By the time Air Force One started down the runaway at Naval Air Station Sigonella in Sicily, to bring President Trump home, the Atlantic had grown markedly wider than it was when he flew to Riyadh. In a Munich beer hall Sunday, Angela Merkel confirmed it. Europe must begin to look out for itself, she...
10955 search results for: Post-Human Future
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New Right, New Wrong
John Gray’s latest book, an anthology of essays, confronts unflinchingly the state of conservatism in the Anglo-American world. Resistant to the happy talk about a conservative renaissance in the 80’s, Gray, a Whiggish Oxford don and a scholar of classical liberalism, stresses the ineffectiveness of the respectable right in both the United States and his...
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29,000 Leaseholders
The war on the West is not going badly—from a Westerner’s point of view. As of mid-February, salient victories included the successful filibuster, by Western senators, of Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt’s range reform bill; the routing of the obnoxious Representative Mike Synar (Democrat-OK), the congressional instigator of “reform”; the firing of the arrogant Jim Baca...
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Books Do Furnish a Room…
A commenter on my Daily Mail Blog asked me a few questions about “modern” verse, specifically what I thought of Gerard Manley Hopkins and T.S. Eliot. A political blog with a shelf-life of three days is no place to discuss “the permanent things” (to borrow a famous phrase from Eliot himself), and I have...
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My Old Man
“Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman.” God knows, Tammy Wynette had hard times to complain of, but if being a woman is difficult at the end of the millennium, becoming a man has always been hard. Increasingly, as I look at males of my own age, to say nothing of “guys” in their teens...
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Reservation Blues: Notes From Indian Country
Just outside Tucson, Arizona, lies a foreign country. It is not Mexico, although that is close by, but Tohono O’odham Nation, an Indian reservation the size of Connecticut that is home to some 30,000 people. Larger than many countries, the Tohono O’odham Nation is a place of astonishing and austere beauty. Seldom visited, it harbors...
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Democracy’s Dictionary (With Apologies to Ambrose Bierce)
Democracy: A sacred form of government invented by Abraham Lincoln in the Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address. John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. also helped greatly in the invention of democracy. Democratic Elections: When the rulers permit the voters to keep on voting until they get it right. Elder...
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The End of Truth
“What is Truth?” is a question that has been around since the Greeks. One can speak of moral truth as well as aesthetic truth, yet scientific truth seems to be the only one that’s undeniable. And yet, even though there’s scientific proof the world is round, those who deny it can still live normal lives...
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Southern Baptists Versus the South
The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) has over 15 million members. With over 46,000 churches, they are present in all 50 states (as well as several foreign countries). It is the largest Protestant denomination in the United States. Nonetheless, for nine straight years, the SBC has reported a net loss of membership. Last summer, the SBC...
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The Funders of the U.S. Invasion
Thanks to the UN, and your tax dollars, millions now travel north from Central and South America and reach our border looking none the worse for the wear. This is a well-planned and well-funded invasion.
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It’s Sovereignty, Stupid!
On March 18, President Bill Clinton tested the waters on the foreign trade issue. These waters had been heated up by Republican contender Patrick Buchanan’s attacks on “unfair trade deals,” which had hurt Americans for the benefit of transnational corporations. Speaking in New Orleans, Clinton defended his “free trade” policies, quoting John F. Kennedy and...
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Trouble With Iran
Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared on October 26 that “Israel must be wiped off the map.” Invoking the words of Ayatollah Khomeini, he told an audience of 4,000 cheering students that a new conflict in Palestine would soon remove “this disgraceful blot from the face of the Islamic world.” The statement, made in the midst...
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“All the News Unfit to Print”
The U.N.-sponsored World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa, turned out to be every bit as odious as its name promised. It furnished an occasion for the talking heads, otherwise-unemployable NGO apparatchiks, and sanctimonious windbags around the globe to do their thing, and—in particular—to agonize over the departure...
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The Race Mafia Goes to Jena
If Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton believed raising Cain in Jena, Louisiana, would rekindle that old-time religion, they were sadly and predictably wrong. They hoped to reprise the glory days of Selma and Montgomery, but the media and most Americans forgot their vaunted march as quickly as its slogans wafted into the Bayou State’s muggy...
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What the Editors Are Reading
Confined to a three-man tent on a rainy day in the canyons of southeastern Utah, I continued by lantern light my rereading of Cormac McCarthy’s novel All the Pretty Horses, first published a quarter-century ago as the first volume in The Border Trilogy, and got a good start on its immediate sequel, The Crossing. McCarthy’s...
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A Trial That Will Convict Us All
Republican members of Congress and what masquerades as a “conservative” media are outraged that the Obama administration intends to try in federal court Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of Sept. 11, and four alleged co-conspirators. The Republican and right wing ranting that a trial is too good for these people proves what I have...
