“Jan. 6, 2021, is not over, but it already lives in infamy. A sitting president of the United States, having lost re-election, incited a mob to storm the Capitol as the Congress sat in joint session to certify the Electoral College vote. This act was without precedent. It was based on a lie, fed by...
I enjoyed Dr. Thomas Fleming’s “Topsy-Turvy” (Perspective, June). But I thought his gratuitous denigration of Jakob Dylan both unnecessary and ill informed. I am not some Jakob Dylan “fanboy”; in fact, the only album I had owned is the Wallflowers’ 1996 Bringing Down the Horse, which is a fine piece of pop music. Dr. Fleming’s...
State Department Foreign Service Officers are an elite group. Well-educated, fluent in foreign languages, knowledgeable of foreign cultures, they help inform U.S. foreign policy and carry out its day-to-day implementation. Entry into the Foreign Service is highly competitive. Annually, over 20,000 hopefuls take the Foreign Service exam: in recent years the State Department has hired...
Do you look forward to living in a majority nonwhite country, which the U.S. is predicted to be in a few decades? Will you take a lie detector test about this? Do you look forward to your descendants living in such a country? Have you ever thought about your descendants at all? Did your...
One of the dumber remarks of the 1984 Presidential campaign—a campaign notable for its dumb remarks—came from Joe Frank Harris, governor of Georgia. Asked if he approved of Geraldine Ferraro, he replied: “Yes. I asked her if she had eaten grits and liked them, and she said, ‘Yes’—and she passed the test.” He should have...
Barack Obama has just taken his first baby steps into a war in Syria that may define and destroy his presidency. Thursday, while he was ringing in Gay Pride Month with LGBT revelers, a staffer, Ben Rhodes, informed the White House press that U.S. weapons will be going to the Syrian rebels. For two...
The creative writing students in the small seminar room at Ateneo University in Metro Manila were answering my question about the relation of language to politics in the Philippines. With that youthful energy that is each generation’s greatest natural resource they talked about the “feudal system” Filipinos have lived under, about the centrality of village...
“The Jewish people were building Jerusalem 3,000 years ago, and the Jewish people are building Jerusalem today. Jerusalem is not a settlement. It is our capital.” With this defiant declaration, to a thunderous ovation at AIPAC, Benjamin Netanyahu informed the United States that East Jerusalem, taken from Jordan in the Six Day War, is not...
President Barack Obama surprised even battle-hardened pro-life Americans with his official remarks on the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that has, since 1973, littered garbage dumps across America with the corpses of 50 million babies, 32 percent of them African-American. In a White House press ...
Informing Iran, “The U.S. is watching what you do,” Amb. Nikki Haley called an emergency meeting Friday of the Security Council regarding the riots in Iran. The session left her and us looking ridiculous. France’s ambassador tutored Haley that how nations deal with internal disorders is not the council’s concern. Russia’s ambassador suggested the United...
On September 25, 1789, Congress submitted to the states for ratification ten amendments to the 1787 Constitution, known as the Bill of Rights. Seldom is there much serious reflection on the issues involved in a “Bill of Rights,” but there was a great deal in 1787-1789. Those Americans were highly informed political thinkers, versed in...
The American educational system at every level is an immensely expensive obstacle to culture and learning. America is not a Christian county. It is a post-Christian country. Ex-President Bush is guilty of great crimes and has done his country irreparable damage. (Although only an insignificant handful of people have noticed.) By launching ...
The Jury is the greatest achievement of the Anglo-Saxon legal system. No matter how much pressure from kings and lords, or in our ease politicians and the media, “twelve good men and true” can do the right thing, so to speak. And that is exactly what they did in the case of Rodney King, although...
Srdja Trifkovic’s Interview on RT International Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a leading advocate of NATO’s bombing of Serbia in 1999, will be an advisor to Serbia’s Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic, who was Milosevic’s information minister at that time. Five years later Vucic edited Seselj’s book which referred to Blair as “that English faggot...
At CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Conference), U.S. Rep. Allen West (R-FL) cited the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act as the cause of the financial crisis. He has a point: As long as Glass-Steagall was in place, we had no systemic collapse. Banks that were busy underwriting crazy subprime securities—synthetic CDOs, synthetic CDOs squared,...
Cui bono? That is the question to ask now that the fur and feathers have settled from the celebrated January match between gamecock Vice President Bush and wildcat Dan Rather. Clearly the answer is George Bush. Before the encounter Bush had two serious liabilities: a general impression of wimpishness and a lingering taint (at least...
