“If a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.” American evangelicals, according to former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “are the Israelis’ best friend in the whole world.” In return, they dubbed him “the Ronald Reagan of Israel.” That so many are still surprised by those statements indicates that, by and large, those...
Spending the first three days of spring in snowy Moscow, especially after being in balmy Yalta and Sevastopol, is not my idea of fun. It is useful, however, when you write on foreign affairs and there’s a first-rate crisis under way between “Putin’s Russia” and the West. The overriding impression is that Moscow no longer...
On this month’s form, 2018 will be an interesting year. So far it has brought rich rewards to us world affairs aficionados. The overall global tempo is accelerating, affrettando, like de Falla’s Danza Ritual del Fuego. What would have been considered bizarre if not outright insane but a few years ago is now commonplace. Take...
“He was just kidding,” our waitress said about her coworker, the sometimes banquet waiter Marcus Burrizon, age 21, who was just hauled away in shackles and leg irons by Secret Service agents. It was “Renaissance Weekend” in Hilton Head, South Carolina, and President Clinton and about 1,600 top achievers were getting together for beach fun-runs...
Earlier this week, Michael Gerson, formerly a speechwriter for George W. Bush, now a scribbler for The Washington Post, trained his sights on those he termed “Rust Belt revivalists.” These are the Republicans who have noticed that “the GOP has been dominated by corporate interests and needs to identify more directly with the economic frustrations...
Chronicles Unbound, the official radio program of the best magazine on earth, is on the air and streaming live today, 3-5 PM. Join Tom Fleming, Scott Richert, and host Paul Youngblood as they discuss the Obama administration's war against ...
Barack Hussein Obama’s triumphal progress to the presidential mansion was fueled by the utopian sentimentality that dominates the political thinking of large segments of the U.S. population. Here was a dream combination—dark (but not too dark) skin with the manners and platitudes of a classic Midwestern liberal. It was like lackluster Hubert Humphrey or George...
What you might find on a long walk, a determined walk, a walk of exploration, you never know, of course, until you take the next step. And the next; and the next—in Rory Stewart’s case, across the constantly revelatory terrain of the borderlands shared since Roman times by England and Scotland. To what end? Do...
As a confirmed member of the Ninety-Nine Percent, I do not believe that the One Percent has too much money. I think that it does not have money enough. Even President Obama is unclear about his reasons for wanting to raise taxes on the well-to-do (the people with an income of $250,000 he regards as...
With never-Trump conservatives bailing on the GOP and crying out for the Party of Pelosi to save us, some painful truths need to be restated. The Republican Party of Bush I and II, of Bob Dole and John McCain, is history. It’s not coming back. Unlike the Bourbons after the Revolution and the Terror, after...
George W. Bush’s electoral victory stunned pundits and pollsters. I was more surprised by the preelection polls than by the President’s margin of victory, which I had been correctly predicting for several months. When the Zogby numbers were brought to me at the end of the day, predicting a Kerry victory by 100 electoral votes,...
Over at Takimag, Chronicles contributing editor Tom Piatak has a thought-provoking piece on the proposal to extend $25 to $50 billion in government-backed loans to the Big Three automakers. Among other points completely ignored by those who reflexively shout “Let them die!” whenever the American auto industry is mentioned are, as Tom notes, that as...
Donald Trump has upended the GOP presidential primary process and turned it into the most entertaining reality show yet. If The Donald’s road to the White House is blocked—either by the Republican elites or by his own tendency to go too far—and he returns to TV land, he’ll have a hard time topping this one....
I thank Paul Gottfried for a generally accurate and positive review of my book, The Culture of Critique (“A Race Apart,” Opinions, June). Nevertheless, there are a few issues that bear discussion, the most important of which is the role of Jewish organizations and intellectuals with strong Jewish identifications as agents of change in the...
Given the alternatives, the Democrats might have to roll the 2024 dice with their stammering, scandal-ridden, palpably weak, cognitively deficient presidential incumbent.
Any conversation about conspiracy theories inevitably turns to “the Jews.” On one hand, the critics of “international Zionism” claim that U.S. foreign policy (or the world’s resources) are being devoted to promoting Israel’s interests; on the other, there are those who warn against an “international Jewish conspiracy.” The second group can be traced at least...
Malabar Farm drew a large crowd the summer day I was there, mostly busloads of the elderly on excursion from the “senior centers” of Ohio. They came to see Louis Bromfield’s legacy—the once famous agricultural experiment that is now a state park. Most of their interest centered on the tour of Bromfield’s “Big House,” his...
