I’ve just learned I may be a terrorist. On Aug. 13, the Secretary of Homeland Security issued a statement warning about an increase in domestic and foreign terrorism. At the end of the document’s summary were these words: “Such threats are also exacerbated by impacts of the ongoing global pandemic, including grievances...
In the new Democratic Party, where women and people of color are to lead, and the white men are to stand back, the presidential field has begun to sort itself out somewhat problematically. According to a Real Clear Politics average of five polls between mid-March and April 1, four white men—Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, “Beto”...
Last November’s “Rose Revolution” in the Caucasian republic of Georgia made political bedfellows of an unlikely couple: George W. Bush and billionaire “philanthropist” and global meddler George Soros. The apparent cooperation between the Bush administration and Soros in backing the ouster of President Eduard Shevardnadze seems all the more bizarre in light of Soros’ stated...
It felt as strange flying west—not south, not east—from Salt Lake City as if the earth had reversed its rotation and were spinning in the opposite direction. Basin and range, range and basin: the long barrier mountains were heavy with snow, but now in early March the desert separating them lay bare, dramatizing the topographical...
In the early months of 1985, national headlines recounted lurid tales of an impending right-wing bloodbath in the United States. In New York City Bernhard Goetz admitted to the shooting of four Blacks who he believed were about to assault him on a subway car, and he promptly became a national hero. In the Washington...
We live in an era of unprecedently widespread lying. Yet lying itself, is an art—albeit an unadmirable one—in decline in a decadent age. Our leaders have set a spectacularly bad example. Former President Trump lied continually and shamelessly, as do his noisiest enemies and his successor. But they are bad liars—clumsy, unconvincing, and incredibly short-sighted,...
The- Missouri Ozarks are the western outpost of Appalachia. The hills are not as high as their elder brothers to the east, but they plunge down into narrow, labyrinthine valleys, where streams of cool, green water run. The surrounding soil is mostly shallow and full of rocks, with open spaces so small that vegetable gardens...
Chronicles falls short of its usual high standards by giving so much space to “Faulkner in Japan: The ‘American Century’” in the August issue (Society & Culture). As far as I can tell amidst all the unanchored theorizing, the author wants to make America’s greatest writer out to be a clueless dupe of postwar “American...
In the Anglo-American experience, the partisans of concentrated wealth and advocates for political centralization have long been connected. Over the last three centuries, that connection has grown stronger, and in the United States this process accelerated dramatically during and after the Lincoln administration. Lincolnism, the idea that the central state can and should use its...
Blame everything on Trump. Your car won’t start? It’s Trump’s fault. Your dog threw up in the living room? It’s Trump’s fault. The media have lost their collective mind. That’s definitely Trump’s fault. And the blame game seems to get worse by the day. Every politician who won office this past November won only because...
The events in Gaza since July 7 have shown, not for the first time, Israel’s difficulty in coping with the challenges of asymmetric warfare. The problem first became apparent in Lebanon exactly eight years ago (July-August 2006), when Hezbollah – the weaker party by several orders of magnitude – was able to exploit Israeli political...
“The feeling between this city and the hayseeds . . . is every bit as bitter as the feelings between the North and South before the War. . . . Why, I know a lot of men in my district who would like nothin’ better than to go out gunnin’ for hayseeds.” —George Washington Plunkitt...
Nearing the third anniversary of their crime, the remaining members of the Jena Six at long last admitted what anyone with any sense knew: They are guilty as charged. The leader of the pack, Mychal Bell, had already confessed to second-degree battery on December 4, 2007, one year to the day after the attack, and...
Last week saw two particularly grisly Islamic terror attacks of the type that have become all too common: 22 people, mostly children and teenagers, were killed after a bomb exploded at a pop concert in Manchester, England, and 28 Egyptian Copts, including young children, were massacred when ISIS ambushed their bus, which was taking them...
If the media could invent a headline that comprehensively described the definitive news of the world today, it would be something like Experts Confirm Top Rail Is on Bottom. For almost my entire working life I have been hearing how the upper classes are being displaced by the lower ones, the American native-born by immigrants...
“What I like best about the Order of the Garter,” Lord Melbourne is reported to have remarked, “is that there is no damned merit about it.” Had the Philadelphia Society existed in Melbourne’s day, he would have found damned little merit in it either, though the society is not on quite the same level of...
With all the mud spattered on the Confederate Battle Flag of late, you knew it wouldn’t be long before Ol’ Virginny scrubbed up for Jamestown’s 400th anniversary with a grandiloquent apology for slavery. And Georgia, New York, and other former colonies of the original 13 will soon join the state in the confessional tub and...
