Nearly every film using Europe as a backdrop for international intrigue, especially those featuring Nazis in black leather trench coats, employs a scene in which the hero is crossing transnational borders on a slow-moving train. As he nervously exhales a cloud of blue smoke from an unfiltered cigarette, the authorities move from berth to berth...
2674 search results for: Southern%252525252525252525252BHeritage
Post
A Not So Radical Documentary
Ironically, a new documentary about Tom Wolfe, “Radical Wolfe,” lacks the radical thrust it laments is missing today and that Wolfe himself had.
Post
Fascism, Real and Imagined
A personal and national narrative of resistance to globalism Twenty years ago I somehow managed to get my act together and get out of Paris, where I had haunted a cheap hotel for a year in the wake of the death of Princess Diana like the ghost of the Marlon Brando character in Last Tango...
Post
Learning to Speak in Opar
When I was ten, I fell into the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. With him, I fled the dinosaurs of Pellucidar in the center of the earth; in the company of the anthropoid apes, I sought the fabled jewels of Opar. I wondered at the hurtling moons of Barsoom, and gasped for oxygen in the...
Post
Éric Zemmour, in the Footsteps of de Gaulle
The Economist contemptuously called him France’s “wannabe Donald Trump.” He’s been accused by The Atlantic of using the “Trump playbook.” Not to be outdone, Britain’s New Statesman dubbed him a “TV-friendly fascist.” French anti-racism and rights groups, including SOS Racisme, have filed complaints against him. Already thrice convicted of inciting racial hatred, he is due...
Post
Save the Children
Modern Americans are going to live forever. We must believe that; otherwise we would not rise up in spontaneous outrage whenever a stuck accelerator causes a car to crash or a surgical procedure goes awry. Science and technology have made our world not only foolproof but death-proof, or at least they would have, were it...
Post
The Great American Purge
“States’ rights? You can’t be serious! What do you want to do—restore Jim Crow or bring back slavery?” Any serious discussion of the American republic always comes aground on this rock, and it does not matter which kind of liberal is expressing the obligatory shock and dismay, whether a David Corn leftist at the Nation,...
Post
Destroyers and Keepers
On becoming an historian long ago, I was most attracted to the period of American history from Jefferson to the great conflict of 1861-65. Were I a young historian today, rather than one well over the hill, I think I would take up instead the Progressive Era—historians’ convenient label for a period covering roughly the...
Post
Why Trump Must Not Apologize
“Never retreat. Never explain. Get it done and let them howl.” Donald Trump has internalized the maxim Benjamin Jowett gave to his students at Balliol who would soon be running the empire. And in rejecting demands that he apologize for his remarks about the La Raza judge presiding over the class-action suit against Trump University,...
Post
Muffled Voices
“The Noise of the City Cannot Be Heard” was the title of a very popular song in the Soviet Union just after World War II. According to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the song was so much in demand that “no singer, even the most mediocre, could perform it without receiving enthusiastic applause.” The Soviet Chief Administration of...
Post
Life in the Happy Valley
My friend Dr. Bob grew up in a coal town called Packard in eastern Kentucky, a place that was abandoned years ago. All that is left these days is kudzu growing over old foundations. He’s a neurosurgeon in Louisville now, and an amateur Kentucky historian, and my favorite tale of his is about the blue...
Post
Reflections on Immigration Reform
The most significant event of President George W. Bush’s second term (thus far) has been the defeat of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007 (S.1348). This bill was initiated by President Bush in collaboration with the Democratic congressional majority, over the opposition of the Republicans and a few rebellious Democrats. The real winners of...
Post
Empire of Destruction: Precision Warfare? Don’t Make Me Laugh
You remember. It was supposed to be twenty-first-century war, American-style: precise beyond imagining; smart bombs; drones capable of taking out a carefully identified and tracked human being just about anywhere on Earth; special operations raids so pinpoint-accurate that they would represent a triumph of modern military science. Everything “networked.” It was to be a glorious...
Post
#MeToo: Stalinism in Drag
We live in a Puritan country, in which self-righteousness is eternally wedded to cheap theatrics. This explains the dual phenomena of Meryl Streep and Hollywood’s earnest commitment to distributing her films to every country on the planet. Like all good Puritans, self-righteous Americans are sure to be the most depraved of anyone. So when Tinseltown,...
