Back in the 70’s when the publicity stunt called Hands Across America was in the planning stage Kenny Rogers announced his intention to assume a position on the western boundary of Texas in order to be able to hold hands with the state of Arizona. I was reminded of the story last summer when a...
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The Honorable Gentleman From New York
It shouldn’t be news to anyone that conservative middle-aged professors are rare birds. Until recently, right-wing academics have been almost as rare as black ones, and for pretty much the same reason: bright conservatives could generally do better elsewhere. So it didn’t go to my head a few years ago when I learned that the...
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Caring More for Palestine than East Palestine
Even in Ohio, it seems the activists motivated to get out in the streets are more concerned for people in faraway destinations than those in their own backyards.
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The Cold War Never Ended: U.S.-Russian Relations Since September 11
The recent invasion of South Ossetia by the U.S.-trained and -equipped Georgian army turned into a debacle for both Tbilisi and Washington. It also demonstrated that, for the U.S. government, the fall of the Soviet Union on December 8, 1991, did not mean the Cold War had ended. Washington simply shifted focus to the newly...
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Toward One Nation, Indivisible
It is time we looked at the world from a new perspective, one of enlightened nationalism. Cliches about a “new” global economy aside, there has always been an international economy—ever since Columbus stumbled onto the Western Hemisphere while seeking new trade routes to the East, in the hire of a nation-state, Spain. The Dutch East...
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Roots of Radicalism
“The purity of a revolution can last a fortnight.” —Jean Cocteau Magisterial works of history are almost always informed by a tragic sense of life. Some recall epochal transformations that were as lamentable as they were inescapable. Still others dramatize the clash of two valid, but irreconcilable, principles. Among the latter, certainly, are the best...
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True Tar-Heel Tales
Great Granddaddy Honeycutt and Teddy Roosevelt Children, I haven’t ever been on what you might call speakin’ terms with any presidents. But I have seen four or five of them from pretty near, and I want to tell you that they ain’t nothing special. They have to get out of bed in the mornin’ and...
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Limits to Litigation
Gerald N. Rosenberg, an assistant professor of political science and an instructor in law at the University of Chicago, has some simple advice for activists who think a United States Supreme Court ruling is an end-all: not only are you wrong, but your money is better spent out of court than in court. In The...
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The State of Union
“I grew up a few miles from the X county this book deals with,” anthropologist Jane Adams writes in her account of rural Union County, Illinois. “My family’s farm, although dating only to the early 1940’s, is now essentially abandoned, the community emptied.” Her book describes this loss, serving both as indirect autobiography and scholarly...
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Celtic Thunder
“The Celts fear neither earthquakes nor the waves.” —Aristotle Nearly six years ago, Chronicles published “Death Before Dishonor,” an article I wrote about the westward march of the American pioneer. Much of the time, I was writing about the Scotch-Irish—or Scots-Irish, if you prefer. These hard-edged folks were in the vanguard of the movement across...
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Are We on the Ramp to Impeachment Road?
After a stroke felled Woodrow Wilson during his national tour to save his League of Nations, an old rival, Sen. Albert Fall, went to the White House to tell the president, “I have been praying for you, Sir.” To which Wilson is said to have replied, “Which way, Senator?” Historians are in dispute as to...
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War on the Home Front
U.S. officialdom calls them “Special Interest Aliens,” as much because they might have a special interest in us as we in them. They are aliens from countries that are considered potential sources of terrorist attacks on the American homeland, and their numbers are reportedly growing. “People are coming here with bad intentions,” an anonymous Border...
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Taking the Kwannukah Out of Christmas
A Christ-free Christmas, which has been the goal of the American ruling elite since before World War II, has finally, at the dawn of the new millennium, been reached. At corporate “holiday parties,” references to ...
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The New Deplorables
After Roy Moore secured the Republican nomination to fill Jeff Sessions’ seat in the U.S. Senate, the Washington Post ran an article claiming that, roughly four decades ago, Moore had dated two teenage girls and asked out a third in front of her mother, who did not approve. These girls were over the age of...
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The Children of Eden
All of us, I imagine, are granted from time to time moments of uninvited insight that will, for years to come, provide a basis for reflection and a more penetrating glimpse of the forces that shape the realms in which we live and labor. Such a moment was granted to me back in the early...
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What We Are Reading: March 2025
Short reviews of "A Worthy Company" by M. E. Bradford, and "Intelligence in Danger of Death" by Marcel De Corte.
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Studies of Character
“Teach him he must deny himself,” said Lee. That was the general’s advice to a young mother who brought her infant to him after the War Between the States to receive his blessing. In his classic four-volume biography R.E. Lee, Douglas Southall Freeman chose this as the incident that best exemplifies Robert E. Lee’s message...
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Courage in Profile
Like Richard A. Epstein’s earlier book Takings, dealing with the defense of property in the Fifth Amendment, his latest one combines legal study and economic analysis with megadoses of political and social theory. Though Epstein explores, for the most part, civil rights legislation aimed at the removal of job discrimination, he devotes the opening section...
