I write with bittersweet excitement to reveal the new interim editor in chief of Chronicles. As our readers know, Aaron Wolf was to become the editor in chief this year, but passed away suddenly on Easter Sunday. Aaron was an exceptional man and a wonderful, loyal editor for Chronicles, serving the institution for 20 years....
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Till Earth Was
Poet John Clare (1793-1864) seems to have grown from the soil. His last name derives from the word clayer—someone who manures and enriches clay. As a farm laborer, he drew sustenance from the earth. Immersed in humus, he learned the humility so necessary to creativity. His poems, like furrow lines, break the surface of things...
Books in Brief
The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding, by Eric Nelson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press; 390 pp., $29.95). Historians have long noted the seeming paradox that the Framers of the U.S. Constitution invested the office of the American president with greater powers than those enjoyed by the English king, whose “yoke” they had just thrown...
The Criminal Type
Iconoclasm is the poor man’s intellectualism. Challenge a traditional way of thinking and you can vault yourself instantly into the celebrity spotlight, with lucrative publishing deals, testimonies before congressional committees, and interviews on Good Morning America. Since the 1960’s the iconoclasts have held sway in the study of criminal behavior, ignoring important studies done in...
DNC Roundup: What Did I Just Watch?
Democratic conventions are usually filled with soaring rhetoric disguising the party’s extremism. This year’s trainwreck is what happens when a party has no idea what they are or why they’re here.
Patriarch Alesky, R.I.P
Aleksy II, Patriarch of Moscow and head of the Russian Orthodox Church, died of heart failure on December 5, 2008, at the age of 79. Born in Estonia in 1929 into a pious family of Russian émigrés of German extraction, Aleksei Mikhailovich Ridiger was ordained a priest in 1950, completed his theological studies in St....
The Cataclysm That Was Roe
The pro-life movement today almost completely identifies with the Republican Party, despite its support by a few Democrats such as Pennsylvania Sen. Robert Casey (sometimes). It wasn’t always so. In 1972, at the age of 17, I worked against Michigan’s Measure B, which would have legalized abortion in the state. It lost, with 61 percent...
On Fire
Christopher Check’s review of W.G. Simms’ A City Laid Waste: The Capture, Sack, and Destruction of the City of Columbia (“Total War,” September) was an excellent consideration of that volume’s importance in current topical terms. If Southerners were allowed to know the true story of the invasion and burning of the civilian South by U.S....
Erdogan’s Ambush
Turkey’s shooting down of a Russian Su-24 bomber over northwestern Syria on November 24 may be a game changer in that strategically positioned Middle Eastern country. Various parties have been forced to declare their true agendas. Strategic clarity is finally emerging, which is the precondition for an eventual solution—even though no solution is yet in...
Paper War
My local newspaper is now unreadable, and I’m damn mad about it. In order to understand the earthshaking significance of this turn of events and its emotional impact on me, you have to understand the role my paper, the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat, plays in my life. It is the centerpiece of a long-standing ritual, one...
Eating With Sinners
And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me. Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you. —Luke 22:19-20 These familiar...
Recoil and Revulsion
“Ambition and suspicion always go together.” —G.C. Lichtenberg Back in the 1950’s and 60’s, when Malcolm Muggeridge was one of the resident personalities of British television, all over Britain people used to wonder what the origins of such a bizarre figure might be. Many of them would watch solely to be...
The War for the Soul of America
The war in Washington will not end until the presidency of Donald Trump ends. Everyone seems to sense that now. This is a fight to the finish. A postelection truce that began with Trump congratulating House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi—”I give her a great deal of credit for what she’s done and what she’s accomplished”—was...
Mending Wall
The Jewish population I encountered during my recent month-long tour of Israel was markedly different from anything I had expected. If there are Israeli counterparts to Abe Foxman and Midge Decter, I didn’t meet them. The vast majority of Jews I did meet were Moroccan and Levantine, while most of the security police in the...
Lost and Found in America
One Saturday night last summer I found myself sitting on a warm, grassy knoll outside Missoula, Montana, watching a blood-red sun set behind a cup in the hills with the snow-fringed Bitterroot Mountains beyond, while in the foreground an elfin, 70-year-old man dressed entirely in black leather, accompanied by an energetically hair-swinging band, blasted out...
2020: The Year ‘Expert’ Credibility Died
If there were ever a time to “question authority,” as the old counterculture slogan of the 1960s urged, the authoritarian age of COVID-19 is that time. Two thousand twenty will go down in American history as the year that public health “experts” got everything wrong. It’s not just that their judgment...
Stardust
“Not till the fire is dying in the grate / Look we for any kinship with the stars.” —Meredith The post-World War I shattered visions of Pound and Eliot are perhaps fundamentally less different from the incoherencies of Kerouac and Corso, the randomly referential allegory of Ashbery, or the associative anarchy of Bly and Merwin...
