On February 6, 1998, the Mexican consul general in California, Jose Angel Pescador Osuna, spoke at the Southwestern School of Law in Los Angeles as part of a symposium on the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which gave the Southwest to the United States. Osuna proclaimed, “And even though I am saying this part serious,...
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Is Putin’s Russia an ‘Evil Empire’?
“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce,” a saying attributed to Karl Marx, comes to mind in this time of Trump. To those of us raised in the Truman era, when the Red Army was imposing its bloody Bolshevik rule on half of Europe, and NATO was needed to keep Stalin’s armies from...
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Aaron D. Wolf: A Man of Faith and Family
The executive editor of Chronicles, Aaron Wolf, died suddenly and tragically on Easter Sunday. He left behind a loving wife and six children, and colleagues and contributors to this magazine who admired him greatly. Aaron worked for Chronicles for 20 years, and his journey reflects where the magazine and the conservative cultural movement it represents...
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Writing Without Letters
Whatever happened to the old middle-to-highbrow American culture? Once upon a time, there was a fair-sized literate class that kept up on fiction and verse by reading the great organs of literary opinion. These days there is a great gulf between serious literature and general-interest journalism. “Literary” magazines—Kenyon Review, Daedelus, or Sewanee Review, for instance—now...
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Il Whig in Italia
Some years ago I was interviewed by a reporter for Corriere della Sera, Italy’s most prestigious newspaper. He had heard that I was a follower of Umberto Bossi, leader of the secessionist Lega Nord, and he wanted to know what plans I had for breaking up the United States. After disclaiming any secessionist political agenda,...
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It’s Just Business
A dozen years ago (give or take), I tried to commission a piece for Chronicles on how Big Business was increasingly pushing a leftist social and cultural agenda. For years, the conservative orthodoxy in the United States had been that capitalist institutions, from mom-and-pop shops up to the largest corporations, were essentially conservative. (In the...
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Letter From South Africa
I spent March 1985 in South Africa as a guest of several South African universities. I lectured to academic audiences, traveled in the rural areas of Transvaal and the Cape Province, spent a day in Soweto, visited the Crossroads slum in Cape Town and the Black township of Alexandra in Johannesburg. I talked to Black ser vants and Black leaders,...
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To Arms!
Concerning Scott P. Richert’s reservations about secession, as expressed in the October Rockford Files (“To Secede or Succeed?”): Maybe “many proponents of secession seem reluctant to consider” some of the alleged drawbacks of secession. There certainly are risks. The architects of unitary nationalism weren’t dummies. The grants economy, the safety net, Social Security, and the...
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A Nation of (Proletarian) Immigrants
One of many reasons conservatives are so often at a disadvantage in political discussions is that we do not see why there should be any discussion, since we do not recognize a problem open to discussion at all. Take, for instance, assimilation. If you do not believe the United States should be accepting immigrants in...
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CPAC moves to Rockford?
Here’s how you’ll know the conservative movement means something again: When the Conservative Political Action Conference, which just held its annual meeting, moves from Washington, D.C. to Rockford. Or Dubuque. Or Peoria. Or Helena. Or San Antonio. Or Bakersfield. Anywhere but the District of Corruption. I attended a couple CPACs back in the mid-1980s, at...
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Syria’s Violent Stalemate
The international crisis may be over, but the multisided war in Syria is continuing. On Friday government planes bombarded rebel positions in the eastern city of Deir al-Zor after heavy clashes claimed the life of one of President Bashar al-Assad’s top military intelligence officers. In the long-contested city of Aleppo, a renewed rebel assault on the city’s...
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The German Swindle
To walk along a narrow ridge or cliff path, German-speakers will tell you, you have to be schwindelfrei. The French word vertige exists in English (vertigo), but we would be more likely to say “dizziness.” The German word is for vertige or dizziness der Schwindel, but Schwindel also can mean what it does in English—swindle....
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Roger Stone’s Case Shows the Left’s Control of U.S. Courts
The contrived conviction of Roger Stone showed that America has a profoundly serious problem with its legal system. The reaction to President Trump’s commutation of Stone’s sentence by mainline media, and former and current prosecutors tells us that the president himself is likely to be prosecuted after leaving office. The roots of this problem lie...
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Special Ops at War
From Afghanistan to Somalia, Special Ops Achieves Less with More At around 11 o’clock that night, four Lockheed MC-130 Combat Talons, turboprop Special Operations aircraft, were flying through a moonless sky from Pakistani into Afghan airspace. On board were 199 Army Rangers with orders to seize an airstrip. One hundred miles to the northeast, Chinook...
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The Voice That Won’t Be Silenced
Tucker Carlson's voice is too important to silence because he speaks for so many people.
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A War on Whites?
Alabama Republican congressman Mo Brooks generated outrage among the usual suspects this week by telling Laura Ingraham that the Obama Adminstration’s push for amnesty for illegal immigrants is “a part of the war on whites that’s being launched by the Democratic Party. And the way in which they’re launching this war is by claiming that...
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Why I Am an Episcopalian
A friend of mine was having a theological discussion with his cleaning lady one day (people do that sort of thing in the South), and the subject of the End of Time came up. They agreed that the signs are all in place, and that it must be coming soon, if the Bible is to...
