“Say what you mean,” the March Hare advised Alice—a piece of counsel imparted by writing teachers of the old school. But, as we know nowadays, say-what-you-mean is a lot of old-fashioned baloney. If we were to take it seriously, which of course we can’t (don’t forget “mad as a March Hare”), we’d never get anything...
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A Midterm Reality Check
With the Georgia runoff results in, the midterms represent a remarkable achievement for the Democratic Party. They've held their own despite failing grades in all polls on inflation, crime, foreign policy, and immigration, and a mostly senile president.
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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 ...
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J.D. Vance is Both Right and Wrong about Kids and Cat Ladies
We should all be for the proposition that Americans ought to have more children, but the truth is that we may have our hands full with trying to improve the quality of the population we’ve got.
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Will the Oligarchs Kill Trump?
Narrow victories in the Kentucky caucuses and the Louisiana primary, the largest states decided on Saturday, have moved Donald Trump one step nearer to the nomination. Primaries in Michigan, Mississippi and Idaho on March 8, and in Florida, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina on March 15, may prove decisive. If Marco Rubio does not...
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The Never Trumpers: Sore Losers With Thin Skins
Emerald Robinson recently wrote a witty piece for The American Spectator puncturing the pomposity of the Never Trump wing of the conservative movement. At least one member of that wing, the thin-skinned Jonah Goldberg, now the holder of the “Asness Chair in Applied Liberty at the American Enterprise Institute,” was not amused, and he let...
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Emerging Majority?
It is reported that when British General Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington at Yorktown, thus effectively ending the War of Independence, his regimental band played a tune called “The World Turned Upside Down.” As we approach the end of the second Christian millennium, one begins to wonder if the band was not just a bit...
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A Necessary Realignment
As I write on the morning of Super Tuesday, March 1, the Republican establishment is in hysterics. The writing is on the wall. By the end of the day, Donald Trump will have all but sewed up the 2016 Republican nomination for president. And I write those words confidently, even though voting has just begun...
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Judging Judge Gorsuch
A guide to the Neil Gorsuch nomination uproar: If you want the federal government to exercise greater and greater power over daily life in America, with minimum backtalk from us, the people, you deplore the prospective elevation of Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court. If, by contrast, you regard the expansion or contraction...
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Jefferson’s Cousin
There are probably more judicial biographies of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall than of all the rest of the Supreme Court justices combined, so why another one? R. Kent Newmyer, historian and law professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law, undertook to write a work that would not mirror the standard hagiographical...
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Is Mitt on a Suicide Mission?
“It’s a suicide mission,” said the Republican Party Chairman. Reince Priebus was commenting on a Washington Post story about Mitt Romney and William Kristol’s plot to recruit a third-party conservative candidate to sink Donald Trump. Several big-name Republican “consultants” and “strategists” are said to be on board. Understandably so, given the bucks involved. With the...
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Hating Babies, Hating God
When I sat down to write this article, Google reminded me that, when it comes to the issue of contraception, the stakes are very high. To check the date of publication of Dr. Charles Provan’s important work The Bible and Birth Control, I typed “Charles, Provan, Bible, Birth Control” into the mother of all search...
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Our Heads Cut Off
“Language is the armory of the human mind; and at once contains the trophies of its past, and the weapons of its future conquests.” —Samuel Taylor Coleridge This remarkable French mathematician has written extensively on what he considers the fundamental spiritual problem of our day, the perversion of language, which he...
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Gay Marriage in the Dock
In the 2012 election, same-sex marriage made gains at the ballot box for the first time—however narrowly—in all four states where “marriage equality” was presented to the voters for decision. Have the American people been successfully fooled? Maybe the more germane question is, Are large numbers of the American people self-deceived about homosexuality? We must...
