The incoming Trump administration already knows how to fix our border crisis. What it requires is the strength and support of the American people.
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Good Winners and Bad Winners
The following article by Charles G. Mills appeared originally at the website of FGFBooks.com and is reprinted with permission. Christian morality requires that the victors in war show mercy to the losers. Mercy is a form of charity, the greatest of the virtues. If we do not show mercy, we should not necessarily expect it...
Pedantry and Progress
He wrote one of the most distinctive and original prose styles of his time, paralleling the techniques of his Yankee contemporary, Henry James, anticipating those of Pound and Eliot. But he used that style to write Greek grammars and commentaries on obscure Greek and Latin poets and page after page of “brief mentions,” mini-reviews, of...
The 99th’s Last Mission
My father told me about his combat experience in World War II just once when I was a boy. I must have been under ten, and we were in a car at night. My clearest memory of what he told me is the story of the deer his unit killed with their carbines, and of...
Planes, Trains, and Automobiles
Social conservatives have long argued that radical individualism—the essence of modern freedom—is corrosive to family and community life, and, if left unchecked, can even lead to civilizational collapse. But another, perhaps more damning, charge today is that individualism is bad for the environment. This seems paradoxical, as modern man sees himself as the quintessential environmentalist...
Elena Chudinova: Telling the Truth
In the autumn of 2005, I moved to New York City, breaking out of the green confines of bucolic and insufferably boring upstate New York to continue college. I wandered into one of the numerous Russian bookstores on Brighton Beach—a noisy, dirty, and delicious corner of the Soviet Union, preserved on the southernmost tip of...
An Unsteady Empire
August 29, 2005, the day when hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, may have marked the beginning of the end of the American Empire. Four years after the horrors in New York and Washington, D.C., showed the nation’s vulnerability to external attack, the Hobbesian free-for-all in New Orleans demonstrated just how fragile it is internally....
Exposing the Woke School Counselor Cabal
The American School Counselor Association trains counselors to be "master manipulators" of children, but whistle blowers are exposing them.
Under Cover of Darkness
For 124 years, the statue of John C. Calhoun, from high upon his perch in Marion Square, kept vigil over the city of Charleston. In life as in death Calhoun was indeed a monumental figure. Even in the flesh he seemed carved out of granite. He was, without question, the finest mind and the most dedicated...
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,...
Rehabilitating Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was the finest American writer to be transformed into a “personality” in his own lifetime and, like François Villon, to be known less for his work than for his person. As is so often the case with figures of public celebrity, the facts of Poe’s life have been obscured by layers of...
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,...
Ron DeSantis Joins the Fight for Sanity Against the Foreign Policy Blob
The truth is that the vitriolic reaction to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis this week says everything about the foreign blob’s personal and vocational insecurities, and nothing about DeSantis’ call for measured prudence in Eastern Europe.
Delenda Est Academia
In the Winter 2015/2016 issue of the Claremont Review of Books, William Voegeli argues, Conservatives have been firing shots across the bow of higher education for years, but the Ship of Fools has never turned back, or changed course. It’s time either to surrender or to shoot a round into the engine room. While the...
The Dream Dealer
When I hear of the books in the history of publishing that were self-published, I react like Lenin, who, on hearing of the 5,000 print run of Mayakovsky’s poem 150,000,000, scoffed that it was “a colossal waste of paper.” E.E. Cummings, for instance, published The Enormous Room at his own expense, petulantly dedicating it to...
The Sumptuous Basket
In New York City there is a room for wonder. Each year, for the past decade and more, the exhibitions held in this small room have left viewers in awe. The extraordinary quality of these shows devoted to the art of China makes a visit to China Institute worthwhile at any time of the year,...
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...
Putin’s Gamble: Playing the Terrorist Card
When Russian President Vladimir Putin called President Bush shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks to express his solidarity, pundits East and West took this as a sign of what one American columnist called the coming “earthquake” in U.S.-Russia relations. Putin was aiming to shift his policy focus westward, away from his previous “Eurasianist” effort...
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...
Letter From Waco: A Visit to Mount Carmel
We are headed north on Interstate 35 from Austin to Dallas, on the tail end of an unexpected trip to Texas. The dog days of August have not been quite as unbearable as we anticipated but are still startlingly hot by our Alaskan standards. Beside the interstate, we glimpse many small Protestant churches, mostly of...
Faux Amis in the Balkans
Roy Gutman’s Witness to Genocide raises the specter of Janet Cooke. Although the author of Witness to Genocide, the 1993 Pulitzer Prize-winning “dispatches” on the “ethnic cleansing” of Bosnia, speaks American English, from the many awkward phrases in “his” book one might infer that someone other than Mr. Gutman wrote at least parts of it....
Secure of Private Rights
“For who can be secure of private right, If sovereign sway may be dissolved by might?” —John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel Dryden’s question, posed more than 300 years ago, supposes a just distinction but also a connection between one kind of rights, which he calls “private,” and another, “sovereign sway,” or legitimate public order. The...
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...
The Cardinal Vicar
“Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish . . . ” —Psalm 2:12 Twenty-one centuries will have passed since He promised to come in His glory, 21 centuries since His prophet wrote, “Behold, I come quickly.” For centuries, then, men had beseeched Him with faith and fervor, “O Lord our God hasten...