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On Lincolnolatry
Joseph E. Fallon’s thesis (“Lincoln and the Death of the Old Republic,” Vital Signs, August) that the Lincoln administration destroyed the Old Republic of the Founding Fathers and replaced it with the ideological foundations of today’s welfare state is unassailable. Indeed, this result is celebrated by such left-wing legal scholars as George P. Fletcher, author...
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“Nothin’ Could Be Finah Than to Be in Carolina”
Memory’s Keep by James Everett Kibler Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Co.; 221 pp., $22.00 A first-rate scholar is as rare as, or rarer than, a first-rate creative writer. Believe me, having hung out with professors for 45 years, I know whereof I speak. When a first-rate scholar is also a creative artist of merit, you have...
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The Chinese Exclusion Act
In 1882 Congress took steps to control Chinese immigration with the passage of “An Act to execute certain treaty stipulations relating to Chinese.” The act later became known misleadingly as the Chinese Exclusion Act. In high schools and colleges it’s taught that the act was simply another example of American racism. The real story is more...
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Trump’s Public Opinion Coup on Immigration
Kamala Harris’s contrived photo-op visit to the border demonstrates how Trump’s immigration nationalism has become the norm.
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The Hollywood Ten(nessean)
Fifty years have passed since the orgy of squealing and sanctimony, of perfidy and posturing, that begat the Hollywood blacklist. What a cast of characters paraded before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC): at this table, communist screenwriters making $2,000 a week scribbling claptrap and convincing themselves that it was revolution; and at that table,...
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The Art of Creation An Interview With Dean Koontz
“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”—Samuel Johnson G.K. Chesterton was an avid reader of popular fiction, particularly the so-called “penny dreadfuls,” whose everyday morality and concentration on plot and character made them more wholesome reading than the pretentious productions of modernist literature. Chesterton’s prejudice is shared today...
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Geostrategic Challenges in 2020
As we approach the last year of this century’s second decade, the United States is still the most powerful state in the world, safe from direct threats by foreign state actors. Two oceans separate America from actual or potential hot spots on other continents, while its neighbors to the north and south are harmless and...
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The State That Didn’t Forget
The Confederate battle flag still flies every day over the capitol building of South Carolina. Readers may remember that I have several times reported in these pages on the attempts to remove this lonely anti-imperial symbol from public view. One discussion a few years ago even elicited a complaint to Chronicles from then-Governor David Beasley....
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Lone Star Rising
The development of a uniquely Texan conservatism has occurred over the last quarter century. A central figure in this transition was the late M.E. Bradford, professor of English at the University of Dallas, literary essayist in the tradition of the Vanderbilt Agrarians, and prominent critic of the political Lincoln. In 1972, Bradford rallied to the...
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The Real Fight Is Here at Home
On our refrigerator door, we have posted photos and stories of Marines who have lost their lives in the Iraq war. Among them are Cpl. Jason Dunham and Lance Cpl. Aaron Austin. Dunham was 22 when he dived onto a grenade to protect his buddies in K Company, 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines. A top high-school...
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Why Russia Does Not Fear an Iranian Bomb
When President George W. Bush met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Bratislava, Slovakia, this past February, the first item on the White House’s laundry list of discussion points for the summit was nuclear programs, including Russian aid to Iran’s nuclear-power effort. After the meeting, Putin told reporters that the issue of nuclear proliferation was...
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Options for Syria
Addressing the annual Jamestown Foundation conference of terror experts on December 12, former CIA chief Michael Hayden outlined three possible outcomes of the ongoing conflict in Syria. The first would be further escalation of violence between ever more extreme Sunni and Shiite factions. The second possible outcome—which Hayden described as the most likely but also the...
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Serbia Humiliated
On October 5, 2000, in an almost bloodless coup by the security forces staged against the backdrop of massive street protests, Slobodan Milosevic was removed from power in Serbia. Ten years later, many of those who cheered his downfall then (this author included) have nothing to celebrate. In the run-up ...
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Tucker Versus Woke Mickey
T-Mobile and ABC, owned by Disney Company, will stop advertising on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show in view of his scandalous comments on the Black Lives Matter movement. Or so I’ve just learned. On Saturday, the news host referred to the protests as “Black Lives Matter riot.” Carlson also asked why he was “required to...
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Race and Civil Rights
One would expect race-baiting liberals and leftists to try to glorify the “civil-rights movement” and the laws of the early 1960’s, insisting that we view all of it as earth shaking history, more important than the fall of the Roman Empire, the Norman Invasion, the battles of Tours and Lepanto, the Reformation, the American, French,...
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Europe’s Belgian Future
If you plan to read only one book on foreign affairs in the next year, you should read Paul Belien’s A Throne in Brussels. Belien is a lawyer and a journalist, a rare free-market advocate who understands the importance of ethnic identity. On one level, Belien’s book is a ruthless investigation of the history and...
