“Blacks for Gray, Whites for Fenty,” ran the nuanced headline on page one of the Washington Examiner. The story told of how black Mayor Adrian Fenty, who got rave reviews for appointing Michelle Rhee to save District of Columbia schools, was crushed six to one in black wards east of the Anacostia River, as he...
4621 search results for: The Old Right
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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...
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Is the American Century Over For Good?
“Politics stops at the water’s edge” was a tradition that, not so long ago, was observed by both parties, particularly when a president was abroad, speaking for the nation. The tradition was enunciated by Sen. Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan in 1947, as many of the Republicans in the 80th Congress moved to back Truman’s leadership...
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Michelle Obama Isn’t Running for President
Dropping Michelle Obama into the presidential race as the ultimate Hail Mary pass may be a fun gossip item, but the important thing to remember is that there’s nothing in it for her.
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Will Bibi Break Obama?
The prime minister of Israel is angry with Barack Obama and is coming here to force a hardening of U.S. policy toward Iran. “Bibi” Netanyahu had his anger on display at a meeting in Israel with Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham. McCain emerged saying he had never seen an Israeli prime minister “that...
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Academic Charlatanism
Academic charlatanism these days includes not only defenses of plagiarism and violent campaigns of intimidation against proscribed opinion. These symptoms of the bankruptcy of humanistic learning worry some and find celebration among others. But who on either side of the fault line in the academic humanities can find grounds to defend giving degrees in subjects...
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Bad Investments Pay Off
Money Monster Directed by Jodie Foster Screenplay by Jamie Linden, Alan DiFiore, Jim Kouf Produced by TriStar Pictures Distributed by Sony Pictures Mustang Directed and written by Deniz Gamze Ergüven Produced by CG Cinema Distributed by Cohen Media Group When I graduated from college with a degree in English literature, it occurred to me I...
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Unpalatable Values: Culture as Gastronomy
To American readers the name A.A. Gill may mean nothing, but in England the restaurant and television critic of the Sunday Times is a cultural force to be reckoned with. A witty autodidact, with plenty of disdain for the pieties of the moment, to easily deafened ears he is a Jeremiah of the petit-four and...
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The ‘Most Moral’ Military on Earth?
In the midst of the ongoing brutal war in Gaza, there is something disturbingly dishonest and self-abasing about Americans claiming Israel’s military is “the most moral on Earth.”
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Rolling Stone Gathered No Facts
Last month, Rolling Stone published a story entitled A Rape on Campus, which described a brutal gang rape of a woman named Jackie during a party at a University of Virginia fraternity house, the University’s failure to respond to this alleged assault—and the school’s troubling history of indifference to many other instances of alleged sexual...
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Up From Sharpton
If I were a North Korean leader, or even an ISIS head chopper, I’d be reveling in the fact that a former American black basketball star spoke more plainly about race in America than any member of our political class or media. Charles Barkley doesn’t mince words. Many of his fellow blacks were not pleased...
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Finding Eden
“Likewise also the chief priests mocking said . . . Let Christ the King of Israel descend now from the cross that we may see and believe.” I have been a citizen of the sovereign state of California for most of my life. I can guarantee you, Alta California is not merely a result of the...
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The Woke-Enabling Act
In the first week of September 1792 the French Revolution entered its openly terroristic phase with the massacre of some 1,600 prisoners in Paris. It was an outrage euphemistically called les Journées du Septembre (or the September Days). It was justified by the claim that the country was in danger from foreign enemies and domestic...
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Double Down: Illegal Aliens and Crime
For too long now I have heard that illegal immigrants are not criminals and that they have come to America only to work. Not really. Whether or not they want to work, they have already committed a crime by illegally entering the United States. I am still naive enough to think that national sovereignty should...
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Shadows in the Limelight
An American television viewer will witness more violence in a single evening than an Athenian would have seen during a lifetime of theatergoing. Acts of violence were virtually prohibited in Greek drama, and Aristotle goes so far as to argue against the use of “mere spectacle” to produce the desired catharsis of pity and fear:...
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Jeans to Flag Ban in 46 Years
Back in the innocent days of 1967-70, I attended Benjamin Franklin Junior High School in the Wayne-Westland Community School District in Michigan. District motto: “Absolutely, entirely, completely dedicated to mediocrity.” Like most junior high schools, grades 7-9, it mysteriously has been transformed into a middle school, grades 6-8. In 1967-68, Franklin had a simple dress...
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The New Yorker Under the Glass
The first issue of The New Yorker (February 21, 1925) showed on its cover a dandy in top hat, high collar, and morning suit gazing through his monocle at a butterfly. The drawing is reproduced yearly, and butterflies became a cover motif. Whatever tastes, affectations, or snobbery the artist, Rea Irvin, wanted to suggest, it...
