Shukov felt pleased with life as he went to sleep . . . The end of an unclouded day. Almost a happy one. [from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich] The journey is over. Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn survived war, the Gulag, and cancer; was exiled from his homeland, only to return, having outlived...
221 search results for: Wayne Allensworth
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The Twilight of the USA and the Way Forward
It’s mid-September, and the sun already seems to be setting lower in a sky of lengthening shadows. The temperatures have noticeably dropped off. Autumn, such as it is in this part of the country, appears to already have begun settling in, like an early and unexpected guest. I was walking along a sidewalk in my...
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Everything Dies
It was one of those winter days in Texas that seem as gray as the surface of the moon and about as hospitable. It’s cool outside, so you wear a jacket. Inside, it’s stuffy. I’m wearing a coat and running the fan at the same time. You can’t quite get comfortable when it’s like that. ...
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Importing Multiculturalism—June 2010
perspective Cursing the Darknessby Thomas Fleming views Immigration: A History Lessonby John Willson Cannibal Statisticsby Chilton Williamson, Jr. news Double Down: Illegal Aliens and Crimeby Roger D. McGrath reviews Great Cooptationsby W. James Antle III [Edward M. Kennedy, True Compass: A Memoir andSarah Palin, Going Rogue: An American Life] Past, Present, and Futureby Darío Fernández-Morera...
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Strangers in a Strange Land
Regarding my last post on working class support for Trump, a Breitbart report on a Reuters poll tells us something important about America’s state of mind: According to the Reuters survey, 58 percent Americans say they “don’t identify with what America has become.” While Republicans and Independents are the most likely to agree with this...
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What’s Wrong With “Compassionate Conservatism”?
When my family and I moved to Purcellville nearly ten years ago, I was surprised by how much traffic came through our little town. Purcellville had a population of less than 2,000 then, and the Old Colonial Highway, which doubles as the town’s Main Street, began piling up well before 6:00 A.M. on the weekdays,...
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A Christmas Miscellany
Peter Brimelow has written a discussion of the War on Christmas for VDARE.com that is well worth reading. In it, Peter puts me in the unusual role of optimist. There are still many people in this country who want to suppress the public celebration of Christmas, and the situation in the schools, where culture is formed...
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Change is in the Air
Gov. Rick Perry was a star at the Texas “tea parties,” denouncing Washington and mentioning the s-word—secession—in front of enthusiastic crowds. Perry had already made headlines by calling for Texas to reject Washington’s “stimulus” funds and by backing a resolution in the Texas House of Representatives affirming the state’s sovereignty, before he fired up the...
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The Tiger, the Lion, and the Old Man
A day like today reminds you of how you got here, of the struggle, of the good in your life—and of a tiger, a lion, and an old man. The sun shines stark white, shimmering in a way that reminds you that it is a star, technically a yellow dwarf, but it seems not so...
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War on the Home Front
U.S. officialdom calls them “Special Interest Aliens,” as much because they might have a special interest in us as we in them. They are aliens from countries that are considered potential sources of terrorist attacks on the American homeland, and their numbers are reportedly growing. “People are coming here with bad intentions,” an anonymous Border...
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September 11: What Has Changed?—September 2011
beyond the revolution Deforming Education by Thomas Fleming views U No What I Meen: Technology and Illiteracy by R. Clay Reynolds Tarzan’s Way by Andrei Navrozov news September 11: Ten Years After by John C. Seiler, Jr. reviews The Monism of Perfection by Chilton Williamson, Jr. The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life by Kenneth ...
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“Gunfire erupted”: Merry Christmas from the Religion of Peace
As in a number of cases involving minority criminals, mass media initially appeared reluctant to identify the perpetrators in the San Bernadino shootings that left fourteen people dead, Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik. The Los Angeles Times seemed to play down the agency of the shooters, with a by-now familiar description of gunfire...
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The Problem With Religious Secular Zealots
Since September 11, I’ve heard it more than once and will likely hear it again. The argument goes like this: Yes, all this banal talk about Islam being a “religion of peace” is, of course, a lot of nonsense. But the problem is not their religion but all religion. “Religious” people, you see, are all...
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If Pigs Could Fly
The day after Christmas 2006, the U.S.-military death toll in Iraq overtook and then surpassed the total number of Americans killed on September 11, 2001. Some Democrats, even before the symbolic number was reached, were calling for a withdrawal, either immediate or gradual, of U.S. forces. President Bush, although he had abandoned his signature tune...
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What “Terrible Lesson” Can Russia Teach Us?
“We are exceptional people; we are among those nations that . . . exist only to give the world some terrible lesson.” —Pyotr Chaadayev Chaadayev’s words came to mind in the aftermath of a blizzard in Vladivostok, snowy peaks ringing the port city, the sky still obscured by thick clouds. It was November 1992. The...
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Return of the War Nerds
As the MAGA political realignment consolidates its power within the GOP, the neocons view the Democratic Party as the best vehicle for their policies.
