To realize, even delusively, that knowing a little implies knowing a lot because the one is related to the other is to me a great comfort. If, for example, we know one subject well, an understanding of other parallel subjects is implied. Knowing the history of a city says much about the development and decay...
This summer, as the odious Barry Bonds advanced toward Henry Aaron’s home-run record, I told a friend: “I’m going to write Bonds a letter. And it’s going to be even more vitriolic than the one I wrote Aaron 30 years ago.” Just kidding, of course! When Aaron broke the most venerable record in baseball—then held,...
Recently, I returned to dear old Cork after exactly ten years’ absence. What 50 years ago had been a poor town on the periphery of Ireland is now a big, thriving, growing, wealthy city. As I was conveyed from the airport to the city center, I asked the driver, “Anything changed round here recently?” “Immigrants,”...
In one of the most memorable lines in American political history, Joseph Welch, the patrician Boston lawyer, asked Sen. Joseph McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency?” Traditional conservatives should be asking the so-called neoconservatives if they have no sense of shame. In the pages of Vanity Fair, on various television interviews, and in other...
Hypocrisy, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld told us, is the tribute which vice pays to virtue. Tributes of this kind have been flowing lately from the members of the United States Senate and the mainstream press who clamored for some sort of censure of President William Jefferson Clinton, or who scrambled, for a while, to...
It is usually difficult to choose only one author who is essential to the study of a particular subject. When it comes to the history of the frontier West, however, the choice is easy. Ray Allen Billington stands alone above all. He is the sine qua non of any course on frontier history. When reading...
The Libyan operation is being quietly aborted, barely three weeks after its ill-conceived onset. There will be no mission creep, no American boots on the ground, and no arming and training of the rebel forces. The impending stalemate is the least of all evils. It is preferable to an open-ended escalation or to an...
The casual characterization of Jan. 6 as an “insurrection” is unjust and it appears to be creating a backlash, at least among Republicans.
Excessive insecurity and widespread aversion to commitment are driving our country’s toxic dating culture off a cliff.
“You are a stubborn bastard,” a Yale classmate of mine writes from the wilds of Virginia, where he, an Englishman, has been thrown by the hand of fate and now lives what I imagine as the life of an early colonist. “Your writing remains as difficult to penetrate as ever. Though,” he adds benevolently, “I admire...
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' ...
There are several conflicting narratives on who is doing what to whom in Syria, and why. That a false-flag operation was followed by an act of aggression by the U.S. and its European satellites is clear. Everything else is murky. Three initial impressions deserve particular attention. 1. False flags work if they are supported by...
John Milton Cooper, Jr.: The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt; Harvard University Press; Boston. Lloyd Gardner: A Convenant with Power: America and World Order from Wilson to Reagan; Oxford University Press; New York. There have been many interpretations of Woodrow Wilson done from widely divergent perspectives. Fortunately for Wilson’s reputation, his...
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.
Who do you suppose would get the better of it if the mayor of your city made a bet with Goldman Sachs on the direction of interest rates? Would you be surprised if the mayor lost, costing the city’s taxpayers millions of dollars? Do you think betting taxpayer dollars is legal? In the years leading...
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 ...
A wise man recently said: Our youth love luxury, they have bad manners, contempt for authority, they show disrespect for their elders, and no longer rise when a lady enters the room. They chatter instead of exercising, gobble up their food, and tyrannize their teachers. That was Socrates, 2000 years ago, which I suppose qualifies...
In view of the ongoing partisan MSM feeding frenzy over Donald Trump’s hot microphone comments about women, the question is raised over what constitutes impermissibly lewd thoughts, words, and actions. The following is a helpful guide: 1. LEWD. This means the way virtually all men sometimes think about women, with varying degrees of frequency; the...
Vladimir Putin’s one-year anniversary as president of Russia was marked by a Soviet-style celebration. “We are back to pretending again,” my Russian friend commented as we watched the stage-managed antics of several thousand young people, all of them wearing T-shirts bearing the likeness of Vladimir Putin, converging on Vasilevsky Spusk (adjacent to the Kremlin) on...
Recently C. Bradley Thompson responded obliquely to my critical comments in Chronicles about his book and subsequent observations on the American Founding. Contrary to Thompson’s asides on Facebook and Twitter dismissing my criticism, I did read some of his tome, The Revolutionary Mind, and even commented on it—but I found its discussion of our state-builders so...
The Neoconservative dream of spreading “democracy” in the Middle East, a delusion wholeheartedly embraced by President George W. Bush, is rapidly becoming a nightmare. Pursuit of this utopian vision has already strengthened the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, propelled Hezbollah into the Lebanese government, and brought Hamas to power in the Palestinian Authority. In Iraq, it...
Saturday afternoon, my sister-in-law, Carolina, called from Bogotá. She asked me how we were doing—repeatedly, the way her mother does—then she asked to speak to my wife. My wife wasn’t home, so Carolina asked me to have her call, since “we have a little problem.” Carolina sounded fine, so I didn’t understand why my wife...
Watchmen Produced and distributed by Warner Bros. and Paramount Pictures Directed by Zack Snyder Screenplay by David Hayter and Alex Tse Duplicity Produced and distributed by Universal Pictures Directed and written by Tony Gilroy The title of Alan Moore’s 1986 comic-book series Watchmen alludes to the Roman satirist Juvenal, who asked, “Who watches the...
It has been only a few weeks since I used my tears to moisten the mixed-fruit schiacciata cake of Florentine captivity, but from the chaise lounge on my terrace it seems that this was in another life. Here, at last, I know I am where I belong, a spark of cosmic indolence fortuitously restored to...
