One of the great ironies of our present age is that democracy's would-be eponymous outfit, the Democratic Party, has become an enemy of democracy itself.
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Nixon and Trump, Then and Now
For two years, this writer has been consumed by two subjects. First, the presidency of Richard Nixon, in whose White House I served from its first day to its last, covered in my new book, Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever. The second has been...
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El Gringo y El Mexicano
America has not been a nation for well over a century. She is more like an Indian stew: Never taken off the fire, the mess of wild carrots and fish is gradually transformed by the daily addition of squirrels and squash, birds and deer, and the odd bit of human body. By the end of...
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Israel Rules
On Christmas Eve, when Christians were celebrating the Prince of Peace, THE New York Times delivered forth a call for war. “There’s only one way to stop Iran,” declared Alan J. Kuperman, and that is “military air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities.” Kuperman is described as the “director of the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Program at...
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Mexico Way
Back in the 70’s when the publicity stunt called Hands Across America was in the planning stage Kenny Rogers announced his intention to assume a position on the western boundary of Texas in order to be able to hold hands with the state of Arizona. I was reminded of the story last summer when a...
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The Honorable Gentleman From New York
It shouldn’t be news to anyone that conservative middle-aged professors are rare birds. Until recently, right-wing academics have been almost as rare as black ones, and for pretty much the same reason: bright conservatives could generally do better elsewhere. So it didn’t go to my head a few years ago when I learned that the...
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Caring More for Palestine than East Palestine
Even in Ohio, it seems the activists motivated to get out in the streets are more concerned for people in faraway destinations than those in their own backyards.
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The Cold War Never Ended: U.S.-Russian Relations Since September 11
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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The Case Against Reparations: Part 2
With reparations, there is the issue of who pays. Do African countries owe reparations to Black Americans? After all, Harvard’s director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Henry Louis Gates, wrote that 90 percent of those enslaved and shipped to the New World were sold by Africans to European slavers. All...
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The Dictatorship of Victims Strikes Back
One can almost hear an audible sigh of relief from the rogues’ gallery of criminal conspirators behind the phony Russiagate collusion story cooked up in the bowels of the US-UK Deep State with the aim of overturning the 2016 election. Now, after two years of the GOP’s dithering in the area of investigations and hearings...
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Cajuns Uncaged
While many modern historians, liberal politicians, and media elites would like to think that the very concept of “state sovereignty” died when Robert E. Lee offered his sword to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865, the people of one state recently gave state sovereignty a ringing endorsement at the ballot box....
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The State of Union
“I grew up a few miles from the X county this book deals with,” anthropologist Jane Adams writes in her account of rural Union County, Illinois. “My family’s farm, although dating only to the early 1940’s, is now essentially abandoned, the community emptied.” Her book describes this loss, serving both as indirect autobiography and scholarly...
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Hardly an Accident
It is hardly an accident that the decomposition of the American nation and its culture is paralleled by the decomposition of the American middle class. In the 19th century, nationality and the middle classes were born together as Siamese twins, and their enemies understood their linkage and tried their best to strangle them in their...
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Taking the Kwannukah Out of Christmas
A Christ-free Christmas, which has been the goal of the American ruling elite since before World War II, has finally, at the dawn of the new millennium, been reached. At corporate “holiday parties,” references to ...
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The Children of Eden
All of us, I imagine, are granted from time to time moments of uninvited insight that will, for years to come, provide a basis for reflection and a more penetrating glimpse of the forces that shape the realms in which we live and labor. Such a moment was granted to me back in the early...
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What We Are Reading: March 2025
Short reviews of "A Worthy Company" by M. E. Bradford, and "Intelligence in Danger of Death" by Marcel De Corte.
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“Nothin’ Could Be Finah Than to Be in Carolina”
Memory’s Keep by James Everett Kibler Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Co.; 221 pp., $22.00 A first-rate scholar is as rare as, or rarer than, a first-rate creative writer. Believe me, having hung out with professors for 45 years, I know whereof I speak. When a first-rate scholar is also a creative artist of merit, you have...
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Paradise Recovered
Mr. D’Souza might have reconsidered the title of his book, for he is not describing the end of racism. Glenn Loury recently observed a predilection for “end” themes in recent neoconservative tracts: Fukuyama with the end of history and D’Souza with the end of racism, Loury explains, have taken Hegelian (or pseudo-Hegelian) phrases to express...
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On American Heroes
In “A Hero Among Heroes” (Sins of Omission, March), Roger McGrath wrote, “Ever since the late 1960’s, the cultural Marxists of academe have worked assiduously to destroy American heroes.” I surely agree with him; however, he uses the term cultural Marxist, which sounds to me like an oxymoron, since Marxists have no culture in the...