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The Limits of Russophilia
Despite all the media attention devoted to it, Russia’s incursion into Ukraine poses no threat to the United States. Soviet Russia was a mortal threat to the United States because she embodied a communist ideology with aspirations of global hegemony. The threat died with that ideology, which is why Americans who believe that the goal...
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The Decline and Fall of Rock
The twists of fate have resulted in rock becoming the conservative music of the age, but specifically conservative, not right-wing, which would have been truly counter-cultural and "dangerous."
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The Message of Tokyo’s Kowtow
Hubris will do it ever time. The Chinese have just made a serious strategic blunder. They dropped the mask and showed their scowling face to Asia, exposing how the Middle Kingdom intends to deal with smaller powers, now that she is the largest military and economic force in Asia and second largest ...
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How Long Will the Vandals Run Amok?
The left’s war on America’s past crossed several new frontiers last week. Portland’s statue of George Washington, the Father of his Country and the first president of the United States, the greatest man of his age, was toppled and desecrated. While the statue stood, an American flag was draped over its head and set ablaze....
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Thunder on the Right
National Reviewhas been the flagship of the conservative movement for almost 30 years. From the very beginning, its editors set the agenda for American conservatism. NR’s peculiar mixture of capitalist anticommunism with the concerns of traditional Catholicism defined the movement. Even before being cursed with the name “fusionism,” it was a potent combination. Where else...
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At the Crossroads
At the Crossroads by Justin Raimondo “No one is free save Jove.” —Aeschylus Up until now, Ayn Rand hasn’t had a biographer worthy of the name: only the memoirs of embittered ex-followers, or hagiographies written by devotees. Anne Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made remedies that lack. It’s the first serious attempt...
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The Ideological Tyranny of Liberal Interventionism
Elon Musk found out the hard way that the foreign policy elite demands total compliance and consensus for its interventionism. His peace proposal drew their ire because they want war.
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A Tale of Two Elections
Despite a surge of popular support for right-wing parties in Britain and France, this summer's elections ended with an effective containment of the right that will last for years to come.
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Filmlog: Liliom
Frank Borzage may well be the best film director born in the United States, and I haven’t forgotten John Ford, who was also a master. Borzage, the son of Italian-Swiss immigrants, achieved much in his films that can only be understood as Catholic art, which is why his movies are ...
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The Honorable Gentleman From New York
It shouldn’t be news to anyone that conservative middle-aged professors are rare birds. Until recently, right-wing academics have been almost as rare as black ones, and for pretty much the same reason: bright conservatives could generally do better elsewhere. So it didn’t go to my head a few years ago when I learned that the...
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Books in Brief: May 2024
Short reviews of Bartleby & Me by Gay Talese and Southern Poets and Poems, 1606 -1860: The Land They Loved by Clyde N. Wilson.
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Brown Revolution in Ukraine: The Neo-Nazis’ Charm Offensive
The radical organization “Right Sector” is the hidden force behind the armed overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych. Even the openly neo-nazi political party “Svoboda” led by the urologist-turned-aspiring fuhrer Oleh Tyahnybok seems almost respectable, compared to the militant thugs of “Right Sector”. That has not prevented such diverse media outlets as New York Times and Steve...
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Is a Black Female Dictator in Our Future?
A Harris presidency would mean that the Orwellian trauma will only be intensified: Doublespeak, gaslighting, the erasure of history, and big lies that amount to the reverse or inverse of the truth.
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Ross Perot and Middle American Radicalism
For a few moments during last year’s presidential election, it appeared that the American two-party system was headed for a meltdown. As the ineffectual Bush campaign drew to its merciful close, the resurgence of support for Ross Perot defied every principle of professional political punditry. In 1992, disaffected Middle Americans were key to the 19...
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“Bibi” Votes Republican
Not since Nikita Khrushchev berated Dwight Eisenhower over Gary Powers’ U-2 spy flight over Russia only weeks earlier has an American president been subjected to a dressing down like the one Barack Obama received from Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday. With this crucial difference. Khrushchev ranted behind closed doors, and when Ike refused to apologize,...
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Kings of the Wild Frontier
Until 20 years ago, one could count on Hollywood to produce at least one film every few years dealing with early American history. John Ford gave us Drums Along the Mohawk in the 1940’s, and Disney gave us the Swamp Fox in the 1960’s. Such movies may have given the public only “popular” history (before...
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Walt Disney Rolls Over in His Grave
Fun for the whole family, the ad for the movie said. (I was relieved to know that it wasn’t zany or lafF-packed, although later I would have settled for that.) Our kids, then eight and 13, deserved a celebration for lasting through the final day of school before Christmas vacation, so, loaded with grotesque candy...
