Publicly Funded Art is causing a stir now in Los Angeles, where a mural citing (in part) the Pledge of Allegiance has drawn fire from a neighborhood group. The Little Tokyo Community Development Advisory Committee complained that placing a mural featuring the pledge above LA’s Little Tokyo was, at the very least, insensitive to the...
4595 search results for: The Old Right
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Digging For Truth in Pravda
I confess—I know Russian. This ability has been causing me a lot of irritation lately. I have been bombarded with questions from people who don’t know the language, about what is really going on in Moscow now. In my answers, in order to be absolutely unbiased, I always rely on “Pravda.” I mean not just...
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Cold Pricklies & Warm Fuzzies
Joyce Carol Oates: Last Days; E. P. Dutton; New York. Joseph Campos-De Metro: The Slugger Heart & Other Stories; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego. At 47, Joyce Carol Oates has to her credit more than 40 books, including 16 rather fat novels and nearly as many collections of not-so-short stories. Ms. Oates is also, however, one of this country’s...
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The Filthy Rich
I haven't investigated, but I'm sure of it. A pollster in ancient Babylonia was sampling the citizenry on a proposal to raise money by taxing the vineyards and flesh pots of the obscenely rich. I don't know a word of ancient Babylonian, but can we doubt the response went something ...
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Islamic State and the Theater of Jihad
The Al Khansa Brigade is the all-female fighting force of the organization that calls itself the Islamic State (IS). Al Khansa, we are most unreliably informed, has 60 members, many of whom are British. Their leader is reputedly a privately educated Scotswoman. These amazons are, we’re told, particularly cruel, force captive local women to be...
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Should Speculative Bankers Be Put to Death?
The latest spectacle of disgusting posthuman monsters in expensive suits squandering other people’s billions—while displaying nothing but studied contempt for hoi polloi whose blood is their sustenance—is sickening and infuriating. Déjà vu all over again. Never mind the regulators and government officials with whom they are in existential cahoots; the bastards will continue doing their thing...
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A Divide in the Oregon Trail
The socio-political divide in Oregon is so dramatic that the red rural areas are continually trying to break-off from the rest of the state.
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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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Clap & Trap
From the December 1992 issue of Chronicles. I had heard about, but not read, “The End of History?” Francis Fukuyama’s star-burst essay published in 1989; but I felt a twinge of sympathy for him as his critics chortled and pointed at history rumbling anew: people dancing atop the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union falling to...
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When the Cure Is the Poison
John Agresto is full of ideas about what needs to be done to fix the broken liberal arts tradition. Unfortunately, his proposed plan won’t work—they're too liberal.
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Will Churchill’s Statue Be the Next to Fall?
On Gen. George Washington’s orders, the Declaration of Independence, signed in Philadelphia, was read aloud to his army. On hearing it, the troops marched to Bowling Green, decapitated and pulled down the statue of George III, and sent the remnants to be melted down into musket balls. It was a revolutionary act, a symbolic statement....
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Another Reason Why the Agrarians Lost
Andrew Lytle’s “The Hind Tit” is the best essay in I’ll Take My Stand (1930), not only because it focuses on the small, independent farmer, the class the Agrarians most admired, but also because Lytle nails the volume’s primary thesis to the church door, the dilemma his region and nation faced in 1930—the choice between...
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Someone Else’s Backyard
Wars, according to the one-dimensional view of world history favored by Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright, are caused by bad or mad men. Once we, the almighty, self-appointed arbiters of worldwide justice, determine who the bad guys are, we can go in, blow them away, and make the world safe for democracy. This approach is...
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The Cold War Never Ended: U.S.-Russian Relations Since September 11
The recent invasion of South Ossetia by the U.S.-trained and -equipped Georgian army turned into a debacle for both Tbilisi and Washington. It also demonstrated that, for the U.S. government, the fall of the Soviet Union on December 8, 1991, did not mean the Cold War had ended. Washington simply shifted focus to the newly...
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Light at the End of the Pandemic
When the COVID-19 pandemic began in March, most people never imagined the government-imposed restrictions would be as harsh and arbitrary as they have been, nor that the entire affair would drag on into the new year. Yet glimpses of hope are arriving this week, small pieces of good news we can joyfully carry throughout Advent...
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Bruce Springsteen
For the life of me, I can’t see why anyone under the age of, say, 55 would want to listen to Bruce Springsteen, never mind revere him as a deep and important artist, or pay upward of $200 to be crammed into a football stadium to attend one of his concerts. Surely the only pertinent...
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NYT Reporter Regrets Kavanaugh Hit: “I Have Learned Some Lessons”
In an age where journalists may finally be held accountable for their lies, we should expect more sudden pangs of conscience.
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Obama as Lincoln
Ron English, the self-styled “Robin Hood of Madison Avenue” who specializes in “liberating” commercial billboards and defacing them (albeit artistically) with his anticapitalist messages, has painted a portrait of Obama as Lincoln: The President’s thick lips, crinkled brow, and eyes sparkling with a preternatural intelligence are seamlessly merged with the high forehead, biblical beard, and...
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Liberals Love the Minimum Wage—Though It Hurts People Liberals Love
A much-touted study on the effects of minimum wage is really a study in confirmation bias.
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57 million babies and counting, RIP
Something died in America 42 years ago today. That’s when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its 1973 edict, Roe v. Wade, forcing all 50 states to almost completely legalize abortion on demand – even those states that already had legalized it. About 57 million babies have been killed since. But something more died: Maybe...
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Social Security’s War on Families: A Current Crisis and a Coming Disaster
The war in Iraq has left many casualties; Social Security reform is one of them. For so long, Democrats surrounded the issue with demagoguery. And now that the Democrats control Capitol Hill, Republicans seem unwilling to acknowledge, let alone confront, Social Security’s impending financial collapse. And yet the need to confront the problem has never...