Post
The Justification for War
During the Cold War, occasional resorts to war or threats of war by the United States were justified by the need to keep communism in check. This justification had the advantage of being based on a real threat—notably in Berlin in 1949, in Korea in 1950, and during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. The...
Post
Trump Turns the Tide with Blunt Talk About Kamala’s Identity
The forbidden truth of the 2024 campaign is that Kamala Harris is an unqualified, race-hustling phony. Donald Trump is the only one with the courage to say it.
Post
Recent Lowlights in the Woke Capture of Our Once-Venerable Institutions
The leading liberal institutions of civil society have been captured by far-left activists, who are busy embarrassing themselves of late.
Post
Rendezvous With Billy
The established church in Washington didn’t know what to make of Billy Graham. By “established church,” I don’t mean the main-line Protestant churches: They were too busy trying to convert their churches into instruments of Democratic foreign policy to care very much about religion. The only established church that counts in Washington, as everyone knows,...
Post
A Pair of Charmers
There are two archetypes of the charming idler. One, rather like myself, is likely to be unemployed de métier. The other drifts in and out of employment, trading on social connections, borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, pandering, dealing cocaine, walking dogs, selling Impressionist pictures, joining the Foreign Legion, working on a perpetuum mobile, discovering...
Post
Paying the Price
Iraqi Christians are paying the price of the Bush administration’s desire to remove Saddam Hussein. The Iranian Revolution and the rising influence of militant Islam have already forced the secular Iraqi dictatorship to make concessions to proponents of Iraq’s Islamicization, but the threat of a U.S. attack, together with a widespread feeling in the Arab...
Post
University The New Overseas Campus
The inauguration of Lagado University’s new campus in Plagho-Plaguo, the capital of Dismailia, is generating great excitement throughout the Diversity Community. As President Bleatley has said, LU’s “Semester in Dismailia” is guaranteed to challenge Eurocentric cultural values on every level and at every turn. It centers the Other, presents the Absent, privileges Multiplicity, and promises...
Post
The Chechen War Far From Over
The Chechen War, as the Russian leadership discovered in early March, is far from over. On the night of March 2, a convoy of nine trucks, carrying about 100 Internal Ministry special forces troops from Grozny to the strategically important crossroads village of Pervomayskava, was ambushed by an estimated 40 Chechen boyevikiy (“fighters” or “warriors”)....
Post
Are the Halcyon Days Over for Joe Biden?
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...
Post
A Life in Literature
In May 2003, Christian Wiman was named the new editor of Poetry, the Chicago-based magazine that Harriet Monroe founded and made justly famous. This appointment came a year after Ruth Lilly made a massive gift to the magazine that brought its endowment to nearly $200 million and attracted enormous media attention. Wiman, born in 1966,...
Post
Clash of Civilizations
I am a “liberal Democrat” who likes to read different perspectives on the many issues facing our country. I picked up Chronicles to read your article on Rolling Stone’s and Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s egregious misreporting (“UVA: Facts Versus the Left’s Narrative,” News, June), which I’m interested in as a UVA alumna and parent. When Mr....
Post
Your Future as a Terrorist
The Homeland Security apparatus has garnered quite a bit of attention lately for a paper that identified anti-abortionists, anti-immigrationists, and war veterans as terrorist suspects. (I thought “profiling” was forbidden, but in that matter, as so often these days, it would seem that some people are more equal than others.) Some Republican politicians are playing...
Post
Buying Up American Symbols
The Japanese have been zealous in buying up American symbols: golf courses, movie studios. Rockefeller Center, the Mariners. Recently, however, they are beginning to learn that cosmopolitanism can be a two-way street. In January, American sumo wrestler Chad Rowan became the first foreigner to be awarded the rank of “Exalted Grand Champion.” Six feet five...
Post
The Perpetual Family
“And Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living.” —Genesis 3:20 The first time I ever visited Saint Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, it was in the company of a pretty Irish-American girl from Massachusetts named Evelyn. Her father was some kind of Democratic politician back home. She and...
Post
Strategic Blunders
It has been a summer of major strategic blunders by the United States and Russia over Ukraine and by the United States in the Middle East, where the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS, now renamed simply the Islamic Caliphate) has emerged as a major player, threatening what little remains of the region’s stability....
Post
Taking the Booster
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...