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Prophesying War
As the summer before the first anniversary of the September 11 attack drew to a sweltering end, the Bush administration desperately sought some plausible reason for the war against Iraq that its chieftains so desperately wanted to wage. The appeal to the “weapons of mass destruction” that Saddam Hussein supposedly harbors and which he was...
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An Establishment Unhinged
Calling for a moratorium on Muslim immigration “until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on,” Donald Trump this week ignited a firestorm of historic proportions. As all the old hate words—xenophobe, racist, bigot—have lost their electric charge from overuse, and Trump was being called a fascist demagogue and compared to...
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Haley’s Career Died Because of the GOP’s Poison Ideology
This is what happens to leaders who despise their voters and whose contempt for the culture, faith, and heritage of their people is palpable and overpowering—to the point that such leaders cannot contain themselves.
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One Nation Divided
Since 1892, when the original text was composed, the Pledge of Allegiance has been revised three times. Viewed chronologically, the alterations appear to have aimed at a greater specificity, but also a wider and deeper self-assurance. The current text, dating from 1954, capitalizes “Nation” and adds “under God,” as if the editors (a committee, no...
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Global Hot Spots in 2022
Today’s commentariat is prone to ignore history, or to simplify past events to make them fit their current ideological preferences. The discourse of regime-approved conservative intellectuals and their mass media cohorts—such as Victor Davis Hanson and the tedious George Will—remains liberally optimistic and upwardly linear. The notion that our civilization is on a downward course...
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The Rape of the Afghan Boys
Ainuddin Khudairaham held down the trigger of his Kalashnikov and kept firing on unarmed U.S. Marines until the rifle’s magazine was empty, murdering three and wounding one. The Americans had been working out at a gym on Forward Operating Base Delhi in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province when the teenaged boy attacked on Aug. 10, 2012. “I...
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On Hillary Clinton in Bulgaria
During Hillary Clinton’s recent trip to Bulgaria (Cultural Revolutions, December), the Washington Times featured a front-page photo of the First Lady surrounded by several Bulgarian orphans, over the caption, “Aiding Orphans.” I sincerely hope that Mrs. Clinton showed more compassion toward these Bulgarian orphans than she did during her 1996 visit with their Rumanian counterparts....
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God and Man at Wabash
On Monday, September 12, my friend and mentor died at the age of 82 from lung cancer after a decade of up-and-down health problems borne without complaint—a man whom I have loved more than any other man but my own father, starting from the time of our first meeting after I matriculated at Wabash College...
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South by Southeast
East, east-southeast, southeast: rugged mountains covered by lichenous forests breaking from the red desert floor, sky islands of the American Southwest. San Carlos Lake ahead of the wing, and beyond it the dark mass of the Pinaleno Mountains; southwest, the distant horn of Baboquivari snagging the summer haze. The Chiricahua Mountains crowded the Arizona line...
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The World Turned Upside Down
A truly startling, topsy-turvy race is being run for governor of Illinois. U.S. Representative Glenn Poshard, the Democrat, is embracing more conservative positions on culture and social policy; Illinois Secretary of State George Ryan, the Republican, is running away with much of the Democratic base, including gay-rights supporters. On trade, Poshard has supported a Buchananite...
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Democrats’ Noncitizen Voting Scam
Across the country Democrats, like New York City Mayor Eric Adams, are pushing for the disaster of allowing noncitizens to vote in local elections.
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The Counterrevolution Against Globalism
On August 19, 1991, the people of the Soviet Union awoke to music from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake playing on national television. Swan Lake would play continuously that day as the “hard line” State Emergency Committee staged its coup against the first and last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, who had been arrested at his Crimea vacation...
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The Road to Rome–and Back
The title is intended as a joke and not as a declaration of apostasy. The past two weeks my attention has been almost entirely absorbed, first by our Winter School program and then by an informal after-excursion to Rome with a few lingering students. I enjoy these programs, but while they are going on I...
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An American Bhagavadgita
“The United States of America—the greatest potential force, material, moral, and spiritual, in the world.” —G. Lowes Dickinson For Paul Johnson, American history was a non-subject in his days at Oxford and its School of Modern History in the 1940’s. “Nothing was said of America, except insofar as it lay on...
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The Libyan Endgame
Regardless of whether Muammar Qaddafy is killed, brought before the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague, or exiled, his regime has collapsed beyond recovery. After a five-month air war against his forces NATO has succeeded in decisively tipping the balance on the ground in favor of the rebels. This does not mean that the...
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Lessons From France
On the French nightly news for Monday, June 12, the anchor’s face was so grim that, at first, I thought the French forces in Bosnia had suffered serious losses. But, no, he was reporting on the French municipal elections, the first round of voting for mayors of cities with populations of 30,000 or more. The...
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Biden’s Master Airbrushers in the Media
On July 21, President Joe Biden held a townhall in Cincinnati, taking questions from gushingly friendly CNN “journalists.” The room in which he spoke was half empty. From all appearances, Biden confirmed the suspicions of his critics that he is failing mentally and that what his “advisers” told him to say parroted the views of the left...
