This issue brings together a number of discussions of man’s place in nature. Stephen R. L. Clark, Tibor Machan, and jay Mechling explore the implications of the animal rights movement. Debating the “moral status of animals” (to borrow one of Prof. Clark’s titles) is interesting not so much for what it reveals about beasts as...
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Immigration: The Greatest Government Failure of Our Times
Migration is a reality that concerns no more than 200 million people on earth now living outside their country of origin—that is, only three percent of the world’s population. Why should we even talk about it? The reason is simple: Global statistics are worthless; the whole phenomenon is concentrated in Europe and the United States. ...
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Welcome to Dodge City
On the American frontier of previous centuries, the possession of a firearm was often a key to survival. In this regard, the frontier of 20th-century America, although different geographically, is very much like earlier frontiers. As different waves of Europeans arrived in North America, each took a distinct approach to trading guns with the Indians....
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Syria: No End Game in Sight
The Russian military intervention in Syria, and the creation of a new regional alliance which includes Iran and Iraq, removes one undesirable outcome from the complex equation. The collapse of the government in Damascus, and its replacement by some form of jihadist-dominated Sharia regime which would spell the end of the non-Sunni minorities (including Christians),...
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The Empire State of Mind
Nigel Biggar's sophisticated history of British colonialism does not ignore the many benefits reaped by the recipients. His work is relevant to all Western nations, now threatened by faux radicals.
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The Serbs of Ozren Mountain
“Let me marry / Or buy me a banjo / For I must pluck / At something!” sings Milosli Dragichevitch, a Serb from Ozren Mountain in Bosnia. Milosh is a 50-year-old whose eyes twinkle darkly as he laughs at jokes about Serbs and Turks, made up by someone diabolical, somewhere in Bosnia. “Two Red Berets,”...
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The American Crisis Without Alternative
The most important event of the waning years of the 20th century is the collapse of the last of the great national socialist powers whose rise and fall dominated the generations after World War I. The Axis easily defeated their liberal and imperial opponents, but were crushed by the national socialist regimes of the Soviet...
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Labor Left in the Lurch
It became clear on Labor Day 2022 that the American left has no use for Americans who make a living with their hands, particularly if those hands are white and masculine.
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Krugman Oblivious to Inflation
Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman got upset on a recent plane flight when he saw Ron Paul on NewsMax TV on the jet’s telescreen. Krugman wondered, “Who knew there was such a thing? Is it there to serve people who find Fox News too liberal?” Actually, Newsmax, like Fox News, is neoconservative – that is,...
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The Conservative Search for Order
The terms liberal and conservative (nearly always paired in that descending order) are now so confused as to be almost entirely useless. Originally, liberal was used to denote the ideology that aimed at the liberation of human individuals from the restraints of Church establishments, aristocratic and monarchical privileges, and legal restrictions on business and international...
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Gay Marriage, Before the Ruling
Justice [Antonin] Scalia: [W]hen did it become unconstitutional to exclude homosexual couples from marriage? 1791? 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted? . . . Has it always been unconstitutional? . . . You say it is now unconstitutional. [Theodore Olson, attorney arguing that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional]: Yes. Justice Scalia: Was it always unconstitutional?...
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Dominating Headlines
The recall election in California has dominated the headlines of late, thanks, in part, to Governor Hiram Johnson, the lion of the Western Progressives. The irony is that today’s alleged “progressives”—in thrall to the special interests (i.e., the public-employee unions)—are horrified by what their ancestors have wrought. The Union Pacific Railroad was a great octopus...
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Ghosts of the Midwest
The decline of the Midwest as a cultural force was well under way by the time Russell Kirk was born in Plymouth, Michigan, in 1918. Yankee influence in the region had largely been replaced by a more vibrant German-American culture, and now the United States, in the midst of the War to End All Wars,...
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The English Rejoice at Scotland’s Coming Independence
Everyone in Britain knows that it is just a matter of time before Scotland becomes independent and reverts to medieval chaos. The English Labour Party’s plan of establishing a devolved but subordinate parliament in Edinburgh to be dominated forever by inept Labour MPs recruited from the decaying slums of Glasgow has failed. The secessionist Scottish...
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North and South
The proprietor of the restaurant M——A——, known as “Ricotta,” likes to share with his intimate friends—for the most part fecund, avuncular family men who, between them, did upward of a thousand years in the high-security Section 2 of the city’s thistle-shaped Ucciardone jail, awaiting trial on accusations of various victimless crimes, usually involving government building...
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The End of the NCC?
