BP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico continues to be a lead story. Naturally it has engendered polemics over who is responsible and a broader discussion of whether offshore drilling should be continued or even increased. On these great issues that agitate NPR listeners and FOX watchers, I have nothing to say. I would,...
10853 search results for: Post-Human Future
A Stubborn Love of Honor
For the Ancient Greeks, the concepts of courage and honor were indivisible. Both are necessary to fight for what is most important.
The Shooting of George Wallace
On May 15, 1972, I was a nine-year-old Little Leaguer determined to become the next Johnny Bench. As I headed home from the playground after baseball practice, our neighbor, Willie Kines, waved me over to his car. I remember thinking it odd that he would be picking me up, given that I lived only three...
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...
Darwin Is Wrong
Regarding the inaugural “poem” . . . Joan Rivers. Atrium. A poet manqué without a poem. Or even a coherent thought. But sexually, racially, politically correct. Living proof Darwin is wrong. The fittest have not survived. Once mute. Now, unfortunately, speaking. Mind-numbing gibberish that would make Ferlinghetti puke. She a species that has not, alas,...
Buenas Noches, America
“Mexico does not end at its borders. . . . Where there is a Mexican, there is Mexico.” That astonishing claim, by Mexican President Felipe Calderon, in his state of the nation address at the National Palace Sunday, brought his audience wildly cheering to its feet. Were the United States a serious nation, Calderon’s claim...
Carolina Courage
“This all sounds fanatical if people don’t know about it. I’m not a radical person.” Despite her critics, and despite the rough reelection campaign she faces in Charlotte this fall, U.S. Rep. Sue Myrick (R-NC, 9th District) has spent the last two years fighting to bring her concerns before Congress and the American people. In...
Israel’s Lesson for 2024: A Liberal Crackup
The new New Left has the potential to spark a civil war among progressives, especially as causes like Black Lives Matter and anti-police policies entwine with "anti-colonial" and anti-Israel ideology.
Passing Up Chances
The frequency with which American politicians—and Republican ones in particular—habitually neglect or pass up obvious chances to score a telling hit on their opponents is really amazing. An immediately recent example is the claim made on the campaign trail by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the leading candidate for the Mexican presidency in the forthcoming election...
Political Passions, Part II
American churches cannot make up their minds. Do they serve God or an Uncle Sam who for a long time has been looking a great deal like Mammon? On patriotic holidays the choirs sing that bloodthirsty and nonsensical anthem to war and slaughter ironically titled “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and pastors give sermons...
Viva la Musical Comedy
A few months before I saw the musical Les Miserables—actually a few months before it opened at the Kennedy Center last December—I heard it. The show’s publicist had sent me a tape of the London version. When I first listened to it, I felt disappointed. It sounded more than a little like Evita, with the...
Groomers by Any Other Name
In the wake of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signing the Parental Rights in Education bill into law, the internet has been ablaze with debate as to whether those who advocate for LGBT curricula and policies in public schools should be described as “groomers.” The left is predictably up in arms over this controversy. And although...
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...
Who and What Is Tearing the US Apart?
In Shanksville, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, former President George W. Bush’s theme was national unity—and how it has been lost over these past 20 years. “In the weeks and months following the 9/11 attacks,” said Bush, “I was proud to lead an amazing, resilient, united people. When it comes to the unity of America, those days...
The Cause of Us All
Mark Winchell explores the myth of Abraham Lincoln's "deification" in American culture, among other Southern themes.
Biden’s Chinese War
Don’t look now, but a serious conflict is brewing with China, infinitely more dangerous than anything regarding Russia or Iran. The problem? China may have developed the ability to militarily defeat the United States and control the Far East. “U.S. policy between the end of the Cold War and 2017,” former Trump National Security Advisor H. R....
Kamala Harris Is a Race Hustler
A Harris presidency would send white men to the back of the line and ignite racial animus.
The Dan Rather Diversion
The “mainstream” media, we often hear, isn’t covering the real stories—it shies away from controversy and supinely bends under pressure from government officials, corporate sponsors, and warmongering demagogues. All of this may be true, but what we don’t hear is what happens when the media does do a little investigative reporting, especially when the resulting...
