Samuel Francis’s new book America Extinguished and Joe Scotchie’s review of it (“While America Sleeps,” March) deal with the problems resulting from unlimited mass immigration—people from foreign countries bringing a different culture and values to America. Neither one, however, deals with the fact that the United States has experienced and still faces similar and equally...
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The Growing Irrelevance of the NCC
The National Council of Churches (NCC) is the Hugh Hefner of the religious world: aging and not dealing well with it, trapped in the fashions of the 1960’s and 1970’s, financially troubled, still offensive but no longer shocking, blissfully unaware of obsolescence, and feebly trying to disco at a time when retirement might be in...
Rights of Clergy
I saw my old friend Browne recently. The subject eventually turned to the politics of religion and the religion of politics. I asked him what he thought about the current Anglican debate over homosexuality, and I wondered aloud if it had anything to do with the obvious unmanliness of the clergy—the final phase of what...
Serbia Betrayed by Her Leaders
Talking to CKCU 93.1FM in Ottawa, Dr. Srdja Trifkovic considers the extraordinary readiness of the government in Belgrade to compromise Serbia’s national and state interests in order to demonstrate its subservience to the “international community.” A recent batch of Wikileaks cables from the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade drastically illustrates the extent of institutionalized political...
Epic America
Up in Oregon a woman was bathing in a river. The transistor radio she had set on the bank played as she swam. She was still swimming when a movement farther along the bank caught her eye. She turned and saw Elvis disappearing into the woods on her side of the river. At the same...
A Divisive Statement
The Dixie Chicks have caused quite a stir in Lee Greenwood’s America. To recap, for those who have taken E. Michael Jones’ advice and drop-kicked their television set out the front door: On March 10, during a concert in London, singer Natalie Maines said, “Just so you know, we’re ashamed the President of the United...
Americans Souring on Biden—and Washington
The California recall election turned out well for the Democrats. With Gov. Gavin Newsom sinking in the summer polls, the party had been staring starkly at the prospect of losing the nation’s largest state and seeing its governor replaced by talk-show host Larry Elder, who had vaulted into the lead among the 46 candidates seeking...
The Diner’s Refrain
With former president Bill Clinton settled into his new headquarters on New York’s 125th Street, in central Harlem, the danger for the culinary crowd is that he may now take to hanging out at Sylvia’s, the famous soul-food restaurant barely three blocks away on Lenox Avenue near 126th. For almost 40 years, the family-owned restaurant...
John F. Kennedy: Character and Camelot
John F. Kennedy first gained national attention at the age of 23. His book Why England Slept, published in 1940, became a best-seller and earned the new Harvard graduate plaudits as a man of learning and thoughtfulness. Kennedy was heard from again in the summer of 1944 when the New York Times carried a front-page...
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan, like many of those in the lively arts, frequently urges us to admire his present work rather than to dwell on his past triumphs, although he has been known to make an exception to the rule when it comes time to release his latest greatest-hits package. Unlike some rock-music critics, I’m happy to...
Impeachable Offenses
Back in March, Republican Majority Whip Tom DcLay took lunch at the Washington Times and started jabbering about how he and his party were going to impeach “activist judges” who handed down improper rulings. I know something about how those luncheons at the Times work, so I was not as impressed as some people. First,...
Pakistan: America’s Pandora’s Box?
On September 10, 2008,the New York Times reported that, back in July, President Bush had authorized ground incursions and missile attacks to destroy Taliban and Al Qaeda sanctuaries in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas. As the Times noted, “It is unclear precisely what legal authorities the United States has invoked to conduct even limited ground...
The Fire This Time
“You’ve damaged your own race,” said Mayor Michael Nutter to the black youths of Philadelphia whose flash mobs have been beating and robbing shoppers in the fashionable district of downtown. “Take those God-darn hoodies down,” the mayor went on in his blistering lecture. “Pull your pants up and buy a belt, ’cause no one...
A Warring Visionary
The Crusader: The Life and Tumultuous Times of Pat Buchanan by Timothy Stanley New York: Thomas Dunne Books 464 pp., $27.99 British scholar Timothy Stanley has produced the first significant biography of Patrick J. Buchanan, describing his life from his boyhood in Washington, D.C., up ...
The American Exception
From the October 1993 issue of Chronicles. A favorite exhortation of those seeking to further restrict or remove the private possession of firearms in the United States is to “look at other countries,” where lower murder rates are supposed to be a result of gun control laws. The underlying presumption beneath these laws is that...
Sentimental Democracy
Several months ago I spoke briefly at the Baltimore Bar Library against passage of the Maryland Dream Act, the state version of the federal initiative that has been hanging around the capitol for a dozen years now. My remarks were countered by two supporters of the act, a pair of earnest young men: both Catholic,...
