Campaign 1998 was the dirtiest in recent memory. The bottom of the slime-pit was reached by Al D’Amato and Chuck Schumer, who got into a spitting contest to determine which was the sleaziest politician in the history of the U.S. Senate: Schumer won. Elsewhere, leftist Democrats pulled out all the stops, blaring the message: A...
2679 search results for: Southern%25252525252525252BHeritage
Post
Fighting Terrorism
A BBC television spy series, M I-5, which is now being marketed to the U.S., portrays a heroic group of British government agents who have been beefed up and empowered since 9/11 to fight the rising threat of terrorism. In the first episode, the ...
Post
Still Sorry After All These Years
With all the mud spattered on the Confederate Battle Flag of late, you knew it wouldn’t be long before Ol’ Virginny scrubbed up for Jamestown’s 400th anniversary with a grandiloquent apology for slavery. And Georgia, New York, and other former colonies of the original 13 will soon join the state in the confessional tub and...
Post
In Control
The Feds now control my backyard—in direct defiance of the Ninth and Tenth amendments. I have heard and read many stories over the years about imperial intrusions into private affairs, but I recently learned about these firsthand when I tried to refinance my mortgage to take advantage of lower interest rates. I immediately ran up...
Post
“A Scientific Faith’s Absurd”
Science, that is, natural and physical science, is supposed to be pure. Those who do science keep their work free from any taint of political belief or social prejudice. The scientific method is itself value-free, beyond good and evil. That, at least, was the theory. In practice, however, scientists are not always so pure. They...
Post
The Coming Belgoslavia?
What was meant to grow separately cannot last long as an artificial whole. This prehistoric wisdom seems to be forgotten by advocates of multiculturalism—which is just a misleading euphemism for polyethnism and multiracialism. The unpredictable side of multiracial conviviality seems to be deliberately overlooked by political elites in multiethnic and multiracial Belgium, a miniscule country...
Post
The Ants and Elephants of Swedish Politics
In February, I returned to Sweden after a 15-year absence, and discovered a very different land. In 1976, Americans were viewed with suspicion. We carried the immediate legacy of the Vietnam imbroglio and a vague reputation as “protofascists.” These were the heady early days of Prime Minister Olaf Palme. The Swedes were, as always, polite,...
Post
Baghdad or Pyongyang?
Last October, North Korea announced that it has a nuclear-weapons program. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld confirmed that North Korea already has a “small number” of nuclear weapons, and a Pentagon official later added that the United States thought Pyongyang had two nuclear bombs. The stunning revelations sent shockwaves around the world, but the White House...
Post
Aaron D. Wolf: A Man of Faith and Family
The executive editor of Chronicles, Aaron Wolf, died suddenly and tragically on Easter Sunday. He left behind a loving wife and six children, and colleagues and contributors to this magazine who admired him greatly. Aaron worked for Chronicles for 20 years, and his journey reflects where the magazine and the conservative cultural movement it represents...
Post
Writing Without Letters
Whatever happened to the old middle-to-highbrow American culture? Once upon a time, there was a fair-sized literate class that kept up on fiction and verse by reading the great organs of literary opinion. These days there is a great gulf between serious literature and general-interest journalism. “Literary” magazines—Kenyon Review, Daedelus, or Sewanee Review, for instance—now...
Post
The Revolution in Civil Rights Law
It has been nearly 30 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. By banning discrimination in employment and public accommodations the law was meant to minimize the role of race in the daily lives of Americans. Its result has been the opposite. The doctrine of “disparate impact” has had the astonishing...
Post
Jerks on a Shopping Spree
“He who dies with the most toys wins.” Every year on Black Friday, American shoppers brave the bad weather and go out to do battle with other shoppers in a contest that will determine who pays the least for the most stuff they are better off without. Twenty years ago, the worst these...
Post
CRAP Happens
My summer vacation along Lake Superior’s western shore into Canada took place just before the anniversary of a milestone, although it was marked by no celebrations or remembrances, and nobody I saw on mv quick stay in Thunder Bay showed any sign of acknowledging it. The anniversary was not the subject of conversation in the...
Post
Letter From South Africa
I spent March 1985 in South Africa as a guest of several South African universities. I lectured to academic audiences, traveled in the rural areas of Transvaal and the Cape Province, spent a day in Soweto, visited the Crossroads slum in Cape Town and the Black township of Alexandra in Johannesburg. I talked to Black ser vants and Black leaders,...
