Since the days when Tom Paine set himself up as chief propagandist for the emerging American colonies the United States has been subject to invasion by British journalists. They come for a variety of reasons. Tired of tax collecting in England, Tom Paine came to start anew, and if doing so involved the common sense...
At the dawn of the 21st century, few of today’s public (or private) school students would argue with you if you told them that the United States of America was founded upon the principle, proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal.” They would offer no argument, perhaps, except that they...
“Shop Like You Mean It” read the ads for a nearby mall every “Holiday Season.” The obvious question is: Mean what? The ad agency probably wants us to get into the spirit of the season of wasteful expenditure and conspicuous consumption, but, if we interpreted their ungrammatical sentence not according to the intention but according...
Most of what we see and read from the government and its media organs are variations on a tired but persistent theme of irreversible progress toward utopia. (William Pfaff has a new book arguing that secular utopianism, even more than war profiteering or career advancement, is what drives U.S. foreign policy, making it impervious to...
The sheer incongruity of the deceased Ray Liotta appearing in a new release added a hint of fascination to "1992," an otherwise formulaic heist picture produced by rap artist Snoop Dogg.
Moreno Religious persecution in Africa is particularly interesting since countries there go from one extreme to another in terms of religious tolerance. The growth of Islam is reconfiguring Africa’s religious landscape—at the cost of religious liberty. Frontline Fellowship, an evangelical group based in South Africa which operates in Sudan and other countries, provides these estimates:...
Most English schoolboys learn this quip: Belgium is a country invented by the British to annoy the French. Which is just about true. And if you don’t understand why and how Belgium was invented, you won’t understand the significance of the elections in Belgium earlier this summer. In 1795 the revolutionary French occupied what were...
With impeccable timing, I interviewed Eisenhower biographer and Colin Powell booster Stephen E. Ambrose just days before Powell’s Noble Renunciation of Ambition. But before our chat disappears into that void (de?)populated by Milton Shapp’s Inaugural Address and the Oscar acceptance speech of Pauly Shore, I retrieve this exchange: Me: One way to look at Eisenhower...
Everyone wants to save the American family. Not a day goes by, it seems, without some politician or professor issuing a call to arms or an invitation to a congressional hearing. For a long time the family had been a conservative/ Republican issue, but last fall both Mr. Mondale and Ms. Ferraro made a great...
“No womman of no clerk is praised.” —Chaucer An old-fashioned historian can be forgiven for feeling a touch of empathy for the bewildered Egyptians upon whom Yahweh emptied the vessels of wrath some 3,500 years ago. The Hebrews’ God plagued the Egyptians for a matter of days, but the stern Minerva who reigns over academe...
Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s order to attack South Ossetia’s capital, Tskhinvali, was a breathtakingly audacious challenge to Russia, to which she was bound to respond forcefully. That response was promptly exploited by the American mainstream media machine and the foreign-policy community in Washington to paint Russia as a rogue power that is not only dangerous...
Recently I ordered a bit of merchandise from a Carolina town about 30 miles away. It took some time to arrive. With a little research I discovered that the package had been sent by the USPS to Baltimore! And then to Charlotte, 90 miles from its destination and 120 miles from it place of shipping....
When President Joe Biden announced he would withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by the 20th anniversary of 9/11, GOP hawks like Sens. Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham responded predictably. “Grave mistake,” muttered McConnell. “Insane,” said Graham, “dumber than dirt and… dangerous.” Of more interest were the responses of conservative Republicans who commended the president....
A BBC television spy series, M I-5, which is now being marketed to the U.S., portrays a heroic group of British government agents who have been beefed up and empowered since 9/11 to fight the rising threat of terrorism. In the first episode, the ...
With the death of Eugenio Corti on February 4, Italian literature has lost the last of its great masters. Born in 1921, Corti grew up in the rolling countryside south of Lago di Como known as the Brianza. His father was a textile manufacturer whose handsome brick factory in Besana had been converted into the...
The Feds now control my backyard—in direct defiance of the Ninth and Tenth amendments. I have heard and read many stories over the years about imperial intrusions into private affairs, but I recently learned about these firsthand when I tried to refinance my mortgage to take advantage of lower interest rates. I immediately ran up...