In “‘Bless the Lord, All You Works of the Lord’: Nature and the Incarnation” (Views, December 2001), Scott P. Richert asserts that “modern environmentalist thought” seeks to preserve a closed, idyllic system through the exclusion of man. This is either disingenuous or uninformed; either way, it is a wholly inaccurate characterization of modern environmentalism. While...
Free speech, open inquiry, and serious academic discussion are now being construed as the fruits of racism, white supremacy, sexism, or homophobia in my state of North Carolina. Differing points of view, once the hallmark of our college education system, are now routinely suppressed, and increasingly by professors and pusillanimous administrators at our universities. A...
The American news media with hardly any exceptions is propagating a falsehood, a lie which is fatal to what remains of the old American republic. Practically all our political leaders, including most Republicans and establishment conservatives, have bought into it. America at its core, goes the narrative, is a racist society, drenched in historic systemic...
Proust wrote, in Time Regained, that “Style is a question not of technique, but of vision.” Technique may be said to inform and undergird the style, but the artistic vision has priority: It is the style. In Charles Edward Eaton’s recent collection, his 17th, comprising new verse (some published previously in Chronicles) and a generous...
The New York Post‘s editorial page has been one of the few bright spots in the City of Dreadful Night. Generally a steamy tabloid in its news coverage, the Post has nevertheless offered thoughtful and informed editorials and Commentary of a mainstream conservative orientation under its editorial page editor, neoconservative Eric Breindel, and his deputy,...
If you think the removal of the Confederate Battle Flag from the grounds of the South Carolina capitol was the end of flag controversy, you may be surprised to learn that an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times declared, “It’s time California dump” the Bear Flag, “a symbol of blatant illegality and racial prejudice. ...
Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life; by Zena Hitz; Princeton University Press; 240 pp., $22.95 “What do I need to know for the test?” This common refrain, repeated endlessly by high school and undergraduate students, sums up one of the great heresies of our age: the view that learning is a...
Recently The Michelle Obama Podcast revealed shocking information that should concern all white people. “When I’ve been completely incognito during the eight years in the White House, walking the dogs on the canal,” Obama explained, “people will come up and pet my dogs, but will not look me in the eye. They don’t know it’s me.” She further...
When Magic Johnson announced that he was retiring from basketball because he had tested positive for the HIV virus, the nation fell into the kind of cultural coma that is all too common in recent history. The national television networks interrupted regularly scheduled programs for live coverage of Magic’s news conference and ran nightly retrospectives...
Traveling to Philadelphia Tuesday, President Joe Biden laid out in apocalyptic terms the gravity of the “threat” to American democracy from Republican efforts to reform and rewrite state election laws. We are facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War. That’s not hyperbole. Since the Civil War. The Confederates back then...
Ronald Blythe: Characters and Their Landscapes; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego. Central though it is to any sound system of economics, the traditional notion of private property is wholly inadequate in the world of literature. As Henry David Thoreau once observed: I have frequently seen a poet withdraw, having enjoyed the most valuable part of...
The second law of thermodynamics poses a problem for evolutionary biologists. While it seems to predict increasing disorder over time, the record of evolution suggests ever-increasing order and higher levels of organization. The common solution to the paradox was to look for a balance between organic systems and their environment. Perhaps there was, as Schrodinger...
When Abraham Lincoln tried to explain the issue between North and South, he said it was a test of the conception on which America had been founded, “a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Lincoln, inadvertently revealing the principle on which a revolution was being...
The reincarnation of Hitler in some national leader and the heroism of Churchill, both stand-by props of neoconservatives, rear their head again in a recent commentary by Daniel Gelernter. Expecting neocons to abandon their continual reference of these props would be comparable to asking the Democratic Party to stop talking about “systemic racism” or Mike Pompeo to...
It was not a letter to the editor, for which a tolerant journal needs not be responsible, but an article, something featured as information, so that its laudable attitude is more than a mere expression of opinion. There we read: Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called communists….Is it not to the everlasting...
Whether it ends with a whimper or a bang, the American Empire is ending. WikiLeaks shows that the empire can no longer control the dissemination of information. Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen show it can no longer militarily defeat insurgencies. Brazil, China, Iran, Russia, Turkey, and even Bolivia show it can no longer dictate the foreign...
In the third book of his Ancien Régime, Alexis de Tocqueville takes up the intellectual origins of the French Revolution. AT notes the at first sight strange phenomenon, that in absolutist France intellectuals were free to challenge the most fundamental political, social, and religious institutions and beliefs. While each “philosopher” had his own system and...
