The U.S. media are stoking the coalfires of populist nationalism with their breathless coverage of President Trump’s private and undoubtedly unwise comment that Haiti is a “sh-thole country.” The President denies using that specific language, but owns up to the substance of the comment. The New York Times has declared that Trump’s reported comment is...
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The Fire Next Time
Morgan Norval shares with this reviewer one characteristic both of us may soon have cause to regret: We live near Washington, D.C., one of the prime candidates for a major terrorist attack with unconventional weapons in the near future, an attack in which the victims will be numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Among those...
Black English
“Those is the niggers that was f–kin’ with my sh-t.” “I knew that nigger was one of the niggers I could rely on.” The first speaker was a twenty-something “homegirl” from the projects, the second a drunk in his late 30’s. Both were riding on New York’s A train on different days and at different...
We Need a Time Out
The Center for Immigration Studies recently issued two reports that show how transformative mass immigration has been in recent decades. The first study focused on the number of immigrants now living in the United States. Recent data from the Census Bureau show that 3.3 million immigrants, both legal and illegal, came to America between July...
Trumpism Has a Future Now
Donald Trump has secured a future for Trumpism by picking J. D. Vance as his running mate. Trump has ensured that Trumpism will not only be about Trump.
Empire’s Bloody End
In A Continent Erupts Ronald Spector analyzes the complex conflicts of East and Southeast Asia in the 10 years after the end of World War II.
Comrade King?
Twenty years have come and gone since Congress passed, and President Reagan signed into law, a bill creating a federal holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr., and, in those years, the holiday has become little more than yet another session in the perennial ritual of mass production and consumption that American public festivals generally celebrate. ...
What the Editors Are Reading
Outside of my regular reading for the courses I’m teaching—this semester, this week, Livy’s History of Rome, Books 1-5, and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Book 1—I have been reading mainly books and articles with some relation to nostalgia, broadly speaking. That has included what for me have been some gratifying discoveries, such as Thomas Molnar’s...
Conservative Education: Caveat Emptor!
Much of the blame for the deplorable state of higher education in America today must be traced back to the baneful influence of America’s most revolutionary educationist, John Dewey. In his enormously influential Democracy and Education (1915), Dewey defined education as “a freeing of individual capacity in a progressive growth directed to social aims.” In...
Islam and the West: An Irreconcilable Conflict?
“I worry greatly that the rhetoric coming from the Republicans, particularly Donald Trump, is sending a message to Muslims here . . . and . . . around the world, that there is a ‘clash of civilizations.'” So said Hillary Clinton in Saturday night’s New Hampshire debate. Yet, that phrase was not popularized by Donald...
A Desirable Transit Point
The Republic of Georgia’s desirability as an oil and natural-gas transit point has made her a pawn in a game that involves Washington, Moscow, Caspian Sea oil, and the fate of Iraq. And this game is, in turn, part of the great game going on in Central Asia. Since September 11, 2001, American policymakers have...
Where’s Joe McCarthy When You Need Him?
Many Americans are so disappointed with the Bush administration that they are tempted to vote for John Kerry. Some Democrats who spent the past 80 years waiting for the Revolution to blow over may think theirs is still the party of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion,” as it was dubbed in 1884, but, by the 1960’s,...
Parents Against the Regime
Attorney General Merrick Garland recently set his sights on what the federal government considers one of the gravest threats to the political order: parents angry with the promotion of transgender ideology and critical race theory in public schools. “In recent months, there has been a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence...
The Way We Are Now—The Campaign
A strongly shared sense of right and wrong has maintained a working peace and harmony within many societies over long periods. This is probably what saw the class-ridden British through an empire and two world wars. It is what kept the South ...
On Quebec Separatism
The “Letter From Montreal: Qui Shall Overcome!” (Correspondence, December) by John O’Neill, who “writes from Detroit,” is so riddled with errors that it makes this reader question the credibility of all your Correspondence. 1. “Jean Baptiste, the patron saint of Quebec.” John the Baptist is the patron saint of French Canadians. Quebec has its quota...
Beautiful Excess
The Hard to Catch Mercy, William Baldwin’s entrancing first novel, is bound to remind some readers of Mark Twain, especially of some of the bleaker pages of moral fables like The Mysterious Stranger and The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg. But Baldwin’s purpose is not to piggyback a Grand Master. He desires to remind us of...
Not Out of Africa
If radical Afrocentrists have their way, soon all schoolchildren will learn—as some are now learning—a version of ancient Mediterranean history that gives credit for the Greek achievement to the ancient Egyptians. The Afrocentrists contend that what most people have learned about the origins of Western civilization is untrue. According to them, the ancient history we...