The declining National Council of Churches, once the mouthpiece of America’s mainline Protestant denominations, is struggling to find a new purpose. At its May 2002 board meeting, the NCC discussed its latest ecumenical outreach, an attempt to incorporate Roman Catholics and evangelicals. Called “Christian Churches Together in the U.S.A.: An Invitation to a Journey,” the...
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DOGE Has Exposed the Anti-Borders Cash Pipeline
DOGE is exposing how government under Biden was funding both half-hearted efforts to enforce immigration laws and massive efforts to evade them.
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Letitia James’s Richelieu Routine
If New York’s attorney general can smear and destroy an online publication simply because she does not agree with its contents, there’s no meaningful free speech in America anymore.
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America as a ‘Wokers’ Paradise
Distinctions between the First, Second, and Third Worlds have blurred in contemporary America as government competence stretches in odd and tyrannical directions while leaving the basic functions of government untouched. This misalignment of priorities could well serve to delegitimize the government in the eyes of many of its citizens. The post-WWII political landscape was simple....
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Multiculturalism in Theory and Practice
I came by my lifelong interest in foreign languages and cultures honestly. Mv grandfather, Andrew Jackson King, Jr., migrated to a Hispanic-populated area of the Territory of New Mexico in 1906. Acquiring a small ranch, he hired some (Spanish-speaking) Basque shepherds and raised sheep—for a while, that is, until one morning he discovered that both...
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Race and the Classless Society
A few months ago I was on a long plane ride when something rather startling happened: Someone sitting near me was actually polite. He was in the seat immediately in front of mine, and before reclining he turned to look over his shoulder and asked—asked!—if I would mind if he leaned a little bit into...
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Can Poland Be Poland—and Stay in the EU?
“Let Poland be Poland!” That was the call of American conservatives, four decades ago, when the Solidarity movement of labor leader Lech Walesa arose in the port city of Gdansk to demand their freedom of the Communist system imposed upon Poland by the Soviet Union after World War II. A decade later, Poland broke free...
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EXCLUSIVE: Guns and Roses
When one William Kostric walked into a protest outside a town hall meeting in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, at which the President of the United States was present, carrying a loaded gun—“Of course it was loaded,” he told Chris Matthews later, “what kind of fool would carry around an unloaded gun?”—he ...
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A Third Way?
I went into the 2000 presidential campaign an enthusiastic supporter of Pat Buchanan’s bid for the White House as a third-party candidate. I emerged more convinced than ever that Buchanan would have made an outstanding president but skeptical that a serious right-wing party will be able to emerge, at least in the short run. I knew...
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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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Vigilante Justice: A Case Study
When mild-mannered Bernhard Goetz shot four black youths who attempted to rob him in a New York subway in 1984, news reporters inevitably called him the “subway vigilante.” But Goetz was not a vigilante; he was not a member of a vigilant group of concerned citizens patrolling the subways as keepers of the peace. On...
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Immigrant Birthright
Any doubts you may have had about the absurdity and falseness of American electoral politics would have been removed if you had lived through the barrage of advertising that preceded our South Carolina presidential primary. Every single one of the Republican candidates pretended to have become Horatio at the Bridge, single-handedly holding back the onslaught...
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White Anxiety and the GOP
White anxiety is the single greatest driver of right-wing politics in the United States, and it is as understandable as the fear one feels while trying to avoid death by drowning.
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Nixon—Before Watergate
It has been a summer of remembrance. The centennial of the Great War that began with the Guns of August 1914. The 75th anniversary of the Danzig crisis that led to Hitler’s invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. The 70th anniversary of D-Day. In America, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights...
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Roll, Jordan, Roll
So the anti-Confederate backlash comes to Dallas . . . but, then, maybe not. Maybe that isn’t fundamentally what happened when the Dallas school board, in June, voted to rename mostly black and Hispanic Jefferson Davis Elementary School for Barbara Jordan, the late Houston congresswoman. Here, likely, is what happened: Within the community at large,...
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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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The Case for American Secession
There has always been talk about secession in this country by those variously disgruntled on both the right and left, but, since the last presidential election, which revealed deep-seated divisions in American society over a variety of fundamental issues, that talk has grown exponentially. Such talk is not likely to lead to a dissolution of...
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With the Nietzscheans of Naumburg
The old cathedral town of Naumburg, where Friedrich Nietzsche spent 12 of the first 18 and seven of the last ten years of his life, is located in the southeastern corner of the Land (province) of Sachsen-Anhalt, roughly halfway between Weimar and Leipzig. In late April and early May of 1945, this part of Germany...
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The Myth of the Atomic Bomb
Japan feared the Soviets, not the bomb For a generation after the Japanese Instrument of Surrender was signed on Sept. 2, 1945, the standard narrative remained fairly straightforward. By deciding to use nuclear weapons—against Hiroshima on Aug. 6 and on Nagasaki three days later—President Harry Truman enabled the realists in Tokyo, also called the peace faction,...
