We told ourselves we would never forget. We put bumper stickers bearing that slogan on our cars, we hung flags in front of our homes, and we repeated the names, deeds, and last words of the day’s heroes. We read books and watched movies about what happened. We gave the impression of a people grimly...
The Plaka was once the heart of modern Athens, first Ottoman Athens and then the Athens built largely by German kings and queens and their philhellenic architects. It was ruined by the work of brilliant American archaeologists who tore out the heart of the neighborhood in digging up the ...
The name Learned Hand may not leap readily off the tongue if one were asked to list the conservative luminaries of the 20th century. Few people today outside the legal profession have any idea just how profound his influence as a jurist was and continues to be more than half a century after his death. His...
The minefield of Middle Eastern myths, passions, and deceit is so dense that even making a factual statement may open you to accusations of bias and mendacity. It would take an entire issue of Chronicles just to provide a comprehensive bibliography and a list of the websites relevant to the Middle East. However, the non-idiot...
The New York Times’ “1619 Project” is a series of articles published in 2019 to mark the 400th anniversary of the first enslaved Africans to arrive in America. In an introduction to the series, New York Times Magazine Editor-in-Chief Jake Silverstein claims that slavery “is the country’s very origin.” He writes: Out of slavery—and...
Ours is an age of politicization. No matter the problem, real or imagined, proposed solutions are always couched in the language of politics. No subject can be discussed without constant reference to its political ramifications. Whatever position a political leader may adopt with respect to a current “issue,” it must be judged not by its relevance...
News Item: “Al Gore helped lead the federal response to Y2K, hut that doesn’t mean his own Internet operations went hug-free. The computer glitch took a tiny bite out of Gore’s campaign Web site. The damage came inside his “virtual town hall,” where a message from a supporter was dated January 3, 19100. . ....
Paleoconservatives often refer to “the limits of permissible dissent” in describing the struggle to hold on to their views in the realms of the media and academia against the censure of both the left and the “mainstream” right. Now, this struggle has been extended into the realm of the internet, the supposed last frontier of...
We had a big but quite mediocre lunch near the Agora, at Attalos, and by the time we got to the entrance, we found out they had changed the schedule for visiting the Agora. Returning the next day, we took our time getting lost on the site, which is impossible ...
If I were committed to wiping the United States from the face of the earth—and I am not—I might begin with defacing statues and memorials with graffiti. My graffiti would be more literate than most. I imagine the Statue of Liberty’s base with the plaque bearing Emma Lazarus’ poem that begs the ancient world...
Mere pandemics cannot stop the Richard Wagner bibliography from expanding, indeed from metastasizing. Yet, even as the catalogue of new books on the famed, 19th-century German composer expands, “woke” culture threatens to drive him, and the Western civilization he represents, into a state of cancellation. Vast quantities of ink have been lavished upon every bizarre...
Radically recasting America’s formative years would be damaging enough, but The New York Times’ “1619 Project” is applying that same radical intellectual perspective on American history to contemporary social issues and problems. That intellectual perspective has its own history. It developed in earnest during the tumult and chaos of the Black Power radicalism of the...
The Life of William Faulkner. Volume 1: The Past Is Never Dead, 1897–1934 512 pp., $34.95 The Life of William Faulkner. Volume 2: This Alarming Paradox, 1935–1962 656 pp., $34.95 by Carl Rollyson University of Virginia Press Readers might be excused for exclaiming, “What! Another Faulkner biography?” Yet one can make a case for a...
A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith, by Timothy Egan. Viking Press 384 pp., $28.00 “Men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the broad tide of rivers, the vast compass of the ocean, the circular motion of the stars, and yet...
So many Americans, particularly on the right, have taken Fox News for granted over the past 20 years. It has become a fixture as an alternative to what is known as the mainstream media. In confirmation of the old saying, “You never know what you’ve got til it’s gone,” Fox’s abrupt change during the era of Donald...
As modern imperialism grows, even the regions within those countries under its rule become homogenized. Within the subnational regions, smaller ethnic enclaves, with their diverse cultures, tend to take one of two paths. They become tourist traps where the natives are ...
America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding; by Robert R. Reilly; Ignatius Press; 384 pp., $27.95 Few observers of America today would doubt that the republic is in crisis. The crisis stems from a growing skepticism over the truth and validity of the principles of the American founding. For the political left to question...
