A bill that the media is touting as providing “comprehensive immigration reform” is currently making its way through the Senate. In essence, the bill will provide amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants and vastly expand legal immigration, while doing nothing to prevent future illegal immigration. In fact, we know from past immigration amnesties that they...
10363 search results for: Politics%2Bof%2BRace
Macedonia unrest: ‘Warning to Skopje against new Turkish pipeline’
Srdja Trifkovic’s latest RT interview The Republic of Macedonia has become important to the U.S. policymakers in recent months, as it could be the only way for Russia’s proposed Turkish Stream pipeline to reach Central Europe. Washington does not want that to happen, as Srdja Trifkovic told RT in the latest live interview, and this...
On ‘A Lot of Americans’
Albert Einstein once noted that a thing should be made as simple as possible—but no simpler. I am afraid that E. Christian Kopff (Cultural Revolutions, May 1989) has reduced my ideas below an acceptable minimum and distorted them in the process. I have said that teaching is undervalued in today’s university, that we do not...
A Reluctant Warrior Tiptoes to War
Barack Obama has just taken his first baby steps into a war in Syria that may define and destroy his presidency. Thursday, while he was ringing in Gay Pride Month with LGBT revelers, a staffer, Ben Rhodes, informed the White House press that U.S. weapons will be going to the Syrian rebels. For two...
Babbitt and More in the Eighties
“Every artist is a moralist, though he need not preach.” —George Santayana Accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature on December 12, 1930, Sinclair Lewis used the occasion to attack academic traditionalists, who, he said, “like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.” And among that group he singled out the New Humanists,...
Time to Allow a Cease-Fire in Ukraine
U.S. and UK officials have been sabotaging attempts to reach a cease-fire in Ukraine in an attempt to embroil Russia in a war of attrition. It’s time for a sober reassessment of a strategy that has backfired on Western leaders.
Deplored in Public Print
Guns and rape are often deplored in the public prints as two of our nation’s worst plagues. One may be the cure for the other. Denver, for instance, is at the mercy of a serial rapist. It is increasingly clear that the police, if not exactly helpless, cannot cope with the massive violence that is...
Biden’s America: One Nation or Us Versus Them?
“We have met the enemy and he is us,” said Walt Kelly’s cartoon character Pogo, half a century ago, about what we Americans were doing to our environment. Rereading President Joe Biden’s inaugural address, Pogo’s remark comes to mind. Biden began on a lofty, hopeful and familiar note: “This is a...
Debunking the ‘Plunging Border Crossings’ Narrative
The supposed miraculous deathbed conversion of the Biden administration on illegal immigration at the border is just more of the same shell game.
MIT Researchers Admit Anti-Maskers Are More Scientifically Rigorous
Upon recounting my bout with COVID to an acquaintance, I was asked if I knew where I might have picked up the virus. When I mentioned my hunch about the source, my acquaintance gasped, then inferred that I and those I caught it from must not have been wearing masks since the virus had spread....
Adam Smith University: A Modest Proposal
Fellow investors: Here is our business plan. The route to big profits is to find an industry that is oversized, inefficient, smug, and self-satisfied and then give it an injection of good old-fashioned business competition. Bring the power of business thinking and private sector efficiency to an outmoded industry. Cut costs and prices, downsize, consolidate,...
Trump-Kim Summit: The Score
At the end of their meeting in Singapore, President Donald Trump and North Korea’s Chairman Kim Jong Un signed a document in which Trump “committed to provide security guarantees to the DPRK,” while Kim “reaffirmed his firm and unwavering commitment to complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.” In principle this is a reasonable formula which...
SPLC Spreads More Hate, This Time With A Twist
You wonder what took so long. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which labels any group or person even a smidgen to the right of Al Sharpton a “racist,” “hater” or “right-wing extremist,” is now terrorizing those who indirectly fund “hate groups.” Last week, World Net Daily reported that SPLC is moving against websites through which...
Gone With the Wind
This year marks the 150th anniversary of Appomattox. In recent times, academics studying the Civil War have reached a striking degree of consensus about how that war should be understood, and its practical implications today. Sadly, that consensus has one enormous omission. Overwhelmingly, scholars agree that the war was about the defense and preservation of...
A Nation Starting (Maybe) to Turn
A nation of 300 million souls—richest and most powerful in the world, for all its messes and perturbations—needs a turning radius wide as the future. But you know what—realization precedes intellectual assent, which precedes needed action. There’s much to be hopeful about as the nation goes in for its electoral physical. Valuable realizations are...
Oh I Wish I Was in Dixie
For a native son of the Midwest who has sympathized with the Southern states in the War of Northern Aggression for as far back as he can remember, I can see why some Southerners might find a certain justice in the impending fiscal collapse of the state that launched Abraham Lincoln, coming as it has...
Her Majesty’s Afghan Warlord
The Man Who Would Be King Written and Directed by John Huston ◆ Produced by John Foreman ◆ Distributed by Columbia Pictures With Afghanistan on the mind, as President Biden tries to benightedly disengage from America’s longest war, it seems a worthy time to revisit John Huston’s 1975 adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who...
