Jeffrey Bell is perhaps the most experienced conservative political advisor in Washington, D.C. Once a key Reagan campaign advisor, Bell later became a political candidate himself, scoring a stunning primary upset against a seated Republican senator in New Jersey only to lose in the general election to Democrat Bill Bradley. Bell, a graduate of Columbia...
About a hundred years before the Civil War, two British surveyors, Jeremiah Mason and Charles Dixon, with a crew of ax-men, marked out 270 miles of wilderness. They set a stone at every mile, and another grander one embossed with the arms of the Penn and Calvert clans every five miles. The resulting map pacified...
Back in November and December, while Republicans across the country were writing letters, calling in to talk radio, and even taking to the streets to protest Al Gore’s attempt to steal the election in Florida, their fellow party members in Rockford remained strangely silent. They must have found it disquieting when the Bush campaign kept...
While Sen. Tuberville failed in his effort to curtail the Pentagon’s new plan to subsidize soldier abortions, his willingness to stand alone in opposition to the deep state juggernaut is inspiring.
The promoters of infanticide have a new weapon in their arsenal. “Storytelling” is the new “safe, legal, and rare” of the pro-abortion movement. See as Exhibit A the new HBO documentary, Abortion: Stories Women Tell, released a few weeks ago in select theaters. The film focuses on women in Missouri, a state where only one abortion...
James Bohan, a Pennsylvania attorney, believes he has elevated the abortion debate above the pedestrian levels of both medicine and religion. However, Mr. Bohan rises above faith and science only to fall back on the well-worn cliches of human rights doctrines found in the sacred texts of the Declaration of Independence, the writings of Albert...
Rabbi Mayer Schiller was a close friend of Thomas Molnar, Sam Francis, and Joe Sobran. I described his life and views in a VDARE column some years ago. Rabbi Schiller is a staunchly paleoconservative Hassidic rabbi living in internal exile in the manner of Soviet dissidents in upstate New York and teaches at a prestigious...
The election results are in, and those who are reading this piece have an advantage I do not: They know whether George W. Bush or John Kerry has won. (This issue went to press the day after the election.) Regardless of the outcome, however, we already know a good deal about what the next President...
“You mean,” said Marina, “you mean that we’re sitting here over Hell?” “Over a hell, conceivably. There are many hells, and the same place may be Hell or Purgatory, depending upon the situation. Most of them are private.” Those words echo in my thoughts as we approach the building. Turner School, built in 1898, is...
Political scientists say presidential elections are referendums on the incumbent. If that’s the case next year, none of the Biden team’s grounds for optimism will matter.
Thanks to Britney Spears’ court battles over her hard-earned fortune, more Americans than ever before are learning about how predatory lawyers, judges, doctors, conservators and guardians collaborate to defraud and destroy the lives of innocent victims. The 39-year-old Spears went public last week with her 13-year-long struggle against her father and court-appointed guardian Jamie Spears—who...
The state of the Union is divided, as we were reminded not only after but during the President’s speech of February 5. Republicans chanted “USA! USA!” several times in response to lines delivered to elicit the same; Democrats (upon whom the camera lovingly lingered) competed for the honor of “best sour expression/sneer by an elected...
Questions concerning the relationship between morality and law were reignited when, during the Republican primary campaign, Donald Trump commented on the matter of abortion and (implicitly) women’s rights. When pressed by a journalist, Trump stated that, yes, women should be “punished” if their behavior is illegal or contrary to prevailing community standards. Though abortion is...
Sometimes it takes distance and time passed before we can look back and laugh at the situations that take place in our lives, but Tom Fleming’s run-in with the busybodies in his hometown who objected to his bushes made me laugh, because my wife and I had a similar encounter. Here’s some background. The Village...
Pat Buchanan’s new biography of Richard Nixon’s presidency is the first volume anyone looking at that tumultuous time should turn to. Having served as Nixon’s researcher and speechwriter starting in 1966, Buchanan, not yet 30, followed the victorious President into the White House in 1969. In Nixon’s White House Wars, Buchanan makes it clear that Nixon’s tragic...
William J. Brennan, Jr., has retired from the Supreme Court. In three decades on the nation’s highest court Brennan did more, perhaps, than any other American politician except for Lyndon Johnson to promote the agenda of the liberal left: the antiwhite racism of the “Jim Snow” system, radical feminism, the reduction of the authority of...
Not so long ago, Rudy Giuliani was the consensus front runner for the Republican presidential nomination. He had won the first beauty contest of the primary season, from the nation’s most self-important electorate, the neoconservative punditariat: George Will, Norman Podhoretz, John Podhoretz, David Frum, and Richard Brookhiser all lined up behind Giuliani, together with an...
Pat Buchanan’s new biography of Richard Nixon’s presidency is the first volume anyone looking at that tumultuous time should turn to. Having served as Nixon’s researcher and speechwriter starting in 1966, Buchanan, not yet 30, followed the victorious President into the White House in 1969. In Nixon’s White House Wars, Buchanan makes it clear that...
When I started this column back in January 2001 (as a “Letter From Rockford”), the United States had just emerged from a presidential election that made this country look anything but united. Red and Blue, until then simply convenient colors used by the television networks to designate which party’s candidate had captured the electoral votes...
When George McGovern died, aged 90, two weeks before the last general election, the obituaries rightly praised his long and fitfully distinguished record as a U.S. representative and senator, his years of military service, his plucky presidential campaign against Richard Nixon, and his principled opposition to the Vietnam War, among other such causes. Unlike the...
