The greatest enemy of government power in the early American republic was Thomas Jefferson. It is no wonder, then, that Jefferson has been so aggressively vilified by the partisans of political correctness. Jefferson was likewise disdained by many in the 19th and early 20th century who, quite rightly, saw his ideas as an obstacle to...
10952 search results for: Post-Human Future
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Fire in the Minds of Men
Recently, we marked the 100th anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution, an event sparked by the revolutionary fire in the minds of men that has burned for as long as there have been men on the earth. In the modern era, revolution ignited in France in the 18th century. It caught fire again in 1848,...
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It Can’t Be Repeated Too Often (Until It Sinks In), Again
It Can’t Be Repeated Too Often (Until It Sinks In), Again by Clyde N. Wilson • March 12, 2009 • Printer-friendly “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” —Orwell (Things that are known but which Americans do not acknowledge or discuss.) Ruby Ridge. Your President George H.W. Bush sent...
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All Local, All the Time
One of the talk-radio stations here in Rockford bills itself as “All Local. All Day.” It is an interesting slogan, in light of increasing reports of the impending failure of local media; it would be even more interesting if it (or a version of it) were not used by hundreds of other talk-radio stations across...
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Prior Reflections
When Chronicles talks, people listen—at least in New Zealand. I have had my allotted 15 minutes of total fame, all because of a couple of paragraphs snatched by the Kiwi press out of a little piece of mine (Letter From Inner Israel, “Sorting Out Jew-Haters“) printed in these pages in March. Readers will recall that...
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Robert Penn Warren Remembered
Reading Joseph Blotner’s biography revives my memories of Robert Penn Warren. I was summoned to his rooms at Silliman College on September 5, 1969. I was a freckled, red-haired 18-year-old in whom he may have seen an apparition from his past. “Show me the poems you wrote this summer,” he demanded. I produced a sheaf...
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Trench Warfare
War talk was running high when they threw the loaded packs in back of the Gold Pony and left Flagstaff, headed north across the Navajo Reservation. Television and the newspapers had nothing to say about anything except the towering evil of Hubbub Ihnssain, while National Public Radio had suspended All Things Considered to concentrate on...
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The Constitution, R.I.P.
On July 22 of this year, the Washington Times published, as the weekly installment of its “Civil War” section, a long article by a gentleman named Mackubin Thomas Owens, described as “professor of strategy and force planning” at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, under the headline, “Secession’s apologists gut Constitution, history.” The...
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Not Ours to Give
Gary David Comstock is Protestant chaplain and visiting assistant professor of sociology at Wesleyan University. The author cites his “lover/partner Ted” in the acknowledgments, and thus manifestly belongs to the group he describes in uniformly favorable terms. The book is interesting, and in many respects challenging to the traditionally minded reader. A jacket blurb by...
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The Bishop Takes a Stand
In recent years America has seemed to lack the sort of bold churchman who is willing to put his penny-loafered foot down and say enough is enough. But according to recent press reports, the shoe has dropped. Even in these degraded times, there is a limit—a line you just can’t cross. What is that line?...
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Rogue President
Asserting a legal and constitutional authority he himself said he did not have, President Obama is going rogue, issuing an executive amnesty to 4 to 5 million illegal aliens. He will order the U.S. government not to enforce the law against these 5 million, and declare that they are to be exempt from deportation and...
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The Panic of 2011
If you’re old or sick and have a lot of money, I suggest taking a trip out of the country, away from your heirs, until January 1, 2011. And don’t tell them where you’re going. On that date, the death tax for rich folks goes from the current 0 percent to 55 percent. So your...
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Kosovo Blowback Reaches America
The story: four Albanian Muslims from Kosovo, plus a Turk and a Jordanian, are arrested for conspiring to attack Fort Dix, a military base in New Jersey, with AK47s and “to kill as many soldiers as possible” (U.S. Attorney’s Office). The Mainstream Media spin: “Four ...
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Answering Pop Music’s Malaise this Christmas
A culture is characterized by its public rites. Western culture today shows itself most clearly in popular song and what we hear is in need of an antidote.
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Will Joe Repudiate His Segregationist Friends?
“Apologize for what? Cory should apologize. He knows better. There’s not a racist bone in my body.” Thus did a stung Joe Biden answer rival Cory Booker’s demand he apologize for telling contributors, in a southern drawl, “I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland, He never called me ‘boy.’ He always called me...
