Addressing a Boston anti-slavery audience in 1865, abolitionist Frederick Douglass asked, “What shall we do with the Negro?” The answer he provided was a favorite of the conservative economist Walter E. Williams, though if Douglass were to utter it today he would probably be condemned by Black Lives Matter and deplatformed from social media: ...
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The Knack of the Non-Deal
An Arab-Israeli peace agreement is like a moderate Syrian rebel or rational leftist: It is possible to visualize, but producing one is daunting. Every attempt has failed. President Donald Trump’s “Peace to Prosperity” plan will be no exception. Hardly the “deal of the century,” it proposes the establishment of a disconnected, truncated Palestinian state with...
Taking a Stand in Warsaw
With a monument to the 1944 Warsaw Uprising as his backdrop, President Trump delivered a forceful speech on the eve of the G20 Summit, sounding themes that would not be welcome by most other leaders of the world’s most economically powerful countries. Trump identified “the fundamental question of our time” as whether “the West has...
Among the Lakes
My advice to anyone who wants to see some of the most polite people around is to get to Chile soon—before we declare war on it or the media level it into the likeness of a London suburb, with a bust of Lenin in every town hall, tax-funded homes for lesbians, and a veto on...
Truth and Public Truth
“It is as hard to tell the truth as to hide it.” —Baltasar Gracián While the conservative movement, like the liberal one, has its share of dishonest and fraudulent people, liberalism is itself an inherently dishonest business whose promulgators have been lying to themselves, as well as to everyone else, lo these many generations. As...
Laughter Will Win Against Totalitarianism
The gray, gloomy days of November have set in, and this year it seems harder than ever to banish them. I was feeling the oppression of these gray days when a note from a friend landed in my inbox. He made some joke in relation to election voter fraud and suddenly I found myself giggling....
The Worst O-limp-ics Ever
Never have so many won so many accolades for so few real achievements on the world stage. That about sums up the Olympics 2021 — or, as I call them, the O-limp-ics 2021. Indeed, the time has come to retire the hallowed motto of the Games: “Faster, Higher, Stronger.” In our modern age, it’s: “Woker,...
In Loco Parentis, Part II
My ten years of research have finally paid off. My article in the February 1991 Chronicles, “In Loco Parentis: The Brave New Family in Missouri,” has led to nationwide opposition to the Parents as Teachers (PAT) program that began here in Missouri. As a result of this article, I have been over whelmed with hundreds of...
The Way We Are, No. 10
According to the Constitution, Congress must declare war. However, the President is authorized to initiate an Overseas Contingency Operation whenever he chooses. It is said that a man is just as good as his word. That tells us everything we need to know about our politicians. An establishment “conservative” complains that Obama is “the first...
De Gustibus Semper Disputandum Est
I suppose this book might be called a coffee-table book. It has the shape and the lavish illustration of that kind of thing. And I suppose that of its kind, this book isn’t so bad, which is not to say that it’s good. The Sterns’ alphabetical survey of bad taste has the merit of some...
HUD Strikes Again
It may not be the start of the Great Middle American Revolution, but the reaction of residents in Lima, Ohio, to a heavy-handed public housing plan shows that some Americans are still willing to stand up for their communities. A declining industrial city of 45,000, Lima has seen its share of hard times in recent...
What the Editors Are Reading
How is it possible to describe Dostoevsky’s great but sometimes neglected novel, Notes From Underground, without provoking repugnance for the nameless anti- hero whose voice dominates its pages? He is, as he announces in the opening lines, “a sick man…a spiteful man,” yet for all his insight into the nature of his own malady, he...
Books in Brief: October 2021
Homo Americanus, by Zbigniew Janowski (St. Augustine’s Press; 250 pp., $24.00). Polish American political thinker Zbigniew Janowski examines the reasons that modern American democracy has taken a totalitarian turn. Contrary to the happy talk coming from establishment conservatives about the need to spread America’s so-called liberal democratic values everywhere, Janowski paints a dark but compelling...
Exiting Iraq: The Least Undesirable End
When a patient is diagnosed with lung cancer, it is tempting but not useful to harangue him on the evils of his three-pack-a-day habit. But when he refuses to kick that habit, or to accept its link with the disease, or even to acknowledge the seriousness of his condition, it is reasonable to assume that...
Time for the Truth About the Pandemic
We need the truth about what saved lives and what actually ended up killing our loved ones and neighbors.
Back at the Front
When Senator Jesse Helms was in his prime, one newspaperman described his crusades on the Senate floor as “stompin’ trompin’ ultra-right action.” Ultra-rightists of the Helmsian kidney were not offended, and most were despondent when the most reliable man on the right went into ideological hibernation during the Reagan-Bush years. Helms went after a few...
Pop Culture and Politics: Passing By the Train Wreck
If Macbeth were alive today, he would probably make an appearance in the public confessional with Oprah Winfrey and, in all likelihood, would emerge as a prime candidate for Big Brother or one of the other “reality” shows that crowd our airwaves. Macbeth would be helped to come to terms with his domestic issues and...
