It is over 60 years since the Scopes Trial attracted journalists like Henry Mencken and Joseph Wood Krutch to Dayton, Tennessee, and yet the teaching of evolution is once again as controversial as—it was in 1925. Most of the debate is carried out between militant fundamentalists and equally militant materialists. While most of the fundamentalists...
These days, you don't have to leave your house to do much of anything—and fewer people do. That’s probably why so many Millennials are pining for a simpler time.
High Country News, the environmentalist newspaper founded by Tom Bell, a former rancher, in Lander, Wyoming, in 1970 turned 25 this year, and since the weekend of September 8 was forecast to be a fine one I decided to attend the anniversary celebration. HCN has been based for about a decade or so in Paonia,...
From the July 2005 issue of Chronicles. Whatever happened to Randolph Scott ridin’ the range alone? Whatever happened to Gene and Tex And Roy and Rex, the Durango Kid? Whatever happened to Randolph Scott His horse plain, as can be? Whatever happened to Randolph Scott Has happened to the best of me. So sang the...
On taking the oath of office, Jan. 20, Joe Biden may not have realized it, but history had dealt him a pair of aces. The COVID-19 pandemic had reached its apex, infecting a quarter of a million Americans every day. Yet, due to the discovery and distribution of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, the incidence...
Our elite political class has manipulated illegal immigration to entrench themselves in power and disenfranchise Americans.
For Americans, ebola is the new AIDS. It’s not only the nightmare plague that is supposed to obsess our imaginations, all day long and every day, as we sip the first cup of coffee or the first martini or the first 2000 calorie big gulp of diabetic shock at our favorite fat-food joint, but, wait,...
Emails released by the House Judiciary Committee should outrage Americans. The federal government devised a scheme to covertly stamp out public debate over election fraud.
I dutifully took the Moderna COVID vaccine booster on Nov. 5 at the advice of my younger brother, who practices medicine. Two hours after this ordeal, I began to feel chills and suffer from a very upset stomach. These symptoms vanished two days later, and I resumed my normal routine, which includes jogging. However, a...
The recent passing of Mary Travers—who, with Peter and Paul, was years ago always intoning that the answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind—brought back some quaint memories of kumbaya moments, and the consoling thought that at least Mary Travers lived long enough to see her political vision fulfilled in the person of Barack...
The Great American Jerk is a chameleon who changes colors according to circumstances, from obsequious to bullying, from pious to lewd. He may, on some occasions, display buck-waving generosity and on others check-splitting stinginess, but underneath there is always the baby boy or girl who wants what he or she wants, whether it is money,...
The sea, warm and quiet, lay in front of me. Dusk was falling, and there was a strong smell of brine and kelp in the air. I was sitting on a piece of a ruined ancient column on the shore of the Black Sea and couldn’t quite believe that just a few hours earlier I...
Traditional Christians should unite against the satanic vision of liberal-democratic nirvana, which continually threatens the West.
A rare crack in the fortified wall of the Bush administration’s diplomatic obstinacy seemed to appear as U.S. diplomats sat down in March with their Iranian and Syrian counterparts to discuss stability in Iraq. Foreign-policy realists of both parties hailed the move as a potential breakthrough: Sen. Joseph Biden (D-DE) offered a characteristically self-righteous lecture,...
In order to do research for a novel, I spent January and February of this year in Chile, thereby avoiding a particularly bitter winter in Washington, D.C. My intention was to pass most of my time in Santiago and spend only a couple of weeks touring the South. After about a week in the capital,...
When I first met General Alexander Lebed, shortly after he was forced to retire from his military career in 1995, he was a crusty soldier with great political ambitions, itching for action but visibly uncomfortable in mufti. His tie knot was too wide and his parade-ground bass sounded coarse and unmodulated. His face, with more...
A computer was the victor on a popular television game show, easily defeating its human competitors; an arms race is under way involving militarized robots that can take the battlefield in the place of inferior humans; in Japan, artificial-intelligence software has outperformed college applicants on a standardized college-entrance examination. Our machines are becoming a part...
In the long run, history will validate Donald Trump’s stand on a border wall to defend the sovereignty and security of the United States. Why? Because mass migration from the global South, not climate change, is the real existential crisis of the West. The American people know this, and even the elites sense it. Think...