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Burn, Baby, Burn
For several months, the nation has been wracked by the widespread perception that black churches across the South were under widescale attack by racist arsonists. President Clinton dutifully visited a victimized South Carolina congregation, and Congress speedily voted increased prison terms for church burners. Groups from across the political spectrum, from the Ford Foundation on...
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Christmas in July
The crickets which stopped singing at Thanksgiving have come inside at last, along with the spiders and an occasional skink. The leaves dropped from the pecan trees around the beginning of December, and crews are at work in the orchards beside the Rio Grande gathering the nuts. The bermuda grass is brown in the backyard,...
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The Habsburgs and the Balkans: A Rich, Uneven Tapestry
Much ill-informed and superficial nonsense has been published in recent weeks on the Habsburgs in general and on their role in the Balkans in particular. This is a pity because that role is genuinely interesting, often filled with drama and heroism, and in its final stages marked by hubris, folly, and tragedy. Well worth a...
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Answering the Call
Brand New Strings by Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder Recorded and mixed at Skaggs Place Studios Produced by Ricky Skaggs When Lester Flatt’s health began to decline in 1979, he was sure of one thing: All those years, when he was playing Gospel songs with Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs, he had been an unbeliever. ...
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Lincoln and God
Before the first shots were fired in the U.S. Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln had begun to style himself as an instrument of the Lord. But as William H. Herndon, a law partner and Lincoln biographer, wrote, “[t]he very idea that he was in the hands of an invisible, irresistible, and inevitable deaf power which...
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Remembering R. L. Dabney
Robert Lewis Dabney was an American theologian and seminary professor. He was also a philosopher who wrote extensively on cultural and political issues of the second half of the 19th century. In our own day, when there is much confusion over what defines conservative political theory, we would do well to look to the writings...
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Remembering H. L. Mencken
Critics have long considered H. L. Mencken to be impossible, meaning stubborn, difficult, exasperating. But today the appellation takes on a different meaning: His career and ideas simply would be impossible today.
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Media More Dishonest Than SPLC
Whatever the wisdom of Pamela Geller’s Mohammed cartoon event in Garland, Texas — and there’s much not to like about it, as Chronicles executive editor, Scott Richert, wrote of Charlie Hebdo’s repulsive fare after the massacre at the magazine’s office — one thing ought not be forgotten: No matter what kind of event Geller had...
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Middle American Gothic
The bad weather of 1993 eliminated my usual fishing trips to northern Wisconsin, but the other day in Madison, where I go to use the library and relive the 60’s, I saw a sign for an instant oil change and lube: “Faster than an Illinois tourist.” Most people in Wisconsin are happy for the dollars...
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Crime That Pays
As a front-line soldier in America’s war on drugs, Joe Occhipinti is an American hero. He became one of the most highly decorated federal agents in American history, with 78 commendations and awards in his 22 years of public service. His reward? He was set up by Dominican drug lords on specious civil rights violations;...
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Is the Left Playing with Fire Again?
To those who lived through that era that tore us apart in the ’60s and ’70s, it is starting to look like “deja vu all over again.” And as Adlai Stevenson, Bobby Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey did then, Democrats today like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi are pandering to the hell-raisers, hoping to ride their...
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Talking Facts: The New Anti-Semitism
In October 1992 Commentary printed an “observation” by David Glasner, “Hayek and the Conservatives,” which abounded in glaring disinformation. The pictures there given of the America First movement as a rallying point for anti-Semitic kooks and of the Old Right as a collection of bigoted psychopaths, pending the arrival of the neoconservatives and their Hayekian...
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Bad Moon Rising for Biden—and Us
“April is the cruelest month,” wrote T. S. Eliot in the opening line of what is regarded as his greatest poem, “The Waste Land.” For President Joe Biden, the cruelest month is surely August of 2021, which is now mercifully ending. When has a president had a worse month? On the last Sunday in August,...
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Scott of the Antarctic
Very long ago, when I was at boarding school in England in the 1960’s, we had a Sunday-morning ritual following chapel. Mr. Gervis, our remote and forbidding headmaster, assembled everyone in the big hall and read to us from an improving book. Over the years, I can remember generous helpings of everything from The Pilgrim’s...
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China’s Future: Ascendency or Fragmentation?
As the American Empire declines, many see the People’s Republic of China, with its dynamic economy and powerful military, surpassing the United States and emerging as the new world power. The reality is more complex, and China’s future more uncertain. According to one set of statistics, China has seen impressive economic growth as a result...
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Biden Goes All In on the Race Issue
Those who believed America’s racial divide would begin to close with the civil rights acts of the 1960s and the election of a black president in this century appear to have been overly optimistic. The race divide seems deeper and wider than at any time in our lifetimes. Most of the aspiring leaders of the...