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Appointing Supreme Court Justices
Michael McConnell, to use the overworked metaphor, is the “poster boy” for the Senate Democrats’ attempts to frustrate President Bush’s promise to appoint more Supreme Court justices like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Scalia and Thomas are the two current justices who have most closely embraced a jurisprudence faithful to the understanding of the Framers,...
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Conservative Credo: Abortion Rights
ABORTION AS SELF-DENIAL In a rationalist system of ethics, every basic principle must be stated in universal terms in which “I” am denied a privileged perspective. I may not, for example, make rules that apply to everyone but me–only the Congress of the United States is free to do that. If I advocate an unrestricted...
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Are Republicans Ready for Biden’s Counterattack?
Republicans need to be wary about becoming complacent about their chances in November or adopting the Democrats' framework on rhetoric and violence lest they make a strength out of Biden’s mediocrity.
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What Hath Trump Wrought?
“If I don’t win, this will be the greatest waste of time, money and energy in my lifetime,” says Donald Trump. Herewith, a dissent. Whatever happens Tuesday, Trump has made history and has forever changed American politics. Though a novice in politics, he captured the Party of Lincoln with the largest turnout of primary voters...
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Evangelical Antifederalists
The Arlington Group, a powerful association of Christian Right leaders, is, to borrow from the author of the Book of Virtues, picking a pony. Some ponies, such as Arkansas’ Mike Huckabee, just don’t look like they can make it to the final stretch. Fred Thompson, on the other hand, could go the distance. The problem...
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Taking Back the Culture
By the time you read this, “the most important election of our lifetime” will be headed for the history books. If the last six most important elections of our lifetime are any indication, however, we will once again have a chance to vote in the most important election of our lifetime in 2020. Or perhaps...
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Bo Gritz and Middle America
“You want to go see Bo Gritz burn the U.N. flag?” My libertarian neighbor Bill, during the final days of the last presidential campaign, was making me an offer I couldn’t refuse. I have always been half-frustrated by mv failure to take advantage of all those radical activities in my college days during the 60’s....
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Will the Conservative Momentum at the Supreme Court Continue This Term?
Impending Supreme Court cases give good reason for conservatives and constitutionalists to be cautiously optimistic. Significant conservative victories could be coming soon.
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Same-Sex Marriage: The Continuing Conversation
Immanentizing the eschaton via Obergefell v. Hodges, Justice Anthony Kennedy has achieved his long-sought goal—namely, to be to 21st-century America what Bonaparte was to 19th-century Europe. In respectable quarters Justice Kennedy is considered a world-historical personage, having made the oxymoron “same-sex marriage” the law of the land. Several years ago, in a letter to the...
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Conservative Credo IV: The Abortion Debate
The Abortion Debate In the 20th century the most powerful and difficult transitions in human life have been turned into political war zones in which the different sides routinely invoke the power of government to establish and enforce their points of view. Few debates have been so heated as those involving the decision to terminate...
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Slouching Towards the Gulag
The Trump “hush money” verdict should serve as a wake-up call to all freedom-loving Americans. If the best-known man in the world can be railroaded in a rigged kangaroo court, any of us could be.
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Nixon, LBJ & the First Shots in the Judges’ War
The Democrats’ drive to defeat Neil Gorsuch is the latest battle in a 50-year war for control of the Supreme Court—a war that began with a conspiracy against Richard Nixon by Chief Justice Earl Warren, Justice Abe Fortas and Lyndon Johnson. By June 1968, Nixon, having swept his primaries, was cruising to the nomination and...
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Dobson’s Choice: Politics and the Spirit of Martyrdom
During the 1990’s, under the guidance of Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich, the Christian Right learned to hate Hillary Clinton, and all her lies, and all her empty promises. To them, she is (to borrow from Dr. Sam Loomis) pure evil. She is a feminist who looks down her nose at women who stay home...
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Defense of the American Vision
Gordon Wood shows how far we have drifted from the Founding Fathers' vision of a polity that would limit arbitrary power in order that the government might serve the people rather than tyrannize them.