Hearts and Minds
We’ve only just begun . . . Have you ever wondered what it was like to live through a sweeping cultural revolution? If you lived in France in late 1789, for instance, and you reviewed the events of the previous 12 months, you would have shaken your head in wonderment at all that had happened. ...
Further on the Way We Are Now
I find that local radio gives me a good view of the state of American consciousness, or unconsciousness. Just today I learned that the government is studying how to help “ailing mortgages.” Defaulters, it seems, have been struck by an unfortunate epidemic. Anyone can get sick, and sick people have to be helped. I also...
A Letter From Earth
“As fire is kindled by fire, so is a poet’s mind kindled by contact with a brother poet.” —John Keble, Lectures on Poetry, XVI Dear Jimbo, I am sending this c/o the Dead Poets Society. I hope it reaches you all right. Sure, it’s doubtful, I know. But, then again, why not? About the afterlife...
A New Agrarian Primer
Most people think agrarianism is synonymous with farming. As a result, agrarian thinkers spend much of their time defending what they really mean—namely, that agrarianism is not so much about agriculture as it is an integrated life in which farming plays a central or at least respectable role. Eric Freyfogle wisely avoids this pitfall and...
Reconsider Political Attachments
The presidential election is still one year away, but now is the time for American patriots of all stripes to reconsider their political attachments. Since the end of World War II, domestic opponents of the American Empire have struggled fruitlessly to contain its growth. As a philosopher friend recently remarked, we have no politics today...
Jihad’s Enablers
Almost 80 years ago, Julien Benda published his tirade against the intellectual corruption of his time, La Trahison des Clercs. The “scribes” in question are those who traffic in words and ideas. For generations before the 20th century, Benda wrote, members of the Western intellectual elite made sure that “humanity did evil, but honored good.”...
The Letter That Rocked Orange County
Greetings: You are being sent this letter because you were recently registered to vote. If you are a citizen of the United States, we ask that you participate in the democratic process of voting. You are advised that if your residence in this country is illegal or you are an immigrant, voting in a federal...
Is the Interventionists’ Era Over for Good?
President Donald Trump could have been more deft and diplomatic in how he engineered that immediate pullout from northeastern Syria. Yet that withdrawal was as inevitable as were its consequences. A thousand U.S. troops and their Kurdish allies were not going to dominate indefinitely the entire northeast quadrant of a country the size of Syria...
Where The Real Hate Lies
The measure of how far the American left will go to press its phony “hate” narrative can be found in five statements about the grand jury’s sound decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for shooting and killing black teenager Michael Brown, the thief whom Wilson tried to stop for robbing a convenience store. Brown...
Iraq as “Intelligence Failure”: We Told You So
“W,” a.k.a. “our Commander in Chief,” is apparently even more blindly stubborn and willfully ignorant than I had thought. As of this writing (December 2006), he is still distancing himself from the Iraq Study Group’s efforts to provide him cover for a withdrawal from the Middle East morass he has drawn us into. Bush Senior,...
We Were Right About Foreign Policy
U.S. leaders continue vindicating Chronicles' warnings with their disastrous foreign policy decisions. It remains to be seen whether President Trump will continue to break the trend by keeping the U.S. out of unnecessary wars.
We’re All Sikhs Now
The shooting of Sikhs at a temple in Milwaukee is generating the usual blather about senseless violence, the paranoid racialist right, and the patriotism of Sikh immigrants. I finally heard, this morning, the inevitable, “Today, we are all Sikhs.” Excuse me, but no, I am not now and shall never be a Sikh. Sikhs,...
The Cost of Welfare
perspective 8 | Topsy-Turvy by Thomas Fleming views 12 | Uncle Sam Goes Bust by Doug Bandow 16 | Take the Money and Run: Entitlement Politics by Mark G. Brennan reviews 20 | Mal de Mer by Chilton Williamson, Jr. [Sea Changes by Derek Turner] 22 | Why Garry Wills? by James Kalb [Why Priests? A Failed Tradition by Garry Wills]...
Nationalism Looking Pretty Good
If conservatives carried revolvers, they’d probably reach for them at the sound of the word “nationalism.” Perhaps it’s just as well they don’t carry revolvers, since nationalism usually makes its appearance armed with considerably bigger guns. In the Europe of Metternich and Castlereagh, nationalism was the vehicle for the revolutionary destruction of dynastic and aristocratic...
Remembering Robert E. Lee
Forbearance is a moral principle from which General Robert E. Lee rarely if ever wavered, and his unflinching practice of that virtue is the primary reason that he should be remembered today.