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Biden Holds a Losing Hand
As President Joe Biden’s poll numbers sank this fall, and the presidentially ambitious in his party began to stir, the White House put out the word. Forget all that 2020 campaign chatter about Biden being a “transitional president.” He intends to run and win a second term. Well, perhaps. Yet, skepticism abounds. First, if Biden...
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Doing Well; Done Better
“These monstrous views, . . . these venemous teachings.” —Pope Leo XIII on socialism According to the jacket copy of Doing Well and Doing Good, Richard John Neuhaus is “one of the most prominent religious intellectuals” of our time (which helps explain our time). Neuhaus argues that while “Christianity has had nothing to say” to...
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Neither “Gay” Nor “Marriage”
Peter Hitchens, writing in The Spectator last March, asked why we should be concerned with stopping several thousand homosexuals from getting married when heterosexual marriage is so threatened by dysfunction and divorce. The social conservatives’ obsession with the subject is, he argued, simply “a stupid distraction from the main war,” like the battle of Stalingrad. ...
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The New Conservation Movement
To mainstream environmental activists, Ron Arnold merits special disdain. A former Sierra Club conservation committee member, Arnold now runs, with associate Alan Gottlieb, the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise in Bellevue, Washington. Together they wrote a 1993 expose of the environmental movement, Trashing the Economy: How Runaway Environmentalism is Wrecking America, which remains...
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Macron in Washington
French President Emanuel Macron’s three-day visit to Washington started on an awkward note when he kissed an obviously uncomfortable President Donald Trump. The scene was a symbolic reminder that the two leaders do not enjoy an “intense, close relationship” invented by the media. In reality Macron is, both ideologically and temperamentally, the polar opposite of...
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The Spanish Civil War and the Battle for Western Civilization
After a lengthy legal battle concluded in September, Spain’s Supreme Court gave its approval to the socialist government’s plans to exhume and remove the remains of General Francisco Franco from the Valley of the Fallen, where they have lain since his death in 1975. The controversial general led Spain’s Nationalist forces to victory over their...
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Vol. 1 No. 1 January 1999
Poor Augusto Pinochet! Try to imagine Fidel Castro flying to England on private business and getting arrested for alleged crimes against humanity. Within hours, every talking head on this planet would be up in arms, demanding British blood and Castro’s freedom. It hardly needs stating that Fidel would be better suited to incarceration at Her...
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Soldiers of Burden
Outsourcing Duty tackles the issues that arise in countries where a large majority of citizens avoid military service and isolate themselves from the risks and moral responsibilities that soldiers face.
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Another Country
Most of my news this month has to do, one way or another, with country music. In a roundabout way, a story out of South Carolina last fall got me thinking about that particular contribution of the South to world civilization. It seems the dean of student affairs at the University of South Carolina asked...
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The Case for Proportional Representation
Congressional reapportionment, an orgy of partisan revenge and blatant self-interest mandated every ten years by our Constitution, proved particularly ugly in 1992. In Tennessee, Texas, and other states, judges required minority-dominated districts be carved out to insure representation to blacks and Hispanics. The results left even Governor Gerry turning over in his grave. New electoral...
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A Consummate Politician
Bill Clinton, many conservatives believe, is a smooth political operator. Shifty, unprincipled, and generally odious he may be, they say, but Clinton is a “consummate politician” and a master salesman. Mr. Clinton’s performance in Moscow during the first weekend in June did not confirm this view. He did not sell the National Missile Defense (NMD)...
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Telling Stories in the New Age
Thank you for this honor, and for this very handsome prize. It means all the more because I am privileged to share it with Richard Wilbur. [Editor’s note: Richard Wilbur was the 1996 recipient of The Ingersoll Foundation’s T.S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing.] I have long admired the art and craft and wisdom of...
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Do Democrats Want an Impeachment Fight?
“If anyone is looking for a good lawyer,” said President Donald Trump ruefully, “I would strongly suggest that you don’t retain the services of Michael Cohen.” Michael Cohen is no Roy Cohn. Tuesday, Trump’s ex-lawyer, staring at five years in prison, pled guilty to a campaign violation that may not even be a crime. Cohen...
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The Last Respectable Bias
In this age of multiculturalism and sensitivity, there is one bigotry still tolerated: anti-Catholicism. As Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., Peter Viereck, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan have all observed, anti-Catholicism remains our nation’s deepest bias, and the only one found respectable by intellectuals. The anti-Catholicism that marked our nation’s founding was directed at both individual Catholics and...
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That Demon Weed
When I hear all the talk about tobacco, I think of my Uncle Rollins, a green-visored straw hat on his salt-and-pepper head and a two-day stubble on his seasoned farmer face. He is standing in a field or by an unpainted barn as he crumbles a yellow-brown leaf and sticks a wad of ‘bacca in...
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A Woman’s Dreams
“Most women have no Characters at all,” wrote Alexander Pope: “Good as well as ill, / Woman’s at best a Contradiction still.” The contradiction of womanhood will perhaps never be fully solved, but it has generally been considered manageable within marriage and family. Outside of the home, women are . . . well, we’ve made...