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Getting Back to Nature
“Human rights are fictions—but fictions with highly specific properties.” —Alasdair MacIntyre In 1960 John Courtney Murray, S.J., warned of the possibility that America was slipping into a new barbarism. In his best known work, We Hold These Truths, Father Murray said that barbarism “threatens when men cease to talk together according to reasonable laws.” Argument...
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For the Children
“I figured if he was there, I’d make sure he wasn’t there [again],” Harlan Drake, a 33-year-old truck driver, told Det. Sgt. Scott Shenk of the Shiawassee County Sheriff’s Department. But on the morning of September 11, 2009, James Pouillon was there, sitting across the street from Owosso High ...
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Trump Dumps the Do-Nothing Congress
Donald Trump is president today because he was seen as a doer not a talker. Among the most common compliments paid him in 2016 was, “At least he gets things done!” And it was exasperation with a dithering GOP Congress, which had failed to enact his or its own agenda, that caused Trump to pull...
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Winter of Our Discontent
As fall turned into winter, there were unmistakable signs of paleoconservative dissatisfaction with President Trump. In various forums, several paleoconservatives expressed displeasure that Trump had surrounded himself with unrepentant Bush Republicans and neoconservatives; that he was listening too much to his daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, who may be even further to the...
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God, Man, and Family
The first chapter of the Bible forms the basis of the Christian understanding of the nature and dignity of man—and woman: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:27). The next verse contains the first command given to the...
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Just One More Justice . . .
At the polls last November, conservatives and libertarians who vote according to conscience had two options: Bob Barr (Libertarian Party) and Chuck Baldwin (Constitution Party). Combined, these two garnered only 719,655 votes—a paltry amount compared with John McCain’s 59,082,002. For those who believe in smaller government, fiscal responsibility, and individual liberty, the 2008 election was...
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How, When, Do We Come Together Again?
America suffers from a great divide that goes far beyond our clashing views of Jan. 6 and the Mar-a-Lago raid. Americans need to find common ground again.
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Crying “Halt!”
A federal judge whom I know lamented that the Supreme Court term that ended last June was the worst in recent memory. That judge loves the Constitution but could find few signs that this term’s key decisions were based on that document. A Court that can rule that medical marijuana grown for home use substantially...
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Are Liberals Anti-WASP?
“A chorus of black commentators and civic leaders has begun expressing frustration over (Elena) Kagan’s hiring record as Harvard dean. From 2003 to 2009, 29 faculty members were hired: 28 were white and one was Asian American.” CNN pundit Roland Martin slammed “Kagan’s record on diversity as one that a ‘white Republican U.S. president’ would...
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Missed Opportunities of the Great Debate
With few exceptions, Trump did not engage the queries that he should have answered and missed several opportunities to land blows to his opponent.
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Judge Moore & God’s Law
When elected chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court in 2000, Judge Roy Moore installed in his courthouse a monument with the Ten Commandments that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai carved into it. Told by a federal court his monument violated the separation of church and state, Moore refused to remove it and was...
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GOP Nuclear Plan
Some republicans object to using the term nuclear option to describe their plan to end filibusters on the Senate floor during confirmation hearings, but the image of total war is a fitting one for the possible direction of the “upper chamber” these days. The 11th-hour compromise between the squishes in both parties will only serve...
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Pro-Choice Christians: Shattering Nature’s Glass Ceiling
After eight years of George W. Bush’s “culture of life,” which included well over 4,000 U.S. military deaths in Iraq and an estimated 1.25 million Iraqi deaths, abortion is back on the front burner, thanks to the presence of Sarah Palin on national television. Few were “energized” about John McCain before she entered stage right...
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Powers, Principalities, Spiritual Forces
In Ephesians 6, the Apostle Paul writes, “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (6:12). Political scientist and lay theologian Jacques Ellul went beyond the usual interpretation of these “spiritual forces” as demons to see...