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Traveler’s Tales
Coelum, non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt was Horace’s observation on the narrowing effects of travel: “Those who go across the sea change their weather but not their mind.” It is the rare tourist who gets more out of his expeditions than a confirmation of his prejudices. One of the most intelligent visitors to...
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Trump’s Public Opinion Coup on Immigration
Kamala Harris’s contrived photo-op visit to the border demonstrates how Trump’s immigration nationalism has become the norm.
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The Hollywood Ten(nessean)
Fifty years have passed since the orgy of squealing and sanctimony, of perfidy and posturing, that begat the Hollywood blacklist. What a cast of characters paraded before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC): at this table, communist screenwriters making $2,000 a week scribbling claptrap and convincing themselves that it was revolution; and at that table,...
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True Tar-Heel Tales
Great Granddaddy Honeycutt and Teddy Roosevelt Children, I haven’t ever been on what you might call speakin’ terms with any presidents. But I have seen four or five of them from pretty near, and I want to tell you that they ain’t nothing special. They have to get out of bed in the mornin’ and...
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Limits to Litigation
Gerald N. Rosenberg, an assistant professor of political science and an instructor in law at the University of Chicago, has some simple advice for activists who think a United States Supreme Court ruling is an end-all: not only are you wrong, but your money is better spent out of court than in court. In The...
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The Autocrat of the Dinner Table
“But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue?” —Edmund Burke Murray Rothbard was like the elephant the blind Chinamen in the story tried to describe. Everyone who knew Murray saw only one or two sides of him: There was Murray the happy warrior who campaigned for the soul of the Old Right, the New...
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With Laurel: For Andrew Lytle
What makes it so appropriate that Andrew Lytle should receive the Richard M. Weaver Award for Scholarly Letters is that Mr. Lytle is one of the gifted people who inspired Dick Weaver’s career as what he called “an Agrarian in exile.” Moreover, an essay on the reissue I’ll Take My Stand was among the last...
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Lone Star Rising
The development of a uniquely Texan conservatism has occurred over the last quarter century. A central figure in this transition was the late M.E. Bradford, professor of English at the University of Dallas, literary essayist in the tradition of the Vanderbilt Agrarians, and prominent critic of the political Lincoln. In 1972, Bradford rallied to the...
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The Skin of Their Teeth
John Ferling, professor emeritus from the University of West Georgia and author of several other books on politics and political figures in the Revolutionary and New Nation eras, has produced a work of mature scholarship that reflects a lifetime of study and lecturing and offers a highly readable and comprehensive military history of our War...
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Options for Syria
Addressing the annual Jamestown Foundation conference of terror experts on December 12, former CIA chief Michael Hayden outlined three possible outcomes of the ongoing conflict in Syria. The first would be further escalation of violence between ever more extreme Sunni and Shiite factions. The second possible outcome—which Hayden described as the most likely but also the...
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Serbia Humiliated
On October 5, 2000, in an almost bloodless coup by the security forces staged against the backdrop of massive street protests, Slobodan Milosevic was removed from power in Serbia. Ten years later, many of those who cheered his downfall then (this author included) have nothing to celebrate. In the run-up ...
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Race and Civil Rights
One would expect race-baiting liberals and leftists to try to glorify the “civil-rights movement” and the laws of the early 1960’s, insisting that we view all of it as earth shaking history, more important than the fall of the Roman Empire, the Norman Invasion, the battles of Tours and Lepanto, the Reformation, the American, French,...
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Equality or Privilege
“Everything in American politics always comes down to the race question,” says one of our collaborators. School choice plans, for example, are either condemned for enabling the white middle classes to liberate their children from the hell of public schools or praised for giving black families the prospect of sending their children to the suburbs....
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After the Confederates, Who’s Next?
On Sept. 1, 1864, Union forces under Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, victorious at Jonesborough, burned Atlanta and began the March to the Sea where Sherman’s troops looted and pillaged farms and towns all along the 300-mile road to Savannah. Captured in the Confederate defeat at Jonesborough was William Martin Buchanan of Okolona, Mississippi, who was...
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The Terror Enigma
“Remember 9/11!” is the rallying cry of the War Party; what we are remembering, however, is a half-truth. It is time to draw the curtain on the largely ignored prehistory of September 11. Although Bush-administration officials deny that they had even a hint of what was to come, government agencies were literally awash with warnings...
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Christmas in July
The crickets which stopped singing at Thanksgiving have come inside at last, along with the spiders and an occasional skink. The leaves dropped from the pecan trees around the beginning of December, and crews are at work in the orchards beside the Rio Grande gathering the nuts. The bermuda grass is brown in the backyard,...
