In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell recognizing a non-existent right to gay marriage in the Constitution, there have been numerous articles stating that America has accepted gay marriage and that social conservatives should now shut up. A variation of this theme has been taken up by certain social conservatives such as...
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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...
Four Questions: Freddy Gray
The revolt against globalism is itself a worldwide phenomenon. Reporting for Chronicles from the United Kingdom is Freddy Gray, who also serves as the deputy editor of The Spectator, Britain’s premier political magazine. As an observer who has worked in the United States and has family connections to France as well, Freddy is attentive not...
Are All Men Created Equal?
Forced equality of outcomes is an irrational attempt to save the false assumption that all men are created equal.
On Politics and Race
Now that Samuel Francis’s two-part installment on his “Rise and Fall” appears complete (April and May 1996), it’s time for the readers of Chronicles to hear the rest of the story. What he did not disclose was the nature of his blatantly white supremacist writings that appeared in a newsletter called American Renaissance. In the...
You Say FIFA, I Say WWE
Ah, glorious soccer. The sport where fat and tall and tough guys don't get a pass, unlike those other statistic-driven, 'roid marinated, jingoistic sports Americans love on a more regular basis. But what really makes FIFAball the sport of conservative spectators is that it combines the Grecian ideal ...
Books in Brief: May 2023
Short reviews of Dollars for Life, by Mary Ziegler, and The Encyclopedia of Confederate Generals, by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.
Of Communists and Convicts
House of Slammers by Nathan Heard; Macmillan; New York. “It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good.” So wrote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in “The Soul and Barbed Wire” about his experience in the Soviet Gulag. Like most inmates in the communist penal system,...
Synthesizing Tyranny
Pace W.B. Yeats, mere anarchy is not loosed upon the world. What we enjoy in this country, and to a large extent in most other Western nations, is a bit more complicated than mere anarchy. It is, in fact, the unique achievement of the political genius of the modern era: what, in 1992, I called...
When We Live with Lies
Satan is described as “the father of lies” in John 8:44 of the New Testament. Whether we think of Old Scratch or not, most of us would agree we live in an age of deceit. Many citizens have abandoned common sense and reason for theory and wishful concoction, contending that black is white or that...
Russia’s Strategic Setback
President Putin’s announcement in Turkey last week that Russia was cancelling the $45bn South Stream gas pipeline project has caused havoc in southeastern Europe. Political leaders in the countries most adversely affected by this decision, Serbia and Hungary, have tried to keep a brave face, expressing hope that it may be revived some time in...
The Brothers and Sisters War
All politics is local, said the late House Speaker
Henry Radetsky and Fritz Kreisler
Tossing around a word like music is problematical—and culture is even harder to deploy meaningfully. Nevertheless, I am going to give both a try in a revealing juxtaposition that was brought to my attention by that world-traveling anthropologist Henry Radetsky, an academic colleague and a valued friend. Henry is a cultured man I have learned...
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....
Whose Atrocities?
The Last Samurai is the latest movie to treat us to the spectacle of the U.S. Army slaughtering American Indian women and children. Playing a disillusioned captain, Tom Cruise suffers from nightmares for his role in the dastardly deed. He finds honor and redemption as a Great White Samurai in Japan. Many movie reviewers have...
Vol. 2 No. 2 February 2000
“Spectacular fiasco for the organizers . . . a damning verdict on globalization that ignores its own consequences” was Le Monde‘s assessment (December 2) of the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle. Dozens of dailies all over the world concurred. But the reporting of this event, its background, and the accompanying protests in the “mainstream”...
Scare Quotes
A tactic the left uses to inspire loathing for conservatives is repeating something a conservative or even nominal Republican says, and then slapping scare quotes around it. That supposedly shows that whatever the conservative said is self-evidently false, and worse, “hateful.” It might run something like this: “Tea Party Senator says ‘Earth revolves around Sun.’”...
