After reading an especially radical platform agreed upon by the British Labor Party, one Tory wag described it as “the longest suicide note in history.” The phrase comes to mind on reading of the resolution calling for a Green New Deal, advanced by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and endorsed by at least five of the major Democratic...
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Professional Sports, Sport-Betting, and Hypocrisy
Leagues like the NHL have made their moral stances clear—their millionaire star players may not engage in sports gambling, but hockey fans are subjected to over two hours of gambling propaganda during each broadcast.
A Life in Literature
In May 2003, Christian Wiman was named the new editor of Poetry, the Chicago-based magazine that Harriet Monroe founded and made justly famous. This appointment came a year after Ruth Lilly made a massive gift to the magazine that brought its endowment to nearly $200 million and attracted enormous media attention. Wiman, born in 1966,...
Regional Cinema
(A review of The Last Confederate; produced by Strongbow Pictures; directed by A. Blaine Miller and Julian Adams; written by Julian Adams and Weston Adams; and Firetrail; produced by Forbesfilm; written and directed by Christopher Forbes.) Like it or not, movies are the main art form of our time, the storytelling medium that reaches the...
Beyond the “Other Victorians”
To call something “Victorian” is, in left-liberal parlance, to say that you don’t like it. The fact that hardly anything routinely called “Victorian” accurately characterizes the era of Queen Victoria’s long reign, from 1837 to 1901, is one of the great historiographical tragedies of the 20th century. Thus, when a large number of African bishops...
No Big News
The Bush administration finishes its first four months in office, the big legal news is that there is no big news. There have been some hopeful signs: the appointment of John Ashcroft as attorney general; the appointment of Theodore Olson as solicitor general. Both are distinguished conservatives, the former associated with the Burkean wing of...
Reviving the American Dream—November 2005
PERSPECTIVE Agrarianism From Hesiod to Bradford by Thomas Fleming Life in community. VIEWS The Old South, the New South, and the Real South by Tom Landess Taking off the Yankee spectacles. Reattacking Leviathan by Mark Royden Winchell Starving the beast. The Case for American Secession by Kirkpatrick Sale Still a good idea. The Writer as Farmer by James Everett Kibler Under Heaven. NEWS Solving U.S. Problems in ...
A Prison Without Walls
In the second half of February, I visited Kosovo and Metohija with a Russian humanitarian team that brought 12 tons of food, medicines, and school supplies to the surrounded Serbian enclaves of Lipljan, Batuse, and Priluzje, where the inhabitants have, over two months, had their electricity, heating, and water cut off by the newly elected...
Populists Are Right to Be Paranoid
We are living in a political culture in which anyone identified with the now-vaguely-defined “right” can lose his fortune, reputation, and possibly his freedom. Meanwhile, the racist, vandalizing left can do what it wants with total impunity. A professor lecturing at the Yale School of Medicine dreamt aloud about “shooting white people,” and has not suffered...
A Daughter of Mary and Target for Herod
Last night, my wife and I attended the vigil Mass for the Immaculate Conception at our parish. We sat immediately behind a family I had often seen but never sat by before, a woman in her forties with Down syndrome and her father. I could not help being moved by what I saw. During Mass,...
Libya: A Non-Hostile War
Only one spectacle in recent weeks proved more nauseating than the Commander-in-Chief fine-tuning the Afghan drawdown to suit his re-election timetable. It was Barack Obama’s attempt to justify continued American participation in the illegal and unnecessary war in Libya by claiming that—far from being a war—it does not even merit the designation of hostilities. Back in...
Is Biden Right? Does the Left Own the Future?
Before he appeared at his first solo news conference of 2022, President Joe Biden knew he had a communications problem he had to deal with. Namely, how to get off the defensive. How to avoid spending his time with the White House press corps defending his decisions and explaining his actions as allegations of failure,...
The Struggle for the Gate of Tears
Houthi attacks on Israeli allied vessels in the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait are disrupting the world economy and prompting the U.S. to intervene. Known as "The Gate of Tears," this strait is the gateway for much of the world's commerce.
Who’s the Most Hateful of Them All?
No studies indicate, let alone demonstrate, that a significant percentage of ordinary white people “hate” black people, or black white, or indeed that an appreciable number belonging to any race in America today “hates” members of any other race. But there’s no question that a great many people who subscribe to any one of the...
“Which Way Did They Go?”
There was a time when Texas stood for more than can be expressed in words. It was a symbol of everything that was good about the American West and perhaps even of the United States itself. Texas was a state of mind, a place where men stood on their own two feet without whining to...
A Very Private Person
When Albert Jay Nock died in 1945, American civilization had known saner times. Having just conquered the world through the Final Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the new colossus had a growing appetite, undaunted-by expanse or expense. It was something on the order of: Today the earth, tomorrow the universe! The author of Our Enemy,...
