It has happened. Whites have been reduced to a minority in California. By whites, I mean, of course, “non-Hispanic whites,” because most of the illegal aliens who have poured across the border from Mexico during the last 30 years to change dramatically the composition of California’s population are mestizo, a mixture of Spanish and American...
The campaign to overturn the 2016 election and bring down President Trump shifted into high gear this week. Inspiration came Saturday morning from the altar of the National Cathedral where our establishment came to pay homage to John McCain. Gathered there were all the presidents from 1993 to 2017, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and...
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 ...
There ain’t no shame in a job well done, from driving a nail to driving a truck. As a matter of fact, I’d like to set things straight, A few more people should be pulling their weight. If you want a cram course in reality, You get yourself a working man’s Ph.D. —Aaron Tippin, “Working...
Modern Americans are going to live forever. We must believe that; otherwise we would not rise up in spontaneous outrage whenever a stuck accelerator causes a car to crash or a surgical procedure goes awry. Science and technology have made our world not only foolproof but death-proof, or at least they would have, were it...
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...
Two thousand fifteen was the year that we Americans broke history. By “breaking history,” I do not mean something like “breaking news,” or “breaking records,” or even “breaking the Internet” (though the Internet certainly played a role). Yes, the “historic moments” of the Summer of #LoveWins and #HateLoses—the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v....
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...
Chilton Williamson’s study of the sources of American conservative thought presupposes certain assumptions about his subject that may not be universally shared but are defensible nonetheless. Williamson suggests that American conservatism is essentially paleoconservative, and both his choice of current conservative authors and his comments on Joe Scotchie’s Revolt From the Heartland underline this association. ...
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...
Every evening, thousands of people line up just south of California’s border with Mexico. They wait for darkness to fall so they can slip across the border and illegally enter our country. The Border Patrol succeeds in catching as many as half of these people, but thousands more still succeed at illegally entering our country...
“In the midst of life we are in death.” The old Prayer X Book’s admonition has never been more true or less understood than it is today. Modern man, despite his refusal to consider his own mortality, is busily politicizing all the little decisions and circumstances that attend his departure. Death penalty statutes, abortion regulations,...
Here’s how you’ll know the conservative movement means something again: when the Conservative Political Action Conference moves its annual meeting from Washington, D.C., to Rockford. Or Dubuque. Or Peoria. Or Helena. Or San Antonio. Or Bakersfield. Or Murfreesboro. Anywhere but the District of Corruption. Conservatives flock from around the country to CPAC, expecting to advance...
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...
Given the alternatives, the Democrats might have to roll the 2024 dice with their stammering, scandal-ridden, palpably weak, cognitively deficient presidential incumbent.
Public commentary on recent murders and acts of violence against African Americans has been universally explained as evidence of ingrained racism of American society, the racism of police, and implicit racism of the Republican Party. The result has been wholesale rejection of the display of symbols associated with the Confederate States of America. Even Sen....
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...
“Those is the niggers that was f–kin’ with my sh-t.” “I knew that nigger was one of the niggers I could rely on.” The first speaker was a twenty-something “homegirl” from the projects, the second a drunk in his late 30’s. Both were riding on New York’s A train on different days and at different...
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...
“Woke” is the concept that everything must be inclusive and inoffensive. Oh dear! Being hyperaware of everyone’s sensitivities makes one a hell of a bore. I recently flew down to Charlottesville, Virginia, where I had gone to university, to speak at a memorial service for my friend Willy von Raab. The other speaker was P.J....
perspective 8 | Topsy-Turvy by Thomas Fleming views 12 | Uncle Sam Goes Bust by Doug Bandow 16 | Take the Money and Run: Entitlement Politics by Mark G. Brennan reviews 20 | Mal de Mer by Chilton Williamson, Jr. [Sea Changes by Derek Turner] 22 | Why Garry Wills? by James Kalb [Why Priests? A Failed Tradition by Garry Wills]...
Forbearance is a moral principle from which General Robert E. Lee rarely if ever wavered, and his unflinching practice of that virtue is the primary reason that he should be remembered today.
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...
Excerpts from a speech at Providence College given on Thursday, Oct. 21, 2010. Two sets of fallacies have dominated the mainstream debate about the Ground Zero mosque—and before we go any further, let’s get this straight: it is a mosque, frantic insistence by the Qusling elite to use one euphemistic misnomer ...
“How horrible, fantastic, incredible, it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.” —Neville Chamberlain Persons with roots in Central and Eastern Europe know that to speak with minimal competence about that part of the world...