What really happened on Jan. 6, 2021? The nation still doesn’t know the whole of it, but by all accounts on the Left and from center-right Fox News it was America’s darkest moment since 9/11, Donald Trump’s Waterloo, and the abyss of the Right. As a participant at the Save America Rally, my own perceptions...
In introducing this series last week, I noted that I had been careful in my choice of the title
Equality is a fussy concept. Outside the realm of the legal system, which demands that law be applied the same way regardless of sex, race, or religion, the area of equality’s application has always been controversial. Essential questions remain unanswered: In what circumstances should we limit inequality? Can or should it be abolished? In...
The ideological trajectory followed by the first generation of neoconservatives, from their early fascination with Marxism during the Great Depression to their embrace of Cold War anti-communism and subsequent takeover of the Conservative movement, is by now a well-known chapter in American political history. The life and career of James Burnham followed a similar trajectory,...
Is the current left Marxist? In a provocative commentary, Bill Lind explores this genealogical question, and, unless I’m mistaken, the left and much of its media opposition would second his conclusions. Since Antifa describes itself as Marxist, when it’s not calling itself anarchist, and since leading figures of the Democratic Party, like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria...
The Politics may be the most influential study of political theory and political practice ever written. Aristotle put the book together while investigating different regimes in the Greek world and elsewhere. The philosopher denies the existence of an ideal government applicable to all societies; instead, he looks at various governments that are appropriate for different peoples in...
’Twas the middle of that sacred time of year when all Americans pause to remember what is most important—Christmas Shopping Season. I had just walked through the automatic doorway of MediaPlay, out in what was then the edge of Rockford’s wasteland (the East State Street shopping corridor, which has since sprawled itself all the way...
A remark one often hears from the current crop of film critics is that John Wayne might indeed merit the iconographic status conferred on him by tens of millions of ordinary cinemagoers around the world, were it not for the troubling matter of his alleged evasion of military service during World War II—an issue, it...
The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien: The Places That Inspired Middle-earth; by John Garth; Princeton University Press; 208 pp., $29.95 Authors have always imagined alternate universes, but in the bulging gazetteer of authorial Erewhons—from the transient town of Abaton via Atlantis, Earthsea, and Hogwarts, to Zyundal in the Isles of Wisdom—none attract such obsessive attention as Tolkien’s...
“All politics is on one level sexual politics.” —George Gilder Extremists break out of the margins and take power when they fool opponents into advancing their agenda. By politicizing the family and sexuality, the left duped conservatives, and all of us, into becoming their accomplices. Since last fall’s electoral coup, the United States has been...
Palestinian . . . Lutherans? To many American Christians following the conflict in the Holy Land, this moniker sounds as oxymoronic as the more general “Palestinian Christians.” American evangelical end-times buffs—and their number is legion—simply cannot admit, as they attempt to match daily news items with chapter and verse from Ezekiel, Daniel, and Revelation, the...
Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life by Jordan B. Peterson Portfolio 432 pp., Hardcover $29.00 The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas are Killing Common Sense by Gad Saad Regnery Publishing 235 pp., $28.99 Walmart is for deplorables, the left tells us. If that is so, then Jordan Peterson and Gad Saad must...
At least half of my favourite films are French. For my money they are the best film-makers. The Brits, Italians, and Russians are not bad. The Germans, Spanish, and Scandinavians are horrid (except the Norwegians). The civilised French perspective that marks their best movies is what I would call realism with a heart. Something like...
With all the mud spattered on the Confederate Battle Flag of late, you knew it wouldn’t be long before Ol’ Virginny scrubbed up for Jamestown’s 400th anniversary with a grandiloquent apology for slavery. And Georgia, New York, and other former colonies of the original 13 will soon join the state in the confessional tub and...
If five whites carjacked a black couple, tortured them for hours, then dumped the bodies, the national news media would descend upon the benighted city in which the dastardly crime occurred and, having reported the unspeakable deeds, subject the rest of us to rants on racism and harangues on hate. It happened with James Byrd,...
Digitomania is the compulsion to digitize all human activity. Its compulsive nature is betrayed by the casual, thoughtless manner in which we are casting ourselves down the slippery cyberslope, “acknowledging” the “perils” yet completely unwilling and unable to pull ourselves back. Digitomania gaily mirrors 17th-century Europe’s “tulipomania.” That classic bubble is described with wicked humor...
Over the last 30 years, especially since the spring of 2020, Critical Race Theory (CRT) and its accompanying obsessions with “whiteness” and “white privilege” has almost overwhelmed discussion about race and racism in Western society. CRT “recognizes that racism is engrained in the fabric and system of the American society,” declares a definition from...