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Putin, Planes, and Position
Russian President Vladimir Putin was furious following the late-November destruction of a Russian war plane by Turkish fighter jets over Syrian airspace. The Russians had been bombing “terrorist” positions inside war-torn Syria since September. Less than two weeks before the incident, Putin thought he had reached agreement with his Turkish counterpart, Recip Tayyip Erdogan, on...
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Our Government is Oblivious to Invasion
Recently while driving from town to my house, I was running through some radio stations when I landed on the Glenn Beck show. His guest was Lara Logan, a journalist and commentator unfamiliar to me, and I was sickened and horrified by what I heard. I wish I were exaggerating, but what that woman had...
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We Asked For It
For almost two decades, or ever since Tony Blair became prime minister, the British have moaned about a lack of opposition in politics. All our politicians “sound the same,” we say—and they do, it’s true. Our parliamentary system may be designed for confrontation, but so far this century the Labour and Conservative parties seem to...
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Tell Israel: Cool the Jets!
Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, who is wired into the cabinet of “Bibi” Netanyahu, warns that if Iran’s nuclear program is not aborted by December, Israel will strike to obliterate it. Defense Secretary Gates’ mission to Israel this week, says Bolton, to relay Obama’s red light, was listened to attentively, but will not be decisive....
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Expanding Minds
Thomas Fleming’s “To Save One Child” (Beyond the Revolution, March) reminds me why everyone who still values a reasoned and ethical perspective on family values, and many other aspects of contemporary living in America, should read Chronicles. After pointing out how easily a well-intentioned individual, professing a spiritual nature, confuses values with virtues, Fleming then...
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Forgotten Corners
Minnesota celebrated its 150th birthday in 2008. This occasion drove news reporter Boyd Huppert from KARE–TV in Minneapolis to travel to the corners of the state for a four-part feature series. In the far northwest corner sits Kittson County, bordered by North Dakota and Manitoba. (Winnipeg is about an hour-and-a-half drive.) The landscape is flat...
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The Never Trumpers: Sore Losers With Thin Skins
Emerald Robinson recently wrote a witty piece for The American Spectator puncturing the pomposity of the Never Trump wing of the conservative movement. At least one member of that wing, the thin-skinned Jonah Goldberg, now the holder of the “Asness Chair in Applied Liberty at the American Enterprise Institute,” was not amused, and he let...
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The Neocons Called the Tune
I want to apologize to my readers, although I can only hope for forgiveness. I certainly don’t deserve it. OK, Justin—I can hear you now—what have you done this time? The sin of which I am guilty is optimism of the most fatuous sort—or, rather, projecting an inauthentic optimism onto a most unworthy object. The...
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Hitchens and Israel
The print issue of National Review has a very revealing review of Christopher Hitchens' autobiography by Ronald Radosh. It comes as no surprise that Radosh praises the book and its author as a
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The Tax Rate Racket
The flap over whether to extend present tax rates for the rich finds its center in a cultural proposition: Liberals, including rich liberals, either don’t like the rich or feel obliged to pretend they don’t. The argument official Washington will have this month over tax rates—Republicans on one side, President Obama on the other...
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Common Sense
Over in my philosophy department they used to shake their heads and smile. They didn’t actually pat me on the head or anything; professors don’t do that. But they did get a kick out of what they saw as my naiveté. “How sweet,” they seemed to think, “that he could really believe that philosophy is,...
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What the Editors Are Reading
Having re-rigged my fishing gear over the summer and purchased a new nine-and-a-half-foot No. 6 fly rod by Scott, and a Lamson reel to mount on it, I’ve finally got round to reading a book that’s lain neglected in my sporting library for far too many years. Ray Bergman’s Trout, first published in 1938, has...
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Blair’s War on Biology
In the May 2000 issue of Chronicles (“Letter From England: New Gaybour”), I wrote that there was a good chance that Section 28 (the portion of the 1988 United Kingdom Local Government Bill that forbids the promotion of homosexuality among schoolchildren) would be retained through the current Parliament at least, because of the Labour Party’s...
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How Goldman Sachs Is Swindling America’s Cities
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...
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On Reparations
Philip Jenkins is certainly right about the rising trajectory of demands for reparations for slavery (“For What We Have Done, and What We Have Failed to Do,” Vital Signs, November 2000). I hope, but am doubtful, that he is also right about the potential of this gambit for exposing the root absurdity of liberal social...
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The Satan Club
At last, the Tacoma Public Schools’ board has recognized the obvious educational potential of the Prince of Darkness. For years, this hopelessly hidebound and reactionary institution has restricted itself to providing what it calls “a welcoming, nurturing environment [to] . . . provide the knowledge and skills for students to become respectful, responsible life-long learners...