Tending the Abused Garden
Max Hayward: Writers in Russia: 1917-1978; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego, CA. by Charles A. Moser At the time of his premature death in 1979, Max Hayward was among the finest Western interpreters of contemporary Russian literature in the Soviet Union. As one of Britain’s most accomplished Slavists, he had obtained a research position at...
Can the GOP’s Shotgun Marriage Be Saved?
Wednesday morning, Nov. 9, 2016, Republicans awoke to learn they had won the lottery. Donald Trump had won the presidency by carrying Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. All three states had gone Democratic in the last six presidential elections. The GOP had won both houses of Congress. Party control of governorships and state legislatures rivaled the...
Homme Sérieux
Kipling should be a fascinating subject for literary history. He was enormously gifted and successful, the child of a modest, nonconformist Anglo-Scot family that, besides producing him, also produced his cousin, the conservative prime minister Stanley Baldwin. One of his aunts married Edward Burne-Jones; another married Sir James Baldwin, chairman of the Great Western Railway,...
Where’s the Baking Soda?
Nora Ephron is a genius at turning her personal life in to cash. In her essays, which she has collected in previous volumes, she has taken us to events and places including her college reunion, therapy group, and her amniocentesis. However, take away her individualized experiences and the essays become identical to those of every...
Left Turn In Greece
Security has always been a key issue for conservatives and nationalists worldwide. But that’s not the case in Greece. So voters in the homeland of democracy, displeased by riots and anarchy, the inability of the government to put down the protests, and the effects of the financial crisis, have reacted angrily against the “conservatives” on...
Denouncing ‘Imperial Congress’
“Imperial Congress”—many in the conservative movement are denouncing it these days. From all over the right, we hear worries about slipping presidential prerogatives, or denunciations of Congress’s “meddling” in foreign policy. But I would argue that it is the Imperial Presidency that threatens our freedom. Too often. Congress simply lays down in front of the...
The American Covenant
“It is extremely frustrating to write history today because so much effort must go toward correcting the countless distortions that have been inserted into accounts of our heritage by militant secularists who twist facts to suit their narrow anti-religious political agendas.” So writes Benjamin Hart near the end of Faith and Freedom: The Christian Roots...
Master of Your Domain
With the U.S. Supreme Court’s June decision in Kelo v. New London, the truth of this column’s conceit—that Rockford, Illinois, is a microcosm of America—has never been more clear. One of the running themes of this column since shortly after it began in 2001 as a “Letter From Rockford” has been the abuse of the...
A Penny for Your Chomsky
“O chom kolonka?” asked my son on the telephone. We’ve always spoken Russian to each other, he and I, even though Nikolai was born in London and never so much as visited the country of his father’s birth. “What’s your column going to be about?” I must admit I hadn’t known the answer till he’d...
More Power to the Faculty?
“More power to the faculty” is the current rallying cry of academic reformers. This idea pops up with a persistence that goes beyond ideological divides, appealing even to self-described academic traditionalists, who view professional administrators and boards of regents and trustees as philosophically out of tune. This criticism does seem valid if one looks at...
Suffer the Little Children—March 2011
beyond the revolution To Save One Child by Thomas Fleming views Growing Up Too Fast by Christopher Sandford Going Down With the Good Ship Lollipop by Jack Trotter news Interview With the Archbishop of Kirkuk by Alberto Carosa reviews A Life Rediscovered by John Willson American Cicero: The Life of Charles Carroll by Bradley J. Birzer The Elusive Conflict by H.A. Scott Trask The American Civil War: ...
The Magic of Memory and ‘Holiday Inn’
Today we face a serious bout of historical amnesia, be it in the collective sense or as individuals. We all desperately need some connection to the past. Films like Holiday Inn give us an opportunity to become custodians of Americana.
America and France Turn Right
In Sunday’s first-round of regional elections in France, the clear and stunning winner was the National Front of Marine Le Pen. Her party rolled up 30 percent of the vote, and came in first in 6 of 13 regions. Marine herself won 40 percent of her northeast district. Despite tremendous and positive publicity from his...
Iraq as “Intelligence Failure”: We Told You So
“W,” a.k.a. “our Commander in Chief,” is apparently even more blindly stubborn and willfully ignorant than I had thought. As of this writing (December 2006), he is still distancing himself from the Iraq Study Group’s efforts to provide him cover for a withdrawal from the Middle East morass he has drawn us into. Bush Senior,...
A Failure of Intelligence
“Al Qaeda is on the run, Osama bin Laden is dead,” President Obama announced at a rally in Des Moines on the eve of last year’s presidential election. Less than a year later it is evident that, contrary to Obama’s assurances, Al Qaeda is alive and well, along with other Islamic terrorist networks. The jihadists...
The Grip on Comedy Slips
Comedy has long been under the left’s control, as just one province of the U.S. entertainment empire centered in Hollywood—which is itself a bastion of leftist control over mainstream culture. But comedy is a rebellious province by its nature, as what comics and their audiences find funny is often the opposite of what the left...