Many Americans say they are fed up with their government, that “the time is right for a palace revolution.” President Obama’s approval rating has sunk below 40 percent, and the voters are angry not so much with the administration as with all incumbents. But why would anyone pay attention to opinion polls? All polls are...
The political culture of the United States is cramped and stunted by the narrow range of acceptable viewpoints and the utterly banal, subliterate tone of our political campaigns—to compare American elections to the marketing of soap is an insult to the people who sell soap. If, as Sean Scallon notes in Beating the Powers That...
“Where there’s no solution,” James Burnham used to remark, “there’s no problem.” That’s easy for him to say, the modern populist conservative replies. Burnham died while Reagan was still in office! What did he know about problems? Ah, the Golden Age of the 1980’s, when life was good. At least until we compare it with...
” . . . Form and Limit belong to the Good.” —C.S. Lewis Liberals in the United States have lately gathered around the standard of pluralism in the hope of stalling the movement toward private Christian education. Yet Americans, historically indifferent to such objections, have been the last to censure a church—especially a reformed or...
When C.S. Lewis wrote that there was more distance between us and Jane Austen than between Jane Austen and Plato, he was remarking on a cataclysm that colleges and universities had not escaped. The charters of colleges founded before the Age of Jackson reiterated the claim that the purpose of an educational institution was always,...
Readers of Chronicles already know that David Middleton is an extraordinarily accomplished poet. For much of the rest of the reading world, unfortunately, he is a well-kept secret. Living in Thibodaux, Louisiana, and teaching at Nicholls State University, he is far removed from the centers of literary power and influence. Even if that were not...
In the German name for Austria, Osterreich, Reich denotes more than “empire” in the sense of territorial extension; there is also a certain spiritual content. In the Middle Ages, empire meant the Eastern Roman Empire of Byzantium, and after Christmas Day 800, when Charlemagne was crowned by Pope Leo XIII, the Sacer Imperator Romanus was...
My old teacher, the classicist (and Scots Nationalist) Douglas Young, once interrupted a boring conversation about television by declaring loudly, “Speaking of Aeschylus . . . ” When one of his naive colleagues insisted, “But Douglas, no one was speaking about Aeschylus,” Young responded, “Yes, but I want to be speaking of Aeschylus.” This month,...
Well, Old Man, 70 today. Who’d have thought? And still in pretty good condition, considering how little care I have taken of the old carcass. I understand now how the accumulation of minor miseries in aging is mercifully designed to let us down slow and easy till we are ready. The children are OK....
President Barack Obama’s commencement address at West Point on May 28 managed to displease pretty much everyone in the nation’s commentariat. Before making an overall assessment of its significance, it is necessary to examine the validity and implications of Obama’s individual statements. “[B]y most measures America has rarely been stronger relative to the rest of...
“Truths would you teach, or save a sinking land? All fear, none aid you, and few understand.“ —Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Man” Although the raw figures from Census 2000 have been in the public domain for months already, the American public’s response to the latest decennial survey is still not...
Any young philosopher who aspires to an academic career must, especially in these days of fiscal restraint and feminized privilege, include in his plans a trip to the annual American Philosophical Association (APA) Convention, a curious hybrid of frenetic job-hunting and highbrow hobnobbing widely reviled as “the meat market.” Although Pacific and Central Divisions of...
The Supreme Court, tacitly acknowledging that the great Justice Antonin Scalia is still dead, refused on October 3 to reconsider United States v. Texas. The tie remained at 4-4, same as it was in June when the Court first polled itself, but a petulant Obama Department of Justice asked for the case to be reconsidered. ...
During the centuries of struggle between European Christianity and Islam, various countries were referred to as “Antemurale Christianitatis,” the bulwark of Christendom. Today, with the torrent of mostly Islamic “migrants” heading toward Europe only increasing, that title belongs to Hungary. Hungary was roundly condemned in the international press for seeking to enforce EU rules, which...
Encountered in the right circumstances, Belloc’s prose can become a lifelong addiction. Fortunately, the craving can be as readily satisfied as a thirst (if that is the right word) for cocaine in Hollywood. He wrote so much that one cannot easily run out, and the best of his works (Hills and the Sea, The Cruise...