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Piltdown Man
Virginia Woolf once wrote that human nature suddenly changed in the year 1912. Such things tend to be at the whim of later generations of critics, but there’s no doubt that the idea of an acceptable form of public entertainment underwent a rude shock in the years just before the outbreak of World War I. ...
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New York vs. New York
“The feeling between this city and the hayseeds. . .is every hit as hitter 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...
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On Catron County
The first half of Chilton Williamson’s September essay, “Circuit Rider,” is a joy to read. The second half is also well written, but has no reality to it. The idea that Catron County, New Mexico, is fighting for some grounded life against federal interference founders if the facts are known. The facts are that Catron...
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The Gascon of Europe
Now that communism is dead, a new specter is haunting much of Europe—the specter of nationalism. In several countries, for the first time since World War II, what may be conveniently termed nationalist, right-wing, populist parties are on the verge of coming to power, or at least of gaining respectable numbers of seats in government....
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Westerns: America’s Homeric Era on the Silver Screen
Some time around 800 b.c., Homer put the heroic tales of the Achaeans into lyric form: battles, expeditions, adventures, conquests. The tales were inspiring, heroic, tragic, triumphal. Greeks recited Homer’s iambic pentameter for centuries; so, too, did we as schoolchildren—as inheritors of Western civilization. We Americans, however, also have our own Homeric Era. While the...
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Polemics & Exchanges: August 2022
Correspondence on "More Hand-Wringing About the Radical Right," by Paul Gottfried and "A Fork in Europe's Road," by Srdja Trifkovic.
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Success and Failure in Higher Education
Nelson County, Marion County, and Washington County are collectively referred to by their inhabitants as the Kentucky Holy Land, and I don’t think the expression is meant to be entirely whimsical. Settled in the late 18th century by English Catholics from Maryland, the rolling green country is to this day marked by cattle farms, distilleries,...
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Long Before Trump, We Were a Divided People
In a way, Donald Trump might be called The Great Uniter. Bear with me. No Republican president in the lifetime of this writer, not even Ronald Reagan, united the party as did Trump in the week of his acquittal in the Senate and State of the Union address. According to the Gallup Poll, 94% of...
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Georgia: The Score
Russia’s recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia makes it imperative to analyze the situation in the Caucasus dispassionately and comprehensively. The mainstream media (MSM) treatment of the crisis has been predictably monolithic, however -- almost as biased (“bad ...
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It Will Be Sudden, It May Be Soon
The Roswell Alien Museum and Research Center is on Main Street, an avenue dotted with trinket shops and ads featuring a big-eyed “alien” hawking hamburgers, gasoline, and the wares of various convenience stores. At the north end of Roswell is the New Mexico Military Institute, while the flat, brown-gray expanse of the staked plains surrounds...
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Among the Lakes
My advice to anyone who wants to see some of the most polite people around is to get to Chile soon—before we declare war on it or the media level it into the likeness of a London suburb, with a bust of Lenin in every town hall, tax-funded homes for lesbians, and a veto on...
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Pardon the Pardons
It is reported that “faithful adherence to legal principle sometimes [takes] a back seat to the more compelling demands of politics.” This appears to be a pointed assessment of a little-publicized controversy surrounding the pardon of four convicts by last year’s Acting Governor of Arkansas, dentist Jerry Jewell. As president pro tempore of the state...
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The Bit Between Their Teeth
Despite last summer’s brassy pronouncements that the owl had sung her watchsong on the towers of Capitol Hill, the oligarchs of Congress bit the reins in their teeth and lashed their mounts full into the maelstrom of constituents disgusted with pay-raises, privileges, perversion, and pretension. Some 96 percent of the incumbents managed to ride out...
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Remembering Warren G. Harding
Harding was a consummate conservative governed by humility, kindness, and charity for all: principles that guided him in both his personal life and his political career.
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Kelly Loeffler’s Missed Opportunity in the Georgia Run-off Debate
On the evening of Dec. 6, I watched the debate between Sen. Kelly Loeffler and the Reverend Raphael Warnock, who are running against each other for a U.S. Senate seat from Georgia with the runoff election scheduled for Jan. 5. As a non-leftist I am anxious to see the Georgia Senate seats now up for...
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The Case for Christian Distributism
Christian distributism celebrates the small and the human. It rests on strong home economies and demands the widest possible distribution and ownership of productive property. It favors worker ownership through cooperatives of necessarily larger machines and enterprises. It seeks and reinforces local communities, bound together by ties of kinship, faith, and trade. It welcomes lifelong,...