A debate has broken out over the continuing viability of the “fusion” of libertarians and conservatives. If the latter are represented by President George W. Bush and the 109th Congress, the alliance seems dead. Concocting a coalition of libertarians and liberals isn’t going to be any easier, however. Brink Lindsey of the Cato Institute has attempted...
Among conservative constitutional scholars, George Carey best demonstrates the knack of remaining perpetually relevant. From his collaboration with his own mentor Willmoore Kendall in the 1960’s through his many writings on the federalist papers over three decades, some included in this volume, Carey has worked to show the value of the American founding to our...
George W. Bush is a stunningly and deservedly unpopular president. His approval ratings rival Nixon’s after Watergate, and the Republicans largely avoided any mention of him at their convention in St. Paul, a convention from which Bush was conspicuously absent. Under his leadership, we have become embroiled in a war that has cost thousands of...
John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate was surprising, but the surprise pales in comparison to the reaction of conservative Christians, especially Catholics. In their sudden race to endorse McCain-Palin, they have cast aside any questions about the complementarity of the sexes, or even the late John Paul II’s “theology of the...
During Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign for president, when his fortunes were at their nadir, Joe Biden promised that he would nominate the first black woman to the United States Supreme Court. He reportedly made this pledge to James Clyburn (D-S.C.), the powerful African-American congressman, in return for Clyburn’s help in securing the black vote in...
Like a cold front, you could feel the defeat coming; and you did not need Dan Rather or George Gallup to prepare you. You knew it in your bones as you listened to the sound bites on the evening news: Clinton saying nothing and saying it well; Dole saying nothing and saying it poorly. It...
Politics is like the weather: No matter how blue in the face we talk ourselves, no matter how many virgins we sacrifice to Odin, our leaders do not improve, and the drought continues. The fates who determine the destinies of nations are no more obedient to our words than the little gods of wind and...
During the Republican presidential debate on May 15, Ron Paul, the constitutionalist from Texas, flatly stated that the terrorist attacks on September 11 were retaliation for U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Rudy Giuliani shot back a mendacious rejoinder: “That’s an ...
Here, you can see almost forever. It is a great green plain bounded by low wolds to the west and the North Sea to the east, by the River Humber to the north and the shining mudflats of the Wash to the south. It is a landscape for seven-league boots and ten-league thoughts, as the...
U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul, Obama’s man in Moscow, who just took up his post, has received a rude reception. And understandably so. In 1992, McFaul was the representative in Russia of the National Democratic Institute, a U.S. government-funded agency whose mission is to promote democracy abroad. The NDI has been tied to color-coded...
No one expected the vote to be so close. After Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech in St. Paul, the Republicans were certain they had found a rock star to compete with Barack Obama. They could ride the crest of Palinmania all the way to the Oval Office. All they had to do was keep the hockey...
The elevation of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court formalizes state-sponsored injustice in the very institution charged with upholding justice.
Methodism, America’s third-largest religious denomination, eagerly embraced the Social Gospel nearly a hundred years ago. It supported labor unions, civil rights, and a moderate welfare state. By the 1960’s, the church was supporting Third World revolutions and abortion rights, while opposing school prayer and U.S. military defense efforts. Not surprisingly, Methodist theology became as wacky...
This month, we shall have an answer to an all-important question: Which arm of our bipartisan party state will occupy the White House for the next four years? This is an issue second in importance only to such urgent American questions as “When will Britney Spears be allowed to see her kids?” “How much weight...
John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin to be his running mate was surprising, but the surprise pales in comparison to the reaction of conservative Christians, especially Catholics. In their race to endorse McCain-Palin, they have cast aside any questions about the complementarity of the sexes, or even the late John Paul II’s theology of the...
Samuel Johnson was nearly 64 when he made an unexpected journey. One day in 1773, the internationally renowned lexicographer, essayist, poet, and novelist, who somehow combined being one of the great thinkers of Europe with being a personification of bluff Englishness, suddenly switched his great gaze north, in search of a dream of youth. His...
When the April figures on unemployment were released May 4, they were more than disappointing. They were deeply disturbing. While the unemployment rate had fallen from 8.2 percent to 8.1 percent, 342,000 workers had stopped looking for work. They had just dropped out of the labor market. Only 63.6 percent of the U.S. working...
There are many reasons to criticize the the Republicans as the Stupid Party, and I have often done so. But we need to remember that, in Sam Francis’ dichotomy, the other major party is the Evil Party. And some of what the leader of the Evil Party is doing has no real precedent in American...
On September 25, 1789, Congress submitted to the states for ratification ten amendments to the 1787 Constitution, known as the Bill of Rights. Seldom is there much serious reflection on the issues involved in a “Bill of Rights,” but there was a great deal in 1787-1789. Those Americans were highly informed political thinkers, versed in...
On December 9, 2008, as I read through the federal criminal complaint against the latest Illinois governor to be indicted for the merest portion of his crimes, I could not help but feel uneasy. Sure, it was great fun to imagine Governor Hot Rod sweating it out in his holding cell, awaiting arraignment later in...
Right Samuel Francis’s remarks (“The Abortion Gambit,” October 1994) on the efforts by neoconservatives, especially Bill Kristol, to co-opt the religious right are convincingly presented. Francis rightly notes that Kristol, Bennett, and other neocon movers and shakers are working to control the religious right and thereby to provide themselves with a mass base that they...
Sound of Freedom is a beautifully crafted and passionately humane film about the darkest underbelly of contemporary life: the trafficking and sexual abuse of helpless children.