Latin America has repeatedly failed to achieve the kind of settled distribution of property that could support a middle-class society. This is a disjunction of subtle but increasing cultural importance as the United States becomes more of a Latin country. With Jeb Bush running for the 2016 Republican nomination based in part on his ties...
The targeted burning of France's public schools and libraries in its latest riots shows that the rejection of French education and culture by Muslim immigrants has become overt and systematic. France is a nation shattering into ghettos.
No sooner had at least a dozen or so counterattacks on David Frum’s silly rant against paleoconservatives in the April 7 issue of National Review appeared in print or on the internet than the sole defense of the Frum article of which I am aware popped up under the name of William Rusher. Some paleos...
“The day of small nations has long passed away. The day of Empires has come.” —Joseph Chamberlain In a rational world, the term “imperialism” might have been a carefully defined and useful tool of political and social analysis, part of the study of how empires come into being. But the story of “imperialism” is typical...
Waving off the clerics who had come to administer last rites, Voltaire said: “All my life I have ever made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord, make my enemies look ridiculous.’ And God granted it.” The tale of the thieved emails at the Democratic National Committee is just too good...
Vladimir Putin, at the end of February, was expected by pundits East and West to react sharply to the news of Washington’s plan to send military advisors to Georgia, aiding Tbilisi in its battle with Taliban-connected Chechen insurgents. The insurgents have long used Georgia’s Pankisi gorge as a rest camp and base for continuing their...
When Ariel Sharon, facing strong international pressure, proposed a withdrawal of settlements from Gaza, the settlers’ response was predictably hostile. For some, the motive is predominantly economic—the settlements represent affordable housing; for others, nationalist politics is the driving force: Israel, they say, is Israel, and no part should be subtracted. These arguments can be countered...
As Chief of the Pentagon’s Criminal Law Division, I tried or supervised hundreds of rape cases, and my aggressive prosecutions earned me a place on the Army General Staff. I demanded that my JAG lawyers prosecute the toughest sex crime cases, regardless of evidentiary challenges. But I also insisted that they firmly believe that each...
Karl Marx's support for Lincoln and condemnation of the South, both during and after the Civil War, create an awkward paradox for establishment conservatives.
“Shall I weep if a Poland fall? Shall I shriek if a Hungary fail?” -Tennyson Robert Kee: 1939: In the Shadow of War; Little, Brown; Boston. Gordon Brook-Shepherd: Archduke of Sarajevo; Little, Brown; Boston. Neither Robert Kee nor Gordon Brook-Shepherd has written a masterpiece. Both men cover well trodden fields of research: one, the events of l939 that Winston Churchill aptly called “the Second Thirty-Years...
Dear Members of Congress: Some of you who are doing your duty in representing your constituents need not pay attention to this letter. You know who you are. For the rest of you, I have a question: Where in the name of our country are you people? Since Jan. 20, we’ve had a crisis at...
In recent weeks the proponents of an American war against Iran have been getting impatient with President Obama’s apparent unwillingness to get with the program. Joe Lieberman, Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman, and Howard Berman, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, now press the President to impose a short time limit on the...
Accusations of racism, unlike protestations of patriotism, are the first, not the last, refuge of scoundrels. In today’s world the charge is the ultimate rhetorical weapon, the H-Bomb of public discourse. Even without accurate aim or effective delivery, it is guaranteed to destroy not only the intended target but associates and bystanders for miles around,...
John Ellis, a well-known British military historian, has made a major contribution to our understanding of the nature of World War II with an unflattering reappraisal of the effectiveness and leadership of the Allied forces. His views are not always just, but he raises issues that, while not totally ignored, have usually been confronted only...
After nine people were shot to death by a public transit worker, who then killed himself in San Jose, the latest mass murder in America, California Governor Gavin Newsom spoke for many on the eve of this Memorial Day weekend. “What the hell is going on in the United States of America? What the hell...
Under laissez-faire capitalism, government is limited to armies, which keep foreign bad guys from attacking us; police, to quell local criminals; and courts, to determine guilt and innocence. This is roughly the position of minimal-government libertarians, or minarchists. The foundation of law in this system is the non-aggression principle (NAP). The NAP provides that anyone...
Your mind is a terrible thing to waste—which is what will happen if Chronicles and its web go under because of lack of support. The election is over, and the Republicans have won their much predicted victory. It was only a matter of days before GOP legislators began to run away from the big issues:...