Take My Guns, Please
Worried about your civil liberties? Concerned that the Potomac sniper’s terror, though now concluded, will lead to the shredding of the Second Amendment? Then spare a thought for the helots Down Under, who are facing the prospect of unlimited gun confiscation after the horrific shooting spree of October 21, 2002, which killed two students and...
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...
An Anniversary Remembered
On Saturday, July 10, 2004, my cousin and I drove from Ciechocinek to Czestochowa, to attend a celebration of her grandparents’ 60th wedding anniversary. Ciechocinek is a spa and resort town about 200 kilometers northwest of Warsaw, Poland. Before the trip began, she had to stop by the aesthetics studio (a type of spa) she...
Detroit’s Bankruptcy and The New York Times Idiocy
Like a broken clock taking its twice-a-day victory lap, the New York Times weighed in this morning on Detroit’s bankruptcy. The reason? It’s finger-pointing time. And, when money is the issue, the Times’ ink-stained fingers reflexively point to banks, all of which are big, bad, and beyond the reach of regulators. And now it looks...
François Furet, R.I.P.
François Furet’s death on July 11 in Toulouse at age 70 ended the career of a truly iconoclastic historian. Despite Furet’s association with the political left, as a youthful communist and middle-aged social democrat, his scholarship went against the grain of the French and American academic establishments. In Penser la Révolution and in other revisionist...
Standing for Pat
“We don’t have anyone else from the third congressional district. We need you to fill out our slate,” said the voice on the other end of the phone, a dispatcher from Pat Buchanan’s national headquarters. I couldn’t believe it. The third district of Wisconsin stretches over a sizable portion of the western part of the...
The Strongmen Straw Man
Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism by Anne Applebaum Doubleday 224 pp., $25.00 Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present by Ruth Ben-Ghiat W. W. Norton & Company 384 pp., $28.95 For some among the chattering classes, the electoral defeat of Donald Trump in November must have been a mixed blessing, though they doubtless could...
Why I’m Not Cheering for AIPAC
It’s not the job of American conservatives to be loudly endorsing the taking down of American politicians who are critical of Israel.
The Cowardly American Corporation
The woke bullies of American capitalism are not really bullies at all. The current corporate aborti-mania is driven by abject fear and quivering compliance with cultural authoritarianism.
Calculated Acts of Goodness
How could this be? In a Catholic school? Here? This is what they’re teaching our kids? I stopped, transfixed. I had parked my car and sauntered into the Catholic middle school in search of my son. I was about to turn down the hall that led to his math class when I was struck by...
The Real World Reasserts Itself
Since the death of George Floyd beneath the knee of a cop in Minneapolis on Memorial Day, the nation has been instructed by its cultural elites that this is the daily reality that a racist America has too long ignored. Our nation, it was shouted in our faces, is a place where white cops harass,...
EGYPT: SISI’S SUCCESSES AND CHALLENGES
In his latest interview with Serbia’s top-rated Happy TV Morning Program, Srdja Trifkovic shares his impressions after a two-week tour of Egypt. [You can watch the interview here.] Q: So you’ve just come back from Egypt, perhaps the only country which has managed to be affected and then recover from the Arab Spring revolutions. In...
Tiburcio Vásquez
During the last four decades, California has been proving that demography is indeed destiny. At an ever-accelerating rate the state is becoming Mexifornia. So many Mexicans have flooded into California, nearly all illegally, that instead of the new arrivals assimilating to American culture they are Hispanicizing the state. This means far more than ballots in...
Evolution: A Mistake on Its Own Terms
Though the opponents of Darwinism technically won the famed Scopes Trial of 1925, that event is generally regarded as a decisive triumph for the theory of evolution. After Clarence Darrow had exposed the educational and philosophical deficiencies of the Tennessee anti-Darwinians to a national audience, never again would it be intellectually respectable in America to...
Ideological Ardor
Laurie A. Recht, a legal secretary in New York, received encomiums from the press and various and sundry others for endorsing the court-ordered plan for integrated housing in Yonkers last year. In fact, when Ms. Recht was the only speaker in favor of the integration proposal at an open hearing, arguing that the City Council...
China and the North Korean Nuclear Crisis
Since the North Korean nuclear crisis began in October 2002, Washington has believed that China is the key to solving the problem. The Bush administration has indicated repeatedly that it expects the PRC to exert whatever diplomatic and economic pressure is needed to get North Korea to abandon her nuclear ambitions. From time to time,...
Muslim Sex Crimes in Northern England
In Britain there have been 17 recent prosecutions of gangs of Muslim rapists and child molesters involved in the “on-street grooming” for sex of victims as young as 11 in several towns and cities in northern England. In the most recent case, members of a gang of Muslims from Derby were convicted of rape, false...
Conspiring With Terror in the West
The liberal paradigm is dying before our eyes. At twelve midday on March 22, Theresa May announced at Prime Minister’s Questions that she had sent her condolences to the family of Martin McGuinness, who had been the capo di capi of the IRA. She had been preceded at the BBC by a high priest of...