Rotten to the Core
“Let us gamble with reason in the name of life,” urges Pascal in his celebrated statistical proof for the existence of God. “Let us risk it, for the sake of a win that is infinitely great and just as probable as the loss, which is to say nonexistence.” With the cynicism of an inveterate gambler,...
Plato’s Apology
After returning from my Balkan adventures, I can now return to the serious business of using Plato to teach reasoning. Let us turn to the Apology. You probably all know that the Greek apologia means something like justification or defense argument rather than apology. It is Plato's reconstruction (or imaginative ...
Notables – Of Socialism and Sentimentality
“Socialism,” wrote Dostoevsky in The Possessed, “spreads among us chiefly because of sentimentality.” He was, of course, writing about upper-middle class, 19th-century Russian society, but a reading of Tmubled Journey: From Pearl Harbor to Ronald Reagan (Hill and Wang; New York) by Frederick Siegel suggests that the rise of the American New left during the 1960’s was also...
The Long March Ahead for the Real Right
The American electorate split strongly along class lines in the 2020 election, as revealed by a Bloomberg News data chart that correlated campaign donors with their professions. This data map looks like an inverted triangle made up of circles in varying shades of blue and red. At the top are large circles in deep blue, denoting...
Putin’s New Weapons
The most interesting part of President Vladimir Putin’s two hours long state of nation address on March 1 was his announcement—accompanied by a video presentation—that Russia has developed a hypersonic state-of-the-art missile 20 times faster than the speed of sound, as well as a nuclear-powered cruise missile, both supposedly safe from interception. Putin claimed that...
Letter to the Bishop
Your Excellency: A few years have passed since we corresponded. After my last letter to you, I’m afraid I took a wrong path, crashed and burned, and now stagger forward, burdened by more ordinary trespasses. But still a believer, grateful, as Graham Greene had the wheezing old priest murmur at the end of Brighton Rock,...
Bad Whitey 101
In this space in the June issue, readers learned about a flock of students from the American Studies program at Randolph College who flapped off to the Chicken Ranch Brothel in Nevada to study the profundities of the cathouse. They also learned about yet another aesthete who believes emissions from the nether regions of the...
Rockford Institute Welcomes VP Tom Piatak
The Rockford Institute has taken a bold step forward in its mission to defend traditional conservatism by appointing Thomas Piatak as Executive Vice President. A veteran of the Culture Wars and a tireless advocate of restoring American jobs and economic prosperity, Mr. Piatak is perfectly poised to raise the Institute’s profile among current and new...
An Interwar Odyssey
In 2011, Patrick Leigh Fermor became Patrick Leigh Former, and hundreds of thousands of devotees were doubly bereft. The first loss was the man himself, at 96 an antique in his own right, one of the last links to what feels increasingly like an antediluvian Europe, in which advanced civilization could coexist with medieval color...
New York Writing
“To write simply is as difficult as to be good.” —Somerset Maugham It is just possible that Tom Wolfe’s first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, may be more important for extraliterary reasons than for purely literary ones. Of course, there are no purely literary reasons for anything, especially in the form of fiction, perhaps...
Greenland: Trump’s MAGA Idea!
To those of us of who learned our U.S. history from texts in the 1940s and ’50s, President Donald Trump’s brainstorm of acquiring Greenland fits into a venerable tradition of American expansionism. The story begins with colonial officer George Washington’s march out toward Fort Duquesne in 1754 and crushing defeat and near death at Fort...
Take Off Your Hat
I have been a member of a private club up in the Alps since 1959. Its name is the Eagle Ski Club, and I joined it when I was 20 years of age. Sixty years later I’ve resigned as a life member because of an incident I won’t go into, as things that happen in...
On True Refreshment
While so many publications are content to serve up the same flabby perspectives, it is always refreshing to read Chronicles. Each issue just gets better and better. As luck would have it, the May issue showed up the very same day that I had gone to the public library to catch up on what the...
Is the First Amendment Still in Effect?
Eugene Narrett has lost his job as a professor of English at Framingham State College in Massachusetts. An outspoken conservative who never misses a chance to bash feminism and liberalism in his columns for the Middlesex County News and in periodic essays for this and other magazines, Narrett thinks that his politics had much to...
The President Who Doesn’t Get It
A number of maxims surround the practice of war. The main maxim runs to this effect: When you get attacked, fight back. Unless, to be sure, you don’t care whether you win or lose—an option, to be sure, not given to American presidents and other national leaders, assuming, to be sure, they take with maximum...