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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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La Trahison des Clercs
The state of higher education in our country is best passed over in silence, in order to avoid both useless exasperation and any provocation of “reform.” The mess we are in is the result of a parade of fraudulent reforms and movements, of a national, political, and social corruption so pervasive that I see no...
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The Neoconservative Delusion
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...
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Time To Leave Korea
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...
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Paid to Hate Putin
It seems that National Review Editor Rich Lowry never tires of carrying water for the sponsors of his magazine, whether it’s the high-tech giants who help pay his gargantuan salary, or his neoconservative donors, whom he also faithfully serves. Most recently he honored his patrons with a dutiful denunciation of Russian President Vladmir Putin entitled...
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Omnigendered Christianity
By some measures, the influence of feminist theology peaked in the 1990’s. It is still around, however, acting as a supporting pillar for liberal religion’s latest preoccupation: the elimination of “gender.” Feminist theologians and clergy convened in March 2004 for an annual “Women and the Word” conference at Boston University’s School of Theology, challenging masculine...
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Barack Obama’s Fake Life Story, 20 Years Later
Twenty years ago this month, Barack Obama debuted before the Democratic National Convention with a fake life story that catapulted him to the presidency.
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Out of Troy
Author of several novels and a memorable autobiographical work entitled Our Father’s Fields (1998), as well as a leading light of the Abbeville Institute, James Kibler has produced in the present work an indispensable study of the classical influence on Southern literature. Other literary historians and critics of Southern letters have explored this territory; however,...
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Anglo-Americana
In 1858, as British and French forces pushed their way to Peking in the Opium Wars, Josiah Tatnall, commander of the neutral American naval squadron, intervened to save the British ships from Chinese guns and tow them safely out of range. When asked why he had abandoned his government’s official neutrality, Tatnall replied: “Blood is...
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The Ultimate Insider
Who are the spear-carriers of government policies? This is a tale that puts pieces together over the course of a few decades. Neocons eat stories like this for breakfast. Like most teachers, I have learned at least as much from my students as they have learned from me. An Argentinian graduate student at St. Louis...
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Liz Truss Takes Britain’s Helm Amid Stormy Seas
Britain's new Prime Minister Liz Truss, of the Conservative Party, has her work cut out for her in a country poised to undergo a difficult winter.
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Dreams of Gold
If California were to secede from the United States and establish itself, as its first Anglo settlers once intended, as an independent republic, it would instantly emerge as one of the world’s richest nations. As it is, one in every ten Americans now resides in the so-called Golden State. Its economy affects not only those...
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Don’t Just Wound It: Kill It
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...
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The Coming Backlash
As Americans render what Catholics call temporal judgment on George Bush, are they aware of the radical course correction they are about to make? This center-right country is about to strengthen a liberal Congress whose approval rating is 10 percent and implant in Washington a regime further to the left than any in U.S. history....
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Essentials for a Lasting Peace in the Middle East
No solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is possible unless we clearly define the obstacles that can and must be surmounted. This conflict, which culminated in open warfare in 1948, is rooted in the incompatible claims of two distinct groups regarding the same territory and resources. In 1947, the United Nations partitioned...
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The Ponderous and the Fleet
A review of Watchmen (produced and distributed by Warner Bros. and Paramount Pictures; directed by Zack Snyder; screenplay by David Hayter and Alex Tse) and 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...
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Liberal Culture – Blah, Blah, Blah
In an era when frozen embryos, conceived on processed sperm, are considered legal inheritors to financial assets, and former convicted felons seek redemption by supervising police in Chicago Mayor Washington’s administration, nothing is particularly surprising anymore. In the Chicago Tribune, someone identified as cochairman of the Illinois Gay and Lesbian Task Force bitterly complains that homosexual highschool...
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Son of Tocqueville, Socrates, and Holmes
If Alexis de Tocqueville, Socrates, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., could be combined, such a person would be like Philip Howard. His Everyday Freedom is a well-timed neo-Tocquevillian polemic.
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America Steps Back Into the Syrian Quagmire
It didn’t take long. Barely five weeks after assuming control, the new foreign policy team in Washington confirmed its interventionist credentials by bombing “Iran-backed militias” in Syria. The “defensive precision strike” on Feb. 26, according to the Pentagon statement, was supposed to send “an unambiguous message” that, acting to protect American and Coalition personnel, “we have acted in...