A year ago, the University of Maryland held a special screening of John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), followed by a two-hour discussion of the film led by representatives of the departments of history, English, philosophy, and communications. John Ford would have been publicly contemptuous of this attention from the egghead professors. In private, he probably...
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Citing Scripture for a Progressive Purpose
'The Progressives’ Bible' shows how leftists over the ages—from abolitionists to abortionists—have distorted scripture to build a rhetorical foundation for their political causes and movements.
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Toward a Hard Right
What is the meaning of the election of 2004 for the American Hard Right? The question, of course, presupposes that there is such a thing as a “Hard Right” distinct from the Mossad’s Station Pentagon, or the “moral values” evangelicals, or the Girly Boys’ Jamboree. By “Hard Right,” in this context, I mean neither what...
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What’s in a Naomi?
'Doppelganger' centers around Naomi Klein's personal grievance: Being mistaken for Naomi Wolf.
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The First Firestorm
That hysterical reaction to the travel ban announced Friday is a portent of what is to come if President Donald Trump carries out the mandate given to him by those who elected him. The travel ban bars refugees for 120 days. From Syria, refugees are banned indefinitely. And a 90-day ban has been imposed on...
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Books in Brief
August 1914: France, the Great War, and a Month That Changed the World Forever, by Bruno Cabanes; translated by Stephanie O’Hara (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; 230 pp., $27.50). This superb and marvelously readable work of social and political history, drawn from a wide variety of personal and official documents and records, recounts the...
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Old Progressives Don’t Die
Surprisingly enough, in many ways journalist and commentator John T. Flynn was a typical progressive. Long a figure of prominence on the American right, he was not politically active in the time of Woodrow Wilson, whose domestic policies he much admired. He did, however, first gain prominence as a muckraker denouncing the financial chicanery of...
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Down the Tubes: The Tax Man Cometh
Last week I filed my federal and state taxes. The tax preparation service I use here, mostly for backup purposes in case of an audit, informed me by phone that the forms were ready for my signature and that I would owe the federal government just over $1,000. Expecting to pay much more than that,...
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Chronicling the Fall
“Folly is often more cruel in the consequences than malice can be in the intent.” —Halifax The correspondence of Edmund Burke, whose letters help to illuminate his published works, was not available in a complete edition until 1978. Today, however, it seems that every aspiring journalist begins saving his correspondence even...
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Millennial Nostalgia and the Analog Universe
These days, you don't have to leave your house to do much of anything—and fewer people do. That’s probably why so many Millennials are pining for a simpler time.
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Anniversary Celebration
High Country News, the environmentalist newspaper founded by Tom Bell, a former rancher, in Lander, Wyoming, in 1970 turned 25 this year, and since the weekend of September 8 was forecast to be a fine one I decided to attend the anniversary celebration. HCN has been based for about a decade or so in Paonia,...
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On Making the Chronicles Pilgrimage
As a first-time attendee of the Summer School (“The American Midwest,” The Rockford Institute’s Fourth Annual Summer School, 2001), I can sincerely say that I had one of the best times of my life—intellectually, spiritually, and socially. Having strong family roots in the Midwest, my regional pride and knowledge of this beautiful section of the...
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The Chastity Amendment
The appearance of an article about American church life on the front page of the Washington Post is a rare occurrence. But the approval by the Presbyterian Church (United States) of a church law requiring celibacy of its non-married clergy gained front-page attention in the Post not just once but twice this year. Treatment of...
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Is Demographics Destiny, or Destruction?
Our elite political class has manipulated illegal immigration to entrench themselves in power and disenfranchise Americans.
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The Left Conspires to Keep Election Fraud Quiet. Wonder Why?
Emails released by the House Judiciary Committee should outrage Americans. The federal government devised a scheme to covertly stamp out public debate over election fraud.
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Property Owners Under Assault
It should be a property owner’s dream. Thirteen acres in the heart of America’s largest city, bordered by two of its most prominent streets, Broadway and 42nd Street. Famous shopping and tourist attractions are all within walking distance. Broadway theaters, Fifth Avenue, the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, Madison Square Garden. Major transportation hubs like...
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The Mass Age Medium and Future Shlock: Making Sense of the 60’s
The recent passing of Mary Travers—who, with Peter and Paul, was years ago always intoning that the answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind—brought back some quaint memories of kumbaya moments, and the consoling thought that at least Mary Travers lived long enough to see her political vision fulfilled in the person of Barack...
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Scala Jerkitudinis: The Subspecies
The Great American Jerk is a chameleon who changes colors according to circumstances, from obsequious to bullying, from pious to lewd. He may, on some occasions, display buck-waving generosity and on others check-splitting stinginess, but underneath there is always the baby boy or girl who wants what he or she wants, whether it is money,...