Life on the Frontier
The Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia enjoyed a full 24 hours of resurgent infamy before Gay Day came and took it all away. Screaming and shrieking throughout the process was the puerile, facile, and ultimately Manichaean Weltanschauung of our ruling class, which is best summarized in the phrase, “We are on the...
Athens and Jerusalem
The holiday season is responsible for some of modern America’s most deeply felt traditions: cheap airline tickets on Christmas day, seasonal hymns like “Jinglebell Rock” and “Blue Christmas,” ACLU suits against the school Christmas pageant, and the Andy Williams Christmas special, for which the divorced Mr. Williams (one of whose wives killed her lover, Olympic...
Brexit? Let’s Not Make a Deal
“You have delighted us long enough,” said Mr. Bennet, speaking for all of us on the exhausted subject of Theresa May. We had hoped for closure before Christmas, since a Meaningful Vote on May’s Withdrawal Agreement had been promised and this was surely destined for a massive defeat. But the Prime Minister pulled the vote,...
Veepstakes Give Trump an Edge
Small though the influence of a VP pick usually is, Trump has several ways to turn the right choice into a winning hand.
COVID-19 in the Light of History
Serious epidemics can have far-reaching social, cultural, and geopolitical consequences. The plague which devastated Athens in 430 BC—in the second year of the Peloponnesian War, when an Athenian victory still seemed within reach—claimed a quarter of the population, some 75,000 people including Pericles. His successors were weak and incompetent, and Athens suffered a precipitous decline...
Smyrna: A Melancholy Centennial
The 1922 massacre of Greeks at the ancient city of Smyrna was the bitter final blow in a long century of Turkish-Muslim persecution of the Christians in Asia Minor.
Three Weddings and a Funeral
For several decades
Who Are the Cowards Now?
In July of 1967, after race riots gutted Newark and Detroit, requiring troops to put them down, LBJ appointed a commission to investigate what happened, and why. The Kerner Commission reported back that “white racism” was the cause of black riots. Liberals bought it. America did not. Richard Nixon said of the white racism charge...
Words of Mass Destruction
How many changes have been rung on this one phrase: Weapons Of Mass Destruction. We are told we must eliminate the threat of, degrade his capacity to employ, send a clear signal that we will not tolerate the existence of Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction. Secretaries Cohen and Albright both inserted the key phrase...
The Stupid Party Rides Again
On November 4, 2008, voters decisively rejected the Republican Party, voting for Barack Obama over John McCain by a margin of 52.8 percent to 45.9. Obama won 365 electoral votes to McCain’s 173, including every state in the Northeast and industrial Midwest; every state on the Pacific Coast; Florida, the state that ensured George W....
The Right’s ‘Rocky’ Redux: The Tide Is Turning
The June debate between Biden and Trump was that Rocky moment when the opponent was sent bloodied and reeling back to his corner. But the fight is by no means over.
Poisonous Intoxicants
The Master Produced and distributed by The Weinstein Company, together with Annapurna Pictures Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson The Master is another travesty by the supposed wunderkind Paul Thomas Anderson. In 2005 he gave us his rendition of Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil in There Will Be Blood. Unfortunately, he left out...
Trump Is Right about NATO, Brussels Attacks
This week Donald Trump ignited another furor, this time for asking the simple question of whether America’s commitment to NATO is worth it. The following day, Brussels was hit by jihad terror attacks. Johnny on the spot, Senator Ted Cruz accused Trump of surrendering to ISIS and to Putin in the face of the...
‘Ukraine can’t have it both ways’
Srdja Trifkovic discusses the Ukraine energy crisis, RT live, April 10, 18:06 GMT RT: Ukraine’s economy is in a shambles and its people are suffering. Is it morally justified to turn the taps off? Srdja Trifkovic: Talking about “moral justification,” let’s remember the first OPEC oil crisis in the winter of 1973-74, after the Yom...
‘Buffalo Commons’ Update: The International Parkade
Last year I wrote about the Poppers, Frank and Deborah, the Rutgers University husband-wife duo who theorized that the Great Plains—from Texas to North Dakota and from Oklahoma to Denver—were fit to be nothing more than a “Buffalo Commons.” The couple predicted that the Great Plains, whose largest city is Lubbock, Texas, will slowly dwindle...
Must We Kill the Economy To Kill the Virus?
“We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself,” tweeted the president on Sunday night, adding that, after the current 15-day shutdown, “we will make a decision as to which way we want to go.” President Trump is said to be privately expressing a deepening concern at the damage the coronavirus shutdown is...
