Nebraska Produced by Blue Lake Media Fund and Bona Fide ProductionsDirected by Alexander Payne Screenplay by Bob Nelson Distributed by Paramount Vantage American Hustle Produced by Atlas Entertainment and Annapurna Pictures Directed and written by David O. Russell Distributed by Columbia Pictures Few directors would have taken the chances Alexander Payne does with his...
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Do Sex Scandals Matter?
Trump, Boebert, Gibson—or any candidate—might have moral character flaws, but candidates who are personally objectionable are often politically indispensable.
Between Auschwitz and Armageddon
“Your fathers, where are they? and the prophets, do they live for ever?” —Zechariah Most nations know all too clearly what they believe about Jews. Americans are less sure. This beneficial uncertainty inheres in the two major traditions that shape American souls: Christianity and modern political philosophy. Peter Grose writes that the Puritans “identified with...
The Truth in Stereotypes
The stereotype is in disrepute. The word is often defined in purely negative terms. Some definitions construe the stereotype as necessarily possessing the negative charge that does, indeed, energize many stereotypes. Other definitions see as inseparable from the stereotype the inappropriate application of the stereotype to those members of the stereotyped group who do not...
Haunted by Yesterday
“In literature, it is the hereditary spirit that still prevails.” —George Santayana Nothing is more dangerous for the critic than taking a book cover at face value. But when the blurbs compare the author to William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Saul Bellow, the challenge is irresistible. And since these are the claims with...
Lighting Out for the Territory
Restless Nation is an enjoyable exploration of the American national character. The book presents a plausible hypothesis, supported by the author’s broad knowledge of the nation’s history and social trends and illustrated throughout by aptly chosen literary references that reflect admirably wide reading. The problem is that, despite all these positives, I just don’t buy...
How the Historical Novel Has Changed!
Should one read Hervey Allen or Anne Rice? Why should the question be asked at all? Why might a discriminating reader today even think of picking up either Hervey Allen’s massive best-seller of 1933, Anthony Adverse, or The Feast of All Saints (1979) by Anne Rice, a hugely popular contemporary author? (Both are still available...
Hillaryland
A bit of autobiography. I was born and reared in Chicago. I am married to a man of achievement. I have watched my children leave the nest for college. I am highly opinionated and tend to believe that the world would be a better place if more of my fellow citizens agreed with me. I...
The Emperor’s Tattoo
“A monarchy that’s tempered with republican equality.” Who would have thought, 100 years ago, that by the end of the American Century the great burning public issue would be the Confederate flag? Back in 1900, Americans were eager to put their quarrels behind them. Rebs and Yanks had fought side by side in Cuba, and...
Writing in the Tolstoy Tradition
“I always wanted to be a writer I can remember the first book I ever wrote when I was very little. I wrote the title and the index, but I didn’t actually get ’round to the contents.” Nikolai Tolstoy laughs and leans back, trying to fit his extremely long legs under my dining room table....
The Fruits of Tolerance
The terrorist bombings on July 7, 2005, in London were widely described as proof that the British multicultural model is flawed; few, however, noted that this crisis has an illustrious precedent, the assassination of Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands. On November 2, 2004, a young Muslim, born in Amsterdam to Moroccan parents, shot Mr....
Your Pink Hat Is Transphobic
If Madonna were a standard white person, her appearance at the August 2018 MTV Video Music Awards—at which she delivered a rambling, self-referential soliloquy about the influences she’d absorbed from Aretha Franklin while costumed in an alarming getup that might, in Hollywood parlance, be described as “Bride of Frankenstein Meets Ancient Egyptian Concubine”—would have brought...
Saint Aborta and the Molesters
Vera Drake Produced by Thin Man Films and Studio Canal Written and directed by Mike Leigh Distributed by New Line Cinema Birth Produced and distributed by Fine Line Features Directed by Jonathan Glazer Screenplay by Jean-Claude Carrière and Milo Addica Mike Leigh, one of Britain’s socialist directors, begins and ends his latest effort, Vera Drake,...
Angela Delenda Est
Having written dozens of articles on the subject of Islamic terrorism and Europe’s ongoing suicide, following the latest jihadist carnage in Berlin I find myself lost for words—unable to think of anything useful that has not already appeared on this blog. Let me explain . . . In August of last year I wrote that...
MLK Redivivus
Martin Luther King, Jr. did not bring the races closer together; and the legacy he left behind has been one of erasing more and more of our national heritage whenever it does not fit a progressively more radical leftist agenda.
A Week of Mondays
“There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson What helps set this study apart is its still largely verboten subject. Joseph Scotchie devotes his attention to that part of the American right that Lee Edwards, Jonathan M. Schoenwald, and William Rusher...
Drain the Racket
When Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was first passed, “help wanted: men” and “help wanted: women” ads were common in newspapers. Private employers could hire and fire for discriminatory reasons. Title VII made discriminatory ads and the hiring practices they represent illegal. In their new book, Unequal, two law professors, Sandra...