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Kazin and Caligula?
“Our literature is infested with a swarm of just such little people as this—creatures who succeed in creating for themselves an absolutely positive reputation, by mere dint of the continuity and perpetuality of their appeals to the public.” —E.A. Poe In our age the business of literature has become as stale and well-organized as the...
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Answering the Call
Brand New Strings by Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder Recorded and mixed at Skaggs Place Studios Produced by Ricky Skaggs When Lester Flatt’s health began to decline in 1979, he was sure of one thing: All those years, when he was playing Gospel songs with Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs, he had been an unbeliever. ...
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Lincoln and God
Before the first shots were fired in the U.S. Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln had begun to style himself as an instrument of the Lord. But as William H. Herndon, a law partner and Lincoln biographer, wrote, “[t]he very idea that he was in the hands of an invisible, irresistible, and inevitable deaf power which...
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Tom Wolfe, R.I.P.
When Tom Wolfe’s debut novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, was published in November 1987, the book was greeted with effusive praise and became a best-seller, although some literati seemed offended by Wolfe’s highly descriptive prose, the hyperbole, exuberant punctuation, and occasional sound effects. After film rights were sold for $750,000 that winter to Peter...
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Tally and Record
The Immigration and Naturalization Service announced last June that to “regain control of the border” the INS will now begin to deport and possibly jail aliens and smugglers entering our country illegally. If you’re wondering whether this hasn’t been INS policy all along, think again. In the Southwest, repeat offenders have traditionally been released just...
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The State That Didn’t Forget
The Confederate battle flag still flies every day over the capitol building of South Carolina. Readers may remember that I have several times reported in these pages on the attempts to remove this lonely anti-imperial symbol from public view. One discussion a few years ago even elicited a complaint to Chronicles from then-Governor David Beasley....
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On Crime and Vigilantism
Like Roger McGrath (“Treat Them to a Good Dose of Lead,” January 1994), I “grew up in a Los Angeles that had very little crime.” We, too, “locked the door to our house with a skeleton key, when we remembered”—until we lost the key. Professor McGrath does not attempt to account for the absence of...
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Our Tribal Pasts
This readable and remarkable book is the first in David Hackett Fischer’s projected series regarding American cultural history. In it, Fischer has drawn upon many sources of important information: narratives, statistics, linguistics, literature, diaries, topography, architecture, and political science. The result is a brilliant and formidable achievement, a major American contribution to the international tradition...
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Media More Dishonest Than SPLC
Whatever the wisdom of Pamela Geller’s Mohammed cartoon event in Garland, Texas — and there’s much not to like about it, as Chronicles executive editor, Scott Richert, wrote of Charlie Hebdo’s repulsive fare after the massacre at the magazine’s office — one thing ought not be forgotten: No matter what kind of event Geller had...
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The Italian Revolution
The more I learn of Italy, the less I know. Several years ago I thought I understood the essentials of the Italian political scene, that I was a Tocqueville in reverse. But ignorance was Tocqueville’s great advantage, too, and it is always easier to make out the forest when you are willing to ignore the...
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Crime That Pays
As a front-line soldier in America’s war on drugs, Joe Occhipinti is an American hero. He became one of the most highly decorated federal agents in American history, with 78 commendations and awards in his 22 years of public service. His reward? He was set up by Dominican drug lords on specious civil rights violations;...
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White Out
Hand it to Ann Coulter and Donald Trump: They know how to send the left into an apoplectic conniption. Coulter’s contribution to the left’s unhinged tantrum is her book on immigration, ¡Adios America!: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole. Coulter has gone “full racist,” we are told, because she...
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The Right Falls Again for the Left’s Salami Tactics
The furor over contentious symbols is rising again, the latest case occurring in connection with Canadian truckers protesting vaccine mandates in Ottawa. The frightening hate symbols found among the truckers were described thus by Al Jazeera: The convoy was organised by known far-right figures, the Canadian Anti-Hate Network has reported in detail. Confederate flags and...
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Sacred Texts ’98
As readers of this delightfully passionate work will infer, the U.S. Department of Education is unconstitutional. Nevertheless, before it does the country a great service by abolishing itself, the department ought to issue a mandate requiring every secondary school in the nation to adopt the next edition of Reclaiming the American Revolution as required reading. ...
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If We Erase Our History, Who Are We?
When the Dodge Charger of 20-year-old Nazi sympathizer James Alex Fields Jr., plunged into that crowd of protesters Saturday, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer, Fields put Charlottesville on the map of modernity alongside Ferguson. Before Fields ran down the protesters, and then backed up, running down more, what was happening seemed but a bloody brawl between...