The fall the Orioles won their first World Series, I was rooming off-campus with three other Towson State College freshmen in a three-story house on Evesham Avenue. The Baltimore of the mid-1960’s was not as much ashamed of its heritage as unschooled in it, most Baltimoreans not knowing—or caring—that, under the shade of the trees...
South Africa has rarely been out of the headlines in 2018. In late February, the South African government voted to amend the constitution to allow for the expropriation of land from white farmers without compensation. The vote put an international spotlight on the many problems plaguing the country. In January, President Donald Trump was reported...
Kudos to Dr. Srdja Trifkovic, whose “New Grand Strategy” (American Interest, December) tells us what sensibly ought to be. The stooges inhabiting Foggy Bottom will never look up from their feed troughs to show half the intelligence of your master diplomat. I wish him Godspeed on his new ventures, and wish that Obama had the...
On December 7, 2015—Pearl Harbor Day—candidate Donald Trump called “for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.” After applause from the large crowd at a campaign rally in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, Trump emphasized, “We have no choice. ...
Throughout our legal history we are familiar with incidents of jury-tampering, the act of buying off or frightening one or more of the 12 men good and true called upon to decide a case. This is done to predetermine a verdict, usually to assure a “not guilty.” We have heard of vicious gangsters, corrupt union...
The Chechen War, as the Russian leadership discovered in early March, is far from over. On the night of March 2, a convoy of nine trucks, carrying about 100 Internal Ministry special forces troops from Grozny to the strategically important crossroads village of Pervomayskava, was ambushed by an estimated 40 Chechen boyevikiy (“fighters” or “warriors”)....
During the week of December 6, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear arguments in Perry v. Schwarzenegger. In the original decision, U.S. District Judge Vaughn R. Walker held that California’s Proposition 8, which amended the state constitution to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, violated the Due Process...
I’d worked in the oil patch for several weeks already when I bought a T-shirt at the J.C. Penney Mother Store in Kemmerer. The shirt was fire-engine red with black lettering across the chest. The letters said, “IF YOU HAVE ONLY SIX MONTHS TO LIVE MOVE TO KEMMERER WYOMING. IT’LL SEEM LIKE A LIFETIME.” Since...
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande came to Moscow last Friday night to discuss the outline of what was heralded as their peace plan for Ukraine. They spent five hours talking to President Vladimir Putin, but left for the security conference in Munich early Saturday without making a breakthrough. Their effort will...
Words like liberal and conservative have been losing whatever meaning they once had. An old Tory would not have seen anything very conservative in free trade, and Senator Bob Taft would certainly have had reservations about America’s role as international policeman. But liber al still has discernible significance in ethics, where the great liberal traditions of Locke, Adam Smith, and the Utilitarians...
Few people have been so hated that their enemies have disrupted their funeral processions in an attempt to throw their coffins into a river, but that is precisely what happened to Pope Pius IX on the night of July 12, 1881. Amid the heated debate surrounding Pio Nono’s beatification this past September 3, a few...
The Talented Mr. Ripley Produced by Paramount Pictures and Miramax Films Directed by Anthony Minghella Screenplay by Anthony Minghella, from the novel by Patricia Highsmith Released by Paramount Pictures Anthony Minghella’s screen version of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley has beautiful photography, good acting, and real suspense. What it lacks is the element that...
There’s more than one way the GOP could wind up with a New York-Florida ticket this November.
President Obama’s nationally televised speech announcing an increase in troop levels in Afghanistan was everything we have come to expect from one of his speeches: vapid, dishonest, puerile, and–most of all–confused. Speaking grandly of an exit strategy he never defined, he did not once address the more serious question of an entrance strategy. What possible...
If California Congressman Bob Dornan’s defeat by Loretta Sanchez, the tool of Hispanic activists (Cultural Revolutions, February 1997), was not enough to convince our congressional representatives that white Americans are being sacrificed at the altar of “diversity,” they should read a recent editorial published in the Los Angeles Times. Under the caption “Power Will Have...
One symptom of decline and confusion at the end of an age is the prevalent misuse of terms, of designations that have been losing their meanings and are thus no longer real. One such term is public opinion. Used still by political thinkers, newspapers, articles, institutes, research centers, college and university courses and their professors,...