Sesquicentennial Sidelights
Despite all that has passed since, the war of 1861-65 arguably remains the central event of American history. In proportion to population no other event equals it in mobilization, death, destruction, and revolutionary change. We are into the Sesquicentennial, and one would like to think that Americans will take the opportunity to contemplate where we...
Greek Diary III
We had a big but quite mediocre lunch near the Agora, at Attalos, and by the time we got to the entrance, we found out they had changed the schedule for visiting the Agora. Returning the next day, we took our time getting lost on the site, which is impossible ...
Witchfinder: The Strange Career of Morris Dees
The trial, conviction, and death sentence of Timothy McVeigh for the Oklahoma City bombing of April 19, 1995, passed quietly this year, far more quietly than most reporters and some political leaders wanted. The main reason for the calmness of the McVeigh proceedings was probably the utterly uninteresting mind, character, and personality of the defendant....
Sochi, Putin, and Vlad the Drag Queen
In the Dead West, our heroes are no longer cowboys but those creepy weirdos who slink around the alleyways of red-light districts. One such warrior for righteousness is described by the Associated Press as “Vladimir Luxuria, a former Communist lawmaker in the Italian parliament who has become a prominent transgender rights crusader and television personality.”...
It’s Time to End the Legal Fiction of ‘Asylum’
This strange worship of foreigners has been foisted on America in ways that are unnatural and utterly disabling.
The Litmus Test for American Conservatism
Abraham Lincoln is thought of by many as not only the greatest American statesman but as a great conservative. He was neither. Understanding this is a necessary condition for any genuinely American conservatism. When Lincoln took office, the American polity was regarded as a compact between sovereign states which had created a central government as...
Harry Jaffa and the Historical Imagination
In the 1970’s, Mel Bradford and I were teaching at the University of Dallas, which offered a doctoral program in politics and literature. Students took courses in both disciplines. It was a well-designed curriculum and produced some first-rate scholars. Bradford had long been interested in political theory, but the program probably encouraged him to read...
Seventy Years Old and an NBA Star (in My Mind)
I’m 70 years old, 5’7”, and a bit past my ideal measurement on the Body Mass Index. Let’s say I wake up tomorrow morning, look at myself in the mirror, and suddenly decide I’m capable of hitting three pointers in the National Basketball Association. I see myself soaring through the air like Michael Jordan, ball...
Leftist Culture, Leftist Memory
This book’s lugubrious title, Franco’s Crypt, indicates its partiality. Written in a fluid style befitting its author, who has published in the New York Times Book Review and served as editor for The Times Literary Supplement, the book draws on multiple sources, including necrology, photography, monuments, museums, art, literature, memoirs, histories, and school curricula. The...
The 2024 Test for the New American Right
Among the pool of potential Republican presidential candidates for 2024, Ron DeSantis embodies the tenets and overall ethos of the more nationalist- and populist-infused "New Right" better than any other non-Trump alternative.
Missed Opportunities of the Great Debate
With few exceptions, Trump did not engage the queries that he should have answered and missed several opportunities to land blows to his opponent.
Screen – Once Upon a Time in the West Coast
A cultural paradigm should be a positive one, an object that, through its very being, encourages emulation. If that model is a man or woman, a hero or a heroine, then that person should, at all visible times and in all apparent ways (i.e., let’s acknowledge privacy as a personal need, People and National Enquirer to...
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 ...
Delightful Murders and Sheer Torture
While “off Broadway” is often the destination for the worst sort of stage-direction anarcho-anachronism, with Othello in spaceships and all-lesbian versions of Macbeth, it may surprise the non-New Yorker to learn that it is often the place to discover classic drama played absolutely straight (in all senses) and flawlessly acted. Such was the case recently...
U.S. Politics Gives Brits a Bad Trip
“Covering American politics is like crack,” a veteran British journalist told me last year. “Once you’ve had a taste nothing else gives the same high.” I now think I know what he meant—though LSD might be a more apt comparison. In the age of Trump, it’s hard to watch American politics without wondering if you are...
Polemics & Exchanges: October 2022
Correspondence on Paul Gottfried's speech about Southern conservatives and Taki's article, "End of Empire, End of Manners."
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...