Creating a “New Economy”
Al Gore, in a recent address to the National Council of La Raza, the militant Hispanic organization, credited Latinos for creating “a new economy in America” and said “not enough Latinos are participating [in its benefits]. We have a lot of work to do, and we will not rest until everyone in the community shares...
Liar From the Beginning
Aaron D. Wolf is absolutely right to argue that, from a Christian perspective, J.J. Rousseau is the fountainhead of political evil in our day (“Ignoble Savages,” January-March, Heresies). Indeed, the Prince of this World has been rejoicing in Christianity’s shameless pandering to the courtesan Mlle Égalité, ever since the catastrophe of the First Republic. Rousseau...
A New Deal—April 2009
PERSPECTIVE Dead Romans and Live Americans by Thomas Fleming VIEWS
The Bowe Bergdahl Gaffe
Back in 1988 Michael Kinsley (in the Times of London) famously defined the gaffe as the occasion when “a politician tells the truth.” Kinsley himself immediately watered down his elegant definition by adding “some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say,” as if the code of the politician did not require him to be uniformly...
Do We Need Economic Reform at All?
If there is anything that we should have learned from the 20th century, it is that socialism turned out to be a colossal failure. That was not, however, obvious to large numbers of Americans at the time. Though they might not have bought into full-blown socialism, many 20th-century American intellectuals, economists, and politicians insisted that...
The Reel World & the Real One
Robots: Facts Behind the Fiction by Michael Chester; Macmillan; New York. An associate, a PR representative for a leading manufacturer of industrial robots, did what fathers are want to do when their children come home from school with projects, in this case for a science fair: he gave his daughter some assistance. Given his vocational...
Missed Opportunity
Last November, South Dakota’s pro-life community was a united force. Conditions had changed significantly by the end of February, when the effort to ban almost all abortions in the state suffered its second major defeat in less than four months, this time through the votes of eight state senators who killed a bill in committee...
Red Over Black
For hundreds of years, perhaps thousands, the Indians of North America practiced slavery. Until the 18th century, those enslaved, for the most part, were other Indians. The tribes of the Pacific Northwest, for example, raided constantly, principally to secure slaves. The populations of some villages were one-third slave. There is even an instance of a...
When Experts Attack
For over 30 years, the churches of America have been declining; their numbers, plummeting. Each year, a new set of numbers emerges from the various denominational headquarters, telling the tale. The liberal Protestant Mainlines are in the worst shape, as the figures for 2006 to 2007 indicate. According to the National Council of Churches, the...
The Yellow Brick Road to Jobs and Stability
“Let the Yankees Freeze in the Dark” read the bumper stickers in Texas in February 1982, the month I flew back from West Germany, mustered out of the U.S. Army at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and returned to my hometown of Wayne, Michigan. Oil had soared from $3.60 per barrel in 1972 to $37.42 in...
Road to Damascus
Unrest in Syria has discomforted rather than shaken the regime of Bashar Al-Assad. It is an even bet that he will survive, which is preferable to any likely alternative. There are several reasons he will not end up like Ben Ali or Mubarak. Bashar is popular with a large segment of the population, especially among...
Why you should see the silents, part I
Silent movies are to movies in toto as classical Greek and Roman drama is to all of European drama. Of course, cinema is one of the latest progeny of the classical dramatic tradition, so one can’t claim the silents invented any wheels in terms of plot and characterization; those haven’t changed since Euripides and Menander....
Sounds of the Sixties
To address the main question first: Yes, they really can. That’s the definitive answer to America’s burning cultural debate of the 1960’s about whether or not the Monkees could actually play their musical instruments. Perhaps you remember the general contours of the arguments pro and con: on the one hand, that the Monkees were four...
Wiring to the Future
The current debate over the so-called cyberstream, the data highway that futurists promise will lead us to a technoutopia, has many people bewildered, so dense is it with rhetoric and empty assertion. This is not surprising: most of the debate is filled by boosters of gadgetry on the one hand, by neo-Luddites on the other....
Dress Rehearsal for Impeachment
Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court was approved on an 11-10 party-line vote Friday in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Yet his confirmation is not assured. Sen. Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, has demanded and gotten as the price of his vote on the floor, a weeklong delay. And the GOP Senate has agreed...
Still Sorry After All These Years
With all the mud spattered on the Confederate Battle Flag of late, you knew it wouldn’t be long before Ol’ Virginny scrubbed up for Jamestown’s 400th anniversary with a grandiloquent apology for slavery. And Georgia, New York, and other former colonies of the original 13 will soon join the state in the confessional tub and...
Jonathan Pollard: Drug abusing fraud or Zionist hero?
Recently, American Jewish naval intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard who is serving a life sentence for espionage in favor of Israel has reentered the news. Apparently, the Obama administration is strongly considering his early release in exchange for Israeli concessions in the “peace process”. Israel only admitted that Pollard was their agent in 1998, thirteen whole...