Shine, Perishing Republic
Murray Rothbard recently described American conservatism as “chaos and old night.” Apart from the nasty implication that we are all dunces, there is something to what he says. It is getting harder every year to figure out just what it is that makes a conservative. Consider Newt Gingrich-the Carl Sagan of politics. He wants to...
The Dream Ticket
“While the natural instincts of democracy lead the people to banish distinguished men from power,” Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America, “an instinct no less powerful leads distinguished men to shun careers in politics, in which it is so very difficult to remain entirely true to oneself or to advance without self-abasement.” Some 170 years...
Spring, Like a Lion
The cloud was no bigger than a puff of white smoke above the western horizon at a point equidistant between the Henry Mountains and the Book Cliffs, It was a nice cloud, a point of interest in an otherwise banal sky, soft blue paling around the edges. I tamped down the cookfire I had built...
The Critical Flaw in Critical Race Theory
Over the last 30 years, especially since the spring of 2020, Critical Race Theory (CRT) and its accompanying obsessions with “whiteness” and “white privilege” has almost overwhelmed discussion about race and racism in Western society. CRT “recognizes that racism is engrained in the fabric and system of the American society,” declares a definition from...
Horsemen, Draw Nigh!
The title of Chalmers Johnson’s latest book, the last in his trilogy of empire, invokes the Greek goddess of retribution. He named the first book in his trilogy after the CIA term for the harmful unintended consequences that sometimes result from the agency’s covert policies. “Blowback,” he wrote, “is but another way of saying that...
Why Is Biden Creating His Own Crises?
Our mainstream media largely ignored it, the world media did not. Ascending the stairs of Air Force One on Friday, to fly to Georgia, President Joe Biden slipped and stumbled. Getting up, he slipped again and then fell. The scene was jolting and disquieting. Adversaries abroad will use it as a metaphor for the decline...
Nestorius of Constaninople
In 428 AD [sic], Giusto Traina has written a brief and engaging overview of the Mediterranean and Near East in the early fifth century. Traina, an ancient historian with a strong interest in classical Armenia, chose to survey the events of that year owing to its pivotal importance for the political and cultural history of...
Lincoln’s Slaves
A West Hollywood “Gay” Bar has announced it will not serve California legislators who stand up to the LGBT lobby’s demands. Bar owner David Cooley defended his no-entry list saying: “I want to send a message to all those people out there who conflate Christian values with discrimination: we don’t want your kind here,” Cooley said....
Will There Always Be an England?
Recent events raise the question whether an England that has imported so many different peoples of the world is still recognizable.
Gerald Who?
Snaking out from the Middle Atlantic states is a long distinguished line of political and literary Copperheads: Millard Fillmore, Horatio Seymour, Harold Frederic, Edmund Wilson, and the Pennsylvania duo of James Buchanan and John Updike. These men were certainly not proslavery, but they did view the Union cause with rather more skepticism than did their...
Politics Is the New Religion
The term “political religion” designates the infusion of political beliefs with religious significance. Political religions involve grand plans to transform society into a new sacral order unrelated to how humans have lived beforehand. Political religions also typically divide people into the righteous and the evil based on whether they conform to its transformational vision. They...
Biden: Bull Connor’s GOP Imperils Democracy
“The next few days … will mark a turning point in this nation’s history,” said President Joe Biden in his Atlanta speech to reframe the debate in Congress on voting rights legislation and the filibuster. He went on: “Will we choose democracy over autocracy, light over shadows, justice over injustice? … I know where I...
Erdogan Unleashed
A successful national leader (“good” or “bad”) is able to redefine the terms of what is politically possible in accordance with his values, and to produce durable desired outcomes. Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan come to mind at home, and Churchill, De Gaulle, and Deng Xiaoping abroad. Very few are able to effect a profound, long-lasting...
Paris Personified
In an established literary conceit, houses become people, and people become houses: Roderick Usher and the House of Usher, Quasimodo and Notre Dame. Similarly, people become their cities, and cities their people. Parisians is not an “important” book like Graham Robb’s magisterial work of the historians’ art, The Discovery of France. But it is indisputably...
Just East of the Indian’s Nose
Eleven years ago, I moved to Northwest Wisconsin, a region called the Wisconsin Indianhead because it is shaped like the profile of an Indian chief I live just east of the nose. After a career of publishing magazines and editing newspapers in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, I decided to take a...
Bring Me the Head of John D.
“Studying” philanthropy is a new academic enterprise, and one riven by various interests. Though a growing camp of scholars is following grant money, their studies, even when critical, generally confirm the conventional wisdom of foundation leaders. As a permanent supplicant, the academy approaches organized philanthropy with either a tugged forelock or an upraised list. Ellen...
The Better Way
A review of Winter’s Bone: A Novel, by Daniel Woodrell. The Missouri Ozarks are the western outpost of Appalachia. The hills are not as high as their elder brothers to the east, but they plunge down into narrow, labyrinthine valleys, where streams of cool, green water run. The surrounding soil is mostly shallow and full...
