In a classic book of humor entitled The Experts Speak, we find an impressive collection of failed prophecies and wildly inaccurate predictions: Television would never catch on, nobody needs a personal computer, and so on. I occasionally think there might be a place for a parallel volume of religious forecasts gone stunningly wrong. Such an...
The Last Samurai is the latest movie to treat us to the spectacle of the U.S. Army slaughtering American Indian women and children. Playing a disillusioned captain, Tom Cruise suffers from nightmares for his role in the dastardly deed. He finds honor and redemption as a Great White Samurai in Japan. Many movie reviewers have...
“Politics stops at the water’s edge” was a tradition that, not so long ago, was observed by both parties, particularly when a president was abroad, speaking for the nation. The tradition was enunciated by Sen. Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan in 1947, as many of the Republicans in the 80th Congress moved to back Truman’s leadership...
The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto by Charles Blow Harper Collins 256 pp., $26.99 Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson Random House 496 pp., $32.00 The verbal tics of the orthodox Marxist vocabulary in mid-20th century Europe made it virtually impossible for communists to camouflage themselves. Ex-communist author Arthur Koestler...
In his engaging biography of John C. Calhoun, Irving H. Bartlett reminds us that American political culture and the men who made it were not always as decadent and corrupt as they are today. Yet Bartlett’s book is not a partisan manifesto. He is respectful of Calhoun but not always sympathetic to his views, aspirations,...
According to the latest opinion poll, published on July 16, President Putin’s approval rating among different segments of Russia’s electorate has risen to an unprecedented 66 percent. This may change quickly, however, if he comes to be perceived as weak and indecisive in handling the next stage of the Ukrainian crisis – the one that...
My late friend Sam Francis often wrote about the need for Americans to defend their “culture.” Most assuredly Americans have lives, families, land, and property that they need to and have every right to defend and preserve (which they are not doing a very good job of). But “culture”? I always wondered exactly what Sam...
Some of us down here took exception a while back when John Aldridge referred to Jimmy Carter as “a redneck peanut farmer from Georgia.” We felt it was a gross libel on rednecks. Of course, Aldridge didn’t mean to be complimentary. Calling our former President that was about as malicious, as offensive, and as beside...
Tony Blair is mad—really mad. Nasty people keep blowing up things in his London, and he is going to do something about it. At a press conference in late July, he told the world that he wants to make it illegal for British subjects to leave Britain for advanced terrorist training in Pakistan. The hidden...
Storms and other phenomena of nature have their own distinct sounds. Those who have survived a tornado often say that it sounded “like a train.” A volley of cannon fire accompanies every thunderstorm. The gale-force winds of a hurricane howl at nearly 200 miles per hour, as the rain strikes objects with the velocity of...
Oh, the tedium. We are confronted, yet again, with the spectacle of the establishment media suffering one of their spasms of professional angst, as they ask each other, with fake drama, what their audience, in genuine anger, frequently asks them: Why do you get so much so wrong so often? For those who have witnessed...
Occupying some two thirds of the old czarist province of Bessarabia, with the rivers Dniester to the east and Prut to the west, the Republic of Moldova is a small, poor, landlocked state. Its parliamentary election, held on November 28, should have been irrelevant to anyone except the faraway country’s three and a half million people, of whom we know...
The Last Confederate Produced by Strongbow Pictures Directed by A. Blaine Miller and Julian Adams Written by Julian Adams and Weston Adams Firetrail Produced by Forbesfilm Written and directed by Christopher Forbes Like it or not, movies are the main art form of our time, the storytelling medium that reaches the largest audience and...
Article IV of the Constitution addresses the obligations of the federal government to the state governments that were being asked to surrender aspects of their sovereignty to form our new Union. “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government,” reads Article IV, “and shall protect each of...
From the September 1994 issue of Chronicles. “The corruption of man,” Emerson wrote, “is followed by X the corruption of language.” The reverse is true, and a century later Georges Bernanos had it right: “The worst, the most corrupting lies are problems wrongly stated.” How pertinent this is about so many matters present, including the...
President and five-star Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower said that a man must “believe in his luck” in order to lead. Jeff Sessions is such a man. He has not only survived multiple setbacks, considered career ending by many, but has consistently come out ahead. Most recently, his early and conspicuously vocal endorsement of Donald Trump...
The decline of the household economy is one of the most significant economic changes in post-World War II America. Unfortunately, it has received relatively little attention. Professional economists find it trivial compared to the workings of large-scale institutions and global economies, while the average American sees only a positive development that has meant greater mobility,...
The war in Iraq’s outcome was never in doubt, but the magnitude and speed of the Iraqi regime’s collapse are nevertheless puzzling and deserve closer scrutiny. In terms of numbers and available equipment, the Iraqi military was theoretically a foe worthy of respect. Its past performance was by no means abysmal. It suffered serious reverses...
When my daughter, Katie, was in the fifth grade, her grammar school conducted a week-long series of tests inspired by the White House to promote physical fitness for schoolchildren. Children who completed the tests with passing marks—the standards for passing were not high—received a certificate from the President. The kids ran, jumped, and stretched, and...
I studied the weather for four days before making a break for the south, slipping between the winter storms along icepacked roads wreathed with snowsnakes across sun-glazed plains in the direction of the Salt Lake Valley, where much of the snow had evaporated, under a stiff northwesterly wind and horses and cattle at American Fork...