Bringing Down Brussels
As everyone knows, Greece became a member of the eurozone on the back of a lie. The colonels’ regime had collapsed, Greek politicians were nervous, and that pseudo-French aristocrat Giscard promised entry to a country that is more Middle Eastern than European, but with olive oil. Entry meant no more tanks surrounding Parliament at midnight—rather...
News From Nowhere
Talking recently to a Polish friend who has lived in both Canada and the United States, trying to explain the vitality of my countrymen to him, I said finally, “Unless you’re an American, you don’t know what being alive is!” To which he gloomily replied, “And no one knows what death is till he moves...
Obama’s Choice: FDR or Reagan
Barack Obama, it is said, will inherit the worst times since the Great Depression. Not to minimize the crisis we are in, but we need a little perspective here. The Great Depression began with the Great Crash of 1929. By 1931, unemployment had reached 16 percent. By 1933, 89 percent of stock value had been...
We Say Grace, We Say Ma’am . . .
The news descended with crushing force: I must be getting really old. Rising from the dinner table, I had pulled back my wife’s chair, and our waiter complimented me. He complimented me for the kind of civil and reflexive action to which my generation was bred in the post-World War II years? Ah, yes; he...
More Money Than God
“How shameless and how greedy all these people are!” —Fyodor Dostoevsky Once there were three finance firms and then there were none. One was a Ponzi scheme, one a tax fraud, and the last was sold to American Express for $380 million. One CEO is broke and in jail; one is a wealthy fugitive from...
The ‘Mostly Peaceful’ Double Standard
Though the actions of President Donald Trump’s most foolish supporters at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday were disgraceful, I can’t help but compare the news coverage of this event with the coverage of the Black Lives Matter/Antifa protesters in cities across the country last year. In my home state of Ohio, those protesting the death...
Annus Felix
The Independent Orders of Zhukov, Lenin, and October Revolution Red Banner Operational Purpose Division of Internal Troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia – yes, my friends, there is such a thing – has just been given back its old name. Now it will again be called the Felix Dzerzhinsky Independent Orders of...
School Daze
“A motive fair to Learning’s imps he gave. . . . “ —William Shenstone American education has never been in very good shape, so criticizing it now would be a redundancy, except for the fact that we are facing an increasing teacher shortage across the curricula and across all grade levels which shows no signs...
Eugenio Corti
The fame of Italian writer Eugenio Corti hinges on two works: I piu non ritornano: Diario di ventotto giorni in una sacca sul fronte russo, inverno 1942-43 (Most Do Not Return: Diary of Twenty Days in a Pocket on the Russian Front, Winter 1942-43) first published in 1947, and his great 1,280-page novel Il Cavallo...
Leonardo’s Little Joke
The Da Vinci Code Produced by Columbia Pictures Directed by Ron Howard Screenplay by Akiva Goldsman from the novel by Dan Brown Distributed by Sony Pictures At one point in The Da Vinci Code, the marvelously funny movie based on Dan Brown’s as nearly hilarious novel, Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou), renowned cryptologist for the Direction...
The Real Rush Limbaugh
After I authored a Washington Post article critical of Rush Limbaugh from a conservative perspective, William Kristol of the Project on the Republican Future took me to task, telling a reporter that I had judged the popular talk show host by “extreme standards.” Limbaugh, he said, is “plenty conservative for me.” Among other things, my...
The Wolf Week in Review: Race to the 90’s
Another week has come and gone, and here are some highlights and cultural trends. Republicans Want to Draft Your Daughter Whether your daughter ought to be compelled to sign up for spilling her guts in a regime-change adventure that will ultimately bring to power another Islamic regime is a question that has gone mainstream. And...
An American Statesman Turns 80
Eight years ago, I made the case in this magazine that Pat Buchanan has been a “visionary.” That case is even clearer today, with the White House occupied by a man who got there by running on the issues Buchanan had championed for decades and who is now remaking the GOP along populist and nationalist...
Battling Cyberhate
The conventional wisdom regarding the Internet appears to have changed practically overnight. Once championed as a wonderful Information-Age tool to “empower the individual,” the net is now more likely to be denounced as an iniquitous network of right-wing conspiracy theorists and former Luftwaffe pilots. I would be the last person to peddle a gospel of...
Trump vs. Tyranny
Donald Trump already is the presumptive Republican nominee for president and easily will win Tuesday’s California primary. Yet he has continued to campaign in the state, which has revealed the top issue of this campaign: Trump vs. tyranny. Every rally he has held in the Golden State has been met with protesters trying to shut...
Character in Acting
[This review first appeared in the June 1987 issue of Chronicles.] To 18th-century Britons and Americans who devoted any serious thought to the subject of human nature—and a great many did—the conventional starting point was the theory of the passions, or drives for self-gratification. Rousseau to the contrary, man was not naturally good but was ruled...