Vol. 2 No. 7 July 2000
While we yield to no one when it comes to disdain for Fidel Castro and contempt for Bill Clinton, we also believe in the rule of law and in the right of parents to take care of their children. From the notion that parents’ rights depend on a child’s “best interest” as determined by a...
Attachment and Loss
Blue Jasmine Produced by Perdido Productions Written and directed by Woody Allen Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics Grim. That’s the first thing to say about Woody Allen’s new movie, Blue Jasmine. The second is that its lead, Cate Blanchett, gives one of the best performances by an actress since Vivian Leigh played Blanche DuBois...
Eddie Constable
In the 1940’s, towns like Framalopa were too small for chains like A&P and Piggly Wiggly. Consequently, the landscape was dotted with small neighborhood grocery stores, usually mom-and-pop operations with little merchandising and a spare inventory. You were lucky if you could choose between two brands of pickles. The vegetables came mostly from local truck...
A State Visit
Vicente Fox, Mexico’s president, began his state visit to Washington in September by issuing a public challenge to President George W. Bush to grant amnesty to millions of illegal Mexican aliens in the United States by year’s end. He said he wanted a “bilateral migration agreement” that would ensure that “all Mexicans entering the United...
La Florida
In an expedition that began in 1538 and endured until 1543, Hernando de Soto and six hundred men failed to discover in what is today Florida and the Lower American South that which they craved most to find—gold. Four centuries later, a young writer, poet, and novelist native to the region trained his genius on...
California, Here We Come
It has happened. Whites have been reduced to a minority in California. By whites, I mean, of course, “non-Hispanic whites,” because most of the illegal aliens who have poured across the border from Mexico during the last 30 years to change dramatically the composition of California’s population are mestizo, a mixture of Spanish and American...
Regime Change—American Style
The campaign to overturn the 2016 election and bring down President Trump shifted into high gear this week. Inspiration came Saturday morning from the altar of the National Cathedral where our establishment came to pay homage to John McCain. Gathered there were all the presidents from 1993 to 2017, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and...
Edward Abbey: R.I.P.
“By retaining one’s love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable.” —George Orwell With the death of Edward Abbey, aged 62, in March of last year, the Western portion of what once was really the United States lost her greatest defender of...
The American Redneck
There ain’t no shame in a job well done, from driving a nail to driving a truck. As a matter of fact, I’d like to set things straight, A few more people should be pulling their weight. If you want a cram course in reality, You get yourself a working man’s Ph.D. —Aaron Tippin, “Working...
Something to Remember
Francis Parkman concluded his monumental account of France and England in North America with the Peace of Paris of 1763, by which France ceded Quebec, once and for all, to the British Empire. In an uncharacteristically smug observation on the aftermath, Parkman described the French Canadians as “a people bereft of every vestige of civil...
Sophistory
Two thousand fifteen was the year that we Americans broke history. By “breaking history,” I do not mean something like “breaking news,” or “breaking records,” or even “breaking the Internet” (though the Internet certainly played a role). Yes, the “historic moments” of the Summer of #LoveWins and #HateLoses—the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v....
Of Women and Wanderlust
Elizabeth Arthur: Beyond the Mountain; Harper & Row; New York. Blanche d’Alpuget: Turtle Beach; Simon &Schuster; New York. Janet Turner Hospital: The Ivory Swing; E. P. Dutton; New York. by Bryce Christensen Home, as Robert Frost observed, is that place “where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.” But...
Cataloguing What’s Been Lost
Chilton Williamson’s study of the sources of American conservative thought presupposes certain assumptions about his subject that may not be universally shared but are defensible nonetheless. Williamson suggests that American conservatism is essentially paleoconservative, and both his choice of current conservative authors and his comments on Joe Scotchie’s Revolt From the Heartland underline this association. ...
Lincolnism Today: The Long Marriage of Centralized Power and Concentrated Wealth
In the Anglo-American experience, the partisans of concentrated wealth and advocates for political centralization have long been connected. Over the last three centuries, that connection has grown stronger, and in the United States this process accelerated dramatically during and after the Lincoln administration. Lincolnism, the idea that the central state ...
King George’s Tax
A few points on “Of Presidents and Guns,” by Egon Richard Tausch (Vital Signs, June). After the French and Indian War the British crown gave George Washington some large land grants in Western Pennsylvania for his service. The Indians (part of the Iroquois Confederation) living there didn’t think the British king had any authority to...
The Family Against the Globalists
I once knew a lady who ran for governor of the state of Pennsylvania on the promise that, if elected, she would run the state like a family. Unfortunately, she lost the election, so we will never know what that would have been like. (I am tempted to say that it would be impossible to run...