Kazan was preparing for her 1,000-year anniversary last August when Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived to address the World Tatar Congress in what once had been the center of a Tatar khanate. The goal of the congress was the “spiritual unification” of the Tatars, scattered across Russia and the world. I do not know whether...
Just two days after the alleged April 9 chemical attack in Douma, Syria, TV host Tucker Carlson asked Mississippi Republican Sen. Roger Wicker, “What is the American national security interest that would be served by regime change in Syria?” Wicker responded, “Well, if you care about Israel you have to be interested at least in...
Immigration is like so many other political issues in modern America: The official debate is quashed by political correctness, so the real issues fester under the surface while politicians deal in platitudes. Currently, Americans trip over themselves saying how wonderful all immigrants are, whether they are here legally or not, and opinionmakers argue about whether...
An evident characteristic of the neoconservatives is that they are forever seeing the light. Leon Trotsky, Martin Luther King, Leo Strauss, and George Bush are just some of the splendid aurorae that, in decades past, have shone upon them at the end of philosophical tunnels and through the clearings in political clouds. It’s just that...
Because spectator sports play a dominant role in American culture, many have tried to use them to change our society. Such social engineering happens in America’s inner cities, which would come as no surprise to most people. But it also happens in such unlikely places as the Arrowhead Region of northeastern Minnesota and, specifically, in...
Sam Pickering (born 1941) recently retired from professing English—mostly, it would appear, creative writing. Oh! “Beware! Beware! . . . Weave a circle round him thrice / . . . / For he on honey-dew hath fed / and drunk the milk of paradise.” If Coleridge had not crafted his magical lines for a figure...
Herewith, some exercises in the New Symbolic Logic, inspired by arguments against symbols of the Confederacy. Sociopath and terrorist Dylann Storm Roof murdered nine Christian black people. Dylann Roof liked the Confederate Battle Flag. Therefore, the Confederate Battle Flag causes people to commit mass murder and become terrorists. And therefore, the Confederate Battle Flag...
“Of making many books there is no end,” Ecclesiastes has it. Like the endless streams of cat-cartoon and celebrity workout books, the flow of books factual or fictional about the American West seems not only interminable but ever-increasing: The region has long been a popular setting for a great mass of pulp fiction, to which...
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...
The inability to speak well was once upon a time a great hurdle to overcome. But in today’s schools, pupils are taught that speaking properly is elitist, snobby, and not with the times.
“We will bury you,” warned Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950’s, but in the end, it is America’s NATO imperium that is burying Serbs under the rubble of Novi Sad and Belgrade and Americans under the red tape of the New World Order. The march of globalization has proceeded without effective resistance but not without criticism,...
In the “nihilistic politics of the 1990’s,” warns a newswriter for the Wall Street Journal, “party loyalty counts for almost nothing.” The writer means obeisance to the two major parties, which the civics books imply are ordained by God to rule us. In fact, America needs a breakup of this two-party system, which looks more...
In recent years, American politics has been preoccupied with moral questions, or what are now called “social issues”: sexual immorality, sodomy, abortion, pornography, and recreational drugs. Some conservatives want the federal government to play a role in opposing these evils. Many libertarians, on the other hand, want the government, state and federal alike, to treat...
Visitors to Charleston sometimes take note of the Latin inscriptions on historical plaques: Collegium Carolopolitanum, Diocesis Carolopolitana, and, most commonly, Carolopolis, the Latin version of Charleston’s name, which sounds like one of those Greek cities created by Alexander the Great and his successors somewhere in the hinterlands of Bithynia or Afghanistan. Charleston has always been...
The fate of Karen Whitsett, a black Democratic representative to the Michigan House of Representatives, who was censured by her fellow black Democrats from Detroit, for developing good relations with President Trump, speaks volumes. It tells us, if any further proof were required, how deeply American blacks hate the Republican Party and any black person...
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...
Our Founding Fathers understood that they had inaugurated a republican federal union unique in its balance and distribution of powers. Unlike their descendants, who self-indulgently congratulate themselves on their democracy, the Fathers also understood that the preservation of such a regime was a daunting and demanding task, requiring virtue (in the masculine Roman sense) on...
“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...
One-party rule in California means fiscal lunacy, hazardous living conditions, and dubious elections, among other bad things.
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...
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...
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...
The Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia enjoyed a full 24 hours of resurgent infamy before Gay Day came and took it all away. Screaming and shrieking throughout the process was the puerile, facile, and ultimately Manichaean Weltanschauung of our ruling class, which is best summarized in the phrase, “We are on the...
“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...
It is not enough to merely undo the damage of the Biden administration by deporting all illegal immigrants. There must be a moratorium on all immigration into the United States from culturally incompatible Third World countries.
“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...
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...
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...
The Catholic Church as a whole does not support illegal immigration, at least in principle. However, an increasing number of clergy and prelates, especially in Italy, do grant de facto support to illegal immigration. For example, the bishop of Caserta, Msgr. Raffaele Nogaro, was one of the first high-ranking prelates to support a protest by...
The demands of life are endlessly self-contradictory. It is a supreme compliment in intellectual life, for example, to be called original; but it can be alarming to discover something—so alarming that people have been known to turn tail and run when they do. To take a philosophical instance: Leibniz, as Bertrand Russell tells in his...