“By retaining one’s love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable.” —George Orwell With the death of Edward Abbey, aged 62, in March of last year, the Western portion of what once was really the United States lost her greatest defender of...
The year 2019 was an eventful one in Polish politics. Out of a boring and meaningless dispute between two wings of Polish liberalism, there arose a new political force determined to shake up Poland’s political culture. Eleven MPs from the new Confederation Party appeared in the Polish Parliament, the Sejm, after last October’s parliamentary elections....
By the end of last summer, it had become transparently obvious, even to the graying stallions of the “conservative movement,” that organized conservatism in the United States since the 1950’s has been a colossal failure. The failure has been clear enough to most percipient Americans for perhaps a decade or more (an essay I published...
In the Year of Our Lord 1878, on the sixth day of the sixth month of the year, was born to one Augustín Arango and his wife, Micaela Arambula, humble peasants on the Rancho de la Loyotada in Durango State, Republic of Mexico, a son, Doroteo, known to posterity as Francisco “Pancho” Villa: social bandit,...
“No modern precedent exists for the revival of a party so badly defeated, so intensely discredited, and so essentially split as the Republican Party is today.” Taken from The Party That Lost Its Head by Bruce Chapman and George Gilder, this excerpt, about Barry Goldwater’s defeat in 1964, led Thursday’s column by E.J. Dionne of...
One of Donald Trump’s signature issues during the presidential campaign was his assertion that bad trade deals had cost millions of American manufacturing jobs, and his promise to do something to reverse that doleful trend. As with many of Trump’s assertions, these claims brought only scorn from the purveyors of respectable opinion, who insisted either...
President Obama continues to keep secret the documents on the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. Congressmen can see the documents only if they pledge not to reveal the contents. Then why doesn’t Congress just subpoena the entire contents of the documents and publish them on the website of the Library of Congress? In 2003 the Congressional...
'Terrorist Minds' illustrates a consistent blind spot on the part of terrorism scholars—left-wing terrorism.
“Culture does not exist autonomously,” wrote Robert Nisbet in The Quest for Community; “it is set always in the context of social relationships.” The implications of Nisbet’s statement should be obvious, but in the age of “social” media, when we speak of “long-distance relationships” with “friends” we have never met, the obvious too often gets...
“When people talk of the freedom of writing, speaking, or thinking I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists; but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more.” —John Adams...
It is past time that conservatives actually play to win at the U.S. Supreme Court.
Scott P. Richert remembers local historian Jon Lundin. We’re about 50 miles east of Toledo, cruising along the Ohio Turnpike on our way to Cleveland for the wedding of longtime Chronicles contributor Tom Piatak. Satisfied from a lunch of cabbage rolls, ...
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...
One hot evening at the end of August I was walking up South Michigan Avenue with an Irish-American linguist on the way to eat in a German-American restaurant. The news was filled with reports on the NATO bombing raids against the Bosnian Serbs, but no one on the street seemed to care that an American...
Pat Buchanan’s October 25 announcement that he would seek the presidential nomination of the Reform Party was greeted with contempt by Republican commentators. After all, Buchanan has twice failed to capture the Republican nomination, and in his third time out, he barely registered in the polls. His moment had passed, they argued, or perhaps he’d...
Retroculture: Taking America Back, by William S. Lind (Arktos Media; 212 pp., $18.95). One of the editors of this publication practically laughed in my face when I recently proclaimed myself a “city girl.” “You’re not a city girl,” he snorted, “you are Little House on the Prairie all the way!” Had he read Bill Lind’s latest,...
Last June, the 19,000 delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention voted to boycott the Walt Disney Company for its “promotion of homosexuality” and the other “anti-family” values. The convention pointed to Gay and Lesbian Days sponsored by Disney theme parks; to such twisted fare as Priest, Powder, and Kids, all films produced by Disney’s Miramax;...
Did Pat Buchanan’s politics fail? That is not a question Joseph Scotchie’s biography explicitly seeks to answer, but it is one that a reader of the book cannot help asking. As the Reform Party’s candidate, in his third and last presidential bid, Buchanan earned less than one percent of the vote. In his exposition of...
Peruse left-wing media reports and Twitter trends and one will discover that claims that “Trump won” are labeled as misinformation. Polling numbers, however, show that many Americans hold exactly the opposite view, and think that Biden’s claim to the presidency is questionable. Underlying such contention is the thorny question of who is and who...
“Ideas rule the world and its events. A revolution is a passage of an idea from theory to practice. Whatever men say, material interests never have caused and never will cause a revolution.” —Mazzini My grandmother, the daughter of a Confederate “high private,” always said that if someone had done something particularly good, you could...
Christian believers will remember Benedict XVI as a great teacher of the faith who was never willing to subject Christianity to the destructive standards of post-Christian Western culture.
This September marks 16 years since the fateful day we simply call 9/11, when 19 Islamic jihadists caused the deaths of some 3,000 people in New York, D.C., and Pennsylvania. Less than a month after that horrible day, Operation Enduring Freedom began, as the United States invaded the “land of the Pashtuns,” Afghanistan. We’re still...
Lincoln’s war against Southern independence is just one component of the American Civil War. Like a Matryoshka doll, the Civil War opens up to reveal a set of nested wars, one inside another. There is Lincoln’s war against international law; his war against the Congress; his war against the judiciary; his war against the Bill...
How some classical liberals are using a word that describes the left to gatekeep the right.
ROCKFORD, Ill., Jan. 14, 2015—After several months of successful work as Vice President, Thomas Piatak has been named President of The Rockford Institute by the Institute’s Board of Directors. Former President Thomas Fleming will continue to guide the Institute’s flagship publication as editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. Mr. Piatak has been writing...