Scandalizing Uncle Ez
The Roots of Treason: Ezra Pound and the Secret of St. Elizabeths by W. Fuller Torrey, McGraw-Hill; New York. Without doubt, Ezra Pound was a remarkable poet. His best verse is beautifully cadenced, delicately chiseled. Herbert Read described him as “an alchemist who transmuted the debased counters of our language into pure poetic metal.” Deferentially, T. S. Eliot called him...
America’s Grand Strategy
Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant. “Robbing, slaughtering, pillaging they misname sovereign authority, and where they make an empty waste they call it peace.” Tacitus puts this accurate if one-sided summation of Roman imperial strategy into the mouth of Calgacus, a Caledonian chieftain, urging the Celtic warriors to resist...
The Fellowship of Joking
Besides regaling Chronicles readers with dismaying reports on “the strange death of moral Britain” (the title of the immediate predecessor to the present book), Christie Davies continues his professional pursuits, chief among which is the study of humor. Jokes and Targets is his fifth book concerned with the subject. It focuses on six joke cycles,...
David Horowitz and the Ex-Communist Confessional
The literature of recanting radicals has been with us since 1917: from the recollections of Russian Mensheviks, who rued the day they joined with Lenin, to Irving Kristol’s “Memoirs of a Trotskyist,” in which the neoconservative godfather fondly reminisces about his youthful dalliance with dissident communism. With each successive atrocity and betrayal—Kronstadt, the Moscow Trials,...
A Trip Back to the Fifties
Please hop into my time machine, and I’ll give you a short tour of Boonville, North Carolina in the summer of 1959, before bringing you back to the present day. Strolling around this small hamlet of 600, note the town’s most historic building, the old brick bank founded long ago by Mr. Shore. Take in...
Science, Wisdom, and Moral Judgment
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Juvenal’s admonition to husbands has often been applied to government, but rarely with the full force of the original: “Go ahead and lock her up,” the Roman satirist warned, “but who will watch the watchmen themselves? She’s put on her guard and starts with them.” Once a large number of frail...
Up From the Ice Age
“Nature knows no equality.” —Luc de Varvenargues For about four years before the publication of The Bell Curve last fall, occasional news reports dribbled out tidbits of information about the book and its coauthor. The stories were often pegged to Charles Murray’s departure from the neoconservative Manhattan Institute in 1990 because of the institute’s discomfort...
What We Are Reading: June-July 2023
Short reviews of Noble Savages, by Napoleon Chagnon, and The Natural Family Where It Belongs, by Allan C. Carlson.
Out With the New
On March 12, I was kneeling at the back of the vast 11th-century abbey church of Fontgombault, France, where I formed exactly one third of the congregation at a mid-week, mid-Lent, mid-morning Mass. At the other end of the nave, the monastic community had processed in with identifiably Benedictine decorum, taken their places in the...
How to Keep From Getting Deported
In September, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that an illegal alien, although properly found to be a danger to the community, should not be removed from the United States because he considers himself to be a transgender woman. Finding that Mexico is not in the progressive vanguard in embracing transgender identity, the court...
The Politics of Education and the Metaphysics of Emptiness
The president of a prominent liberal arts college recently conveyed to its philosophy department (and to other constituencies) that regulations may soon be in place which would influence, if not altogether control, the conferring of bachelor’s degrees. Mandated by the federal government, these “guidelines” would have a strongly utilitarian bias. However supportive this might be...
Mother Knows Best
Man may be dying out, but patriarchy—men’s oppression of women—lives on. If only we were more controlled by women, or at least by the feminine aspect of our natures, life would be much better: kinder, gentler, and more “caring.” It is patriarchy, after all, that makes America so aggressive; it is patriarchy that makes American...
On ‘Clarence Thomas’
I sure wouldn’t want to cross Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. In his semihysterical, mean-spirited diatribe (Cultural Revolutions, January 1992), he manages to charge Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas with perjury, perversion, and racial opportunism. And that’s just for openers. Although I probably lost count, there are some twenty-five negative references to Thomas’s character, ideology, or...
Music, Technology, and Psychological Warfare
“No change can be made in styles of music without affecting the most important conventions of society. So Damon declares and I agree.” —Plato, Republic The late Sam Shapiro used to tell a story about two Englishmen in China who wanted to demonstrate the superiority of their culture to one of the mandarins they had...
Australians All, Let Ostriches
“Australians all, let ostriches, / For we are young and free”—the attempt by an expensively educated Australian schoolchild to notate the first two lines of Australia’s national anthem (the first line of which is “Australians all, let us rejoice”). Bill and Hillary not surrealistic enough for your jaded tastes? Alarmed by passing signs of incipient...
DeSantis, Trump, and a New Right Comfortable With Power
Unlike many on the right, Governor Ron DeSantis is not afraid to use political power.
