The world, and U.S. citizens in particular, need a serious America. But thanks to our government’s refusal to secure our border, the idea of America being a serious country is a relic of a bygone era.
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Freedom of Conscience
The Illinois legislature recently overrode Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s veto of what the newspapers are describing as mandatory-school-prayer legislation. Predictably, the state’s editorial pages are filled with denunciations of this arbitrary attempt to impose religion on the helpless children of Illinois, but in fact, the new law, requiring a minute of silence at the beginning of...
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Cruising the Amazon
“Here the people could stand it no longer, And complained of the long voyage.”—Christopher Columbus Vacations follow fashion, like everything else, and now cruising is back. Full employment, cheap oil, a flush Wall Street—the problem is what to spend it on. And think of the Titanic. Never mind that it sank....
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The Political Vocation
In his book on declining social morality and the transformations of liberal ideology, Brad Stetson goes after deserving targets. He unmasks the liberalism that holds the media, universities, and the publishing industry in thrall and stresses the will to total domination that accompanies liberal concerns about racism, sexism, self-actualization, and the costs of low self-esteem....
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The Bombast and Glory of William Jennings Bryan
For three decades, William Jennings Bryan streaked across the sky of American politics, his brightness never fading despite countless failures. Renowned for his zealous Christian faith, he appropriately expired immediately after his final and most glorious defeat, at the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925. In A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan, author...
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Biblical Values—or Vegas Values?
Almost all of the declared and undeclared Republican candidates for 2016 could be found this weekend at one of two events, or both. The first was organized by the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition, and held in Point of Grace Church in Waukee. Dominated by Evangelical Christians, who were 60 percent of Republican caucus-goers in...
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Visible Saints
There is no other American man of letters quite like Marion Montgomery. With the addition of each new book to the canon of works published by the Sage of Crawford, his achievement becomes the more astonishing; the range and depth of his thought, its variety and scope the more impressive. For Professor Montgomery has written...
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Now It’s Woodrow Wilson’s Turn
Now that statues of Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Grant, and Theodore Roosevelt have been desecrated, vandalized, toppled, and smashed, it appears Woodrow Wilson’s time has come. The cultural revolution has come to the Ivy League. Though Wilson attended Princeton as an undergraduate, taught there, and served from 1902 to 1910 as president, his name...
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Slicing and Twisting
No matter how many curses should be heaped on the head of Thurgood Marshall, recently retired from some 24 years of slicing and twisting the raw meat of the Constitution into whatever ideological pastry suited his appetite of the moment, even his shrillest foes have to acknowledge Mr. Marshall’s eminence in the legal and judicial...
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The Future of War
The United States and almost all other states are caught up in the biggest change in war in about 350 years. The state is losing its monopoly on war.
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The Politics of Human Interests
After wearing out the patience of television viewers over an entire year of premature campaigning, the two political parties will soon be informing us of their choices. Will the presidential election of 2008 really come down to a contest between two leftist anti-Christian senators representing New York? Or will Al Gore, even more bloated with...
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Fighting for Orthodoxy Among the Methodists
The Episcopal Church, with two million members, drove off the cliff in 2003 by electing its first openly homosexual bishop. In 2005, the United Church of Christ (1.1 million members) officially endorsed same-sex “marriage,” though the UCC had already long been ordaining active homosexuals. This year, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (4.9 million members),...
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The Devil and Noah Webster
Within the Detroit metropolitan area, a short drive from gutted buildings and abandoned neighborhoods, one can step into a pre-industrial America, complete with working farms, horse-drawn carriages, and the charming homes of a now-vanished elite. Late in life, Henry Ford carefully refabricated the rural America he had helped to destroy in a place called Greenfield...
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Denied Justice
Joe Occhipinti continues to be denied justice. As Greg Kaye reported in the October 1993 Chronicles, Occhipinti was the highly decorated undercover agent for the Immigration and Naturalization Service who was framed, tried, convicted, and sentenced to prison for doing his job too well. Fluent in three languages, Occhipinti had distinguished himself as an expert...
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Our Next Mideast War—Syria
Jeb Bush has spent the week debating with himself over whether he would have started the war his brother launched on Iraq. When he figures it out, hopefully, our would-be president will focus in on the campaign to drag us into yet another Mideast war— this time to bring down Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria....
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A Torch that Had to Be Drowned
There comes a time when a man must put away his boyhood infatuation with professional sports, especially when they have been so profoundly marred by money interests and woke politics.
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Imagining the West
“The curious have observed that the progress of humane literature (like the sun) is from the East to the West. . .” —Nathaniel Ames As both a reality and an interpretive problem, the American West has retained its long-established hold on the attention of our scholars. And the same is true of Western American literature:...