Twenty-two years ago Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb. In an effort to dramatize his thesis, he included a number of scenarios about the future. These tended to obscure the thrust of his work, for many viewed them as predictions. When they failed to come to pass, it was easy—especially for conservatives—to conclude that Ehrlich’s...
Literary feuds, like ideas, have consequences. After Sir Walter Scott read a disparaging review of his Marmion in the Edinburgh Review, the bard of the Borders decided that what British life needed above all was a journal that would give his works more respectful treatment and would provide a powerful antidote to the Whiggish and...
William F. Buckley, for all his strengths, left behind a deeply flawed magazine and movement, which was very much to his demerit.
Sometimes a bellwether issue isn’t the most important issue. Abortion is more important than this week’s U.S. Senate vote on Trade Promotion Authority. But abortion is a decades-old issue that has involved many battles, and still does. The TPA vote, which affirmed the House vote, is a clear issue that shows who’s really in power....
Tony Blair is mad—really mad. Nasty people keep blowing up things in his London, and he is going to do something about it. At a press conference in late July, he told the world that he wants to make it illegal for British subjects to leave Britain for advanced terrorist training in Pakistan. The hidden...
In the Shadow of the Gods chronicles the charismatic and influential movers of history, known as emperors.
It is important to be clear-eyed about the task ahead for President-elect Donald Trump.
Last Saturday, during lunch with Scott Richert and Aaron Wolf at Rockford’s Prairie Street Brewhouse, I expressed suspicion that the coup in Turkey—just over 24 hours old at that time, and in the final stages of collapse—was Erdogan’s Reichstag fire: a stage-managed event, carried out by clueless stooges, meant to enhance the power of the...
Article IV of the Constitution addresses the obligations of the federal government to the state governments that were being asked to surrender aspects of their sovereignty to form our new Union. “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government,” reads Article IV, “and shall protect each of...
The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties; by Christopher Caldwell; New York: Simon & Schuster; 352 pp., $28.00 The social and legal order that emerged from the civil rights movement of the 1960s now dominates public life. While Christopher Caldwell seems to accept in his new book the view of that movement as at least initially a...
Dangerous anti-female attitudes are invading our country because of open borders.
It was eight o’clock Moscow time when the overcrowded British Airways Jet landed at Sheremetevo Airport. Liberated from our Iron Maiden seats—BA seems to have squeezed in an additional seat per row—we made our way into the arrival hall, happily anticipating if not a good Russian dinner, then at least something to eat. The barely...
Donald Trump’s reputation as a champion of the American middle class is long-established and real.
“National aspirations must be respected; peoples may now be dominated and governed only by their own consent. ‘Self-determination’ is not a mere phrase. It is an imperative principle of action, which statesmen will henceforth ignore at their peril.” Woodrow Wilson’s words, recorded in the New York Times on February 12,1918, defined the 20th century and...
Trump’s best chance in 2024 is to ignore the noise and prove, contrary to the smear campaigns, that he is the superior candidate in terms of competence, stability, and sanity.
In the February issue, “My Country—White or Wrong,” Chilton Williamson and Scott Richert criticize white nationalism. I write in reply as someone who has been called a “white nationalist”—whatever that term may mean. First, Mr. Williamson’s sensibilities are so close to my own that his critique may be based on a misunderstanding. He writes of...
The New York Mob ain’t dead, but it’s far from the robust times it enjoyed when the five New York crime families— Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese, and Lucchese—single-handedly controlled the city’s powerful labor unions and ran roughshod over the burgeoning construction, trucking, garbage-hauling, and garment industries. Federal, state, and local law enforcement officials, who have...
Fifteen years after I arrived in the West, I can no longer recall how I first became aware of Edward Abbey, though I do know that I had been the book editor of a national magazine for nearly four years before the name penetrated my consciousness. (The parochialism of the New York literati.) But I...
Amid an eloquent diatribe against the “woke” left and its friends in the Deep State, Fox News host Tucker Carlson attributed to American Deplorables a sentiment that may more accurately reflect his own feelings: “All they want to do is go back to how things were in 2005.” I heard myself responding out loud...
The unconstitutional Obama executive order known as DACA was rescinded by the Trump DOJ on September 5. Even as the courageous and unassuming A.G. Jeff Sessions made the announcement, thousands of tweets painted him as a hood-donning white-supremacist Russian agent. Nancy Pelosi effectively called for more public displays of Antifa violence across the fruited plain,...
The Reagan Administration’s Baby Doe policy is finally being tested in the Supreme Court. Supporters see the law as a necessary guarantee of the rights of handicapped infants whose lives are threatened by selfish parents and amoral physicians. The Federal government has a positive obligation, they insist, to send investigation teams—Baby Doe Squads, as they...
The trouble with last week’s elections for the European Parliament is that its results offer grounds for widely different interpretations of their meaning. Too many glasses are half-full or half-empty. One thing is certain: the upsurge of Euroskeptic, sovereignist-identitarian parties – feared by some, hoped for by others – has not materialized. The EU is...
The death of the sainted George Floyd has proven to be the ideal pretext for the left to accelerate its campaign of dismantling the markers of American historical identity. With lavish corporate and philanthropic support, radical activists are “resetting” America. This means mandating the instruction of Critical Race Theory in public schools; replacing the American...
Less than a month after President Bush unbosomed his latest reflections on political philosophy before the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, one of the latest victims of his administration’s crusade to foster the “global democratic revolution” in Iraq was grousing that what the administration planned for his country simply wasn’t democratic enough. The Grand...