Hoping to bolster its geopolitical position, a great power sends troops to Afghanistan and installs a puppet leader. That leader has little authority with the influential tribal chieftains and insufficient means to buy their complicity. Resistance soon grows into a full-blown insurgency, which leads to harsh reprisals by the occupying forces. The vicious circle becomes...
One-party rule in California means fiscal lunacy, hazardous living conditions, and dubious elections, among other bad things.
“I’ve got a little list, I’ve got a little list,” twitters the Lord High Executioner in a famous line of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, and indeed these days who doesn’t have one? Abortion protester Paul Hill seems to have had a little list of his own, and early in the morning on July 28 of...
Before he appeared at his first solo news conference of 2022, President Joe Biden knew he had a communications problem he had to deal with. Namely, how to get off the defensive. How to avoid spending his time with the White House press corps defending his decisions and explaining his actions as allegations of failure,...
The Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia enjoyed a full 24 hours of resurgent infamy before Gay Day came and took it all away. Screaming and shrieking throughout the process was the puerile, facile, and ultimately Manichaean Weltanschauung of our ruling class, which is best summarized in the phrase, “We are on the...
If a U.S. administration formally attempted to establish an authoritarian police state, its efforts would almost certainly encounter bitter and even violent resistance; recent experience, however, has shown that remarkably authoritarian and unconstitutional methods can be established without provoking serious protest, provided they are introduced piecemeal and justified by the rhetoric of good intentions. In...
The Greek and Roman classics had a great influence on George Gissing, not least because the literature and history of antiquity provided him with a kind of refuge from the grim realities of the modern industrial and commercial world. Gissing was a highly cultivated man who was at home in several foreign languages—French, Italian, Spanish,...
It is not enough to merely undo the damage of the Biden administration by deporting all illegal immigrants. There must be a moratorium on all immigration into the United States from culturally incompatible Third World countries.
“Thou shalt not portray a white male in an heroic light.” Thus reads the first commandment of the politically correct. Ever since the late 1960’s, the cultural Marxists have been engaged in a drive to destroy American heroes—if they are white males. This was not always a difficult task. Historians from an earlier generation had...
Like most “whose hearts pump Confederate blood,” Chilton Williamson, Jr., in lamenting the failure of Dixie’s attempt at secession (“The Revenge of the Confederacy,” What’s Wrong With the World, January), neglects to address the elephant in the bed. That critter is, of course, slavery, the “peculiar institution” at the core of what Williamson sees as...
The Catholic Church as a whole does not support illegal immigration, at least in principle. However, an increasing number of clergy and prelates, especially in Italy, do grant de facto support to illegal immigration. For example, the bishop of Caserta, Msgr. Raffaele Nogaro, was one of the first high-ranking prelates to support a protest by...
Our Founding Fathers understood that they had inaugurated a republican federal union unique in its balance and distribution of powers. Unlike their descendants, who self-indulgently congratulate themselves on their democracy, the Fathers also understood that the preservation of such a regime was a daunting and demanding task, requiring virtue (in the masculine Roman sense) on...
Although I agree with most of the ideas expressed in your round table “What Is Paleoconservatism?” (Views, January), I believe it is a serious mistake to call this persuasion by such a name. The liberals must love you for so hobbling yourselves. To the average person, the name brings one of two things to mind:...
From the August 2013 issue of Chronicles. One of the greatest Olympians of all time, Bob Mathias, is all but forgotten today. He was born in 1930 in Tulare, in the heart of California’s San Joaquin Valley. Robert Bruce Mathias was his name, but everyone called him Bob. Bob had extraordinary coordination from infancy onward. ...
By the middle of the second month of the Republican Revolution, acute observers were beginning to see that the revolution might actually go somewhere if only the Republicans were not in charge of it. Aside from such irritating contretemps as the revelations of Speaker Newt Gingrich’s book deal, his instantaneous dumping of historian Christina Jeffrey...
“Niuno è solo l’april!” Mimì tells Rodolfo in Act Three of La Bohème. Mimì didn’t survive until April, and if she had she might have felt alone without Rodolfo anyway. Still, spring, like sex, is exuberant, irrational—rather, it’s suprarational. And unignorable, like a 70-mile-an-hour wind, which is what spring amounts to in most of the...
