Years ago, a Christian evangelist friend of mine complained about doing the Lord’s work in the South. Everyone is a Christian there, he lamented, whether or not they really are one. His point was well taken. It is hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, which is a problem not just for Christian evangelists...
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Burying the Lede on Reopenings
CNN’s recent criticism of the reopening of Texas and Mississippi has once again proven its journalists merely engage in partisan coverage. This time it is accompanied by the added demerit of not understanding the nuances of federalism in America’s governance. With Govs. Greg Abbott and Tate Reeves both deciding it is high time to re-open...
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The Moral Minority
The word “minority” represents one of those inversions of value (that typify socialist regimes. Derived, obviously, from the Latin minor (smaller or less in respect of size, importance, age, etc.), “minority” has been used in English to express both the immature years before adulthood and the losing side of a judicial opinion. Most significantly, it...
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The Dean Delusion
What is wrong with Howard Dean? Not much, if you listen to many Republicans and some conservatives. Republicans are salivating over the prospect of a Dean nomination because it seems to be the best way to ensure that President Bush stays where he is. Some conservatives, however, are saying that they may vote for the...
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The Dangerous Ignorance of Economics Aggravates Fire Devastation
Elected officials who fail to understand the basic laws of supply and demand make every crisis worse.
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Letter From the Crimea: The Price of Folly
On the night train from Kiev to Simferopol I share a compartment with Volodymyr Prytula, a Crimean journalist. Called “Vova” by his friends, this slender man with a Zhivagoesque mustache is my sole contact in the Crimea. He speaks little English, I no Ukrainian or Russian, but we communicate with the help of Ukrainian red...
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The Late Unpleasantness
There is nothing so painfully ironic as a war between countrymen. So when nurse Kate Cumming speaks bitterly in her 1864 diary of “our kind northern friends, who love us so dearly that they will have us unite with them, whether we will or no” it is hard to blame her. Cumming is one of...
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Commendables
Be True to Your School Ernest L. Boyer, High School, A Report on Secondary Education in America; Harper & Row; New York. by Carlisle G. Packard In 1955, two-thirds of Americans asked by a Gallup poll indicated that they would be willing to pay more taxes if the increase were applied to raising teachers’ salaries. In...
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America First
In this 1996 essay, the late Congressman James Traficant illustrates the Washington establishment’s habitual subordination of America to foreign interests.
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Israel’s American Chattel
I do not believe the National Intelligence Council could function effectively while its chair was under constant attack by unscrupulous people with a passionate attachment to the views of a political faction in a foreign country. The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation,...
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A Half-Open Mind
“The discussion is concerned with no commonplace subject but with how one ought to live.” —Plato During the month of June, Allan Bloom’s observations on the state of American education climbed their way dramatically toward the peak of the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list. Why would such a book engage a mass readership? Bloom’s...
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The Uses of Diversity: Recovering the Recent Past
One of the more interesting recent books of popular history, Paul Johnson’s Modern Times, stakes out the period between the outbreak of World War I to almost the present. In Johnson’s intellectual framework, the boundaries of modernity are marked by two great revolutionaries: Albert Einstein, who threw the thinking world into a turmoil of doubt...
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Rome as We Found It
In horse-and-carriage days, foreign visitors to Rome, after an arduous Alpine crossing, commonly entered the city from the north, by the Milvian Bridge which has existed since the second century B.C. Here, on October 28, 312, Constantine had a vision of Christ on the eve of his victory over his rival, Maxentius. Since that time,...
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Books in Brief: November 2021
Klara and the Sun: A Novel, by Kazuo Ishiguro (Knopf; 320 pp., $28.00). A conservative disposition imposes costs but limits downside surprises. If you always expect rain, you have to lug your umbrella around wherever you go. But you never get wet. Likewise, if you see life through a Menckenian lens, worstcase scenarios sometimes play...
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Ground Zero Mosque: Correcting the Non-Debate
Excerpts from a speech at Providence College given on Thursday, Oct. 21, 2010. Two sets of fallacies have dominated the mainstream debate about the Ground Zero mosque—and before we go any further, let’s get this straight: it is a mosque, frantic insistence by the Qusling elite to use one euphemistic misnomer or another notwithstanding....
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Time for a Conservative Reformation
The fate of conservatism is thought to be hanging in the balance these days, and with it, perhaps, the fate of the country, of a political party, of presidential candidates, of a movement. Well, good. Now is the time for reevaluation or, dare I say it, reformation. “Conservatism isn’t just passivity,” wrote Joseph Sobran in...
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Lonesome No More
All literary genres have their loyalists, but few have more devoted—and querulous—readers than the Western. So when in the mid-1980’s rumors began to circulate that Larry McMurtry, hitherto known for his angst-ridden tales of modern Texas, was at work on an epic oater, shoot-’em-up fans began looking for a noose, sure that the bespectacled belletrist...