I first wrote about the War on Christmas in 2001, when Chronicles published my essay “Happy Holidays! Bah Humbug!: in the December 2001 issue. Peter Brimelow, the editor of VDARE.com, republished that essay. Since then, I have written at least one article each Christmas on the topic. What follows is the piece Peter Brimelow asked...
. . . We interrupt this broadcast to celebrate(!) a Lutheran-Catholic lovefest . . . Recently, there has been a blogosphere brouhaha over questions pertaining to the murder of late-term abortionist scoundrel George Tiller. Our executive editor Scott P. Richert has made compelling arguments against Tiller’s murder at his Catholicism GuideSite on About.com. And yet...
On Wednesday, November 28, at the Dirksen Federal Courthouse in downtown Chicago, Derrick Shareef pled guilty in U.S. District Court on federal charges of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction. Shareef had previously pled not guilty, ...
Larry Ellison has an idea. The relentlessly self-promoting CEO of Oracle Corp., a Silicon Valley software company famous for its ability to grab government contracts, envisions post-September 11 America as a country where everyone walks around with a “smart card.” Days after the terrorist attacks, the opportunistic Ellison was all over the media claiming that...
On January 22, 1899, Pope Leo XIII addressed an encyclical (Testem benevolentiae nostrae) to James Cardinal Gibbons, archbishop of Baltimore, intended “to suppress certain contentions” that had arisen in America “to the detriment of the peace of many souls.” In essence, Leo feared that some American Catholic intellectuals, including a number of bishops, were finding...
There are public protests against lockdowns in Denmark, Italy, France, and all over Europe. They are growing in numbers and fury. Why not the U.S.? Scott Atlas suggested in passing that Michigan residents “rise up” against new lockdowns in Michigan, and major media collectively fainted in shock. Preposterously, he was forced to clarify that he didn’t mean...
A French woman who met the American poet Allen Tate (1899-1979) in the 1930s remarked, “Monsieur Tate is so conservative that he’s almost radical.” Etymologically, “radical” fits Tate well; his conservatism entailed returning, in the face of destructive social practices, to fundamental truths and the established customs embodying them, many immemorial. He espoused the primacy...
Harold O.J. Brown fell asleep, as Our Lord puts it, on July 8, just two days after his 74th birthday. This magazine’s religion editor since 1989, he was a contributor before that. The title of my column in Chronicles was inspired by ...
By the 1950’s, professors at our universities were teaching American history, “warts and all.” By the late 60’s, it was mostly warts. Now, it is all warts, all the time. The Japanese have taken a different tack. They have sanitized their history, especially their actions during World War II, and only in response to pressure...
There are contests in which a decent person prefers not to take sides, such as the bloody wars between Mafia families or Stalin’s disputes with Trotsky and Tito. The war between Khomeini’s Iran and Saddam’s Iraq also comes to mind, or the family feud between Pol Pot and the Vietnamese communists. It is tempting to...
In his weekly roundup of world events for Serbia’s Happy TV network, Dr. Trifkovic discusses the future of the Islamic State. He also looks at a viable strategy for President Donald Trump to emerge victorious from the impeachment battle. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZ2EPtvxQ_c&app=desktop (Translated from Serbian, slightly abbreviated.) Q: What has changed with the killing of al-Baghdadi?...
In the last week of February, the Pennsylvania Republican Party met to decide whether or not to censure U.S. Senator Pat Toomey for multiple offenses, chiefly for criticizing his Republican colleagues for daring to question whether Joe Biden was truly the winner of the 2020 presidential election. Toomey had declared that the “evidence is overwhelming...
What began as an impromptu and uncoordinated eruption of violence in an upstate New York prison soon morphed into a hostage crisis and siege that gripped the nation and claimed the lives of 43 people. The most famous prison riot in American history took place at Attica Correctional Facility in New York’s Wyoming County...
Today we give special thanks to Our Lady whose intercession led the armada of the Holy League to victory over the Ottoman fleet on October 7, 1571, at the mouth of what the Venetians called the Bay of Lepanto but what we today call the Gulf of Patras. My good ...
The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Managerial Elite; by Michael Lind; Portfolio; 224 pp., $25.00 A mostly white, cosmopolitan “overclass” rules America with a technocratic fist through the union of public and private spheres after pulling off a “revolution from above,” Michael Lind argues in his latest book. As Lind sees it, the country’s political institutions...