Post
Every Man for Himself
El Paso del Norte . . . the Jornada del Muerto . . . Tiguex . . . Santa Fe: The trip that for Don Juan de Oñate was a weeks-long ordeal up the Rio Grande on the Camino Real in 1598 for me is an hour-and-20-minute flight, including 20 minutes on the ground at...
Post
A Child’s Joke: A Story
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...
Post
GOP: Adios, WASP!
I’d be the last one to suggest that the Republican National Convention should be a bastion of Christian orthodoxy, and I’m sure no one goes there for the liturgy. But still. The schedule ought to tell us something about the “values” of the GOP, don’t you think? I mean priorities, what sort of face you want to...
Post
More Buchanan, Less Kushner.
Sam Tanenhaus just penned a lengthy profile in Esquire of Pat Buchanan describing how Buchanan’s three unsuccessful presidential campaigns helped lay the groundwork for Trump’s successful campaign this year. Tanenhaus quotes Buchanan as telling the New York Times, in 2000, “When the chickens come home to roost, this whole coalition will be there for somebody....
Post
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,...
Post
Jack Smith, Democrat-Lawfare Complex Hit Man
By now any reasonable prosecutor—or so-called prosecutor—would have conceded defeat and dropped the lawfare madness.
Post
Subverting Protestantism
The Missouri Synod is siding with Antifa over its own historic teachings, and its own members. Congregants within other supposed conservative churches should take note—be prepared for false promises and betrayal.
Post
The Politics of Rape
When an acquitted William Kennedy Smith emerged from the Florida courtroom last December declaring his faith in the system, a viewer could only query, “Why?” There stood a young man who was indicted for rape and forced to spend over one million dollars defending himself on the basis of the word of one person, the...
Post
Reviving Self-Rule Ward
As a general rule, democracy does not grow with time. It usually comes into being as the result of some general uprising, and it is supported by the broader and more general popular will. But, with time, and because the larger population docs not usually continually watch for the encroachment of smaller groups, the course...
Post
What the Republican Congress Will NOT Do
Treat their election victory and new majorities as a mandate for anything other than enjoying additional power and perks and maneuvering for the White House in the next election. Repeal Obamacare. Block the Obama illegal immigrant ukase (if he should pursue it). They may adopt some cosmetic “compromise” invented by PR men which will pretend...
Post
Memo to Trump: Declare an Emergency
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...
Post
Two Flags
From the welter of democratic hysteria, illogic, historical ignorance, and political self-positioning and posturing, the eminently sensible remark by Tate Reeves, lieutenant governor of Mississippi, regarding the public display of the Confederate Battle Flag stands like a stone wall above the general confusion. “Flags and emblems,” Mr. Reeves said, “are chosen by a group of...
Post
One Nation Under Obama
Barack Obama has kicked off his “Patriotism Tour” with a speech that is designed to depict the candidate as a thoughtful man who has meditated long and hard upon the history of our country and the meaning of patriotism. In fact, it reveals him for what he is: a knee-jerk Marxist who has swallowed hook-line-and...
Post
Diplomacy Good and Bad
These two volumes shed considerable light on the fateful events of 1945-46, events determinative of much that followed in American foreign relations. The first argues that, had Franklin Roosevelt lived, even if for only another year, postwar history would have been altogether different. The second, by an experienced “realist” foreign-service officer, views the postwar developments...
Post
Breeding Mosquitos
“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...
Post
The Violent West
The matador who received top billing was not, as advertised, the most famous bullfighter in Spain but rather (we guessed) his son, or perhaps his nephew or second cousin; also, the promised dinner with this matador, to have been arranged by a (self-identified) associate of the Plaza Monumental in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, the evening before...
Post
Pictures Into Words
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...
Post
The Church of Money-Grubbing Toil
The Enchantment of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity; by Eugene McCarraher; Belknap Press; 816 pp., $39.95 When the German thinker Max Weber visited the United States in 1904, he was intrigued by the marked tendency of Americans to think about economic activity against a backdrop of religious morality. He tells of an encounter with a salesman of...
Post
Family Formation in America
Parents, some say, are people who use the rhythm method of family planning. One might better say that parents are optimists, people who think that the present is good and the future probably better. People who look forward with confidence often have an extra child; those who think that their situation may worsen are cautious...
Post
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,...