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Is Biden Really the Lincoln of Our Time?
Traveling to Philadelphia Tuesday, President Joe Biden laid out in apocalyptic terms the gravity of the “threat” to American democracy from Republican efforts to reform and rewrite state election laws. We are facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War. That’s not hyperbole. Since the Civil War. The Confederates back then...
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Remembering St. Thomas Aquinas
St. Thomas Aquinas is a universally admired philosopher who was able to distill the whole of human discourse. His thought even influenced America's Founding Fathers, as seen in the biblical ordering of the new American nation in the Treaty of Paris.
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Letter From the Lower Right
Taxing Matters In a North Carolina newspaper not long ago-a North Carolina newspaper – I actually read an editorial urging Tar Heel legislators to raise the state tax on cigarettes. What is the world coming to? The state’s present tax, I gather, is the lowest in the nation. You would think North Carolinians would join...
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A Plague on Both Their Houses
“Layze Ameeze de tayze ameeze sont mayze ameeze.” A drunken redneck recited this at me late one night in 1965, at Andy’s Lounge. Andy’s was one of Charleston’s last “blind tigers”—a speakeasy, complete with gambling and homely B-girls, that defied even the closing laws that the other scofflaw establishments observed. I went there often to...
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Welfare and Illegal Immigration
Two San Diego police officers, responding in the early morning darkness to a call that a school was being burglarized, arrived just as two suspects were fleeing into a nearby canyon. As the San Diego Union reported, the officers did not plunge into the canyon in pursuit—the terrain was dangerous, night visibility almost zero, and...
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Gone with the Wind
Generations of Hollywood history and local memories went up in flames during the recent Palisades fire.
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Éric Zemmour, in the Footsteps of de Gaulle
The Economist contemptuously called him France’s “wannabe Donald Trump.” He’s been accused by The Atlantic of using the “Trump playbook.” Not to be outdone, Britain’s New Statesman dubbed him a “TV-friendly fascist.” French anti-racism and rights groups, including SOS Racisme, have filed complaints against him. Already thrice convicted of inciting racial hatred, he is due...
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The Great American Purge
“States’ rights? You can’t be serious! What do you want to do—restore Jim Crow or bring back slavery?” Any serious discussion of the American republic always comes aground on this rock, and it does not matter which kind of liberal is expressing the obligatory shock and dismay, whether a David Corn leftist at the Nation,...
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Don’t Have a ‘Merry Little Christmas’
I was sitting in my local coffee shop when “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” began playing over the café’s speaker. Perhaps because this Christmas is so fraught with fear and uncertainty, this song caught my attention. I pushed aside my other thoughts and gave my full attention to the music, hunting down the lyrics...
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Letters From Rome: Italy’s Russiagate-Wannabe
Back in the Eternal City after three years, and there is another political scandal on the horizon. Or at least the local media machine (every bit as bad as its U.S. equivalent) would have us believe there was. The target: Matteo Salvini, Italy’s famously Euroskeptic interior minister. The accusation: corrupt dealings between his Lega party...
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The Lost Tribes of Israel
As Israel enters its 61st year, Israelis may look back with pride. Yet, the realists among them must also look forward with foreboding. Israel is a modern democracy with the highest standard of living in the Middle East. In the high-tech industries of the future, she ...
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The School of History
“We feel bound to disagree with these prophets of doom.” —John XXIII Nestled in the foothills below Saddleback Mountain in “the O.C.” there is an abbey of priests and a small boarding school. There is nothing there that would remind one of the lubricious television program that made the initials of Orange County, California, proverbial;...
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Muffled Voices
“The Noise of the City Cannot Be Heard” was the title of a very popular song in the Soviet Union just after World War II. According to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the song was so much in demand that “no singer, even the most mediocre, could perform it without receiving enthusiastic applause.” The Soviet Chief Administration of...
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Germany Moves Away From Woke Regime Politics. Will America?
The once-docile German people no longer trust their political establishment to deal rationally with immigration and crime. A growing people’s revolt in Europe may be a sign of things to come in America.
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Empire of Destruction: Precision Warfare? Don’t Make Me Laugh
You remember. It was supposed to be twenty-first-century war, American-style: precise beyond imagining; smart bombs; drones capable of taking out a carefully identified and tracked human being just about anywhere on Earth; special operations raids so pinpoint-accurate that they would represent a triumph of modern military science. Everything “networked.” It was to be a glorious...
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Trivializing Rape
Last spring I picked up our student newspaper to read this sentence in a front-page story: “Statistics show that one out of every four UNC females will be sexually assaulted while in college.” Wow. The University of North Carolina has roughly 15,000 undergraduates (leave the graduate students out of it), something over half of them...
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The Justification for War
During the Cold War, occasional resorts to war or threats of war by the United States were justified by the need to keep communism in check. This justification had the advantage of being based on a real threat—notably in Berlin in 1949, in Korea in 1950, and during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. The...