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Islamic State and the Theater of Jihad
The Al Khansa Brigade is the all-female fighting force of the organization that calls itself the Islamic State (IS). Al Khansa, we are most unreliably informed, has 60 members, many of whom are British. Their leader is reputedly a privately educated Scotswoman. These amazons are, we’re told, particularly cruel, force captive local women to be...
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Reflections on the Tragedy of the Hagia Sophia
In the Great Church where the holy gifts were revealed, the King of all, there came to them a voice from heaven, from the mouth of the angels: ‘Leave off your psalter, put away the holy gifts. Send word to the land of the Franks to come and take them: Let them come and take the...
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Law &/or Order—February 2010
PERSPECTIVE Print the Legend by Thomas Fleming VIEWS The Great American Outlaw by Roger D. McGrath On Dueling, Divorce, and Red Indians by Hugh Barbour, O.Praem. NEWS Conservative Leninists and the War on Terror by Ted Galen Carpenter REVIEWS A Huge and Healthy Pessimism by Jack Trotter John Derbyshire, We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism plus Clark Stooksbury on Chris Hedges' ...
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Keeping Taxes Highest
A Stalinist show trial was held on May 21 by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee. Their aim was to investigate “how individual and corporate taxpayers are shifting billions of dollars offshore to avoid U.S. taxes.” In the dock that day, Apple CEO Tim Cook found...
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Revolution and Its Discontents
Winner of France’s Renaudot Prize, this autobiographical Bildungsroman is a first-person narrative of a young man from a Belgian village who begins as a seminarian and ends as a disillusioned anarchist. Under the direction of his widowed mother and the village priest, he enters the seminary in Louvain, where his study of the changing values...
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Westerns: America’s Homeric Era on the Silver Screen
Some time around 800 b.c., Homer put the heroic tales of the Achaeans into lyric form: battles, expeditions, adventures, conquests. The tales were inspiring, heroic, tragic, triumphal. Greeks recited Homer’s iambic pentameter for centuries; so, too, did we as schoolchildren—as inheritors of Western civilization. We Americans, however, also have our own Homeric Era. While the...
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Vive L’Écosse Libre!
I hope I’m not mangling the French in my title, “Vive l’Écosse Libre!” It’s a gloss on de Gaulle’s shout at Montreal City Hall on July 24, 1967, “Vive le Québec libre!” Canadians sure would have been better off if Quebec had separated in 1967. Then the odious socialist and politically correct Pierre Trudeau never...
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Abused Virginia Teen Gets a Second Chance at Justice While Democrats Block It
An interview with the mother of a sex-trafficked, gender-confused teen, who says that Virginia’s proposed ‘Sage’s Law,’ opposed by Democrats, would protect troubled minors and preserve the rights of parents.
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Fighting Terrorism
A BBC television spy series, M I-5, which is now being marketed to the U.S., portrays a heroic group of British government agents who have been beefed up and empowered since 9/11 to fight the rising threat of terrorism. In the first episode, the ...
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How Buckley’s Anti-Communism Morphed Into Neoconservatism
Political magazines have long relied on donors to ensure their continued existence. This is true of Chronicles, but it’s also been true of mainstream organs of conservatism such as the National Review. William F. Buckley, Jr., would often pen letters to donors which asserted that the magazine was “dead broke.” In one such letter from...
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On ‘Islam’
Tomislav Sunic’s (“The Gulf Crisis in Europe,” May 1991) proposal of an Islamic conversion for neo-pagan Western Europe as some type of alternative cultural synthesis is an eyebrow raiser. But to state that the Moslem religion’s “record of zeal and intolerance is no worse than that of other monotheistic beliefs” is a denial of the...
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Books in Brief
A Mad Love: An Introduction to Opera, by Vivien Schweit-zer (New York: Basic Books; 288 pp., $27.00). I need to be fair to this book, because the author, a concert pianist and writer who worked for a decade as a classical-music critic for the New York Times, certainly knows her stuff so far as opera...
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Palm and Pine
David Gilmour’s witty and elegant, original and useful book chronicles “Kipling’s political life, his early role as apostle of the Empire, the embodiment of imperial aspiration, and his later one as the prophet of national decline.” Sympathetic yet aware of Kipling’s faults, Gilmour shows that his ideas were more subtle than those of a crude...
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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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Shooting Elephants With Our Man in Baghdad
A college professor who is planning to teach a course on imperialism contacted me recently, asking for my recommendations for the course’s reading list. If I had only one item to suggest for his class on empire and its discontents, it would not be an essay in history, political science, or economics. Instead, I would...
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ISIS: Trump’s Unheralded Success
Considering the unprecedented obstacles President Trump is facing from various quarters in his attempts to devise a coherent foreign policy strategy (see my column in the September issue of Chronicles), the apparent success of his anti-ISIS approach thus far is both surprising and encouraging. It shows that realist pragmatism yields results. Over the past six...