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Beavers, Banners, and Bulls
Here in Chapel Hill we’ve had this problem with beavers. They’ve been damming creeks, as is their wont. Unfortunately in the process, they’ve been turning great areas into) marsh and creating a mosquito problem, so last year the old boys of our public works department set out to kill the critters, figuring: no beavers =...
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Double Down: Illegal Aliens and Crime
For too long now I have heard that illegal immigrants are not criminals and that they have come to America only to work. Not really. Whether or not they want to work, they have already committed a crime by illegally entering the United States. I am still naive enough to think that national sovereignty should...
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A Most Consequential Presidency
As Donald Trump is about to be nominated for a second term, how his presidency has already altered the orientation of his party is on display. Under Trump, the GOP ceased to be a party of small government whose yardstick of success was how close it came to a balanced budget. Trump signed on, this...
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Free Health Insurance for Migrants Is Lunacy
In blue state after blue state, Democrats are pushing to give migrants taxpayer-funded health coverage. It's a knife in the back of hardworking Americans who struggle to pay medical bills.
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Man, Man, and Again Man
“Qualis aitifex pereo” -Nero I cannot remember a time when I was not what would be called an environmentalist. I spent much of my childhood on an earth unconstricted by concrete streets and unburdened by the weight of buildings. I was never happier than when I was out fishing with my father or picking berries...
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Outgrowing the Past
When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Kelo v. City of New London, a chill wind blew across the rural South. The Court upheld the decision of the city fathers of New London, Connecticut, to grant a private development corporation the right to condemn a middle-income residential neighborhood, evict the property owners,...
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Letter From the Lower Right Poetic Gems
Alas, for the South! Her books have grown fewer— She never was much given to literature.” . . . Thus, South Carolina’s J. Gordon Coogler—“the last bard of Dixie, at least in the legitimate line,” as H.L. Mencken put it in his scathing essay “Sahara of the Bozart.” Mencken’s essay has by now introduced several...
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Normal Germans, Nervous Europeans
The saga of Europe’s debt crisis can be dispiriting for anyone interested in the future of the Old Continent. There is, however, another, perhaps larger story lurking beneath the tales of billions and bond yields, and that is the story of Germany’s changing role. Although French President Nicolas Sarkozy gladly rushes toward any camera or...
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True Love Ways
For the past 40 years, Rockford’s Midtown district has seen more downs than ups. Centered on Seventh Street from First Avenue to Broadway, southeast of the main part of downtown, Midtown—once a bustling commercial and cultural center at the heart of a Swedish neighborhood—was, for far too long, a haven for prostitution and drug use. ...
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Government of the People
The doctrine of states’ rights has returned to the American political scene. Leftist and liberal governors have been dusting off the arguments of John C. Calhoun and echoing the speeches of Strom Thurmond in preparation for their defiance of the national government. The battle is being fought on several grounds. In Massachusetts, the fight is...
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Revolution and the American Mind
“The world has never had a good definition of liberty.” —Abraham Lincoln Food lines lengthen in Moscow; show trials continue in Beijing; bicycles replace motor vehicles in Havana. As the Warsaw Pact and Berlin Wall crumble, so does the standing of Mao and Che, even on college campuses. The closing of this millennium may not...
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True Grit
A remark one often hears from the current crop of film critics is that John Wayne might indeed merit the iconographic status conferred on him by tens of millions of ordinary cinemagoers around the world, were it not for the troubling matter of his alleged evasion of military service during World War II—an issue, it...
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Love and Hate in Dixie
“I will never be able to hold her again, but I forgive you.” So said Nadine Collier, who lost her mother in the massacre at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, offering forgiveness to Dylann Roof, who confessed to the atrocity that took the lives of nine churchgoers at that Wednesday night prayer...
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Republicanism, Monarchy, and the Human Scale of Politics
The Founding Fathers had to face hard and unprecedented questions about the size and scale of a political order. They occupied a vast region, and conventional wisdom said that such could only be governed by monarchy. They were determined to be republicans, however, and the conventional wisdom was that republics had to be small. The...
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Pragmatic Destruction
Greek writers, and writers coming after them for the next 2,000 years, attributed the short life and violent end of democratic governments to democracy’s infallible tendency toward demagoguery and the dispossession of the wealthy and educated by the poor and ignorant. Tocqueville thought democracy’s fatal weakness to be uniformity of thought and opinion, and the...
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From the Family of the Lion
“There is a kind of revolution of so general a character that it changes the tastes as well as the fortunes of the world.” —La Rochefoucauld There is a popular myth of Abraham Lincoln, our 16th President, that is known to most Americans. According to the orthodox version of this highly sympathetic construct, Lincoln was...