The Puritan Legacy Birthed the American Creed
Right-wing critics of Christianity often quote from The Hour of Decision, the last work of a once widely read German historian of philosophy, Oswald Spengler. This short, graphically composed book was published in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler took power in Germany. Although it has never been proven, there is a suspicion that the Nazi government disposed...
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 ...
Paterfamilias
In America today, we seem to face two alternatives: accepting hordes of invaders with alien cultures and ideologies, who are unwilling to assimilate and whose presence endangers the vestiges of our civilization; or homogenizing America into a rootless, soulless melting pot—a “proposition nation” without a past or local or family customs. Families and learning matter. ...
Don’t Tread on Us
In the closing days of 1993 two familiar specters, recently absent from our nightmares, returned to haunt the global consciousness: the Russian bear, in the person of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and the Yellow Peril, in the form of North Korea. There were, of course, other bugbears to frighten the children of democracy—the parade of new Hitlers...
Big Surprise
“When we gained power, the country was at the edge of the abyss; since, we have taken a great step forward.” —unnamed African government minister Tocqueville in the 19th century, and Solzhenitsyn in the 20th, noted that conformity of thought is powerfully prevalent among Americans. I have always thought that a strong justification for freedom...
Erdogan’s Welcome Miscalculation (II)
There was only an en passant reference to Syria at the end of my analysis of Erdogan’s defeat three days ago. This subject deserves closer scrutiny. His controversial policy vis-à-vis Damascus now appears to have been a major factor in his defeat, and Turkey’s likely fine-tuning of her posture in the months ahead may have...
The Great Parental Replacement
Parents are being replaced by woke educators, radical school counselors, gender queer-promoting librarians, meddling school-based health clinic staffers, and Big Pharma drug and jab peddlers.
Wymyn Don’t Wyn
The girly-men at the New York Times and a perpetually aggrieved feminist you’ve never heard of finally got what they wanted. In August, Augusta National Country Club, home of the storied Masters Tournament, finally admitted two women: Condoleezza Rice, a neocon secretary of state under President George W. Bush, and the fetching Darla Moore, a...
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...
Pandora’s Box
Globalization is remaking the world in ways that will profoundly affect how people do business, govern themselves, and even make war. We may debate what the driving force behind globalization is—capitalism or technology, for example—but there is no doubt that capital goods, services, people, and ideas cross borders with increasing speed, frequency, and ease. Actions...
Not Our Fathers’ Auto Industry
The U.S. automotive industry operates in a highly regulated environment, a fact largely overlooked in recent congressional hearings over federal loan guarantees to domestic firms. These regulations affect more than three million American blue- and white-collar workers employed in the industry, along with shareholders and other investors, including retirees (and their spouses) vested in pension...
Build the Wall, Mr. President
10 USC § 2808 gives the President authority to use the military to undertake construction in the event the President declares a national emergency. It has been used, without controversy, to build military facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan. 33 USC § 2293 is an even clearer grant of statutory authority to the President to order construction, “without...
How to Respond to Tradwife Envy
It won’t do to obsess with condemning the unreality of celebrity tradwives living the dream. Their popularity points to something fundamental about the human condition and it deserves a serious answer.
Letter from South Tyrol: Austria’s Crimea
There are many arbitrarily drawn borders in the world, none more so than the one on the Brenner Pass (4,500 ft) between Austria and Italy. As you drive south along the Brenner Autobahn, the Alpine landscape does not change. Only the bilingual signposts indicate that you have crossed from Austria into Italy. Most people speak German, and all local stations...
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...
It Could Happen to You
Waco, as we go to press, stands for “We ain’t comin’ out.” Americans can and do make jokes about anything, particularly current events. That’s the good news. The bad news is that ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms—nee Bureau of Prohibition and now part of the Treasury Department, today under Lloyd Bentsen, former U.S....
No Peace for Iraq
From Operation Desert Storm, unleashed against Iraq by President George Bush, up to the present moment, the attack on Iraq has been relentless. As I write, a report of a U.S. sortie over Iraqi skies and a clash with Iraqi anti-aircraft guns is hitting the wires—yet another skirmish in the continuous low-level warfare that has...
Violent Revolution
This past spring, while Congress was engaging in its usual mock debate about tightening immigration, hundreds of thousands of Mexican-Americans took their case to the streets. In the first round of demonstrations, Chicanos, waving Mexican flags, demanded rights for illegals and declared that all those who favored enforcing the law were racists. We all heard...
A Letter from Switzerland: Alpine Redoubt Stays Neutral
Switzerland provides a model for a morally neutral foreign policy based on pragmatic interests rather than “defining values” and self-proclaimed exceptionality. Americans need to learn from the Swiss.