Ruminations Amidst the Ruins
In the winter of 1987-88, Sen. Dan Quayle of Indiana decided that he wanted the VP spot on the Republican ticket as the most “conservative” candidate. He started his quiet campaign by running the idea by my boss, Sen. Jesse Helms. After all, if Jesse wouldn’t support him, it would have been pointless to go...
The Big Change
Because the movies are a by-product of modern technology, it’s understandable that significant changes in the medium are presumed to be technological. Sound, color, and digital recording are the usual suspects for having caused cataclysmic upheaval. But on the evidence, sound—supposedly a bombshell innovation that littered theaters with films in which neither camera nor actors...
One More From the Ace
Roger McGrath’s excellent account of the career of movie actor/naval aviator Wayne Morris (“Hollywood’s Lone Ace,” Sins of Omission, April) is not quite complete, in that Morris’s service to the Navy and the nation did not end with his discharge in 1945. A movie in which he played an important part helped save the important...
Citizenship and Immigration
Every evening, thousands of people line up just south of California’s border with Mexico. They wait for darkness to fall so they can slip across the border and illegally enter our country. The Border Patrol succeeds in catching as many as half of these people, but thousands more still succeed at illegally entering our country...
Suicide Permitted
In coming to grips with why suicide and suicidal ideation have become so widespread in the West, we tend to overlook one central fact: We no longer consider life sacred.
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...
Graham Crackers, Corn Flakes, and Other Grrrrreat American Heresies
From the August 2002 issue of Chronicles. “Dad,” the inquisitive youngster is bound to ask, “where do corn flakes come from?” In today’s economy, where farms are something you drive by on your way to Disneyland, the most common answer might be “Kroger” or “the 7-Eleven” instead of “from the farm, son, from cornfields.” The...
Hardened Line
Vladimir Putin, prodded by a reporter’s question regarding the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime, remarked that Russia, for “economic and political” reasons, “has no interest in the defeat of the United States.” Putin’s comments were seen by Russian media observers as a sign that the Kremlin had come full circle on the Iraq question. ...
Distant Drums at Sarah’s Party
ST. PAUL, Minn.—The American Right has just died and gone to heaven. Wednesday night’s convention address by Sarah Palin here in St. Paul has confirmed the bold decision of John McCain to choose the Alaska governor as his co-pilot and united the Republican Party as it has not been since the second term of Ronald...
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...
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...
Choosing Independence
There are those moments in which you travel back to some time and place you visited earlier. A trick of light, a confluence of sounds on a summer evening. Sometimes I am fooled into thinking that I am back in Latvia, where August nights around a white wrought-iron table on the grass lasted the length...
Letter From Barcelona: Catalonia Pacified
Back in Barcelona after almost three years, and an obvious novelty is that there are fewer Estelada flags fluttering from the city’s balconies and windows. Some are still out there, tired and pale, but Catalonia’s separatists seem to have run out of steam. Spain has weathered the storm of 2017-18, and it’s all for the...
The Strange Death of the Yellow Dog
Perusing the conservative press in the days after the Republican victories in the November 2002 elections was like watching the triumph scenes in various sword-and-sandal movies of the 1950’s and 60’s, with the reader almost expecting to see outgoing Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle dragged in chains through the streets of Washington. The Stupid Party...
Dick Cheney’s Uncertain Future
Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald called a press conference on October 28 to announce a five-count indictment against I. Lewis Libby, chief of staff and principal national security advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney. Fitzgerald indicted Libby on one count of obstruction of justice, two counts of perjury, and two counts of false statements, the charges...
The Supreme Court, Globalization, and the Teaching of Religion
Public figures talk about globalization as if it were the Rapture. We are told that, unlike Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus, we live in an era of international trade; so these days, we must worry more about what the world thinks and does. As Justice Sandra Day O’Connor told the Southern Center for International Studies,...
Filmlog: The Bullfighter and the Lady
Dr. Fleming wrote in the comments section of his article on Budd Boetticher’s Decision at Sundown that Netflix has 90% of titles a film lover can reasonably expect to find. I would only disagree that, for anyone who loves classic films, a subscription to Turner Classic Movies is also indispensable (no matter how reprehensible Turner...