Grassroots Extremism
“Extremist” is a word that may conjure up images of hooded Klansmen crowded around a burning cross or of Black Panther separatists or kooky 60’s “revolutionaries.” Or perhaps images of Hitler, Stalin, or Mao come to mind. There is a supposition that those who are commonly called “extremists” are unreasonable, irrational, perhaps crazy, and quite...
Thieves, Not Corporations, Are Responsible for Car Thefts
As the decay of America’s urban centers continues, Milwaukee, Wisconsin has experienced a nearly 200 percent increase in car thefts this year, prompting city council members to take action. But rather than calling for more police officers, or even the left’s preferred curative of social workers, to be hired, Alderman Khalif Rainey and Alderwoman Milele Coggs wrote...
Diminishing Returns
Most partisan recollections of the economic world that existed before Adam Smith conjure up words from “feudal” to “primitive” to “mercantilistic” to “Catholic”—a dark era ridden by “just price” theory, wanton poverty induced by ridiculous regulation and barriers to international trade, and the divine right of kings. Then (so the story goes), Smith published The...
Burning Bright in the Darkness
I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. To discover, at his memorial service, that Dr. John Addison Howard’s favorite verse of Scripture was Philippians 4:11 came as no surprise to anyone who knew him well. Those who had simply met him once or twice, or never...
Theme From ‘A Summer Place’
The products of mass culture are not automatically to be sneered at, first because of their massive presence and second because sometimes they have a certain merit or are somehow amusing. The Creature From the Black Lagoon movies are still symbolically potent, and McDonald’s has been known to dispense the best coffee that is easily...
Putin Reset
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin will return to the Kremlin as president in 2012, ending speculation on the fate of the “national leader” and of the “tandem” he had formed with current President Dmitri Medvedev. Medvedev nominated Putin on September 24 during the congress of the ruling United Russia party, dashing the hopes of reformers...
Organs, but no Bach
Bobbing about in the eddies of “choice” as we proles of the “Inclusition” are wont to do, how bracing it was to read Christopher Sandford’s piece on Stravinsky (Vital Signs, April)! Consider this quotation from the composer himself: The stained-glass artists of Chartres had few colors, and the stained-glass artists of today have hundreds of...
Sanctions: War on the Cheap
The modern weapon of “sanctions” seems made-to-order for the foreign policy of Bill Clinton. Remarkably evasive and unprincipled even for a modern politician, Clinton is possessed of a horror of commitment in both his personal and his political life. The armamentarium of minute differentia in sanctions allows Clinton to posture at length as a man...
A Hero of Texas-Sized Proportions
Christopher Danze is a hero of Texas proportions. The Austin concrete supplier has shut down construction of a Planned Parenthood abortuary by rallying his colleagues and competitors in the construction industry to boycott the project. Without concrete—to say nothing of plumbers, electricians, and carpenters (even the porta-john vendor has pulled out)—the project’s general contractor, Browning...
The Trojan Chicken
Albany, Kentucky, has a stay of execution for at least a little longer. But more than a few townspeople are preparing to mourn her passing—and leave before the funeral. Albany is a town of 2,000 in the rolling limestone hills of southern Kentucky, just north of the Tennessee line. Founded in the early 1820’s, it...
For Dancers Only: Remembering Swing
Bittersweet feelings swept over me, a child of swing, during a recent walk down Manhattan’s Times Square after an absence of several decades. At the end of the walk (Broadway and 42nd Street) two other feelings emerged: there’s a permanence in things notwithstanding change. And all of us are, inescapably, creatures of culture. I felt...
The Maze of Metaphor
Jacques Derrida has in recent years made himself one of the most influential figures in literary criticism on American college campuses. The movement he has inspired, alternately known as “deconstruction” or “poststructuralism,” asserts that all language is metaphorical and that there is nothing outside the literary text. Following Derrida’s lead, Joseph G. Kronick challenges the...
Demonizing the Orthodox
I teach seventh- and eighth-graders at the St. George Orthodox Church School in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, a purely volunteer task that takes 45 minutes out of my Sunday and two hours out of the rest of the week. The school, which extends from kindergarten to grade 12, is attached to St. George’s Church, the Antiochian...
Conservative Inc. Pretends to Discipline Its Own
During the last few days, those of us who have questioned Conservatism Inc.’s willingness to stand up to the cultural left seem to have received new allies. David Marcus at The Federalist, Thomas D. Klingenstein at the Claremont Institute, and the commentator Mark Steyn on Tucker Carlson’s program have all been taking shots at the...
Moldovan Elections: A Deadlock on Europe’s Periphery
Occupying some two thirds of the old czarist province of Bessarabia, with the rivers Dniester to the east and Prut to the west, the Republic of Moldova is a small, poor, landlocked state. Its parliamentary election, held on November 28, should have been irrelevant to anyone except the faraway country’s three and a half million people, of whom we know...