A Remembrance of Anne
Note to Readers: This is a condensed version of the eulogy delivered by Patrick Buchanan at St. Stephen Martyr in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 18. It was December of 1965 that I first looked on the friendly Irish face of Anne Volz, outside the law office of Richard M. Nixon. Anne ...
Beyond “Immigration”
The United States has Mexico, and below her Central America, south of the border. In ¡Adios, America!, Ann Coulter claims that 30 percent of the Mexican population, today over 122 million people, has moved to the United States within the past several decades. Directly south of the European Continent lies the continent of Africa, population...
A Tale of Two Assassination Attempts
Reagan had many Democratic detractors but the hatred for Donald Trump is on a different level.
We Are Right on Foreign Affairs Because We Are Right on Everything
It is almost embarrassing to say that we are right on foreign affairs because we are right on everything else. It nevertheless has to be said, because it is true. We are right on foreign affairs because the behavior of our rulers abroad is a logical and inevitable extension of their behavior at home. Having...
Globalists & Nationalists: Who Owns the Future?
Robert Bartley, the late editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal, was a free trade zealot who for decades championed a five-word amendment to the Constitution: “There shall be open borders.” Bartley accepted what the erasure of America’s borders and an endless influx or foreign peoples and goods would mean for his country. Said...
Rummy Reduced
Had President George W. Bush fired Donald Rumsfeld a month before, rather than a day after, November 7, the Republican Party could have retained control of both houses. Still, doing it late is better than not doing it at all. Rumsfeld was a liability and an embarrassment, the embodiment of all that went wrong in...
The Most Unbelievable Thing
The following is the text of Professor Nisbet’s speech at the 1985 Ingersoll Prizes Awards Banquet: One of Hans Christian Andersen’s lesser-known stories bears the title “The Most Unbelievable Thing.” A king offered a fortune to the subject who created the most unbelievable thing in the arts. Competition was intense and prolonged. When at last...
On Jefferson’s Honor
As a long-time reader and supporter of Chronicles, I am a little puzzled by your persistent efforts to debunk the “myth” that Thomas Jefferson took his quadroon chambermaid Sally Hemings as a concubine. While I agree with Samuel Francis, Egon Tausch, and now Matthew Rarey (Cultural Revolutions, September) that the legacy of Thomas Jefferson is...
America: From Village to Empire—October 2004
PERSPECTIVE The Call of Bloodby Thomas Fleming Old Europe versus the New World Order. VIEWS There Once Was a New Englandby John WillsonTimothy Dwight’s New England catechism. Tocqueville’s America and America Todayby Claude PolinLiberty, Equality, Materialism. NEWS H.R. 3313 and the Imperial Judiciaryby William J. QuirkA welcome constitutional crisis. What? Are You Crazy?by B.K. EakmanThe...
April Bombing
The April bombing in Oklahoma City told us a lot about ourselves and how we respond to adversity. When a bomb destroyed the federal building in that city, politicians and journalists were swift to place the atrocity in some kind of wider context, offering interpretations which ranged from the accurate to the vulgar. In the...
From MLK to CRT
Martin Luther King cannot be retrofitted as a conservative. He was at heart an activist of the left, and his ideas were in large part a precursor to critical race theory.
The Other F Bomb: Our Education Crisis
“F” is for failure. Last week, I happened upon an article reporting over 40 percent of Baltimore’s high school students had a 1.0 grade point average or less. In other words, 40 percent of these students were practically flunking their course load. That shocking figure led me to look at statistics from U.S. News and World Report, compiled before...
The Way We Are, No. 5
Your republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire was in the fifth; with this difference; that the Huns and Vandals who ravaged the Roman Empire came from without and your Huns and Vandals will have been engendered ...
National Debtors
The United States is a nation of debtors. Whatever sources you consult or trust, our per capita debt is extraordinarily high. The money geeks at NerdWallet.com, after analyzing statistics from the Federal Reserve, offer the following profile of American households: Average credit-card debt: $15,270 Average mortgage debt: $149,925 Average student-loan debt: $32,258 I shall not...
All the World Against It
In this impressive collection of speeches and essays reflecting decades of somber thought, John A. Howard, senior fellow in educational philosophy at the Howard Center, takes stock of changing American manners and values. What makes these comments especially noteworthy is the distance between Howard’s accomplishments and the irremediably “toxic” culture that he criticizes. The...
Who Won the Taiwan War Games?
Nancy Pelosi's recent visit to Taiwan ignited Chinese war games against Taiwan. A message was sent from both D.C. and Beijing.
Short Constructions
You don’t have to read far into the story collection Thief of Lives before John Cheever’s name comes to mind, but after so many years of writing, Kit Reed must be used to that comparison. By now she should be replying: “Yes, but I write as well as that man did and occasionally even better....