After he left the Church of Scientology, Hollywood screenwriter Paul Haggis recalled a discussion he had had with his fellow Scientologists. If great leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. can err, Haggis suggested to his zealous peers, so too can the cult’s leader, David Miscavige. “How dare you compare a great man like David Miscavige...
The presidency must be destroyed. It is the primary evil we face, and the cause of nearly all our woes. It squanders the national wealth and starts unjust wars against foreign peoples that have never done us am harm. It wrecks our families, tramples on our rights, invades our communities, and spies on our bank...
In February, I returned to Sweden after a 15-year absence, and discovered a very different land. In 1976, Americans were viewed with suspicion. We carried the immediate legacy of the Vietnam imbroglio and a vague reputation as “protofascists.” These were the heady early days of Prime Minister Olaf Palme. The Swedes were, as always, polite,...
A tactic the left uses to inspire loathing for conservatives is repeating something a conservative or even nominal Republican says, and then slapping scare quotes around it. That supposedly shows that whatever the conservative said is self-evidently false, and worse, “hateful.” It might run something like this: “Tea Party Senator says ‘Earth revolves around Sun.’”...
France’s ambassador to Poland Pierre Levy has said he was “surprised, even shocked,” by the Polish foreign minister, Jacek Czaputowicz, declaring that “something’s not right” with France, and that was “sad because France is the sick man of Europe, dragging Europe down.” M. Levy went on to make an astonishing statement which only confirmed that...
The executive editor of Chronicles, Aaron Wolf, died suddenly and tragically on Easter Sunday. He left behind a loving wife and six children, and colleagues and contributors to this magazine who admired him greatly. Aaron worked for Chronicles for 20 years, and his journey reflects where the magazine and the conservative cultural movement it represents...
In light of the vital importance of the Middle East to American interests, it is curious that our media have chosen not to report Arab reactions, which have been uniformly negative, to Sen. Joseph Lieberman’s vice-presidential candidacy. From America’s friends in the Persian Gulf and Egypt to its foes in the Levant and North Africa,...
Braveheart Produced by Mel Gibson Directed by Mel Gibson Screenplay by Randall Wallace Released by Paramount Pictures In recent films, “angry white males” are generally portrayed as psychopaths, and it is, therefore, almost astonishing that even a good conservative like Mel Gibson should have chosen to make a movie on the life of William Wallace....
Whatever happened to the old middle-to-highbrow American culture? Once upon a time, there was a fair-sized literate class that kept up on fiction and verse by reading the great organs of literary opinion. These days there is a great gulf between serious literature and general-interest journalism. “Literary” magazines—Kenyon Review, Daedelus, or Sewanee Review, for instance—now...
In the aftermath of September 11, you have done a reasonably good job managing the crisis, symbolizing the nation’s unity, restraining the laptop bombardiers, and preparing a military response that was neither hasty nor disproportionate. Now that two months have passed, you have more time to reflect on the long-term significance of that event and...
Is President Donald Trump about to intervene militarily in the Syrian civil war? For that is what he and his advisers seem to be signaling. Last week, Trump said of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s campaign to recapture the last stronghold of the rebellion, Idlib province: “If it’s a slaughter, the world is going to get...
One of many reasons conservatives are so often at a disadvantage in political discussions is that we do not see why there should be any discussion, since we do not recognize a problem open to discussion at all. Take, for instance, assimilation. If you do not believe the United States should be accepting immigrants in...
“Blood and revenge are hammering in my head.” —William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus In his 1990 pamphlet “How to Revitalize Russia,” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, “When our fathers and grandfathers threw down their weapons during a deadly war [World War I], deserting the front in order to plunder their neighbor at home, they in effect made a...
It was about 3 p.m. on October 26, 1881, as Tombstone’s town marshal, Virgil Earp (also a deputy U.S. marshal), his brothers Wyatt and Morgan, and the Earps’ eccentric friend Dr. John H. Holliday confronted Isaac and William Clanton and Thomas and Robert Findley McLaury near the O.K. Corral. After 30 seconds of firing, Morgan...