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...
Scott of the Antarctic
Very long ago, when I was at boarding school in England in the 1960’s, we had a Sunday-morning ritual following chapel. Mr. Gervis, our remote and forbidding headmaster, assembled everyone in the big hall and read to us from an improving book. Over the years, I can remember generous helpings of everything from The Pilgrim’s...
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...
History and Nature
Thanks for your response. I enjoyed it immensely, and I believe you will understand that this is debate as it should be, not the invective that often substitutes for intellectual vibrancy these sad days. One of the pitfalls of this point in history is that everything ends up reduced to discussions of “slavery.” One single...
Plundered Province: The American West as Literary Region
“Let a philosophic observer commence a journey from the savages of the Rocky Mountains eastwardly towards our seacoast,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1808, after he had learned of such matters from the reports of Lewis and Clark. “These he would observe in the earliest stage of association, living under no law but that of nature,...
The Efficient Destruction of Flyover Country
Ideologues tend to place a great value on economic laws. I started out my undergraduate career hoping for a double major in political science and economics. My goal was to administer a breadline and to understand why it was necessary. I was doing very well in political philosophy and public administration, but lagging a bit...
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...
Hungary’s Orbán: Europe Should Distance Itself from the United States
As the NATO proxy war in Ukraine reached its first anniversary, Hungary’s leaders suggested investigating the U.S. for the Nord Stream sabotage, and creating a new European alliance—without the U.S.
Courage Is Worth the Risk
“I took a chance on an ‘imperfect’ pregnancy,” the title of a New York Times article recently proclaimed. Intrigued, I read about author Jacquelynn Kerubo’s journey through a fertility clinic where, after initial treatments, she and her husband were told that they had a “mosaic embryo.” A mosaic embryo, Kerubo explains, is one which could result in...
China’s One Child Policy—and Ours
If you’re an old pro-lifer like me, you remember the many battles over China’s one-child policy. Mao actually encouraged large families. He thought population problems would be solved by communist economic planning, a large population would make China stronger—and the 60 million he murdered needed to be replaced. After he died in 1976, his successor,...
BTK Killer
Dennis Rader, the disgusting, twisted pervert who flattered himself with the moniker “BTK” (for “bind, torture, and kill”), is a living witness to the existence of the Devil. On August 18,2005, he was sentenced to 175 consecutive years in prison for ten grisly murders—the harshest sentence that Judge Gregory Waller of the Wichita district court...
Yes We Can!
The word transformational surfaced often in the 2008 election season, and for once, the cliché might have had some validity. America assuredly is entering an era of transformation, even of revolutionary change, but on nothing like the lines that many expect. The political right stands to benefit enormously, provided its adherents understand the dramatically altered...
Driving Miss Racial Activist
At first blush, the 1989 film Driving Miss Daisy seems innocuous. Its plot centers around the relationship of an aging Jewish matron, Daisy Werthan (Jessica Tandy), and her black chauffeur Hoke Colburn (Morgan Freeman). Yet a recent rewatch caused me to notice irksome elements of the plot I missed the first time around. This has...
Advertising Himself
Inception Written and directed by Christopher Nolan Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers It took me a while, but I finally realized what Christopher Nolan’s Inception is all about. Simply put, it’s about how it got to be itself. Or, to be less gnomic, Nolan has undertaken to advertise his own moviemaking skills in...
“Go, Pat, Go!”
Pat Buchanan’s October 25 announcement that he would seek the presidential nomination of the Reform Party was greeted with contempt by Republican commentators. After all, Buchanan has twice failed to capture the Republican nomination, and in his third time out, he barely registered in the polls. His moment had passed, they argued, or perhaps he’d...
The Education of George Bush
I used to wonder at the deep melancholia to which Evelyn Waugh was subject in the last years of his life. “Papa,” his eldest daughter Meg would plead with him, “why are you so unhappy?” Waugh’s misery, verging on despair, struck me as unwarranted. He had, after all, great literary success, a large and creditable family,...