Post
The Stone Wall Has Crumbled
Last June, the tradition of 157 years at single-sex Virginia Military Institute was changed by the vote of seven Justices in Washington. The statue of Stonewall Jackson still guarded the parade grounds, but the general who stood like a stone wall at Manassas could not prevail against those seven Justices. His slogan is still emblazoned...
Post
A Nation of (Proletarian) Immigrants
One of many reasons conservatives are so often at a disadvantage in political discussions is that we do not see why there should be any discussion, since we do not recognize a problem open to discussion at all. Take, for instance, assimilation. If you do not believe the United States should be accepting immigrants in...
Post
The German Swindle
To walk along a narrow ridge or cliff path, German-speakers will tell you, you have to be schwindelfrei. The French word vertige exists in English (vertigo), but we would be more likely to say “dizziness.” The German word is for vertige or dizziness der Schwindel, but Schwindel also can mean what it does in English—swindle....
Post
William Lundigan
Of our 20th-century wars World War II stands alone. In a sneak attack early on Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, Japanese naval forces bombed Pearl Harbor. As reports were broadcast throughout the day American shock turned to anger. The following day Congress, with but one dissenting vote—pacifist Jeannette Rankin—declared war on Japan. We were a...
Post
Are the Good Times Over for Biden?
Are the Democrats headed for their Little Bighorn, with President Joe Biden as Col. Custer? The wish, you suggest, is father to the thought. Yet, consider. On taking office, Biden held a winning hand. Three vaccines, with excellent efficacy rates, had been created and were being administered at a rate of a million shots a...
Post
The Voice That Won’t Be Silenced
Tucker Carlson's voice is too important to silence because he speaks for so many people.
Post
There Once Was a New England
A few years ago, I was talking about Timothy Dwight to an audience of people old enough to appreciate both his Christian orthodoxy and his old-fashioned patriotism. When I mentioned Dwight’s passion for farming and his devotion to agriculture as a way of life, a man from Dwight’s adopted state of Connecticut informed me that there...
Post
The Nationalist Moment
Ever since the end of the Cold War, the standard of respectability in politics has been clear. Respectable politicians are those who believe in international trade agreements, sing the praises of mass immigration, and insist that military force should be used to advance some abstract notion like democracy—whether under the auspices of the United Nations...
Post
Alone Among Strangers
At the moment the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of states to enact parental consultation abortion statutes, the abortion-advocacy organizations went into high gear. The Hodgson v. Minnesota and Ohio v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health decisions “endangered teens,” they claimed, and NOW President Molly Yard charged that the Court had “thrown down the...
Post
Only a Madman Laughs at the Culture of Others
The opening sentence of Herodotus’ Histories, which recount the wars fought between Greece and Persia in the early fifth century B.C., unrolls like a long musical phrase rising to its Homeric crescendo and then dying away into momentary quiet: Herodotus of Halicarnassus here publishes the results of his research, in order that the actions performed...
Post
The Gascon of Europe
Now that communism is dead, a new specter is haunting much of Europe—the specter of nationalism. In several countries, for the first time since World War II, what may be conveniently termed nationalist, right-wing, populist parties are on the verge of coming to power, or at least of gaining respectable numbers of seats in government....
Post
Memoirs of a Reagan Hack
The sensitive conservative. An oxymoron to most liberals. An eye-averting embarrassment to many conservatives. And, it would seem in 1994, an irrelevancy. Who needs sensitive conservatives when Democrats in power can assure tolerance and sensitivity? All in all, it’s a dubious time to be a touchy-feely man of the right. Just my luck. Actually, I...
Post
Is Laken Riley’s Life Worth Less Than George Floyd’s?
The issue facing Biden and his party is not whether to call Ibarra “illegal,” “undocumented” or a “newcomer,” but whether they intend to protect Americans from gang members.
Post
The Logic of Liberalism
Writing in this issue of Chronicles, Frank Brownlow, the scholar and literary critic, quotes W.H. Auden as having described logic as “a condition of the world,” like aesthetics and ethics. Auden was right, which makes advanced liberalism’s rejection of logic so dangerous. Five nights a week on FOX News, week after week, Tucker Carlson in...
Post
The Suicide Strategy of the West
Americans, it has been observed, have little or no strategic sense. Strategy, as any schoolboy used to know, comes from a Greek word meaning “generalship” in the broad sense of the art of “projecting and directing” (OED) a campaign as opposed to the tactical abilities needed to marshal men on the battlefield. The American can-do...
Post
Trump Is Right About “The Squad”
Last Sunday President Trump triggered off a major controversy with a series of tweets directed at Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA). The president berated the far-left quartet for “telling the people of the United States…how our government is to be run,” and suggested that they should...