The Criminal State
“No government power can he abused long. Mankind will not bear it.” —Samuel Johnson The stereotype of the British journalist—and stereotypes are usually true—has an arrogant Brit arriving in Washington, rewriting the Washington Post and the New York Times for his dispatches, and spending the rest of his time in fancy...
Preparing for Battle
Your Excellency: May is once again upon us, bringing that mad dash in which you sprint from parish to parish, rubbing oily crosses on the smooth foreheads of gawky teens, confirmandi mentally and spiritually armed to do battle with the dragons facing God’s holy Church. My youngest son, who is even now preparing to receive...
Books in Brief: The Forgotten Slave Trade
The Forgotten Slave Trade: The White European Slaves of Islam, by Simon Webb (Pen and Sword History; 208 pp., $39.95). In America, public discussion about slavery—when it doesn’t devolve into BLM activists burning cities or congressmen bending the knee—is premised on important but erroneous assumptions: only blacks have been enslaved; black slavery was racially motivated; discussion...
Sizing Up the Feline Uproar
We all have our perspectives. In London recently, I found that many of the locals had stayed up until the early hours of a wet Monday morning to watch Super Bowl 50 on television, and judging from the T-shirts being paraded around town there seems to be a particular groundswell of support among British youth...
Can a Pope Change Moral Truth?
That joking retort we heard as children, “Is the pope Catholic?” is starting to look like a serious question. Asked five years ago about a “gay lobby” in the Vatican, Pope Francis responded, “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?” As judgment was thought to...
Sociological Balderdash
The Supreme Court’s recent Casey decision on abortion is a memorable example of sociological balderdash. The joint decision began, “Liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt,” to which Justice Scalia fired back in his dissent, “Liberty finds no refuge in this jurisprudence of confusion.” Scalia’s observation becomes painfully clear when one reads the...
Baseball and Marital Permanence
The game of baseball is centered on home: pitchers throw the ball over home plate, batters hit home runs, and fans root for the home team. Apparently, baseball’s preoccupation with home is no accident. According to a recent study by Denver psychologist Howard Markham, the average divorce rate in cities that have major league baseball...
Muslim Migrants and the Religious Left
Why are so many Western Christians either silent about, or actually complicit in, the Muslim hegira to the West? One would think Christians would be at the forefront of opposition. Some are, but most are not, and these latter include Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, mainline “Protestants,” and evangelicals in America. These churches have made four...
Consider the Alternative
Wessex and Aquitaine, Arizona and Pennsylvania. All were, once upon a time, regions that had a distinct political identity, genuine states in which one could be a citizen or a subject. The first two survive only in the would-be romantic kitsch peddled by tourist boards; the others still survive as real states, but not for...
Prometheus Unbound
This volume, belonging to the Iowa Whitman Series, is identified as “the 150th Anniversary Facsimile Edition” of Leaves of Grass, third edition (1860). Originally issued in 1855, at the author’s expense, the collection was revised and republished in 1856, 1860, 1867, 1871, 1881-82, and finally 1892. The versions varied greatly in length and contents, as...
Secularism and the Mosque Flap
Let's say the mosque (you know what mosque) gets built, as it certainly might, public opinion notwithstanding. What's the next theological concession America's Christian churches get to make in the name of brotherhood, sisterhood, pluralism, world peace and amity, the reconstruction of America's image, etc., etc.? First it's one thing, ...
Touring the Arc
In my mind’s eye, I have come to see a great arc radiating above the Clinton presidency, an arc of constant existential activity, a zone where effects are received but not transmitted, a curved line on which every American, with the single exception of the President of the United States, occupies a place. One of...
A Revolution to Save the World
“Beyond Left and Right” was the tide of the Antiwar.com conference which brought together Pat Buchanan and Alexander Cockburn, Justin Raimondo and Lenora Fulani (to say nothing of two Chronicles editors) in the same room (if not all at the same time) for a broad critique of the aggressive New World Order launched by the...
The Pilgrimage of Malcolm Muggeridge
In the second segment of the several-part BBC documentary on his life, Malcolm Muggeridge smoothed his white feathery hair away from his cherubic face, smiled cryptically, and said in his deep, rolling, gentle English voice, “There’s nothing in this world more instinctively abhorrent to me than finding myself in agreement with my fellow humans.” And...
The Allure of the Lurid
Reviews of Blonde, adapted from the Joyce Carol Oates biographical novel of the same title, and the 1951 film, The Enforcer.
A.D. Hope: Poet of the Antipodes
The other day, as I was reading an article about Keats, I thought suddenly of A.D. Hope. I started imagining a time when young writers would lose interest in the romance of a vivid English youth extinguished by early death. Instead, they would learn to admire the less gifted but longer-lived Australian who ultimately wrote...
Books in Brief
Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center by Tyler O’Neil (Bombardier Books; 240 pp., $16.99). Journalist Tyler O’Neil of PJ Media has been busy. From roughly around the time of the Charlottesville racial conflagration in 2017 to the filling of the inkwells that were used to print this book, O’Neil has...