For the third time in our generation, independent voters could be the balance of power in this year’s presidential election. In 1968, Alabama Gov. George G. Wallace, standardbearer of the American Independent Party, received 13 percent of the popular vote, a sum greater than the difference between Hubert H. Humphrey and the victor, Richard M....
Having written the book on Bill Bryson (literally—for Marshall Cavendish’s Today’s Writers & Their Works series, 2010), I have been looking forward to the film version of A Walk in the Woods (1998) since I first read Bryson’s semifictionalized account of hiking the Appalachian Trail. Robert Redford, who produced the movie and stars as a...
Tucker Carlson's voice is too important to silence because he speaks for so many people.
I am grateful to George McCartney for his articulate and fascinating review of Copperhead (“Reason’s Enemy,” In the Dark, September). Unlike most reviewers, he concentrates (at least this time) on the plot, theme, historicity, characters, and atmosphere, instead of the usual pointless ramblings about the previous work and personal history of the director, or technical...
At the moment the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of states to enact parental consultation abortion statutes, the abortion-advocacy organizations went into high gear. The Hodgson v. Minnesota and Ohio v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health decisions “endangered teens,” they claimed, and NOW President Molly Yard charged that the Court had “thrown down the...
—“If a temple is to be erected, a temple must be destroyed.” —Friedrich Nietzsche When the Cold War ended in 1991, American conservatives rejoiced over the triumph of democratic capitalism, which had struggled for over half a century, first against the rise of fascism, and then against the Soviet bloc and...
Many of the same characters involved in lawfare against President Trump are implicated in the untruthful ambush of me and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
The issue facing Biden and his party is not whether to call Ibarra “illegal,” “undocumented” or a “newcomer,” but whether they intend to protect Americans from gang members.
“It’s a new day, and a new way!” exulted Adelaide Sanford on television in early 1985. A black supremacist and member of the New York City Board of Education, Sanford was the candidate for schools chancellor of the Reverend Al Sharpton and “activist attorneys” Alton Maddox and C. Vernon Mason (both of whom have since...
Writing in this issue of Chronicles, Frank Brownlow, the scholar and literary critic, quotes W.H. Auden as having described logic as “a condition of the world,” like aesthetics and ethics. Auden was right, which makes advanced liberalism’s rejection of logic so dangerous. Five nights a week on FOX News, week after week, Tucker Carlson in...
In Huysmans’ Against the Grain (1884), the precious hero Des Esseintes has “the idea of turning dream into reality, of traveling [from France] to England in the flesh as well as in the spirit, of checking the accuracy of his visions.” He orders a servant to pack his bags, calls a cab, and stops in...
The first four Republican contests—Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada—produced record turnouts. While the prospect of routing Hillary Clinton and recapturing the White House brought out the true believers, it was Donald Trump’s name on the ballot and his calls for economic patriotism, border security, and an end to imperial wars that brought out...
One of the really cool things about democracy is that voters tend to get what they want—which, um, can also turn out to be one of the really uncool things about democracy. A thing of real terror, if you want the truth. I tiptoe past the presidential election of 2016 on my way to look...
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,...
In New York City there is a room for wonder. Each year, for the past decade and more, the exhibitions held in this small room have left viewers in awe. The extraordinary quality of these shows devoted to the art of China makes a visit to China Institute worthwhile at any time of the year,...
Across the country Democrats, like New York City Mayor Eric Adams, are pushing for the disaster of allowing noncitizens to vote in local elections.
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...
We are headed north on Interstate 35 from Austin to Dallas, on the tail end of an unexpected trip to Texas. The dog days of August have not been quite as unbearable as we anticipated but are still startlingly hot by our Alaskan standards. Beside the interstate, we glimpse many small Protestant churches, mostly of...
Regardless of whether Muammar Qaddafy is killed, brought before the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague, or exiled, his regime has collapsed beyond recovery. After a five-month air war against his forces NATO has succeeded in decisively tipping the balance on the ground in favor of the rebels. This does not mean that the...
“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...