During Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign for president, when his fortunes were at their nadir, Joe Biden promised that he would nominate the first black woman to the United States Supreme Court. He reportedly made this pledge to James Clyburn (D-S.C.), the powerful African-American congressman, in return for Clyburn’s help in securing the black vote in...
Jeffrey Bell is perhaps the most experienced conservative political advisor in Washington, D.C. Once a key Reagan campaign advisor, Bell later became a political candidate himself, scoring a stunning primary upset against a seated Republican senator in New Jersey only to lose in the general election to Democrat Bill Bradley. Bell, a graduate of Columbia...
A guide to the Neil Gorsuch nomination uproar: If you want the federal government to exercise greater and greater power over daily life in America, with minimum backtalk from us, the people, you deplore the prospective elevation of Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court. If, by contrast, you regard the expansion or contraction...
I can’t think of a political speech in recent decades that more rattles around the back of the conscious of the American mind than Pat Buchanan’s “Culture Wars” speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston. It even overshadows Reagan’s last major speech at the same convention before he slipped into the night of...
As a cradle Catholic and recipient of Notre Dame’s Laetare Medal, Joe Biden is outspoken in declaring that the principles and beliefs of his Catholic faith guide his public life. “Joe is a man of faith,” was a recurring theme at the Democratic convention that nominated him to become our second Catholic president. Biden has...
The elevation of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court formalizes state-sponsored injustice in the very institution charged with upholding justice.
Rabbi Mayer Schiller was a close friend of Thomas Molnar, Sam Francis, and Joe Sobran. I described his life and views in a VDARE column some years ago. Rabbi Schiller is a staunchly paleoconservative Hassidic rabbi living in internal exile in the manner of Soviet dissidents in upstate New York and teaches at a prestigious...
Trying to be the chief intellectual in the Republican Party is probably a little like trying to be an admiral in the Swiss navy, but in the last year or so, that is more or less what Bill Kristol has become. The son of neoconservative godfather Irving Kristol, young Bill made his bones by billing...
During the Republican presidential debate on May 15, Ron Paul, the constitutionalist from Texas, flatly stated that the terrorist attacks on September 11 were retaliation for U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Rudy Giuliani shot back a mendacious rejoinder: “That’s an ...
I have previously suggested in these pages that the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Obergefell v. Hodges—the five-to-four decision which declared that two Americans of the same sex have a constitutionally guaranteed right to marry each other—may be the worst in the history of the Court. First, there was no adequate legal or constitutional basis...
Bache. Cobbett’s modest ambition to leave his country nornworse than he found it is the political equivalent of the Hippocraticrninjunction to do no harm.rnAdversarial journalism has had a long history in Britain andrnAmerica, and some of the best of it has been reactionary: thernessavs of Swift, Johnson, and Coleridge; and in America, thernnewspaper and magazine...
Right Samuel Francis’s remarks (“The Abortion Gambit,” October 1994) on the efforts by neoconservatives, especially Bill Kristol, to co-opt the religious right are convincingly presented. Francis rightly notes that Kristol, Bennett, and other neocon movers and shakers are working to control the religious right and thereby to provide themselves with a mass base that they...
Questions concerning the relationship between morality and law were reignited when, during the Republican primary campaign, Donald Trump commented on the matter of abortion and (implicitly) women’s rights. When pressed by a journalist, Trump stated that, yes, women should be “punished” if their behavior is illegal or contrary to prevailing community standards. Though abortion is...
“I’ve got a little list, I’ve got a little list,” twitters the Lord High Executioner in a famous line of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, and indeed these days who doesn’t have one? Abortion protester Paul Hill seems to have had a little list of his own, and early in the morning on July 28 of...
“You want to go see Bo Gritz burn the U.N. flag?” My libertarian neighbor Bill, during the final days of the last presidential campaign, was making me an offer I couldn’t refuse. I have always been half-frustrated by mv failure to take advantage of all those radical activities in my college days during the 60’s....
John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin to be his running mate was surprising, but the surprise pales in comparison to the reaction of conservative Christians, especially Catholics. In their race to endorse McCain-Palin, they have cast aside any questions about the complementarity of the sexes, or even the late John Paul II’s theology of the...
As fall turned into winter, there were unmistakable signs of paleoconservative dissatisfaction with President Trump. In various forums, several paleoconservatives expressed displeasure that Trump had surrounded himself with unrepentant Bush Republicans and neoconservatives; that he was listening too much to his daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, who may be even further to the...
Aaron D. Wolf’s condemnation of civil disobedience by pro-life activists (Cultural Revolutions, October) strikes me as a classic case of sloppy thinking, characterized by what Hannah Arendt called the inability to grasp elementary distinctions. Wolf’s sweeping denial that one may break the law even for a good cause is not good law. There exists in...
Some republicans object to using the term nuclear option to describe their plan to end filibusters on the Senate floor during confirmation hearings, but the image of total war is a fitting one for the possible direction of the “upper chamber” these days. The 11th-hour compromise between the squishes in both parties will only serve...
Your March 2004 issue (“Straight Eye for the Queer Guy”) was valuable in many ways, not least because the cascading phenomenon of enthusiasm for “gay marriage” or “civil unions” both reveals and contributes mightily to our society’s increasingly rapid slide into what Pitirim Sorokin called the “social sewer.” Stephen B. Presser puts his finger on...
A debate has broken out over the continuing viability of the “fusion” of libertarians and conservatives. If the latter are represented by President George W. Bush and the 109th Congress, the alliance seems dead. Concocting a coalition of libertarians and liberals isn’t going to be any easier, however. Brink Lindsey of the Cato Institute has attempted...