Copperhead Produced by Swordspoint Productions Directed by Ronald F. Maxwell Screenplay by Bill Kauffman Distributed by Brainstorm Media What makes a good war story? Cannons, bombs, bloody bodies, and bounding heroes? Stephen Crane’s short story “An Episode of War” demonstrates it can be achieved by other means. It fully registers the madness, horror, and folly...
“In victory, magnanimity!” said Winston Churchill. Donald Trump should be magnanimous and gracious toward those whom he defeated this week, but his first duty is to keep faith with those who put their faith in him. The protests, riots and violence that have attended his triumph in city after city should only serve to steel...
Rather than dropping out of the sky into Bulgaria at the Sophia airport as I did, travelers would be better advised to enter by other ways. Driving up from Greece through the Rhodope mountains would be one appealing way. Another fascinating approach would be to sail into the Black Sea city of Varna or the...
What a marathon of Jefferson-bashing we have had in the last few years. This book by the “global statesman” O’Brien follows several other critical biographies, all of which have been highlighted in the fashionable reviews. More than usually offensive to Jefferson admirers were a collection (The View from Monticello) by University of Virginia professors trashing...
This book is mistitled, in the sense that Richard Nixon is the least interesting of the multivarious subjects covered herein. The author, of course, is not to blame for that fact; and perhaps it was modesty that kept him from perceiving where the strengths of his collection really lie. These essays differ in depth and...
“I see the rural virtues leave the land. “ —Oliver Goldsmith Garrison Keillor, the writer, has finally made it big. Five years ago a regional cult figure and occasional contributor to the New Yorker, Keillor has now vaulted on to the cover of Time and to the top of the New...
The “range war” in Sen. Harry Reid’s Nevada between hardscrabble rancher Cliven Bundy and the federal government appears to have ended. The Bureau of Land Management has retreated, having seized Bundy’s cattle and tasered and arrested his son. Bundy and the BLM are fighting over his refusing to pay fees to use federal lands for...
“The consent of all nations is the law of nature.” —Cicero On the Law of Nations is a powerful brief in favor of what the United States Supreme Court in 1900 declared to be “the customs and usages of the civilized world.” (In Paquete Habana, the highest court declared international law to be “part of...
Greg Kaza (“Economic Liberty and American Manufacturing,” Views, January) is to be congratulated for seizing hold of two important realities: that the late 1990’s saw a financial bubble of historic proportions, the origins and implications of which are poorly understood; and that incomes for the median- and lower-wage earner, when adjusted for inflation, have seen...
Allowing migrants—or anyone—to board airplanes without photo ID, and promoting ID cards that blur the lines between legal and illegal, sabotage us.
Living at home with one’s parents and saving money is an increasingly attractive option for young, working adults facing high housing costs.
“Literature is an avenue to glory ever open for those ingenious men who are deprived of honors or of wealth.” —Isaac D’Israeli These volumes—one of letters, the other heavily dependent on correspondence—document and analyze, respectively, episodes of American literary history that feature three brilliant personalities. These volumes will surely attract readers on that basis, for...
Everyone knows that Andrew Jackson wanted American Indians annihilated, defied the Supreme Court in a famous challenge to Chief Justice John Marshall, and forcibly removed the Five Civilized Tribes of the Southeast to lands west of the Mississippi River. What everyone knows is not true. Once a venerated American hero, Andrew Jackson has been attacked...
I just got a copy of a thoughtful new book, Vindicating Lincoln: Defending the Politics of Our Greatest President, by Thomas L. Krannawitter. The book mentions me a couple of times, in polite disagreement. Krannawitter, now of Hillsdale College, is a disciple of Claremont McKenna College’s Harry V. Jaffa, as ...
When I called Mike Rafferty to arrange a meeting to discuss a possible symposium on the demise of the local community, I had to choose a different date from the one I?wanted because Mike was busy that night. He was boxing at the Spectrum. Like Rocky Balboa, Mike Rafferty lives ten minutes from the Spectrum. ...
To understand what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s select committee investigation of the Capitol Hill events of Jan. 6 is all about, a good place to begin is with the sentencing hearing last week of Paul Hodgkins. A crane operator from Tampa, Florida, Hodgkins, 38, pleaded guilty to a single count of obstructing a joint session...
