Adams (who was intended by nature for a preacher) declaimed at length about the virtues of the British government, which, he ...
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William Morris in Tokyo
Mingei: Japanese Folk Art, an exhibition consisting of 115 paintings, sculptures, ceramics, furniture, lacquers, toys, and other artifacts, opened at the Brooklyn Museum on July 12 and remained on display through September 30, 1985. Most of the art of Japan is imbued with simplicity, directness, and a tremendous sense of design. Japanese work in 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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Still Fighting the Civil War
The influx of Northern migrants to these parts continues to produce misunderstanding. Some time ago, the good people of Hillsborough, North Carolina, gave up their right to shoot marauding vermin in their own backyards to an official municipal squirrel-shooter. Citizens whose nut trees were being sacked, gardens despoiled, or houses chewed up (it happens) could...
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Bring Me the Head of John D.
“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...
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Unconstitutional
“Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure, when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God?” —Thomas Jefferson Not long ago Time magazine celebrated America with a special issue. Among the ornaments of this production was an essay...
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Andrew Lytle Talks
Andrew Lytle lives in a log house on the Assembly Grounds in Monteagle, Tennessee. It is a busy area in summer, but in the wintertime most of the other houses are closed, and he has few immediate neighbors. The house is built on a cross plan and has somewhat unusually high ceilings. Most often Mr....
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On ‘New Jersey’s Helmet Law’ and Other Articles
Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, brilliant laissez-faire economist of 18th-century France, said that interventions by the government to protect consumers “would be like wanting it to provide cushions for all the children who might fall.” If he were alive today, wouldn’t he be amused to learn that a sober (?) New Jersey legislature (Cultural Revolutions, March...
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What War with Iran Means
“Diplomacy has failed,” Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., told AIPAC, “Iran is on the verge of becoming nuclear and we cannot afford that.” “We have to contemplate the final option,” said Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., “the use of force to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.” War is a “terrible thing,” said Sen. Lindsay Graham,...
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The Big Three: America, Russia, and China Must Join Hands for Security, Prosperity, and Peace
by Edward Lozansky and Jim Jatras With the defeat of Hillary Clinton by Donald Trump, we may never know how close America and all mankind came to nuclear war. Driven by the globalist agenda of the “indispensable” neoconservatives and liberal-interventionists calling the shots in a Clinton administration, it would have been only a matter of...
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King of Pop’s Trial
The Michael Jackson trial is underway, and the media is licking its chops each day in anticipation of all of the lurid details that will continue to surface over the next several months. Jackson, who is 46, has been charged with molesting a 13-year-old boy who was, at the time of the alleged incidents, a...
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The Sexual Left, the Welfare State, and the Divorce Revolution
“All politics is on one level sexual politics.” —George Gilder Extremists break out of the margins and take power when they fool opponents into advancing their agenda. By politicizing the family and sexuality, the left duped conservatives, and all of us, into becoming their accomplices. Since last fall’s electoral coup, the United States has been...
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Truth Is on Trial With Kavanaugh
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...
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‘Buffalo Commons’ Update: The International Parkade
Last year I wrote about the Poppers, Frank and Deborah, the Rutgers University husband-wife duo who theorized that the Great Plains—from Texas to North Dakota and from Oklahoma to Denver—were fit to be nothing more than a “Buffalo Commons.” The couple predicted that the Great Plains, whose largest city is Lubbock, Texas, will slowly dwindle...
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Don’t Trash the Nuclear Deal!
This next week may determine whether President Trump extricates us from that cauldron of conflict that is the Middle East, as he promised, or plunges us even deeper into these forever wars. Friday will see the sixth in a row of weekly protests at the Gaza border fence in clashes that have left 40 Palestinians...
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Collateral America
The Mirror Test is John Kael Weston’s testament and witness to seven years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Weston worked as a State Department political officer alongside U.S. Marines and Army soldiers in some of the most dangerous areas of both countries, advising—and sometimes overruling—American military commanders in what became political nation-building operations growing...
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Did Hitler Want War?
On Sept. 1, 1939, 70 years ago, the German Army crossed the Polish frontier. On Sept. 3, Britain declared war. Six years later, 50 million Christians and Jews had perished. Britain was broken and bankrupt, Germany a smoldering ruin. Europe had served as the site of the most murderous combat known ...
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What the Editors Are Reading
“Why, I pray, do you accuse me of a weak character? It is an accusation to which all enlightened men are exposed, because they see the two, or better say, the thousand sides of things, and it is impossible for them to make up their minds upon them, with the result that they stumble sometimes...
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Pat Buchanan’s First Inaugural Address
What if Pat Buchanan were to win the presidency? That prospect intrigues me. Let’s assume that Pat wins, someday. What could he do to restore the American republic? A great deal. I therefore propose my version of Pat Buchanan’s first inaugural address. It is a wonderful thing to be here in front of ail these...
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More Verbal Panache Than Military Muscle
Twenty years have passed since Charles de Gaulle faded from the scene—for old soldiers, as is well-known, never die. No one can therefore say just how he would have responded to the present crisis in the Persian Gulf But if there is one thing, in this highly mobile situation, that can be said with a...
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Immer Drummer
Just when I was beginning to think the neoconservatives had reached the nadir of ignorance with people like Jonah Goldberg and David Frum, along comes Harvard grad Bill Kristol to flaunt his ignorance. Bill was so thrilled that someone had put up these mock lyrics to a Harvard Fight song: Illegitimum non carborundum that...
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Clipping the Angel’s Wings
” . . . Words strain, Crack and sometimes break. . . . “ —T.S. Eliot The ancients, wiser than modem theorists, recognized language as a gift and (at Babel) a curse from the heavens. Even pagans recognized a Word behind words and a Muse beyond music. The Creator of the world was everywhere acknowledged...