“Supreme Court sharply limits presidential power on recess appointments.” Thus read the headline in the Los Angeles Times after the High Court’s decision in National Labor Relations Board v. Canning. Applying its spin to the decision, National Review opined that “the Court rejected the administration’s power grab on recess appointments” and clarified when a recess...
When Republicans were warned not to give Sonia Sotomayor the drubbing Democrats gave Robert Bork and Sam Alito—lest they be perceived as sexist and racist by women and Hispanics—the threat was credible, for it underscored a new reality in American politics. The Supreme Court, far from being the last redoubt of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant...
From the June 2002 issue of Chronicles. There are probably more judicial biographies of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall than of all the rest of the Supreme Court justices combined, so why another one? R. Kent Newmyer, historian and law professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law, undertook to write a work...
Help Us FightrnOur oouthem Â¥rno Saverneritage!rn”Civil Rights” groups have launched a campaign to eliminaternALL symbols of Confederate history and heritage, including thernremoval of all Confederate monuments from public property!rnIf you’re ready to fight back, then Join A Winning Team!rnThe Heritage Preservation AssociationrnHPA is a nonprofit, national membership organization thatrnutilizes educational, legal and political resources to...
Since 1935, a branch of psychiatry specializing in hereditary illnesses and abnormalities known as “behavioral eugenics” has been warning of rampant mental illness. Dr. Franz J. Kallmann, who came to America in the mid-1930’s after having served under Ernst Rüdin, head of Hitler’s “racial hygiene” program, argued in favor of “psychiatric genetics” even after he...
Virginia is a newly blue state, with a Democratic governor and two Democratic senators, that Joe Biden won by 10 points. Hence, former Gov. Terry McAuliffe was an early and solid favorite to regain the office he vacated in 2017. But if McAuliffe loses Tuesday, the defeat will be measured on the Richter scale. For...
The November 2011 issue of Chronicles has a major problem on page five. In “Aborted Economy” (American Proscenium), John C. Seiler, Jr., writes, and the editors boldly highlight in a pull-quote, a statement about “the 1973 class of ‘fetal matter,’ as the pro-aborts call them.” I have reread the article several times looking for support...
During the Republican presidential debate on May 15, Ron Paul, the constitutionalist from Texas, flatly stated that the terrorist attacks on September 11 were retaliation for U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Rudy Giuliani shot back a mendacious rejoinder: “That’s an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that...
Pat Buchanan’s new biography of Richard Nixon’s presidency is the first volume anyone looking at that tumultuous time should turn to. Having served as Nixon’s researcher and speechwriter starting in 1966, Buchanan, not yet 30, followed the victorious President into the White House in 1969. In Nixon’s White House Wars, Buchanan makes it clear that Nixon’s tragic...
American interest is lacking, and its interventionrnwould be misunderstood.rnThe United States, Steel writes, has “nornresponsibility to defend break-away statesrnthat unilaterally declare their independence.”rnCertainly it must not lead anyrn”global fire brigade.”rnThere is one sense in which Steel hasrnsomething in common with many isolationists;rnthis concerns his claim thatrnthreats to American security are now internal.rnAmericans suffer from a...
The promoters of infanticide have a new weapon in their arsenal. “Storytelling” is the new “safe, legal, and rare” of the pro-abortion movement. See as Exhibit A the new HBO documentary, Abortion: Stories Women Tell, released a few weeks ago in select theaters. The film focuses on women in Missouri, a state where only one abortion...
“He that is proud eats himself up; pride is his own glass, his own trumpet, his own chronicle.” —William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida What shall we say of Garry Wills who, with a doctorate in the classics, once purportedly showed promise as a conservative intellectual, only to become the historian-icon of...
ChroniclesrnA M A G A Z I N E OF A M E R I C A N C U L T U RErnPERSPECTIVErnThe Lesson of the Roaring Parrotrnby Thomas FlemingrnThe case for religious boycotts.rn14rnVIEWSrnEpiscopal Follies by Philip Jenkins 18rnLinguistic and liturgical radicalism.rnJustice and Its Harvesters by Thomas Molnar 21rnThe National Conference of Catholic Bishops.rnThe...
Secular anti-Catholicism can fairly be described as the ruling ideology of the modern Republic of Ireland. In no other country do politicians and the media so openly, persistently, and savagely attack the Catholic Church. In no other country do leading politicians seek to score political points by launching virulent attacks on the Church and all...
You really can’t have “gay marriage,” you know, irrespective of what a court or a legislature may say. You can have something some people call gay marriage because to them the idea sounds worthy and necessary, but to say a thing is other than it is, is to stand reality on its head, hoping to...
Pat Buchanan’s new biography of Richard Nixon’s presidency is the first volume anyone looking at that tumultuous time should turn to. Having served as Nixon’s researcher and speechwriter starting in 1966, Buchanan, not yet 30, followed the victorious President into the White House in 1969. In Nixon’s White House Wars, Buchanan makes it clear that...
This scrupulously objective book may be considered a gift to conservatives who have long despaired about the possibility of principled legal tenets regularly prevailing in Supreme Court opinions. For decades this long-suffering group has watched Republican Supreme Court appointees concur in various left-wing crackpot decisions that have become the law of the land. Thankfully, such...
William J. Brennan, Jr., has retired from the Supreme Court. In three decades on the nation’s highest court Brennan did more, perhaps, than any other American politician except for Lyndon Johnson to promote the agenda of the liberal left: the antiwhite racism of the “Jim Snow” system, radical feminism, the reduction of the authority of...
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...