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A Rumor of War
George W. Bush’s man at the CIA, Porter Goss, is now purging the agency, an act prompted by the persistence of certain parties in the CIA in presenting the White House with “reality-based analysis.” Since such analysis presented a road block to war plans, Goss was ordered to rid the agency of “disloyal” employees, meaning...
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Singing Our Song
In the summer of 2014, a “surge” was on at the southern border, particularly in my home state of Texas, stimulated by the Obama administration’s signals that it was planning a mass amnesty and had no intention of enforcing immigration laws. It became painfully obvious that the border crisis—the near total collapse of any controls...
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Been There, Done That
It is a beautiful April evening in Hico, Texas. My wife and I are having dinner with my in-laws, and I am eyeballing a statue of Billy the Kid across the street from Lilly’s Restaurant. Hico, you see, was the home of “Brushy Bill” Roberts, widely believed around these parts to have been the notorious...
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Unnatural Causes
“For me,” wrote P.D. James in her “fragment of autobiography,” Time To Be in Earnest, “one of the fascinations of detective fiction is the exploration of character under the revealing trauma of murder inquiry.” Murder “is the unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim.” As a writer...
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An Obsolete Alliance Turns 75
NATO has undermined the security of its members and created enemies that, in turn, justify further NATO interference in an increasingly unstable “security environment.”
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Becoming Extinct
Iraq’s Christians may be on their way to extinction, thanks to the Bush administration’s decision to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime. Today, Iraq’s mostly Catholic and Orthodox Christians are fleeing the country, with their destination of choice being, ironically, Syria, another target for “regime change” on the neoconservative hit list. More than two years ago, Chronicles...
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Left Behind
How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? —Psalm 137:4 But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel. —1 Timothy 5:8 The county that became...
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The Season of Rain and Death
A blood-red sun is setting on the horizon, distant but familiar, dull but glowing, like the bloodshot eye of a wounded Titan. Layers of pasty-blue, thin, translucent clouds drape the blood-eye image, as if they themselves were the misty, cloudlike shimmerings of heat rising from the sunbaked pavement, cooled by a late-summer rain. I stand...
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Economic Patriotism
In an essay first published in Chronicles in 2006 and collected in the Chronicles Press volume Life, Literature, and Lincoln, the late Tom Landess relates a story about Arizona Sen. John McCain. While stumping in South Carolina for the Republican presidential nomination, the Mad Bomber encountered a textile-mill worker who was not a fan of...
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Obama Goes to Moscow
President Obama’s July trip to Moscow was intended to “reset” U.S.-Russian relations but also suggested that there is a continuing tug-of-war in the administration between realists and “democracy builders” regarding Russia policy. The struggle was publicly kicked off by the March report of a commission headed by former Sen. Gary Hart and Sen. Chuck Hagel...
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We Can’t Vote Ourselves Out of This: Organizing a Middle American Resistance
The American right needs a Middle American resistance united in its focus on internal secession and self-government, one that does not rely on national politics or bet on political saviors.
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Why Russia Does Not Fear an Iranian Bomb
When President George W. Bush met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Bratislava, Slovakia, this past February, the first item on the White House’s laundry list of discussion points for the summit was nuclear programs, including Russian aid to Iran’s nuclear-power effort. After the meeting, Putin told reporters that the issue of nuclear proliferation was...
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What is “Conservatism”?
Donald Trump isn’t a “conservative” as defined by the Beltway Right. Thank Heaven for that. So what are the defining elements of right-liberal “conservatism” these days? It appears that lining the oligarchs’ pockets (“free enterprise”), unrestrained financial speculation (“limited government”), amnesty/unlimited immigration (so “hardworking” people can “come out of the shadows”), and perpetual war (“protecting...
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Chief Target
Hispanic voters remain the chief target of GOP strategists, at least in Texas. In the wake of Republican Orlando Sanchez’s December 1 runoff loss to Houston’s incumbent black mayor, Lee Brown—Sanchez garnered 48 percent of the vote to Brown’s 52 percent—news media and Republican apparatchiki were busy gushing about the growing electoral weight of “Hispanic”...
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Is Putin Returning?
By the end of 2009, the word on the Moscow grapevine was being picked up by pundits and journalists: Putin’s “return” is in the works, and the premier’s reoccupation of the Kremlin may take place sooner rather than later. The tandem of Vladimir Putin and his handpicked successor, Dmitri Medvedev, is said to be coming...
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A Place to Stand
The names are legendary; the tales of heroism, a part of our heritage as Texans and Americans. Houston, Crockett, Bowie, Travis: All, save William Barret Travis, were nationally known figures before they came to Texas, which was then considered Mexican territory. Sam Houston had been governor of Tennessee, a protégé of Andrew Jackson, a war...