An article I read lately informs me that the Southern accent is endangered: the “post-vocalic r,” the absence of which has heretofore characterized most Southerners’ speech, is creeping in, especially in middle-class circles, and especially among women. Ordinarily I stand up for schoolmarms—a genuinely endangered species, there-but if they’re behind this revolting development, I say...
“So spake the Fiend, and with necessity, The tyrant’s plea, excus’d his devilish deeds.” —Milton, Paradise Lost The locus classicus of all informed discussion on the subject of the political essence of totalitarianism is the following passage from Plato’s Republic: If you are caught committing any of these crimes on a...
Are we all going crazy? A few months ago, I read a newspaper column containing information so shocking yet unsurprising, so awful yet predictable, that I was overcome by emotional vertigo. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, I thought of John and Lawrence, two children I knew long ago, and disorientation was replaced by generalized depression....
Ancien Regime III b In his first and vitally important chapter, Tocqueville says that true aristocracies impose their system of values on a nation, but in France the nobles permitted the philosophes to impose their ideology not only on the education of the young but also even onto the edicts of ...
As 1995 drew to a close, Senate Democrats and Republicans were still debating Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms’ legislation to restructure the State Department and its ancillary agencies. Helms wanted to jettison the United States Agency for International Development, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and the United States Information Agency, fold their functions...
“Often the test of courage is not to die but to live.” —Vittorio Alfieri, Oreste (1785) This volume is the first complete English translation of Zbigniew Herbert’s poetry—a cause for rejoicing. And, although Alissa Valles’s translations are a bit gray, as if sprinkled with fine dust, they are invariably precise and never overstated. While there...
Last Wednesday China completed a major naval exercise in the disputed waters of the South China Sea. On July 3 it was reported that China was testing a new naval helicopter which “could fill a big gap” in its expanding fleet. Over the weekend, Australian media reported that the country’s navy was monitoring a Chinese...
The Christian Vision: Man in Society; Edited by Lynne Morris; The Hillsdale College Press; Hillsdale, MI. “Where there is no vision,” says Proverbs, “the people perish.” Because the vision provided by Judeo-Christianity has been fading for some time on America’s campuses, college graduates informed by a sense of purpose and meaning have become rare. As...
“If China is not going to solve North Korea, we will.” So President Donald Trump warns, amid reports North Korea, in its zeal to build an intercontinental ballistic missile to hit our West Coast, may test another atom bomb. China shares a border with North Korea. We do not. Why then is this our problem...
The year was 1964. I was 13 years old. Sitting in the family room of my parents’ home in Yorktown Heights, New York, with the TV on, I picked up the envelope that had arrived in the mail that day. I had sent away for information to all sorts of political parties and organizations in...
Freudian Fraud has an intriguing but difficult-to-prove thesis, namely that Freudian thought radically altered American society for the worse. An “audit of Freud’s American account,” says Torrey, shows more debits than credits. He believes the chief liability inherent in the Freudian system is its tendency to undermine traditional notions of responsibility. “Don’t blame me, blame...
Background: The French economist and writer Frederic Bastiat used the simplest economic system he could think of, the duo of Robinson Crusoe and Friday, to illustrate the folly of protectionism in “Something Else,” one of a scries of essays he called Soplmmes économiques, published between 1844 and 1850. In the original story, Robinson’s protectionist instincts...
Antonin Scalia has been a public critic of affirmative action since at least 1979, when the Washington University Law Review published his modest proposal of a “Restorative Justice Handicapping System.” Scalia’s position, simply put, is that the government should not engage in racial discrimination, a position reflected in numerous opinions authored by Scalia. There are...
Everyone now knows what the Methodists have done to their hymnal. Inclusive language once again triumphs over not only tradition and elegance, but even reason. Economists arc not exempt from such folly. In an otherwise excellent and informative book, Breaking the Academic Mould: Economists and American Higher Learning in the Nineteenth Century, there is an...
Herbert Hoover once praised the “American system of rugged individualism.” (This was the same Hoover who gave Americans a trial run of New Deal socialism.) The ideology of individualism is a classic piece of 19th-century claptrap. Once upon a time, people could speak of freedom and liberty without erecting an “ism” or “ology,” but as...
For hypothetical purposes, let’s say Joe Biden had spent the last four years in the White House and Donald Trump was the challenger. What if Biden was the one being dumped from office, despite evidence that Trump supporters engaged in questionable electioneering? What if election workers in heavily Republican areas had mistreated poll watchers in...
The November election revealed a populist upsurge of repugnance against Washington. In the current two-party system, this upsurge could only take the form of support for the Republicans. If the Republicans are interested in real reform, they will act as statesmen and not politicians. A statesman is one who understands and pursues the long-range best...