William Pitt the Elder, in his Speech on the Excise Bill delivered before the House of Commons, encapsulated our Founding Fathers’ view of property rights when he said, “The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the force of the Crown. It may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may...
In the second book, Tocqueville tries to demonstrate a double thesis, which may be summarized as: 1) The centralized authoritarian regime installed by the FR represents continuity with the old regime, not a break with the past, and 2) there is, nonetheless a qualitative difference between the benevolent busybodying of ...
Although we didn’t know it at the time, the incidents in Charlottesville, Virginia on Aug. 12, 2017 would soon develop into a narrative for the left to repeat and then recycle in the summer riots of 2020 and eventually the events at the U.S. Capitol in January 2021. Anne Wilson Smith unpacks this narrative in...
European nations are seeing their cultural if not their actual borders weakened by multiculturalism and the process known as “McDonaldization.” But Austrians, in contrast to their neighbors in Germany where status quo politics are the order of the day, are avidly protesting the corruption, incompetence, and slack enforcement of immigration restrictions characteristic of the “Grand...
By the time Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano confirmed the shift in policy, it was hardly a surprise. In an August 18 letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and 21 other Democratic senators, Napolitano acknowledged that removing people from the country simply for being illegal immigrants was no longer an “enforcement priority” of the...
Last summer this expansive sagebrush basin at the lower end of the Wyoming Range made the annual encampment of the Rainbow Family of Living Light, spawn of a congestive civilization. Fifteen thousand strong, they organized according to their various pursuits: drinking, drugs, nudity, fornication, and—for all the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department knows—cannibalism and human sacrifice....
This town ain’t big This town ain’t small. It’s a little of both they say. And our ball club may be minor league But at least it’s Triple A. . . . We don’t worry ’bout the pennant much We just like to see the boys hit it deep There’s nothing like the view From...
In the U.S. mainstream media the developments that have followed the misnamed “Arab Spring” have been curiously under-reported. The reason seems clear: In recent weeks those developments have taken a clear turn away from Western-style democracy, pluralism, tolerance, respect for human rights, etc. (as we’ve warned, repeatedly, that they would). The turmoil has undermined the region’s...
Terrifier 3 is a garbage film, not because it’s in the horror genre, but because it fails to grapple with any serious theme. Fortunately, we have so many alternatives.
This temperate and thorough book commences with a detailed description of President Nixon’s activities on May 8 and 9, 1970, when thousands of young people had poured into Washington to protest the American expedition into Cambodia. This was the most dramatic of the several crises in Richard Nixon’s life. As Dr. Parmet writes, “Nixon’s postmortem...
A growing nationwide disdain for police officers has resulted from several highly publicized shootings of “unarmed” minority men who have resisted arrest or attacked officers. The media’s rhetoric has inflamed passions, resulting in the murders of two New York policemen seated in their cars, and the assassination of four Lakewood, Washington, officers eating in a...
“We will bury you,” warned Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950’s, but in the end, it is America’s NATO imperium that is burying Serbs under the rubble of Novi Sad and Belgrade and Americans under the red tape of the New World Order. The march of globalization has proceeded without effective resistance but not without criticism,...
The war in Iraq is lost. This fact is widely recognized by American military officers and has been recently expressed forcefully by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq during the first year of the attempted occupation. Winning is no longer an option. Our best hope, Sanchez says, is “to stave...
Homosexuals coast-to-coast have been doing the slow burn in the past few months because their jug-eared leader, Barack Obama, has delayed fulfilling a key campaign promise: to scrap the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule. The policy is actually federal law, and it’s very simple: Keep your mouth shut, and you can serve. Ten months...
Despite the relentless efforts of diehard revisionists, those intellectual terrorists who seem to be bound and determined to explode and reduce to rubble the best of our Western heritage, the ancient and honorable vocation of scholarship continues, patiently adding to our sum of knowledge and appreciation and perhaps even understanding of the living past, undeterred...
The following article by Allan C. Brownfeld is reprinted with permission. Free speech used to be highly valued, particularly on the nation’s college and university campuses. Academic freedom demanded a respect for a diversity of views. During the Vietnam War years, this writer taught at the University of Maryland. The campus was alive with debates...
Somewhere toward the middle of The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Moral Stories, William Bennett has included “The Funeral Oration of Pericles” from Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War. To Bennett (or to his ghostwriter), this “speech reminds participants of democracy two and a half millennia later that the character of the state is determined by...
