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...
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The Conservative Strikes Back
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...
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The Real Cabal
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...
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Remembering Cleanth Brooks
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...
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The Struggle for the Gate of Tears
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.
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On Celebrity
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...
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The Quandry of Tribal Sovereignty
Native American resistance, resilience, and perseverance remain prevalent. The limits of Native American sovereignty remain mysterious.
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Going Back to Charleston
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...
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Bob Mathias
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. ...
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Voices in the Air
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...
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An American Family Covenant
“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),...
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The Real American Dilemma
This remarkable editorial by Chronicles’ longest-serving editor offered one of the first and best analyses of America’s immigration problem.
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“You Have To Commit!”
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...
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Deep as Dante
Brenda Wineapple’s new biography of the most brilliant flower of the New England Renaissance reminded me that it was time to reread Hawthorne. She delineated the man very well, got his politics almost right, but barely did justice to his work. Writing in 1847, ten years after the publication of Hawthorne’s first collection of stories,...
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Going for the Extra Yardage
Hours—or, rather, weeks—spent with the 2006-07 NCAA football bowls may suggest something wrong not only with the priorities of higher education but with the imperial rituals of the nation. There are a lot of cheerleaders and fight songs and marching bands and rowdy fans and excruciatingly bad renditions of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and excellent tailgate...
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Canadian Populism: Alive and Well
“October Revolution” is probably an apt description of Canada’s 1993 parliamentary elections, as the month marked the enthronement of a left-oriented political establishment and the ejection of the ruling Conservatives. The Liberal Party’s sweep to an absolute majority meant the relegation of the Tory Progressive Conservative Party to virtual extinction (it now holds only two...
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The Geopolitics of New Multipolarity
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...
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Affirmative Scholarship
“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...
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Space Art
“The land of the heart is the land of the West.” Catholic readers of American literature have always recognized that the difference between Eastern and Western fiction is the difference between New Canaan, Connecticut, and Tuba City, Arizona. A. Carl Bredahl’s book is a comprehensive as well as original attempt at defining the nature, of...
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Last Chance for the ‘Deplorables’
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....
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The Attraction Offshore
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....
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Saints or Stockbrokers?
“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...
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A Drought in Leadership
California has been living off its legacy of water projects for the last several decades like a lazy, self-indulgent, trust-fund recipient.
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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 to “Peti oktobar” they...
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Eyes on the Prize of Central Asia
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...
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A Different Drum
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...
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A Boundless Field of Power
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...
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Nobody’s Bagboy
Something curious happened in South Carolina on June 10. While Sen. Lindsay Graham easily prevailed over his challenger, Buddy Witherspoon, garnering two thirds of the vote in the Republican U.S Senate primary, the Democrats (voting on the same day) chose a candidate who everyone admits is well to the right of Graham himself. Of course,...
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We’ll Get Him Next Time
After two years and tens of millions of dollars, the Mueller investigation ended in a shattering anticlimax for Democrats. On March 22, Special Counsel Robert Mueller sent Attorney General William Barr his report, and Barr promptly informed Congress that Mueller found no collusion between Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia. Mueller recommended no prosecutions—though Barr’s...
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Rule by Assassination
“Justice has been done,” chortles President Obama and his spokespeople. ”Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey, good bye,” chanted the proles on the streets of New York. There are already T-shirts on sale saying “Obama got Osama.” I am surprised not to have heard of a procession of little people in...
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Don’t Blame Calvin
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...
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Texas Is Correct to Defend Its Sovereignty from the Border Invasion
The mass invasion now transpiring at the U.S. southern border is illegal, immoral, and unsustainable. Texas is within its rights to resist it.
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Death Wish of the West—May 2011
beyond the revolution The Unentitled by Thomas Fleming views Suicide by (Legal) Immigration by Roger D. McGrath The Death Wish of the West by Claude Polin news DOMA’s Fifth Column by William J. Watkins, Jr. reviews A Southern Foison by Ray Olson Chronicles of the South edited by Clyde N. Wilson Vol. 1: Garden of the Beaux Arts Vol. 2: In Justice to so Fine a ...
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Trump Should Close NATO Membership Rolls
When Donald Trump meets with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg today, the president should give him a direct message: The roster of NATO membership is closed. For good. The United States will not hand out any more war guarantees to fight Russia to secure borders deep in Eastern Europe, when our own southern border is...
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Cannibal Statistics
In debate, it is always possible to be right for the wrong reason. For instance, in supporting the proposition that cannibalism is immoral, I might argue that, historically, cannibalism encouraged the killing of human beings who might otherwise have been kidnapped by Arabs or rival African tribesmen and sold into slavery in the southern United...