Post
South by Southeast
East, east-southeast, southeast: rugged mountains covered by lichenous forests breaking from the red desert floor, sky islands of the American Southwest. San Carlos Lake ahead of the wing, and beyond it the dark mass of the Pinaleno Mountains; southwest, the distant horn of Baboquivari snagging the summer haze. The Chiricahua Mountains crowded the Arizona line...
Post
The Uses of Diversity: Recovering the Recent Past
One of the more interesting recent books of popular history, Paul Johnson’s Modern Times, stakes out the period between the outbreak of World War I to almost the present. In Johnson’s intellectual framework, the boundaries of modernity are marked by two great revolutionaries: Albert Einstein, who threw the thinking world into a turmoil of doubt...
Post
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 or another notwithstanding....
Post
Democrats’ Noncitizen Voting Scam
Across the country Democrats, like New York City Mayor Eric Adams, are pushing for the disaster of allowing noncitizens to vote in local elections.
Post
Between Raising Hell and Amazing Grace
I have heard the following remark, or something similar, made about country music on numerous occasions in my life: “You know, it’s kind of hard to take a guy seriously when he sings about loving Jesus one minute and drinking and cheating the next.” It is always uttered by someone who is not a big...
Post
M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E
“First grubs obscene, then wriggling worms, Then painted butterflies.”—Alexander Pope, Phryne Maybe I’m bewitched, but I’m not bothered and certainly I’m not bewildered by Sean Griffin’s too divinely unbelievable disquisition on one of everybody’s favorite topics, and I’m not going to waste space by saying what that is, because you just...
Post
A Plague on Both Their Houses
“Layze Ameeze de tayze ameeze sont mayze ameeze.” A drunken redneck recited this at me late one night in 1965, at Andy’s Lounge. Andy’s was one of Charleston’s last “blind tigers”—a speakeasy, complete with gambling and homely B-girls, that defied even the closing laws that the other scofflaw establishments observed. I went there often to...
Post
The Libyan Endgame
Regardless of whether Muammar Qaddafy is killed, brought before the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague, or exiled, his regime has collapsed beyond recovery. After a five-month air war against his forces NATO has succeeded in decisively tipping the balance on the ground in favor of the rebels. This does not mean that the...
Post
Beat the Drum
There are some foreign-policy questions that require all the wisdom America’s leaders can summon—and some good luck as well. Responding to China’s emergence as a military and economic power, for instance, may prove as difficult for the international system as coming to terms with Germany’s rise was in the last century, with the consequences for...
Post
Lessons From France
On the French nightly news for Monday, June 12, the anchor’s face was so grim that, at first, I thought the French forces in Bosnia had suffered serious losses. But, no, he was reporting on the French municipal elections, the first round of voting for mayors of cities with populations of 30,000 or more. The...
Post
Two Ways of Changing Our Minds About History
For more than 60 years, I’ve been interested in both the historical past and in how historical interpretations are created. I’ve also written a great deal on both subjects, but particularly on how public and scholarly opinions about past events and personalities change, and why they change. I believe there are two routes through which...
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
Neither “Gay” Nor “Marriage”
Peter Hitchens, writing in The Spectator last March, asked why we should be concerned with stopping several thousand homosexuals from getting married when heterosexual marriage is so threatened by dysfunction and divorce. The social conservatives’ obsession with the subject is, he argued, simply “a stupid distraction from the main war,” like the battle of Stalingrad. ...
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
Race, Crime, and the Media
If five whites carjacked a black couple, tortured them for hours, then dumped the bodies, the national news media would descend upon the benighted city in which the dastardly crime occurred and, having reported the unspeakable deeds, subject the rest of us to rants on racism and harangues on hate. It happened with James Byrd,...
Post
Repudiating the National Debt
In the spring of 1981, conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives cried. They cried because, in the first flush of the Reagan Revolution that was supposed to bring drastic cuts in taxes and government spending, as well as a balanced budget, they were being asked by the White House and their own leadership to...
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
Soldiers of Burden
Outsourcing Duty tackles the issues that arise in countries where a large majority of citizens avoid military service and isolate themselves from the risks and moral responsibilities that soldiers face.
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
The Case for Proportional Representation
Congressional reapportionment, an orgy of partisan revenge and blatant self-interest mandated every ten years by our Constitution, proved particularly ugly in 1992. In Tennessee, Texas, and other states, judges required minority-dominated districts be carved out to insure representation to blacks and Hispanics. The results left even Governor Gerry turning over in his grave. New electoral...