Is America Led Today By Anti-Americans?
How can America unite again to do great things if we are led by people who believe America suffers from a great sickness of the soul, an original sin that dates back to her birth as a nation? Consider. After his long night of prayer for “the right verdict” to be pronounced—Derek Chauvin was convicted...
Democrats, Not ‘Democracy,’ at Risk Today
Democracy is not on the ballot. What is on the ballot is a huge slice of the leadership and ruling class of the national Democratic Party. Democracy has not failed America, the reigning Democrats have failed America.
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...
How the Market Stamps Out Evil
In the year before the 1994 election, Ralph Reed announced that the Christian Coalition would broaden its focus. It would go beyond traditional social issues like abortion and school prayer and include economics. He made the case that the security of the American family, a central concern of any Christian political organization, is affected by...
After Strange Gods
In Hungary last October, U.S. diplomat André Goodfriend noted that Americans’ “right to express their views would be protected under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.” Making clear that his sympathies lay not with U.S. citizens arrested in Budapest but with the Hungarian officials who had arrested them, he hastily added, “We’re glad to...
On Migration
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...
Fatal Amendments
Enthusiastic defenders of the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution are fundamentalist cultists—and women and minorities are their victims. At least, that is the thesis of University of Miami law professor Mary Anne Franks’ new book, The Cult of the Constitution, an unforgiving disparagement of the Constitution’s white male origins and the allegedly unwoke...
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...
Unbaptized America
The Godless Constitution is a self-described polemic against those who believe that the United States was, is, or should be a “Christian nation.” Essentially a historical analysis of the religious influences on the Kramers of the Constitution, the book explores the superficially curious omission of God, even the simplest and most formal invocation, from that...
A New European Identity
In Europe today there is a youthful yearning for a new genesis and a desire to overcome the legacy of World War II. While a facile model of one generation rejecting the last is a tempting one to offer as explanation, in fact, the emerging “New Right” seeks both a connection and a rejection to...
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...
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...
Observing American Decencies
Joe Gould’s Secret Produced by First Cold Press and October Films Directed by Stanley Tucci Screenplay by Howard A. Rodman, from an article by Joseph Mitchell Released by October Films American Psycho Produced by Single Cell Pictures Directed by Mary Harron Screenplay by Mary Harron, from a novel by Bret Easton Ellis Released by Lions...
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...
Caravan Puts Trump Legacy on the Line
Our mainstream media remain consumed with the grisly killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, and how President Donald Trump will deal with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Understandably so, for this is the most riveting murder story since O.J. Simpson and has strategic implications across the Middle East....
Give Me That Old-Time Religion
In my 1950’s childhood, boys and men, hair slicked down with tonic, girls and ladies in mantillas and hats primly veiled with mesh worshiped at small country churches against which lapped the green and white fields of late-summer tobacco. On Easter Sundays, prissy and full of ourselves on such a special occasion, my sister and...
Andrew Lytle, R.I.P.
Andrew Lytle died on his couch at his log cabin home on December 12, 1995. Such a passing was and will be known as it can only be known by family and friends who shared with him a wealth of love. The intimacies of privacy were qualified as they must be by the ritual of...
Later, Not Better
The work of a longtime author on social problems, on the deteriorating relations between blacks and Jews, and on Philadelphia civic life who also served as a Reagan appointee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, Murray Friedman’s history of the neoconservative ascent to power is neither scholarly nor balanced. Nor is it a book I...
Why Paleoconservatism Matters
A young reader explains how and why Chronicles has played such a central role in his development as a thinker and citizen.
Living in Interesting Times
The public discourse in both hemispheres seems to be legitimizing the coming of World War III. These are interesting—if not terrifying—times.
Mencken and the World Warmonger
As World War I is remembered in this year of its hundredth anniversary, one rivalry continues to resonate across America. It isn’t between the Allies and the Central Powers, or between two houses of European royalty, but between two countrymen: President Woodrow Wilson and H.L. Mencken, the Bad Boy of Baltimore. Despite a couple of...
The Town I’ve Never Seen
I shouldn’t have been surprised; I’d heard similar stories from my wife. But the more dramatic stories had always involved someone I didn’t know. This was a seven-year-old girl giving an eyewitness account at the dinner table. “The guerrillas came to Aunt Lucy’s house and told her to fix supper for thirty people,” my...
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...
Bring on the GOP!
The awful Obama is pushing terrible things on our country like socialised medicine, big spending, corporate bailouts, affirmative action, and amnesty for illegal aliens. He must be defeated so the Republicans can get in and push socialised medicine, big spending, corporate bailouts, affirmative action, and amnesty for illegal aliens. Obama ...
The Heart’s Own Instinct
Presbyterians have a particular reputation. We are a rather staid bunch, more comfortable in the environs of the country club than those of the chicken farm, more atuned to the hoity-toity, less to hoi polloi. We’re called the frozen chosen, more for accuracy’s sake than for endearment. We read old and dusty books about doctrines...
The Zoophiles of Gaza
A video, reportedly shot by an Israeli drone over the war-torn Gaza Strip has been circulating on various social networks. The footage shows several Hamas fighters, decked out in kuffiya headscarves, having sexual intercourse with a goat or a sheep. Stunningly revolting, but hardly surprising. After all, zoophilia was always quite common, if not widespread...