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Vivek Ramaswamy and Conservative Victimhood
Vivek Ramaswamy once condemned conservative victimhood, especially Trump's Jan. 6 narrative. Now he's indulging it, in order to cultivate Trump supporters.
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Stop It
A review of Stop-Loss (produced by Paramount Pictures, Scott Rudin Productions, and MTV Films; directed by Kimberly Peirce; screenplay by Kimberly Peirce and Mark Richard; distributed by Paramount Pictures). [amazonify]B0013FSL1Q[/amazonify]On March 29, 2008, Suffolk County police officers vigorously fulfilled their sworn duty at the Smith Haven Mall in Lake Grove, New York. Alerted by the...
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On Tolitical Correctness’
While I recognize that Paul Gottfried and I clearly have philosophical differences on the nature and goals of education, I feel compelled to address one point in his review of my book in your May issue. Professor Gottfried correctly notes that I hold up the figure of Mark Van Doren of Columbia University as a...
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Italy’s “Populist” Government
In Italy’s general election on March 4, two parties routinely derided by the corporate media as “populist” won almost 70 percent of the votes cast. A coalition led by Matteo Salvini’s League (Lega, formerly known as Lega Nord, LN) won 37 percent of the vote and a plurality of seats both in the Chamber of...
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Becoming by Beholding
An important new book demonstrates the ways imagination is essential to Christianity.
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Chief of Men
Of the making of books about Churchill there is no end. The latest is the best to date. Andrew Roberts reduces Churchill’s epic life to some 1,100 pages, offering a précis of the great events in which he was involved while drawing on 40 new sources. These include the private diaries of King George VI...
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Rise of the Trumps
Come November, Donald Trump may go down in flames. Or he might continue to surprise and astonish us. But the Trump children, regardless of whether their father is ever again allowed in GOP polite company, are another matter. The display of warm affection for their father during the Republican National Convention was not merely for...
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“Bless the Lord, All You Works of the Lord”
In one of the first episodes of the latest Star Trek series, Enterprise, the crew, a few weeks out from Earth on the ship’s maiden voyage, has become homesick. Suddenly, an inhabitable planet appears off of the port side. There are no signs of humanoid life, but the captain sends a small team down to...
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It’s Time to Break Up Amazon
Despite Jeff Bezos's libertarian ideology, Amazon has used governmental privilege to grow to a massive scale, and has had a disastrous effect on American life, as Alec MacGillis shows in Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America.
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The Gamblers’ Club
On July 15 Goldman Sachs reported that its second-quarter profits were the highest in 140 years. It netted $3.4 billion on $13.4 billion in revenue (78 percent of which came from trading and principal investments and 11 percent from investment banking). Exactly which trades brought in such large profits is said to be proprietary. It...
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The Salami Fallacy
A few months ago in this space I described the Pecorino Effect, referring not so much to the Italian cheese as to the shopper’s inability to refuse any merchandise he has sampled, irrespective of what he thinks of the quality. I diagnosed this modern malady, with myself as a specimen of social tissue in the...
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A Well-Spent Youth
Early last October, there was an item in the national news that stirred some pity and some memories. “Minnesota Fats” (Rudolph Wanderone) had been taken into custody in Nashville after being found wandering the streets in a state of disorientation. A legend in his own mind, “Minnesota Fats” took his sobriquet from the fictional character...
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Orbán: Building the Wall
“What’s past is prologue.” —Shakespeare, The Tempest Situated between Austria and Rumania, Hungary has a rich history worthy of many books. And though this country of less than ten million people is the size of the state of Maine, her role on the world stage is only increasing. She has declared war on billionaire deconstructionist...
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The Moral Economy
The decline of the household economy is one of the most significant economic changes in post-World War II America. Unfortunately, it has received relatively little attention. Professional economists find it trivial compared to the workings of large-scale institutions and global economies, while the average American sees only a positive development that has meant greater mobility,...
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Apocalypse Nigh?
In these scandal-sodden weeks, it’s been tough to write passionately about the fight here over deficit reduction. I look up from some wearisome bulletin on the latest maneuvers of the Gang of Six, and here’s Tristane Banon’s mother admitting to consensual, albeit “clearly brutal,” sex with Dominique Strauss-Kahn amid the filing cabinets in an...
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Worse at What It Is
New York is always changing: It’s the city that never sleeps. When local writer Kay Hymowitz wrote a book about Brooklyn recently she talked about “creative destruction” on almost every other page. She had a point, and the city has seen both sides of the process. Beginning in the 1960’s, the gales of creative destruction...