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The “Trumpening” and Conservative Christians
Many conservative Christians have reservations, at least, about supporting Republican front runner Donald Trump, and not without reason. He has had a less than completely convincing conversion to a pro-life position; has said (more than once) that Planned Parenthood has done some good (on screening for cervical and breast cancer, for instance), while declaring that...
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Mighty Seer, in Days of Old
It’s near the end of October, and the air is crisp and cool. The wind blows hard here on the prairie, the thermometer failing to reflect the chill you feel on your skin and in your bones. A smattering of pinks, reds, and oranges coat the white-cored, cottony fingers floating against the pale-blue morning sky. ...
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Anatomy of a Murder
The November murder of a missionary Orthodox priest in Moscow highlighted the threats to Russia’s stability from extremist groups, including Muslim terrorists and the far right. The priest, Daniil Sysoyev, and his aide, Vladimir Strelbitsky, were shot down in a church in Moscow’s Southern Administrative Okrug on November 19. The gunman, whom some sources described...
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Rethinking ‘National Security’ in Light of War in Ukraine
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch a military “special operation” in Ukraine, which, through the fog of war, looks like an attempt to overthrow the current authorities there and “demilitarize” that country, has prompted the usual globalist/neo-con talking heads to throw around irresponsible comparisons of the Kremlin boss to Hitler. The truth is that...
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Farewell to Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy is gone, having secured his place in the literary canon. At his best, McCarthy’s often terrifying, but deeply religious, tales are a moving spiritual and aesthetic experience. May he rest in peace.
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Downing Street Memo
The Downing Street Memo, a British-government document on Iraq leaked in May to the Sunday Times, may be as close as the American public will get to a “smoking gun” implicating the Bush White House in manipulating this country into war. A July 23, 2002, memo (actually, the minutes of a British cabinet meeting) written...
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Trump’s was a proponent of “America First” in 1990
Republican front runner Donald Trump has been criticized for not being “conservative” in the manner of the Beltway Right, for changing his positions (especially on abortion), and for his past associations with Democratic politicians. Trump-haters frequently claim that The Donald has no fixed views, is merely opportunistically taking advantage of popular anger with political elites,...
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The Trees of Autumn
It is a warm night for November, even in Texas. Thanksgiving is a few days away, and the warm weather, interrupted by a cool snap, has returned, reimposing itself like an unwelcome guest on an autumn background of falling leaves and brown, seemingly endless prairie stretching north to distant Canada. Southeast from Waco, along Highway...
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What the Editors Are Reading
Dostoevsky’s great 1866 novel Crime and Punishment reads like a frenetic vision. A compulsive gambler and one-time political radical who was condemned to Siberia and forced labor, Dostoevsky created the novel’s Rodion Raskolnikov, a half-mad dreamer who expressed the radical, nihilistic ideas of the time. Drawing on his own struggles and experiences, Dostoevsky used Raskolnikov...
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Child Abuse, the State, and the Russian Family
It was another episode in a series of shocking crimes against children. Little Sasha, just three years old, was pulled from the frigid waters of the Pekhorka River in January 2009. He was bound to a car battery with adhesive tape, his body battered and bearing the marks of cigarette burns. It was the second...
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Come Home, America
The proxy war in Ukraine is a globalist creation that has little to do with American interests. Americans should not emotionally invest in a fight that is not their own, but focus on more important matters at their own borders.
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McCarthy’s Missing Man
The Passenger reflects Cormac McCarthy's longtime internal debate over the meaning, if any, and purpose, if any, of human existence.
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Losing the “War on Terror” at the Border
According to a host of news reports, the porous, virtually unprotected southern border of the United States has attracted the attention of Islamic terrorists, as many of us warned it would at the outset of the “War on Terror.” In March, Time, citing U.S. intelligence officials, reported that Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, a ring leader of...
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Trump and the Anti-globalist Moment
The organized, violent, Mexican-flag waving mob that forced Donald Trump to cancel a rally in Chicago underscored the desperation of the globalist oligarchy as the Trump campaign advances toward the Republican presidential nomination. The mob was apparently backed by the George Soros-funded MoveOn.org, and a mass media that has spewed propaganda casting Trump as Hitler,...
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Christmas, Texas
I am fumbling in the console, looking for my Jim Reeves Christmas CD, when I notice the wall of rolling, gray clouds approaching from the east. The sun is sliding slowly beneath the horizon in the west, shooting shards of orange-red hues into the purple-blue sky, presenting a striking contrast to the dark gray wall,...
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In This Number
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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Who Won the Cold War?
In his Foreword to Witness, Whittaker Chambers, writing in the “form of a letter to my children,” tries to explain the appeal of communism: I see in Communism the focus of the concentrated evil of our time. You will ask: Why, then, do men become Communists? How did it happen that you, our gentle and...
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Bowling Alone in Columbine
Politics are over in America. Political maneuvering will go on, of course, but the old civics class view of American political life was based on a set of assumptions that are no longer operative. First, America was far more homogenous before the 1965 Immigration Act and the “New Left” political and social revolution of...