Foreign aid, like other forms of aid, is a subsidy that distorts choice. The distortion takes many forms; for example, aid is sometimes put to uses unintended by the giver; it also lets the recipient pursue activities below their real cost. Since President Harry Truman launched the foreign-aid crusade, U.S. economic aid to developing nations...
The Left insists migration is a humanitarian crisis. Wrong. It’s a lawless invasion. Europeans are fighting back. Americans should, too.
George Garrett used to tell the story of a young writer who visited him in York Harbor, Maine. The writer, who had worked in a prison, wore a cap emblazoned with the letters SCUP, which stood for something like South Carolina Union of Prisons. Sharing some of George’s sense of humor—which bordered on the wicked—he...
Ben Lummis was not in a mood to write this morning. He wanted to be outdoors, and, because he was an outdoor writer, being outdoors was as legitimate a part of his job as writing about having been outdoors was after he’d been there. His work had two stages, outdoor and indoor, and in the...
From 1979 to 1982, I was a Russian linguist stationed in Frankfurt, West Germany, with the 533rd Combat Electronic Warfare Intelligence (CEWI) Battalion, part of the 3rd Armored Division. If a war had come, assuming we hadn’t been nuked right away, we would have deployed within hours northeast to the Fulda Gap to listen to...
Hollywood loves Christmas, or Winterfest, or whatever they’re calling it these days. This is because many Americans make it the most wonderful time of the year for the studios, offering them gifts of gold. For example, on December 25, 2015, we gave Buena Vista/Disney $49.3 million for the right to spend 2 hours and 16...
When the mode of music changes, Plato remarked, the walls of the city shake. When the mode of music changed back in the 1950’s, the denizens of Plato’s Pad—sorry, but there are so few opportunities to get in an allusion to The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis these days—and their peers saw more fingers than...
My annual Middle Eastern tour this winter is limited to Egypt, mainly due to the less rigid Corona-related restrictions there than elsewhere in the region. An additional motive is the fact that this country of over a hundred million souls faces an unprecedented geopolitical crisis that is not sufficiently known in the outside world yet...
Upon being congratulated for defeating the Romans at Asculum in 279 b.c. during the Pyrrhic War, King Pyrrhus of Epirus, who had lost half of his army during the battle, said something to the effect of “Another victory like this, and we’re done for.” Hence the phrase “Pyrrhic victory,” which could probably be applied to...
The aborted Wagner coup was an internal conflict within Russia's elites. Although resolved peacefully, it undermined Putin's authority and has increased the chance that he will be tempted to make risky moves—even nuclear ones.
A belated note: Robert Mugabe’s death at 95 (September 6) was some six decades overdue. He was a thoroughly nasty piece of work. His dictum that “the only white man you can trust is a dead white man” has cost his people dearly, arguably even more so than the dispossessed and racially cleansed white farmers...
Transnationalism isn’t a term that is familiar to the American people. According to Peter Drucker, a leading advocate of transnationalism, a transnational company is one that operates in the global marketplace; that does its research wherever there are scientists and technicians, and manufactures where economics dictate (in many countries, that is); and that has a...
A story long popular in London tells of a foreign visitor losing his bearings while walking along Whitehall and politely asking a passerby, “Excuse me, sir, which side is the Foreign Office on?” Hearing the visitor’s accent, the Brit despairingly replies, “Yours, probably.” This story comes to mind when we read the histories of Western...
Our literary establishment seems designed to ensure that a writer’s first novel is his best. Norman Mailer, James Jones, William Styron and J.D. Salinger are only a few of the better-known novelists whose first work defined the acme of their creative careers. (In the case of John Barth, the second novel, The End of the...
Russian security is threatened in the east as well as in the south and west (through NATO expansion). In an interview in Moscow’s elite-oriented Nezavisimaya Gazeta on April 25, Prof. Vilya Gelbras of Moscow State University’s Asia and Africa Institute called Russia’s East Siberia and Far East regions the “weakest link” in the “system” of...
Wilhelm Roepke (1899-1966) is one of the most original, yet least recognized, economic thinkers of the 20th century. One of the reasons for his relative obscurity is that he does not fit well into the prevailing capitalist/socialist dichotomy. Roepke borrows from both capitalism and socialism, yet he goes beyond defining economics in abstract terms and...
But for the death and suffering it has caused to thousands of innocents, the Liberian imbroglio would have an almost farcical quality—Graham Greene meets Lehar. On one side, there was the LURD (Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy), a ragtag army of heavily armed but poorly trained and undisciplined rebels. They nevertheless have the upper...