In 1889, when the Baron Pierre de Coubertin was in the middle of formulating his plan to revive the Olympic Games of ancient Greece, one of his primary worries was the use of cash as an incentive for performance. He feared that “a mercantile spirit threatened to invade sporting circles,” and that amateur sports had...
Supreme Court Justice John Harlan helped to shape the “color-blind” legal approach toward race in America, and his views were likely shaped by a man likely to have been his mixed-race half-brother.
Gerald N. Rosenberg, an assistant professor of political science and an instructor in law at the University of Chicago, has some simple advice for activists who think a United States Supreme Court ruling is an end-all: not only are you wrong, but your money is better spent out of court than in court. In The...
Leonid Ilych Brezhnev presided over the irreversible decline of the USSR during his 18 years in power, initially as Secretary-General of the Soviet Communist Party and later also as chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. He was two years younger than Joseph Biden is today when he died in 1982, but – just...
That the Trump presidency is bedeviled is undeniable. As President Donald Trump flew off for August at his Jersey club, there came word that Special Counsel Robert Mueller III had impaneled a grand jury and subpoenas were going out to Trump family and campaign associates. The jurors will be drawn from a pool of citizens...
The IRS and the federal tax code have enabled the blessings of government on a scale never envisioned by the Founding Fathers. Consider the vital contributions to the current status of the federal government and its future prospects for growth made possible by the tax code, generally, and progressive taxation, in particular. First, the incredible...
I have always wanted to spend some time in Rome, for a whole rosary of personal reasons. As with much else in a person’s private life, to recount these in print is to expose oneself to public ridicule. Yes, Rome is a wonderful city. Yes, the food is good. But then in England, where I...
If Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture is best known for its political, social, and historical reflections, that by no means implies any neglect of literature, nor does it imply that the distinction of Chronicles has not been felt in its treatment of literature, or indeed in its presentation of literature itself. I think that...
Students need to stand up to flagrantly discriminatory policies designed to exclude or deprive white people.
“The question is,” Humpty Dumpty tells Alice in Through the Looking Glass, “which is to be master—that’s all.” As overused as the quotation may be, it nevertheless communicates a perennial truth that most people forget when it comes to understanding not only the answer but also the question itself, a truth that explains much of...
“The true meaning of Christmas gets lost when we believe contrary worldviews,” the prisoner writes. “Our beliefs determine our views in a world where absolutes are fading away.” The prisoner is dictating this for his newsletter. Come-to-Jesus (or -Allah) experiences abound in prisons, so it’s always wise to take conversion stories with a grain of...
To what extent (if at all) does natural law entail religious liberty? To put it another way, is religious liberty a natural right? An attempt to answer this question should elucidate the long and sometimes equivocal tradition of natural law. What, for example, is the proper relationship between tolerance and the truth? When does tolerance...
Andrew Lytle lives in a log house on the Assembly Grounds in Monteagle, Tennessee. It is a busy area in summer, but in the wintertime most of the other houses are closed, and he has few immediate neighbors. The house is built on a cross plan and has somewhat unusually high ceilings. Most often Mr....
In 1939, a short, fat Englishman named Alfred Hitchcock arrived in Hollywood at the invitation of David Selznick. Impressed by Hitchcock’s work in British film, Selznick thought he would be perfect to direct Rebecca, starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine. Things did not go well. Selznick was among the most overbearing of Hollywood producers. He...
There was symmetry in the news that barraged us one day last week—Michael Jackson, not to mention Farrah Fawcett, had died, and the governor of South Carolina had made a nitwit and a creep out of himself over a woman in Argentina. Politics, entertainment—you can’t tell where one leaves off and the other takes up....
Most sober historians have little respect for counterfactuals, those extrapolations of alternative worlds where matters developed differently from the world we know. Yet such alternatives are actually hard to avoid. How can you claim that Gettysburg was a significant battle unless you contemplate the other paths that American history might have taken if the South...
Judge Roy Moore, chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, is in big trouble again. Judge Moore’s first 15 minutes of fame happened when, as a lower-court judge, he refused to remove a plaque containing the Ten Commandments from the wall of his courtroom. The plaque, it was said, amounted to an impermissible establishment of...