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Trump—Middle American Radical
President Trump is the leader of America’s conservative party. Yet not even his allies would describe him as a conservative in the tradition of Robert Taft, Russell Kirk or William F. Buckley. In the primaries of 2016, all his rivals claimed the mantle of Mr. Conservative, Ronald Reagan. Yet Trump captured the party’s heart. Who,...
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Christopher Hitchens and the Days of Rage
On March 23, the Associated Press published a story dealing with sexual abuse within the Roman Catholic Church to little fanfare. It noted that allegations of sexual abuse involving the Catholic Church in the United States dropped in 2009, and that most of the alleged offenders “are dead, no longer in the priesthood, removed from...
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The Bismarck Bypass
In their own quiet way, arts activities are as vigorous in the Midwest as anywhere else, a fact that few seem to realize—including Midwesterners. A year ago I was privileged to escort an emigre lecturer around my state for a week. At one evening’s talk he impetuously introduced me as “not one of your long-haired...
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Germany’s Quest for a European Wokedom
The European version of wokedom is unfolding under the watchful eye of Germany’s new foreign minister Annalena Baerbock. As discussed in a previous article, Baerbock looks like she will be the most interventionist-minded, Russophobic, and Euro-federalist German foreign minister ever, one who promotes a nebulous concept of European strategic sovereignty. Europe’s leftists are positively elated...
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Origins and Outcome
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 in the years 1940-1941, some of the...
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Supreme Court’s Drifting Days Are Done
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...
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What the Editors Are Reading
Having read Sir Philip Magnus’s biography of William Gladstone in graduate school, I recently picked up a copy of his King Edward the Seventh, published in 1964 and made the basis of a very excellent series by Masterpiece Theater, with the superb British actor Timothy West in the title role, a decade or so later. ...
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Ritual, Tragedy, and Restoration
The Deer Hunter received the Academy Award for best picture at the Oscars ceremony in 1979. The film was much criticized by some for its Russian roulette sequences, especially the alleged “racism” on display in the film’s depiction of the Viet Cong. But The Deer Hunter is truly a mythic, poetic work of art. The...
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Maybe Forever
Is the current wave of immigration to America, mainly from the Third World, an invasion? Wayne Lutton and John Tanton maintain that it is. The authors effectively argue that our unprecedented level of immigration, forced on the country by selfish interests, is remaking America in many negative ways, especially by eroding our national culture. But...
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Causley at 70
My formal association with Chronicles began in February 1986, when, at the suggestion of its editor, I wrote an obituary of Philip Larkin. Looking back at the history of my loves, I explained that I had decided to buy and edit The Yale Literary Magazine because “my ambition in life was to find the poet...
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A Durable Fire
“Literature is news that stays news.” —Ezra Pound George Garrett is a man of letters—a member of a diminishing breed that may soon vanish. For well over three decades he has regularly published poetry, criticism, and fiction long and short; he has also written screenplays and memoirs, and explored still other modes. This very facility...
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The Real World Reasserts Itself
Since the death of George Floyd beneath the knee of a cop in Minneapolis on Memorial Day, the nation has been instructed by its cultural elites that this is the daily reality that a racist America has too long ignored. Our nation, it was shouted in our faces, is a place where white cops harass,...
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Debate-o-mania
The wild rhetoric of Harris and Trump in their epic debate-o-mania should be compared with a general ledger of political actions. Election '24 needs an accountant!
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Lost Generations
“You are all a lost generation,” Gertrude Stein is said to have told Ernest Hemingway when he and his first wife were living in Paris after the Great War. Since then, the generation that was born in the 1890’s and reached maturity to fight in the terrible conflict that came close to exterminating both it...
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Who Wants to Be House Speaker?
Weakening House committees had the paradoxical effect of concentrating power in leadership and making the speaker more important in setting the majority’s policy direction—which only turned the speaker into the focus of every member’s discontent and created stronger opposition to him within the party.
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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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Cardinal Stepinac: Another View
It pains me to disagree with a writer I like and admire, but Srdja Trifkovic’s piece on Cardinal Stepinac makes no attempt to explain, much less understand, why Catholics respect and admire this brave Croatian martyr. Trifkovic takes umbrage at Pope Benedict’s treating Stepinac as a “saintly figure” and of saying this about him: “Precisely because...
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Embarrassment of Riches
“Semper inops quicumque cupit” (Whoever yearns is always poor) —Claudian During the 1950’s, an increasing number of middle Americans no longer took seriously the principle that honest work carefully performed is its own true reward. As the exhortative Vance Packard and a host of other social critics noted, these Americans defined themselves not by the...
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Escape From Gotham
When novelist Larry Woiwode moved to a house and a little piece of land just off State Highway 21 in the loneliest corner of North Dakota, he left behind the world of New York and the New Yorker for a part of America which, if it conjures any image in the coastal mind, is that...
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Ancient Greek Religion
The religion of the ancient Greeks is startlingly different from Christianity. It has been misinterpreted by people who think that since it is a religion it must be like Christianity, and also by people who think that because it is not like Christianity it is not really a religion at all. The Greeks had poetry...
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Cupidity
A review of The Informant! (produced and distributed by Warner Brothers; directed by Steven Soderbergh; screenplay by Scott Z. Burns based on Kirt Eichenwald’s book) “Radix omnium malorum est cupiditas,” Chaucer’s pardoner warned his guilt-ridden audiences: The root of all evil is greed. Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! serves as a latter-day illustration of this admonition....
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Border ‘Gotaways’ are Getting Away from Justice
Since the start of the Biden administration, 1.7 million “gotaways” have entered the country. Many of them are running away from justice in their home countries and bringing their criminality to the United States.
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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...