“Defeat in detail” is a military concept that denotes the rout of an enemy by dividing and destroying segments of his forces one by one, instead of engaging his entire strength. A brilliant example was Stonewall Jackson’s 1862 Shenandoah Valley campaign, when his force of 17,000 beat three mutually unsupported Union commands almost four times...
Let us now praise famous Queenslanders, in particular the most famous Queenslander of the lot: Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen, who died, aged 94, on April 26. One of Australia’s most sure-footed and most intuitively brilliant political leaders, Sir Joh, as everyone called him (though he received his knighthood only in 1983, it is now impossible to...
Supreme Court Justice John Harlan helped to shape the “color-blind” legal approach toward race in America, and his views were likely shaped by a man likely to have been his mixed-race half-brother.
America’s War-Fighting Footprint in Africa Secret U.S. Military Documents Reveal a Constellation of American Military Bases Across That Continent General Thomas Waldhauser sounded a little uneasy. “I would just say, they are on the ground. They are trying to influence the action,” commented the chief of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) at a Pentagon press briefing in...
“Race in America is always an inflammatory, volatile thing,” chirped NPR sports commentator Tom Goldman on this morning’s “Morning Edition. Goldman was sounding off to David Greene on the woes of Donald Sterling, owner of the LA Clippers, who expressed himself too candidly on matters of race in a private phone call. The word “always”...
Sunday, on the eve of All Saints’ Day, Nov. 1, 2010, the faithful gathered at the Assyrian Catholic Church of Our Lady of Salvation in Baghdad. As Father Wassim Sabih finished the mass, eight al-Qaida stormed in, began shooting and forced him to the floor. As the priest pleaded that his parishioners be spared, they...
The Democrats’ strategy is failing. But it is up to the American people to make them pay for it.
The tedium that descended upon the nation’s politics last winter when Bush II ascended the presidential throne was relieved briefly in the waning days of the Clinton era by the bitter breezes that wafted around some of the new President’s Cabinet appointments. After repeatedly muttering his meaningless campaign slogan, “I’m a uniter, not a divider,”...
If the left believed that draping the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021, around the neck of former President Donald Trump and the party that refused to repudiate him would sink the GOP, it appears to have miscalculated. For, as the left painted the Capitol riot as an “armed insurrection,” “domestic terrorism,” “attempted coup,” and...
Pope Francis’s four-day visit to the United States was by any measure a personal and political triumph. The crowds were immense, and coverage of the Holy Father on television and in the print press swamped the state visit of Xi Jinping, the leader of the world’s second-greatest power. But how enduring, and how relevant, was...
The Vice President was in Russia in September, trying to persuade Boris Yeltsin to amend legislation giving the Russian Orthodox Church a privileged position. Al Gore was just the man to explain religious toleration to the Russians. In the 1996 campaign, he revealed himself as an affirmative action fundraiser, willing to solicit donations from anyone,...
As the Midterm Apocalypse was sliced and diced on the Day After, pundits noted the “Kavanaugh Effect,” whereby Senate Democrats who joined in the smear-and-delay campaign against then-nominee Brett Kavanaugh lost their bids for reelection in states that had supported President Trump in 2016. On the other hand, Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia, moistened...
Lord Hastings Ismay, Winston Churchill’s trusted military advisor and NATO’s first secretary-general (1952-1957), famously quipped in the early days of his tenure that the purpose of the Alliance was to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” In the early 1950s Ismay’s adage made sense. Stalin’s armored divisions, encamped in...
I stopped paying attention to Time many years ago. My twin brother and I, already plotting our emigration to the United States, subscribed as college students in England in the 1960’s to get some sense of this world-straddling “indispensable nation”—as Clinton administration Secretary of State Madeleine Albright later called it, possibly not for our reasons—and also...
According to the 1940 census, Framalopa County had a population of slightly over 8,000. About half of these lived in town, and the other half lived in the country: truck farmers and cattlemen who came to town on Saturdays to buy the few necessities they couldn’t raise themselves. At that time, Florida was the second-largest...
The American Military System Dissected The purpose of all wars, is peace. So observed St. Augustine early in the first millennium A.D. Far be it from me to disagree with the esteemed Bishop of Hippo, but his crisply formulated aphorism just might require a bit of updating. I’m not a saint or even a bishop,...
Writing in the New York Times on September 26, Paul Krugman insisted that the war against Afghanistan would not be “a war on behalf of the oil companies; not even a war on behalf of SUVs and McMansions.” It was, though, going to be a war “over a natural resource that is more vital than...