I am an admirer of Derek Turner’s writing and his work as editor of Right Now! and Quarterly Review. Yet I sense that he cuts John Gray undeserved slack in his review of Gray’s book, Black Mass: Religion and the Death of Utopia (“The Skeptical Mind,” Opinion, June). I have not read this book, nor...
Joe Biden is going to lose to Donald Trump in '24. Democrats can see this but there is little they can do to stop it.
We need the truth about what saved lives and what actually ended up killing our loved ones and neighbors.
If there is one constant at yard sales, estate auctions, and second-hand bookstores in this state, it is the presence of old books, Bibles, classics, and diverse texts that once made splashes before sinking into obscurity. Perhaps the most frequently seen volume, after the Bible, is John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, a book that, again, was...
Stand by for a barrage of centennials. For some years to come, we will be facing very regular commemorations of the various horrors of World War I and its aftermath, so expect a great many books, documentaries, and newspaper pieces on Sarajevo, the Armenian massacres, the Lusitania, the Russian Revolution, and on through the 2020’s. ...
Let’s say you have an idea. Any old idea. No matter how big or small, grandiose or simple. You naturally want to share that idea with someone, anyone, maybe no one. Maybe you want to keep it to yourself, fearing negative reaction. Or maybe you think your idea is so good, so great, so broad...
On January 9, 1997, in an open letter in the New York Times to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, American artists and intellectuals criticized the discriminatory treatment of Scientologists in Germany. Although the petitioners claimed not to be biased in their complaint by sympathy for this church, their objectivity has to be questioned, for there are...
The American love of free enterprise has been one of this country’s greatest blessings. The same, however, cannot be said unequivocally of the economic individualism that we too often assume is an indispensable part of the free-enterprise system. The fundamental fallacy of that assumption should be obvious: Every economic transaction, by definition, requires more than...
The City of Rockford is broke. That does not mean, of course, that it is insolvent or bankrupt; after all, it is rather hard for any government with the power to tax to end up in that position (though some occasionally do). Like so many other cities of its size today, however, Rockford has projected...
The New Sexual World Order is taking shape, thanks to the Peace Gorps, the United Nations, and the U.S. Congress. In late September, Dr. J. Ricker Polsdorfer, the Peace Corps’ director of medical services in Africa, was fired for promoting abstinence as a method of preventing AIDS. Dr. Polsdorfer’s crimes, according to the Peace Corps...
It wasn’t supposed to end like this. We were all going to “get along” in a diverse, multicultural paradise, led by our brilliant universities. But in a pattern sure to spread across America, the ethnic strife in California is increasing, not decreasing, as the state becomes even more diverse. And public universities are at the...
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....
The United States will go to war to defend Taiwan if China invades the mainland. That is the commitment made last week by President Joe Biden.
National Review’s decision to side with Disney against Florida Governor De Santis’s parental rights law demonstrates its capitulation to the left.
North Korea’s artillery attack on a South Korean island on Tuesday was the latest in a series of Pyongyang’s aggressive moves over the past year and a half. They started with ballistic missile tests in April of last year, soon followed by a nuclear test in May. Kim Jong Il, who may be mad, upped...
On September 24 I embarked on a week-long tour of Tunisia, hoping to learn more on the aftermath of last year’s revolution and the state of political play ahead of the elections, which are due before the year’s end. The findings are surprising. The country looks and feels civilized, roadside trash notwithstanding. It is safe...
Psychotherapy is big business. America employs perhaps a half million professionals and paraprofessionals (psycho therapists, psychiatric technicians, drug/alcohol counselors, clinical social workers, clinical psychologists, psychiatrists and psychiatric nurses, family therapists) in the field, and the talk therapy industry as a whole is worth about $17 billion. Yet many scholars and laymen are uneasy at the...
President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats have successfully passed the American Rescue Plan, with its $1,400 stimulus checks and its $1.9 trillion price tag. In total the federal government has now spent enough on COVID stimulus and relief to fund key moments in American history, such as world wars and moon landings, many times over....
We received a piece of direct mail sent to us from an outfit in San Francisco entitled U.S. Out of Central America. There we could read: We are not from the left or the right, we are not from the same political organization, and we probably have different opinions on many things. As the very...
President Donald Trump’s first official visit to India produced all the right optics for him and his host, Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Tens of thousands of flag-waving Indians lined the streets, and well over 100,000 came to the cricket stadium in Ahmedabad to hear Trump speak. Clips from the Namaste Trump extravaganza—shots of a charismatic...
At a raucous campaign rally in Houston, President Trump laid his ideological cards on the table for all to see. If the Democrats take the House and/or the Senate, he told the crowd, they’ll carry out the agenda of “corrupt, power-hungry globalists.” “You know what a globalist is? A globalist is a person that wants...
Jared Kushner should be ashamed of himself for his blatant, unfathomable, and utterly unacceptable profiteering from his father-in-law’s presidency. But shame is a word unknown to the 45th president’s son-in-law.
The Department of Education must be destroyed. This holdover from the Carter administration costs us $80 billion per year, for which we have received in return a centralized educational bureaucracy beholden to wildly leftist teachers’ unions and the proliferation of ignorance. Cut this monstrous budget in half, and federal spending on education is still not...
It seems like every other major American institution is apologizing for racism these days, so why not the American Psychiatric Association (APA)? Back in January, the APA issued an apology for its “ingrained” racism towards black and indigenous people of color (BIPOCs). The APA pledged to develop “anti-racist policies that promote equity in mental health for...
We have now entered a new age which will not have a name or a designation until, I think, at least one or two centuries from now: But then, such is the evolution of historical terminology. Yet we should be able to recognize at least some of its apparent characteristics. One (to my old-fashioned mind,...