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The Ugly Beautiful Losers
“Beautiful losers” was the phrase Sam Francis borrowed from Leonard Cohen to sum up the failure of the American conservative movement. Beautiful or not, American conservatives have been losers from their movement’s inception, and the same can be said for every conservative movement since the French Revolution and going back at least to the Enlightenment,...
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Christian Rout in the Culture War
A Democratic Congress, discharged by the voters on Nov. 2, has as one of its last official acts, imposed its San Francisco values on the armed forces of the United States. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” is to be repealed. Open homosexuals are to be welcomed with open arms in all branches of the armed...
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The West on the Precipice: A Warning and a Hope
Traditional Christians should unite against the satanic vision of liberal-democratic nirvana, which continually threatens the West.
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Ubuntu!
William Murchison gets right to the point in his eloquent account of mainline Protestantism’s near-terminal degeneration, written poignantly from an Anglican’s perspective: Whenever traditional Christianity clashed with late-twentieth-century culture, the Episcopal Church normally weighed in on the side of the culture: for enhanced choice in life, for more laxity and less permanence in belief. Don’t...
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The American Exception
A favorite exhortation of those seeking to further restrict or remove the private possession of firearms in the United States is to “look at other countries,” where lower murder rates are supposed to be a result of gun control laws. The underlying presumption beneath these laws is that guns cause crime. Getting rid of guns,...
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Border Math: A Study in Priorities
A rare crack in the fortified wall of the Bush administration’s diplomatic obstinacy seemed to appear as U.S. diplomats sat down in March with their Iranian and Syrian counterparts to discuss stability in Iraq. Foreign-policy realists of both parties hailed the move as a potential breakthrough: Sen. Joseph Biden (D-DE) offered a characteristically self-righteous lecture,...
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Will ISIS Rise Again? Trump’s Winning Strategy?
In his weekly roundup of world events for Serbia’s Happy TV network, Dr. Trifkovic discusses the future of the Islamic State. He also looks at a viable strategy for President Donald Trump to emerge victorious from the impeachment battle. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZ2EPtvxQ_c&app=desktop (Translated from Serbian, slightly abbreviated.) Q: What has changed with the killing of al-Baghdadi?...
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The Next Militia Panic
Only a fool would try to foretell the course of U.S. politics a few months in advance, let alone several years in the future. The fact that Democrats are riding high after their electoral triumph last November does not necessarily mean that they will win the White House in 2008. But just suppose that January...
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Waste of Money
Media MIA’s Vietnam Reconsidered: Lessons from a War;Edited by Harrison E. Salisbury; Harper & Row; New York. James Dunkerley: The Long War, Dictatorship and Revou1tion in El Salvador;Junction; London. It has been a decade since America withdrew its troops from Vietnam. Unfortunately, scores of servicemen remain officially unaccounted for, their fate shrouded...
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Lessons from Montgomery
At 11:30 A.M. (CST) on Thursday, November 13, 2003, Roy Moore, chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, was removed from office, and the will of the people of the sovereign state of Alabama was thwarted by a unanimous vote of the nine-member panel of the Court of Judicial Ethics. In deciding Glassroth v. Moore,...
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The Unmeaning of Unmeaning
A computer was the victor on a popular television game show, easily defeating its human competitors; an arms race is under way involving militarized robots that can take the battlefield in the place of inferior humans; in Japan, artificial-intelligence software has outperformed college applicants on a standardized college-entrance examination. Our machines are becoming a part...
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The Greatest Revolution
Most people throughout the industrial world see cheap and readily available food as simply another modern amenity, such as electricity or running water. Few understand that agriculture has always been political, because it is tied to human survival. Even fewer know that the world is currently undergoing one of the greatest agrarian revolutions in history:...
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Global Anarcho-Tyranny
The kind of regime that is being imposed on the world by what still passes for the West has two basic forms. The form preferred by the Democratic Party in the United States and by the European Union is multilateralist and therapeutic. The form favored by the people who currently control U.S. foreign policy is...
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Cowboy Heroes
Whatever happened to Randolph Scott ridin’ the range alone? Whatever happened to Gene and Tex And Roy and Rex, the Durango Kid? Whatever happened to Randolph Scott His horse plain, as can be? Whatever happened to Randolph Scott Has happened to the best of me. So sang the Statler Brothers in their 1974 country hit. ...
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All Honorable Means
The political culture of the United States is cramped and stunted by the narrow range of acceptable viewpoints and the utterly banal, subliterate tone of our political campaigns—to compare American elections to the marketing of soap is an insult to the people who sell soap. If, as Sean Scallon notes in Beating the Powers That...
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Is Trump Capturing the ‘Law and Order’ Issue?
Did President Donald Trump launch his Twitter barrage at Elijah Cummings simply because the Baltimore congressman was black? Was it just a “racist” attack on a member of the Black Caucus? Or did Trump go after Cummings after a Saturday Fox News report that his district was in far worse condition than the Mexican border...