We stopped for gas and food in Chamberlain, perched on a bluff above the grand Missouri River. A clear late summer Thursday evening in South Dakota, and we were halfway to the Black Hills, where on Saturday the 55th annual Sturgis Rally and Races—one of the world’s largest congregations of Harley Davidson aficionados—would kick off....
The “Battle of Los Angeles,” or the Great Los Angeles Air Raid, occurred during the early morning hours of February 25, 1942. It has been portrayed in Steven Spielberg’s 1979 slapstick comedy 1941, starring Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi. The farcical movie is about all younger generations today know of the Battle of Los Angeles...
The political establishment in California has become self-admittedly secessionist in recent months, rebelling specifically against federal immigration policy and more broadly by raising the possibility of leaving a backward and reactionary country that does not share its culture and its politics. The secessionist spirit is spreading on the left and in leftist portions of the...
Her mother said she had been brainwashed. Her daughter had never liked who she was and was always looking to become someone else. Mother is quick to reassure reporters she is not prejudiced: “I’m not against Muslims. I married one.” Jihad Jamie, as the press has dubbed her, is only 31, but she has lived...
For decades now CBS, ABC, and NBC have pretended on election night to be in hot competition to project the “winner” and “loser.” We know the act well: Dan, Peter, or Tom comes on the air and solemnly intones, “We can now project that President X is the winner in Florida.” As a viewer, I...
One good way to ruin your Christmas this year would be to spend the holidays reading a new book entitled Abandoned: The Betrayal of the American Middle Class Since World War II, by two law professors at the University of South Carolina, William J. Quirk and R. Randall Bridwell. Maybe you don’t want to ruin...
Up in Oregon a woman was bathing in a river. The transistor radio she had set on the bank played as she swam. She was still swimming when a movement farther along the bank caught her eye. She turned and saw Elvis disappearing into the woods on her side of the river. At the same...
Members of the establishment conservative media are wimps when it comes to responding to the left’s accusations about white American “systemic racism.” Whether it’s refusing to stand for the national anthem at sports events, substituting the Black National Anthem for the Star-Spangled Banner on PBS, announcing fireworks shows on Independence Day are a “racist” activity, or...
“Every nation has the government it deserves.” Joseph de Maistre’s hard saying can give small comfort to Americans. Oh, it is true, we have a paper Constitution that promises a republican form of government, but all three branches of that government have for several generations conspired to evacuate the republican content from the system, leaving...
The Dixie Chicks have caused quite a stir in Lee Greenwood’s America. To recap, for those who have taken E. Michael Jones’ advice and drop-kicked their television set out the front door: On March 10, during a concert in London, singer Natalie Maines said, “Just so you know, we’re ashamed the President of the United...
Two important recent events – Narendra Modi’s landslide victory in India last week and the massive energy and trade agreement which Russia and China signed in Beijing on Wednesday – have the potential to alter Asia’s strategic landscape. Modi is an assertive politician unafraid to take risks, a market-oriented reformer, but also a Hindu nationalist....
Since there are no pressing global issues that cannot wait until next week, I’ll devote my column to a book I’ve just finished reading. Its title, Sea Power: The History and Geopolitics of the World’s Oceans (Penguin, 2017), and the reputation of its author—retired admiral James George Stavridis, who ended his career as NATO Supreme...
Bob Dylan, like many of those in the lively arts, frequently urges us to admire his present work rather than to dwell on his past triumphs, although he has been known to make an exception to the rule when it comes time to release his latest greatest-hits package. Unlike some rock-music critics, I’m happy to...
In a 1956 essay, Edmund Wilson wrote: “Cabell is out of fashion.” Withdrawing his dismissal of James Branch Cabell, Wilson gave him a critical accolade—and his generosity was praiseworthy. For by 1956, Cabell was not only out of fashion but virtually forgotten, though he was not alone in this. Most of his contemporaries, more or...
Srdja Trifkovic’s contact within the Dutch Ministry of Immigration isn’t the only one who has noticed that the current flood of “migrants” now heading to Europe resembles an invasion. Catholic World News reports that Edward Luttwak has likened the current wave of immigration to the barbarian invasions that doomed Rome. Luttwak charges that the Islamic...
Russell Kirk played a prominent role in founding and promoting modern conservatism in America—not neoconservatism, but the more traditional variety which emphasizes culture and tradition more than political programs and economics. He is known as the author of The Conservative Mind, The Roots of American Order, The Age of Eliot, and other “conservative” studies and...