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...
“What is the theme of your conference?” asked a potential traveler to Rome. “How republics perish,” I replied. “Don’t you mean democracies?” he persisted, referring to the title of a good but far-from-profound book by Jean-François Revel. I congratulated him on getting the point of the title of our second Rome Convivium. After all, I...
“When we gained power, the country was at the edge of the abyss; since, we have taken a great step forward.” —unnamed African government minister Tocqueville in the 19th century, and Solzhenitsyn in the 20th, noted that conformity of thought is powerfully prevalent among Americans. I have always thought that a strong justification for freedom...
According to an article in Forbes (November 16, 2016), “Mexico aside, [Latin America] barely featured at all in the presidential campaign. This overall situation will largely remain the same under the Trump administration.” The first sentence is a truism (when has Latin America, as such, ever “featured” in a U.S. presidential election?), and the second...
Parents are being replaced by woke educators, radical school counselors, gender queer-promoting librarians, meddling school-based health clinic staffers, and Big Pharma drug and jab peddlers.
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:...
In Ephesians 6, the Apostle Paul writes, “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (6:12). Political scientist and lay theologian Jacques Ellul went beyond the usual interpretation of these “spiritual forces” as demons to see...
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...
It won’t do to obsess with condemning the unreality of celebrity tradwives living the dream. Their popularity points to something fundamental about the human condition and it deserves a serious answer.
In the November 1986 Encounter, the Princeton University economist Harold James sets out to tell us “Why We Should Learn to Love a Crisis.” His explanation is not quite what we would expect from a champion of a market economy. In that economy, he says, crises serve a necessary function; states should not try to...
The death at age 97 of Prof. Alex N. Dragnich, a leading American expert on Serbian and Yugoslav history, marks the departure of one of the last witnesses to an era in which this country’s involvement in Southeastern Europe was neither contrary to her traditional values nor overtly harmful to the region’s inhabitants. His dozen...
There are many arbitrarily drawn borders in the world, none more so than the one on the Brenner Pass (4,500 ft) between Austria and Italy. As you drive south along the Brenner Autobahn, the Alpine landscape does not change. Only the bilingual signposts indicate that you have crossed from Austria into Italy. Most people speak German, and all local stations...
Waco, as we go to press, stands for “We ain’t comin’ out.” Americans can and do make jokes about anything, particularly current events. That’s the good news. The bad news is that ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms—nee Bureau of Prohibition and now part of the Treasury Department, today under Lloyd Bentsen, former U.S....
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....
Switzerland provides a model for a morally neutral foreign policy based on pragmatic interests rather than “defining values” and self-proclaimed exceptionality. Americans need to learn from the Swiss.
My wife and I shall visit Paris again this fall, as we have done for years, but the city will be an empty place for us following the death of our dear friend and my revered colleague, Claude Polin, on July 23. Mercifully, Claude was spared the horrors of modern death in a nursing home...
You could say Parag Khanna is the quintessential “Davos Man.” This silver spoon globe-trotter, a specialist in globalization, wants to change the world forever, openly advocating a mix-and-match “Civilization 3.0” under a decentralized world government. And he couldn’t care less how you feel about it. The term “Davos Man” was coined by Harvard political scientist...
Stevie Wonder wants to become mayor of Detroit. He’s had some trouble determining precisely when the election will be held, but no matter. He believes that he can be the mayor of Motown in the 90’s. Now, this is no Sonny Bono and Palm Springs. Bono is decidedly a working-class stiff compared with the Retin...
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 reading through the works of popular historian Victor Davis Hanson, I was reminded of a parody in an episode of The Simpsons. Bart and Homer watch a clip of Rainier Wolfcastle—the show’s Arnold Schwarzenegger-esque action hero—fly a UNICEF cargo plane full of pennies to impoverished children. A villainous cadre calling themselves the “CommieNazis” chase Wolfcastle in their...
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...
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...
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...
In his book The Ethics of Rhetoric, Richard Weaver explains different types of argumentation. The most effective type is the argument from definition, which forces one’s attention on values and demands either assent or rejection of those values. In Lincoln’s arguments on slavery, to follow Weaver’s example, the Negro was either a man or not...
Visits in the space of ten days to Toronto, Ontario, and then Tifton, Georgia, demand reflective analysis for stronger reasons than the compelling force of alliteration. The city and the town are so different that the visitor to both is driven to look for the faintest similarities. Once that effort is made, however, sweeping conclusions...