According to some theorists, most of America’s woes began with the arrival of big government in 1932. Before that time, so the story goes, liberty was the rule, the work ethic was alive and well, God was in the classroom, and all was well with the world. As with all ideologies, this one presents an...
“I used to say to my father,” he says, “‘If my class at Yale ran this country, we would have no problems.’ And the irony of my life is that they did.” —Louis Auchincloss, interview with Trevor Butterworth, Financial Times, September 21, 2007 In January (one year after his death at the age of 92),...
It was sort of like being caught in a raging stream, and swimming hard against the current, inch by inch, to reach safety. The time was many years ago, when, as a college freshman, I fell into the currents of liberalism. And they were powerful. Just go with the flow, and you could get approval,...
We were on the practice field preparing for a team that ran the option. Our scout team was running the upcoming opponent’s offense. To our surprise, the scouts executed the option perfectly, which left our outside linebacker frozen halfway between the quarterback, cutting off the block of a tight end, and a trailing halfback arcing...
“Conservatives engage in rebellions, not revolutions.” How true, and what a way to begin a book. The Conservative Rebellion is part memoir, part intellectual and political history by a scholar who came of age in the revolutionary 1960’s, when fashionable people viewed rebels as Parliament viewed the Boston Minutemen. (King George III, however, considered George...
The jurors who tried the 14-year-old black boy who shot and killed three widows last year, one of them my own dear neighbor, found him guilty and gave him several life terms. By law, he got the maximum. He is too young for the death penalty. It is beyond me. If you are old enough...
Biden’s political future may be in doubt. But no matter what becomes of him, he can rest assured that his lies will never be exposed by the self-appointed guardians of “Our Democracy™.”
As I write this at the end of April, the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia is in its fourth week. Albania—predictably—has been turned into a NATO base, and the Kosovo Liberation Army is openly recruiting volunteers in NATO countries, including the United States, where both U.S.-born Albanians and Albanian resident aliens are allowed to join the...
What could a world-famous multibillionaire Hollywood star like Mel Gibson have in common with an unknown, cash-strapped, freelance journalist based in Rome? Virtually nothing, it would seem. Yet there is a common denominator: We are both Catholics and cherish the traditional Latin Mass, the primary liturgy of the Church before its post-Vatican II transformation into...
The Democrats picked Jim Webb to offer their response to the President’s State of the Union Address for the same reason they anointed him to face Republican Sen. George Allen in the November 2006 election: his opposition to the war in Iraq, which is bolstered by his surpassing valor in Vietnam. The risible aspect of...
After nearly two decades of paleoconservative criticism, complaints, and general grousing about the ideological hegemony of the neoconservatives, the establishment press finally began to notice the existence of the latter. Between the time of President Bush’s factually flawed “Axis of Evil” State of the Union Address in 2002 and the “end” of the war with...
“All we want are the facts, ma’am.” —Sgt. Joe Friday Not long ago I was sorting through old papers for disposal. I came across a clipping saved for some forgotten reason. On the reverse was this headline: “NAACP Chief Says More Assistance Needed.” This headline might have appeared in my hometown paper today (though I...
Cleanth Brooks, one of the giants of literary criticism, died last May 10. He was 87 years old. He taught thousands of us how to read a poem or a story. Some he taught over a half-century by way of the classroom, some in his numerous public lectures across this country and abroad, and many...
The demands of life are endlessly self-contradictory. It is a supreme compliment in intellectual life, for example, to be called original; but it can be alarming to discover something—so alarming that people have been known to turn tail and run when they do. To take a philosophical instance: Leibniz, as Bertrand Russell tells in his...
I must take up computer and mouse in indignation. How could you include Elvis on your “celebrity” cover? What possessed you to put the King amongst a group of the world’s great sleazeballs? And at the head of the table? Have you no shame, gentlemen? True, the King was famous, and true, in his latter...
This month I’m writing from the lower right about what works out to be the far left: San Francisco. (My first visit, not long ago, with wife and daughter. OK, lots of people have been to San Francisco. Some even live there. But they’re not writing this column.) Let’s give credit where it’s due: the...