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Universities and Students of South America
By 1921, a few years after the Bolshevik revolution, students at Argentine universities had begun to agitate for equal rights with professors and were demanding the same rights for the cleaning staff. It sounds like the spring of 1968 in Paris and Columbia University, but in South America it was old stuff by then. Students...
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The Neo-Ottoman Empire
Contrary to Washington’s official rhetoric, the U.S. government is an ally, not an opponent, of Islamic extremism—a foe, not a defender, of Western civilization. Not since the Turkish siege of Vienna (1526) has Europe faced the threat of a Muslim occupation of significant portions of the continent; it does so now because of the foreign...
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Lastest With the Leastest
Since Professor Wills has a way of relating episodes that transforms the dramatic into the soporific and turns the concrete into the abstract, this first biography of Forrest to be written since 1944 is probably the last that anyone should read. An unrelenting tendentiousness warps his interpretation of even the most transparent matters, so that...
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Yankee Slavers
“Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil.” —Edmund Burke The better part of a century ago, the great scholar A.E. Housman observed that most of the new books that came across his desk served no purpose whatever “except to interrupt our studies.” This is certainly the case today...
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Cincinnatus, Call the Office!
“ . . . a republican government, which many great writers assert to be incapable of subsisting long, except by the preservation of virtuous principles.” —John Taylor of Caroline On a summer morning in 1842, near the end of its session, the U.S. Senate was busy receiving committee reports. The Committee on the Judiciary reported...
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Be Angry at the Sun
Peace is busting out all over, and along with the prospect of peace comes the debate over how to spend the so-called “peace dividend,” supposing there is such a dividend. The administration doesn’t think there is, and Secretary of Defense Cheney has warned against spending the money saved on defense until it is in the...
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Nordic Conquests
In Northfield, Minnesota, St. Olaf’s College was celebrating the 17th of May—the day the sons of Norway wrote their constitution in 1814, declaring self-government and independence from Swedish rule. It was 1907, just two years after the Swedes had released Norway and Prince Carl had become Haakon VII. Thirty-one-year-old first-year instructor Ole Rölvaag gave the...
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Can’t Keep A Great Man Down
John Ganz focuses on American cultural and political wars during the 1990s, when two maverick candidates, Patrick J. Buchanan and H. Ross Perot, rocked the world of staid mainstream conservatism.
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The Constitution, R.I.P.
On July 22 of this year, the Washington Times published, as the weekly installment of its “Civil War” section, a long article by a gentleman named Mackubin Thomas Owens, described as “professor of strategy and force planning” at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, under the headline, “Secession’s apologists gut Constitution, history.” The...
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Trump and the GOP Border War
In the 2016 race, June belonged to two outsiders who could not be more dissimilar. Bernie Sanders is a socialist senator from Vermont and Donald Trump a celebrity capitalist and legendary entrepreneur and builder. What do they have in common? Both have tapped into what the bases of their respective parties believe is wrong with...
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The Declaration of Independence and Philosophic Superstitions
It is common among our political elites and pundits to link the Declaration of Independence with Abraham Lincoln, who found in it the ground and telos of the American nation: the Enlightenment doctrine that all individuals are endowed with rights that precede and are independent of any political society. To define these rights, we must...
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A Book That Needs No Sequel
Rachel Maddow plays up the danger of a reemergence of America’s 1930s and 1940s domestic fascist movements to an absurd extent.
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Death of a Nation
Every living nation needs symbols. They tell us who we are as one people, in what we believe, and on what basis we organize our common life. This fact seems to be very clear to the current leadership in Russia, particularly to President Vladimir Putin, in restoring and reunifying a country rent by three generations...
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The Cold War Never Ended
The recent invasion of South Ossetia by the U.S.-trained and -equipped Georgian army turned into a debacle for both Tbilisi and Washington. It also demonstrated that, for the U.S. government, the fall of the Soviet Union on December 8, 1991, did not mean the Cold War had ended. Washington simply shifted focus to the newly...
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Will Justice Amy Star in ‘The Five’?
By nominating Federal Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, Donald Trump kept his word, and more than that. Should she be confirmed, he will have made history. Even his enemies would have to concede that Trump triumphed where his Republican predecessors—even Ronald Reagan, who filled three court vacancies—fell short. Trump’s achievement—victory in the...
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Lincoln, the Leiber Code, and Total War
The American Civil War was an unparalleled tragedy for the United States and the world. For it ensured that, thereafter, civilians everywhere were treated as “legitimate” targets in time of war. As in all wars, the victor wrote the official history of the conflict to extol its virtue and to demonize its opponent. Unlike in...