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Gimme That Ol’Time Education
” . . . Form and Limit belong to the Good.” —C.S. Lewis Liberals in the United States have lately gathered around the standard of pluralism in the hope of stalling the movement toward private Christian education. Yet Americans, historically indifferent to such objections, have been the last to censure a church—especially a reformed or...
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Scarlett and Michael
The other night, while watching The Godfather on television for roughly the 50th time, I was struck by a parallel that had never occurred to me before. The movie’s sentimental musical score reminded me of “Tara’s Theme” in Gone With the Wind. My mother used to whistle that melody all the time; she loved the...
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After the Avalanche
When C.S. Lewis wrote that there was more distance between us and Jane Austen than between Jane Austen and Plato, he was remarking on a cataclysm that colleges and universities had not escaped. The charters of colleges founded before the Age of Jackson reiterated the claim that the purpose of an educational institution was always,...
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The Tyranny of Democracy
Winston Churchill’s backhanded praise of democracy as “the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried” is usually cited as the last word on the subject. It is a good way of closing off a dangerous topic of discussion, and it works quite well with that vast majority of people...
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The Empire At Europe’s End
In the German name for Austria, Osterreich, Reich denotes more than “empire” in the sense of territorial extension; there is also a certain spiritual content. In the Middle Ages, empire meant the Eastern Roman Empire of Byzantium, and after Christmas Day 800, when Charlemagne was crowned by Pope Leo XIII, the Sacer Imperator Romanus was...
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A Zeitgeist of Another Color
Among the many questions about the new presidency of George. Bush with which the lips of Washington were afroth this spring was whether Lee Atwater is for real. The thirty-seven-year-old head of the Republican National Committee who made the name of Willie Horton as familiar to American households as the Domino’s Pizza gremlin is one...
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Three Score and Ten: A Meditation
Well, Old Man, 70 today. Who’d have thought? And still in pretty good condition, considering how little care I have taken of the old carcass. I understand now how the accumulation of minor miseries in aging is mercifully designed to let us down slow and easy till we are ready. The children are OK....
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The Third Compartment
“Truths would you teach, or save a sinking land? All fear, none aid you, and few understand.“ —Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Man” Although the raw figures from Census 2000 have been in the public domain for months already, the American public’s response to the latest decennial survey is still not...
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Dabney’s Blind Spot
I read with interest the article by Zachary Garris on Robert Lewis Dabney (“Remembering R. L. Dabney,” December 2019). Having myself graduated from Hampden-Sydney College, where he taught, and being Presbyterian, I have had some interest in his views. The article mentions hierarchal views of biblically sanctioned authority. It does not mention the extension of...
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Darwin for Sissies, or What Ever Happened to Survival of the Fittest?
Evolutionists used to be hard-boiled theorists who maintained that nature, including man, was based only on the impersonal plus time plus chance. They coolly asserted that the fittest survive, that some species die off and others thrive because of natural selection. All enduring creatures, great and small, have mutated and adapted to their environments. The...
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The Music of Chance—An APA Diary
Any young philosopher who aspires to an academic career must, especially in these days of fiscal restraint and feminized privilege, include in his plans a trip to the annual American Philosophical Association (APA) Convention, a curious hybrid of frenetic job-hunting and highbrow hobnobbing widely reviled as “the meat market.” Although Pacific and Central Divisions of...
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Immigration: Deferred Courage
The Supreme Court, tacitly acknowledging that the great Justice Antonin Scalia is still dead, refused on October 3 to reconsider United States v. Texas. The tie remained at 4-4, same as it was in June when the Court first polled itself, but a petulant Obama Department of Justice asked for the case to be reconsidered. ...
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Rethinking the Saudi Connection (II)
The Saudi military intervention in Yemen was launched, according to Riyadh, to “restore the legitimate government” and protect the “Yemeni constitution and elections.” This sudden desire to fight for constitutions and elections sounds odd, coming from an absolute monarchy which is consistently combating efforts at democratization at home or in its neighborhood. As Ali Alahmed,...
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Mentor to Chesterton
Encountered in the right circumstances, Belloc’s prose can become a lifelong addiction. Fortunately, the craving can be as readily satisfied as a thirst (if that is the right word) for cocaine in Hollywood. He wrote so much that one cannot easily run out, and the best of his works (Hills and the Sea, The Cruise...
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Our Alien Victims
If only Roger Barnett had known the courts would lynch him for defending himself. Or maybe he did know and still decided to stand his ground. Either way, the owner of the Cross Rail Ranch in Douglas, Arizona, on the U.S. border with Mexico, may soon be $87,000 poorer. The left-wing Ninth U.S. Circuit Court...
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A Post-Riot Letter from France: A Tense Bastille Day
The targeted burning of France's public schools and libraries in its latest riots shows that the rejection of French education and culture by Muslim immigrants has become overt and systematic. France is a nation shattering into ghettos.