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The New Intolerance
“This was a recognition of American terrorists.” That is CNN’s Roland Martin’s summary judgment of the 258,000 men and boys who fell fighting for the Confederacy in a war that cost as many American lives as World Wars I and II, Korea, Vietnam and Iraq combined. Martin reflects the hysteria that seized Obamaville on hearing...
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The Era of Our Discontent
In scientific culture, every subject is accepted as a legitimate one for quantifiable study, including subjects no wise man would venture to approach in such a manner. Hence academic researchers, boldly rushing in where mystics and poets fear to tread, feel encouraged to establish themselves as experts in matters to which the concept of expertise...
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What We Are Reading: January 2022
What makes a prince? Machiavelli had some ideas. “Above all he should do as some excellent man has done in the past who found someone to imitate who had been praised and glorified before him,” he wrote. “[One] whose exploits and actions he always kept beside himself, as they say Alexander the Great imitated Achilles;...
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Rethinking Big Tech’s Legal Immunity
Should Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram or other purveyors of internet content be liable for damages if they fail to ensure that what they disseminate is not inaccurate, libelous, or otherwise dangerous and pernicious? There is a bit of law on this, but we are only now beginning seriously to consider this question. And only...
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On ‘Homelessness
Theodore Pappas (Cultural Revolutions, November 1991) says, “There is, of course, no long-term answer to homelessness,” but this begs the question. The focus should not be on solving the specific problem of homelessness, but on seeing homelessness as a symptom of modem decay. When the change of focus takes place, a “long-term answer to homelessness”...
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Bloomberg vs. Trump?
The morning of the New Hampshire primary, Donald Trump, being interviewed on “Morning Joe,” said that he would welcome his “friend” Michael Bloomberg into the presidential race. Which is probably the understatement of 2016. The three-term mayor of New York and media mogul whose fortune is estimated at $39 billion, making him one of the...
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After Helsinki: A Coup in the Making
President Donald Trump’s meeting with President Vladimir Putin of Russia and their joint press conference in Helsinki on July 16 have ignited an ongoing paroxysm of rage and hysteria in the U.S. media. Morbid Russophobia and Putin-hate are déjà-vu, but the outpouring of vitriol against Trump has been raised to an entirely new level. The...
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Origins and Outcome
From the December 1991 issue of Chronicles. To the degree that it is remembered at all, the America First Committee (AFC) has gone down in history as an organization most suspect, at best composed of good people serving a bad cause, at worst riddled with conscious agents of a Nazi transmission belt. During its heyday...
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Beat the Clock
The Rookie Produced by Walt Disney Pictures and 98 MPH Productions Directed by John Lee Hancock Screenplay by Mike Rich Released by Buena Vista and Walt Disney Pictures Clockstoppers Produced by Nickelodeon Movies Directed by Jonathan Frakes Screenplay by Rob Hedden and Andy Hedden Released by Paramount Pictures I have no idea whether Oscar Wilde...
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Molecular Families
As we look around at the pandemonium that characterizes the circus maximus of our once-great culture, there are few things as striking as the large number of what we might call “disconnected pockets of sanity,” otherwise known as nuclear families. And the fact that they are disconnected means that the sanity is illusory. When it...
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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,...
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Immigration—and the Politics of Hate
As luck would have it, we Chronicles editors were thinking about immigration, the theme of the January issue, when the President issued his marching orders on Univision. I was not especially interested in the details drawn up by the President’s clueless policy advisors: One way or another, he and they are bound and determined to...
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Another Big Lie: Liberals Are More ‘Caring’ Than Conservatives
Conservatives are more generous with their money, and it’s not even close.
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Born-Again Canadian
I was one of many who sighed with relief when Conrad Black was convicted in U.S. District Court July 13. He is exceedingly litigious, and word had gone out that anyone who had suggested anything untoward in Black’s management of his newspaper empire could expect writs should the great man be found not guilty. But...
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The Strange Death of the Yellow Dog
Perusing the conservative press in the days after the Republican victories in the November 2002 elections was like watching the triumph scenes in various sword-and-sandal movies of the 1950’s and 60’s, with the reader almost expecting to see outgoing Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle dragged in chains through the streets of Washington. The Stupid Party...
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Bonkers in Space
Tarkovsky’s Solaris came out in 1972, which was the year I’d left Russia. It was not until a quarter of a century later that I watched the long and quaint film, and was strangely affected by it. I had always thought that nothing on the screen, if it was any good at all, could not...
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Economics and the Catholic Ethic
Amintore Fanfani (1908-99) was an economic historian whose scholarship focused on the origins of capitalism and questions of economic and social equity. In his early career, he was part of a broader Catholic and conservative intellectual movement that was active during the interwar years and included the English Distributists and the Southern Agrarians. Like these...