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The Unreported Story of Hurricane Andrew
On August 24, 1992, shortly after 3 A.M.. Hurricane Andrew hit the coast at Miami, in South Dade County, Florida. A “Category Four” hurricane on the Saper-Simpson Hurricane Scale, Andrew struck with 145 m.p.h. winds, making it the worst hurricane to hit Miami since 1926. In fact, this was the worst hurricane to hit a...
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John Bull’s Other Island
Jane Ohlmeyer examines how English imperialism shaped Ireland; tangled alliances and cultural identities complicate the story of the Irish nationalist movement.
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Paying the Price
Iraqi Christians are paying the price of the Bush administration’s desire to remove Saddam Hussein. The Iranian Revolution and the rising influence of militant Islam have already forced the secular Iraqi dictatorship to make concessions to proponents of Iraq’s Islamicization, but the threat of a U.S. attack, together with a widespread feeling in the Arab...
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Trifkovic on Russia’s Strategic Crossroads
In his latest RTRS interview (Bosnian-Serb Republic public TV service), Srdja Trifkovic talks about Russia’s complex political and economic power structure, which is mostly at odds with the image of an authoritarian Kremlin monolith presented in the Western media. [Video here—Trifkovic segment starts at 6 minutes. Excerpts, verbatim translation from Serbian.] Q: Professor Trifkovic, you’ve...
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Between Raising Hell and Amazing Grace
I have heard the following remark, or something similar, made about country music on numerous occasions in my life: “You know, it’s kind of hard to take a guy seriously when he sings about loving Jesus one minute and drinking and cheating the next.” It is always uttered by someone who is not a big...
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Beat the Drum
There are some foreign-policy questions that require all the wisdom America’s leaders can summon—and some good luck as well. Responding to China’s emergence as a military and economic power, for instance, may prove as difficult for the international system as coming to terms with Germany’s rise was in the last century, with the consequences for...
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The Bankrupt PIGS of Europe
They are called the PIGS—Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain. What they have in common is that all are facing deficits and debts that could bring on national defaults and break up the European Union. What brought the PIGS to the edge of the abyss? All are neo-socialist states that provide welfare for poor people, generous unemployment,...
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Two Ways of Changing Our Minds About History
For more than 60 years, I’ve been interested in both the historical past and in how historical interpretations are created. I’ve also written a great deal on both subjects, but particularly on how public and scholarly opinions about past events and personalities change, and why they change. I believe there are two routes through which...
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Hearts and Minds
Clyde Wilson’s View in the April issue (“Society Precedes Government: Two Counterrevolutions”) was excellent. A New England “Yankee” (my great-grandfather was captured and put in Libby Prison during the war) and a Bunyanesque Calvinist at that (I might as well completely alienate myself from your editorial staff while I’m at it), I attended school in...
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How, When, Do We Come Together Again?
America suffers from a great divide that goes far beyond our clashing views of Jan. 6 and the Mar-a-Lago raid. Americans need to find common ground again.
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THE AMERICAN WAY OF DEATH: July 2007
PERSPECTIVE Ted's Timor Mortis by Thomas Fleming Stumbling past the half-truths. VIEWS Americans Don't Die! by Roger D. McGrath Casualties, from republic to empire. Portraits by George Garrett Some notes on the poetry of growing old. The Last Adieu by George McCartney A wake for the living. A Dirge for ...
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More Buchanan, Less Kushner.
Sam Tanenhaus just penned a lengthy profile in Esquire of Pat Buchanan describing how Buchanan’s three unsuccessful presidential campaigns helped lay the groundwork for Trump’s successful campaign this year. Tanenhaus quotes Buchanan as telling the New York Times, in 2000, “When the chickens come home to roost, this whole coalition will be there for somebody....
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Mexico’s Supreme Court Changes Provide a Warning for America
There seems to be a new trend that when a new leftist government is elected it attempts to change or undermine its country’s court system to remove it as a barrier to consolidating power. During the U.S. election cycle, there was much talk of how an incoming Democratic administration might reshape the Supreme Court. Thus...
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International Community
In April, Condoleezza Rice made a stunning display of her keen analytical mind and verbal agility. During a joint press conference with the Hungarian foreign minister, the secretary of state found herself defending the Bush administration’s decision to abstain rather than veto a U.N. resolution turning over crimes committed in the Darfur region of the...
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Smear Campaign
“The tone and tendency of liberalism . . . is to attack the institutions of the country under the name of reform and to make war on the manners and customs of the people under the pretext of progress.” —Benjamin Disraeli On April 14, 1996, the Washington Post published a 2,700-word article by liberal journalist...
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Essentials for a Lasting Peace in the Middle East
No solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is possible unless we clearly define the obstacles that can and must be surmounted. This conflict, which culminated in open warfare in 1948, is rooted in the incompatible claims of two distinct groups regarding the same territory and resources. In 1947, the United Nations partitioned...