Not Even Migrants Want to Live in America’s Dying Cities
America has taken on financial and social debts it cannot pay as a result of excessive immigration, and the consequences of those decisions have adversely affected all but the wealthy elites among us.
Love and Work in the Modern Age
My mother would call Allan Carlson a man gifted with “common sense.” In her eyes this was high praise. She was right in this as in so many things. Carlson’s most recent entry into the seemingly interminable debate about “whither the family?” or even “whether the family?” is marked by a refreshingly clear writing style:...
After Iraq
As soon as the long-anticipated war with Iraq has been brought to a temporary close, the United States will be able to get on with the post-September 11 agenda declared by President Bush: the eradication of evil. Even a minimal definition of evil would include the acts of terrorism inflicted every day by Islamic extremists...
The Egyptian Crisis
The ongoing crisis in Egypt, prima facie, is a case of irresistible force (the army) meeting an immovable object (the Muslim Brotherhood, MB). The officers have declared that “the clock cannot be turned back” (i.e. Morsi will not be reinstated), while the deposed president’s supporters aver that they will settle for nothing less than the...
Women in Arms
Lies can’t live forever, as we have seen recently in Eastern Europe. One result of the American invasion of Panama may be that, despite the best efforts of the United States Army, Americans will finally learn the truth about women in the military. It didn’t take long for the truth to come out of Panama,...
Rinse, Please
As the book’s title has all the lyric delicacy of a Rolex advertising campaign, and as we quickly discover that its author is neither a philosopher nor a watchmaker, it becomes clear at the outset that what we are up against is the most irritating of genres, popular science. In Mr. Waugh’s defense, I hasten...
Killing Soleimani: Possibly a Crime, Probably a Mistake
A successful strategy, in diplomacy and war alike, rests on the judicious balancing of ends and means in pursuit of defined objectives. This invariably entails altering the behavior of the adversary in a manner which will make the attainment of those objectives more likely. It is unclear whether and in what way the killing of...
Italian Artworks Targeted by Muslims
When the Taliban in Afghanistan were busy destroying ancient gigantic stone statues of Buddha, some commentators asked: What’s next? Now, a fundamentalist Muslim group known as Unione dei Musulmani d’Italia (Italy’s Union of Muslims) has demanded that a priceless 15th-century fresco, which they call “obscene and blasphemous,” be removed from San Petronio, the 14th-century cathedral...
The Character of Stonewall Jackson
“Look, men, there is Jackson standing like a stone wall! Let us determine to die here, and we will conquer! Follow me!” —General Bernard E. Bee, C.F.A., shortly before falling, mortally wounded, in First Manassas The era of the War for Southern Independence illuminates the present time for what it is,...
Returning to Earth
What lies at the root of the abstractionism that I discussed last month, which afflicts the modern world like a mania, especially here in the United States? Walker Percy dubbed the phenomenon angelism, by which he did not mean that those who exhibit it have evolved to a state of moral purity but that we...
Liberal Culture
The End Nears . . . “The end nears when fools are hailed and the sages ignored —.” This bit of ancient wisdom came to our minds when we were going through Time magazine’s cover story on one Shirley MacLaine, a successful actress and a quasicultural emblem of the liberal America. The gist of Time‘s...
The Price of Hillary
No secretary of state will come to that office with stronger pro-Israel credentials or closer ties to the Jewish community than Sen. Hillary Clinton, Douglas Bloomfield assures his readers in The Jerusalem Post. Good for them, and for Bosnia’s Muslims and Kosovo’s Albanians; but for the rest of us Mrs. Clinton’s appointment as the third...
Vanishing American Footprint
With his order to effect the execution of Osama bin Laden by Navy SEALs, 40 miles from Islamabad, without asking permission of the government, Barack Obama made a bold and courageous decision. Its success, and the accolades he has received, have given him a credibility as commander in chief that he never had before....
Jack Kemp’s Mistaken Identity
President Bush suffered fierce attacks from conservative quarters as the 1992 election year came to a close, and many on the right even celebrated his loss. Fine enough, but after the election the message on the conference circuit and on the nation’s op-ed pages was that conservatives’ great hope for 1996 is Jack F. Kemp....
The Biggest Issue in This Election
Harris has been an enemy of the First Amendment throughout her career.
Notes From a Writer of Trash
The most important datum about Western fiction is that it is at the absolute bottom of the literary heap, somewhere below pornography. English professors would cavil at calling Westerns literature; they prefer to categorize Westerns as subliterature, or entertainment. Few, if any, educated people read Westerns. The higher the cultural and academic attainments of the...
Almost an Idol
Why does the South adore Stonewall Jackson? He was not a particularly lovable man. And he was certainly not a romantic, dashing cavalier, like Jeb Stewart; a stainless aristocrat calmly daring all the odds, like Robert E. Lee; or even a wizard of the saddle, like Bedford Forrest. Yet at Stone Mountain, Georgia—the Confederacy’s Mount...