The United States were once precisely that, a union of unique and independent states—each making its own literary and intellectual contribution to the national experience. Of these states, none was so peculiar as South Carolina, and for much of its intellectual history, South Carolina was Charleston. In the generation before The War, Charleston was in...
In August, President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan announced that the capitol of the country would be moved several hundred miles north, from the green city of Almaty, where the presidential palace stands against a background of snow-capped mountains, to the bleak and windy steppes of north-central Kazakhstan, to the present city of Akmola. The official...
You turn on the radio for the weather report: “Sunny and warm today, with a high near 80. Light breeze out of the south at five miles per hour. Chance of rain less than ten percent.” Outside your window, you watch the winds rage and the rains pour. Which are you going to believe, your...
Does the United States Constitution still exist? There is one simple way to answer this question. Read any article or section of the 200-year-old document written to provide the citizens of a free republic with a short and simple guide to what their government can and cannot do and ask whether the language you have...
The ongoing war between Azerbaijan and Armenia threatens the existence of Christian communities in the Near East. The Biden White House is unlikely to intervene in any way for fear of losing support from Turkey.
One morning recently, National Public Radio offered its listeners an interview with a Texas mass murderer to go with their cornflakes. This monster, who had confessed to 250 or so murders, told the reporter that some of them were “sacrifices to Satan.” Aghast, the reporter asked, “You don’t really believe in Satan, do you?” (He...
“Who would call in a / foreigner—unless / an artisan with skill to / serve the realm, / a healer, or a prophet, or / a builder, / or one whose harp and song / might give us joy. / . . . but when have beggars come by / invitation?” —Homer It should be...
In “1865: The True American Revolution” (Views, April) Claude Polin asserts that Calvinism somehow led to the division between North and South. Such an assertion is unsupportable. The main flaw lies in his defining Calvinism as built upon self-confidence that leads men “to rely exclusively on themselves to steer their lives.” The key tenet of...
Excerpts from a lecture delivered at the IDC in Paris on May 27, 2014. For the French translation click HERE. For Russian, click HERE. During the Cold War, holding on to the continental rimland – from Norway, across central Europe, to Greece and Turkey – was the mainstay of America’s strategy and the rationale behind...
Many conservatives insist that some distant, long-past event supposedly causes all our current woke silliness. I call this the "inverted Whig interpretation of history."
“An excellent scholar! One that hath a head filled with calves’ brains without any sage in it.” —John Webster Thomas Sowell has become a virtual one-man publishing industry, and Preferential Policies is his latest contribution to the Sowell book-of-the-year club. It is not surprising to find that this scattered and woefully disorganized potboiler is part...
Speaking to 1,000 of the overprivileged at an LGBT fundraiser, where the chairs ponied up $250,000 each and Barbra Streisand sang, Hillary Clinton gave New York’s social liberals what they came to hear. “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” smirked Clinton to cheers and laughter....
With the government seizing at least half our incomes each year and the “multi-diversity” crowd sowing seeds of anger and disunity that could well lead to civil war down the road, I hear more and more people talking of places to relocate themselves and their capital: New Zealand, Australia, Switzerland, and Costa Rica. And Chile....
“As long as virtue was dominant in the republic so long was the happiness of the people secure.” —Robert E. Lee John P. Diggins raises various, often profound, questions about the moral foundations of America as a political society. Diggins is fond of calling attention to what he considers the underlying cultural tensions in American...
Even in mid-September you cannot go comfortably by day into the deserts of southeastern Utah. Together the late Edward Abbey and I rented horses and rode into the La Sal mountains, following what began as a dirt road and ended as a trail at an elevation of approximately 10,500 feet. From the mountain pass, we...
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 to “Peti oktobar” they...
Written documents should be interpreted with an eye toward discerning the intent of the author. When the Constitution of the United States is the text under consideration, the relevant intentions are those of the men who drafted and ratified the document. This proposition reflects a long-established canon of construction: common-law judges as far back as...
Houthi attacks on Israeli allied vessels in the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait are disrupting the world economy and prompting the U.S. to intervene. Known as "The Gate of Tears," this strait is the gateway for much of the world's commerce.