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SPLC
So the Southern Poverty Law Center finally lost one. And a big one at that. The FBI has dropped the SPLC from its list of “partners” on the agency’s hate crimes page, The Daily Caller revealed last week. The agency dropped SPLC, an FBI spokesman told TheDC, because,“the Civil Rights program only provides links to...
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Finally, A Black “Hater”
The Southern Poverty Law Center, or the $PLC, as they call it at VDare.com, has finally found a black murder suspect they dislike. Indeed, such was their distaste, the “hate-watchers” published his mugshot on their website. Normally, SPLC covers only white “haters” collared by the long arm of the law. They include crackpot supremacists, separatists...
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Lord Ashdown’s Balkan Fiefdom
For 200 years, the Balkan states have been manipulated by the powers of “Old Europe” to slow and control the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. They were created, enlarged, and shrunk as the need arose. During the two world wars, the territories inhabited by southern Slavs were used as bargaining chips in constructing alliances, while...
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A Conservative Case for Open Borders?
As I write this, the federal government remains “shut down” because congressional Democrats have committed themselves en masse to open borders. The Democrats know that they can secure congressional approval of President Obama’s unilateral DACA amnesty if they give President Trump funding for a wall on our southern border. But the Democrats are unwilling to...
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Economics and the Catholic Ethic
Amintore Fanfani (1908-99) was an economic historian whose scholarship focused on the origins of capitalism and questions of economic and social equity. In his early career, he was part of a broader Catholic and conservative intellectual movement that was active during the interwar years and included the English Distributists and the Southern Agrarians. Like these...
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A Liberal Policy
In regard to the recent controversy over illegal immigration, allow me to offer a few liberal proposals. The problem could be easily and immediately solved by putting all illegal aliens to work constructing a wall across the entire southern border. (They make up 25 percent of the construction industry, anyway.) And, at below minimum wages,...
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Bundy: Not Quite A Terrorist
The Southern Poverty Law Center has weighed in again on Cliven Bundy, the rancher in Nevada at odds with the federal government over grazing rights, fees and endangered turtles on federal land. Having restrained itself from calling Bundy a “terrorist lawbreaker,” as the Daily Kos did, SPLC may be reconsidering. Apparently upset that Daily Kos...
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The Middle East Heats Up
The string of attacks on civilian and military targets in southern Israel by gunmen suspected to have crossed from Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula was a complex, carefully coordinated operation. Israeli sources say that its intelligence services, army and police were taken by surprise by the scale and slick organization of the multiple assaults staged near Eilat. More serious than...
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An Invasion Heads North
The people who voted for Trump weren’t motivated by the allure of tax cuts. They were motivated by a desire to, at long last, secure the southern border. The organized mob now being allowed to march through Mexico is an all too vivid reminder that the wall has not yet been built. These marchers aren’t...
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The Lunacy Spreads
The hatewatch business has grown in recent years from a large but solo operation known as the Southern Poverty Law Center into a major industry that includes an array of outlets that also retail gratuitous contumely, scurrilous innuendo and naked lies. Say something the left doesn’t like, and any number of disreputable websites will declare...
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A Tale of Two Borders
One clear winner of the recent European Parliament elections was Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, whose party won roughly a third of the votes, finishing well ahead of any other party. Salvini’s party, the Lega, began as a regional party in Lombardy, but won numerous votes in southern Italy, including carrying many municipalities and several...
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Miller and Lennon
Sixty-six years ago, a small plane took off from southern England for Paris. It never made it. On board was a 40 year old Army Air Force major, who before the war had been the most popular musician in America. His music is still listened to and enjoyed today, even though popular music has since...
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Our Constitutional Covenant With Death
“The compact which exists between the North and the South,” proclaimed William Lloyd Garrison in an abolitionist declaration of 1843, “is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.” When the Southern states concluded that they were no longer bound by what their enemies regarded as a compact with the devil. Garrison and his...
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Trying to Find “Hate”
A problem with having to find “hate” wherever you look, and then blog about it in breathless, apocalyptic prose, is publishing a major gaffe. Thus did the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch blog offer this gem on Aug. 20 about conservative activist Larry Klayman, the founder of Judicial Watch: Right Wing Watch: Larry Klayman wants...
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Tom Landess, R.I.P.
Chronicles is very sad to report that our friend and longtime contributor Tom Landess has passed away of a sudden illness. A true man of letters, Dr. Landess wrote (and ghostwrote) hundreds of books and articles, as well as poetry. He was a student and friend of many of the Twelve Southerners and a brilliant...