The Editorial Comment was presented as a speech by Dr. Carlson, Executive Vice-President of The Rockford Institute at the April 16, 1984 meeting of the Philadelphia Society. Whole forests have been sacrificed in the last two years to the latest phase of this nation’s perennial debate on education. Yet the debate swirling about us has...
In the aftermath of the U.S.-led air and missile strikes on Syria for the April incident in which Bashar al-Assad’s government allegedly used chemical weapons against innocent civilians, calls are growing for the Trump administration to deepen U.S. military involvement for the explicit purpose of ousting Assad. Those pundits and politicians who advocate a regime-change...
The scene before our eyes resembled something from a disaster film. Roadblocks, fencing, sanitized police checkpoints, sniper’s nests, vehicles loaded with heavy-duty surveillance equipment darting through the streets as an armored vehicle called The Rook lurched onto the field. An armored track vehicle built on a Caterpillar chassis, The Rook is armed with a hydraulic...
The most significant event of President George W. Bush’s second term (thus far) has been the defeat of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007 (S.1348). This bill was initiated by President Bush in collaboration with the Democratic congressional majority, over the opposition of the Republicans and a few rebellious Democrats. The real winners of...
For us to love our country, Burke somewhere wrote, our country must be beautiful. The sheer aesthetic ugliness of modern capitalistic civilization has been as much a reason for the revulsion against it on the part of poets, artists, and social critics as have its various injustices and inequities, real or alleged. We are inclined...
Short reviews of The Life of Samuel Johnson, by James Boswell, and How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy, by Batya Ungar-Sargon.
Living at home with one’s parents and saving money is an increasingly attractive option for young, working adults facing high housing costs.
The human tempests presently sweeping the country—rape allegations at the University of Virginia and in the U.S. military, racial protests and rioting over police conduct, growing and growling bitterness during the sweetest of seasons—have as much to do with moral decay as with circumstances. A moral system presupposes some general level of personal restraint in...
I just got a copy of a thoughtful new book, Vindicating Lincoln: Defending the Politics of Our Greatest President, by Thomas L. Krannawitter. The book mentions me a couple of times, in polite disagreement. Krannawitter, now of Hillsdale College, is a disciple of Claremont McKenna College’s Harry V. Jaffa, as ...
Why are the phrases “honest journalist” and “free press” so often greeted with a snicker? Of course, everyone exempts his own columnist or talking head from the general condemnation, but most Americans also exempt their own congressman from the universal condemnation of Congress as a body made up of toadies and swindlers. To see the...
The Left insists migration is a humanitarian crisis. Wrong. It’s a lawless invasion. Europeans are fighting back. Americans should, too.
On September 10, 2008,the New York Times reported that, back in July, President Bush had authorized ground incursions and missile attacks to destroy Taliban and Al Qaeda sanctuaries in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas. As the Times noted, “It is unclear precisely what legal authorities the United States has invoked to conduct even limited ground...
Ben Lummis was not in a mood to write this morning. He wanted to be outdoors, and, because he was an outdoor writer, being outdoors was as legitimate a part of his job as writing about having been outdoors was after he’d been there. His work had two stages, outdoor and indoor, and in the...
Douglas Wilson’s article, “Why Evangelical Colleges Aren’t,” (Vital Signs, September) is provocative but unsubstantiated. It is also quietly self-serving, failing to mention his role as a founder of New St. Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho. His assertions about evangelical higher education ought to be measured against the facts of those colleges and against his own...
Hollywood loves Christmas, or Winterfest, or whatever they’re calling it these days. This is because many Americans make it the most wonderful time of the year for the studios, offering them gifts of gold. For example, on December 25, 2015, we gave Buena Vista/Disney $49.3 million for the right to spend 2 hours and 16...
Which is the main bastion of institutional liberalism: government or the corporate boardroom, which in addition to its own leftist philanthropy also funds multimillion-dollar foundations? With a cutback in public spending possible, due to voter disenchantment, the answer may be the latter, for universities and special interest groups intent on spreading secularism and nihilism are...
Seven years is a well-rounded time span, for better (“Behold, there come seven years of great plenty”) or for worse (“And there shall arise after them seven years of famine”). As we enter the final year of George W. Bush’s presidency, it is time to look at his septennial foreign-policy scorecard without malice, which his...
When Clarence Thomas, our newest Supreme Court Justice, asked to be sworn in a week before the official ceremony, so he could go on the payroll early, it summed up the whole affair for me. Why are conservatives cheering his ascent to the judicial oligarchy? Yes, it’s fun to beat liberal senators, but not with...
The aborted Wagner coup was an internal conflict within Russia's elites. Although resolved peacefully, it undermined Putin's authority and has increased the chance that he will be tempted to make risky moves—even nuclear ones.
Transnationalism isn’t a term that is familiar to the American people. According to Peter Drucker, a leading advocate of transnationalism, a transnational company is one that operates in the global marketplace; that does its research wherever there are scientists and technicians, and manufactures where economics dictate (in many countries, that is); and that has a...
“Peace in the Middle East” is like the unicorn: we can envisage the beast, paint it in detail even, but we can’t groom a living specimen. The problem transcends geopolitics and ideology, it is also metaphysical. The people inhabiting the region are vying for limited resources, such as land and water. In addition, many also...
Here is Part 1 of the English version of Thomas Fleming’s interview with the Serbian magazine Geopolitika, on the decline of America: Geopolitika: What has happened to the United States? Observers in and outside of America have been commenting on America’s decline, both as a world power and as an inspiration and model for other countries. Within living...
I returned to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) last May and July and noticed that Serbia had changed dramatically since my last visits there in late 1993. The financial reforms of a 75-year-old Serbian university professor, Mr. Dragoslav Avramovic, who has solid banking experiences in Yugoslavia and abroad, had stemmed the soaring inflation rate...
We stopped for gas and food in Chamberlain, perched on a bluff above the grand Missouri River. A clear late summer Thursday evening in South Dakota, and we were halfway to the Black Hills, where on Saturday the 55th annual Sturgis Rally and Races—one of the world’s largest congregations of Harley Davidson aficionados—would kick off....
When news of Lepanto arrived in Rome, the Pope exclaimed, “Now Lord, you can take your servant, for my eyes have seen your salvation.” The battle’s outcome gratified the pontiff, but it may not have surprised him. Legend holds that, at the moment the Turkish admiral was slain on his quarterdeck, Pius V had sensed,...
The measure of how far the American left will go to press its phony “hate” narrative can be found in five statements about the grand jury’s sound decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for shooting and killing black teenager Michael Brown, the thief whom Wilson tried to stop for robbing a convenience store. Brown...
On February 6, 1998, the Mexican consul general in California, Jose Angel Pescador Osuna, spoke at the Southwestern School of Law in Los Angeles as part of a symposium on the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which gave the Southwest to the United States. Osuna proclaimed, “And even though I am saying this part serious,...
Years and years ago—it would have to have been in 1958-59, a year that my wife and I and our two young children were living in Rome—I wrote a little satirical poem about famous old poets and what’s to become of them. It was occasioned by a couple of things. First, there was the arrival...
“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce,” a saying attributed to Karl Marx, comes to mind in this time of Trump. To those of us raised in the Truman era, when the Red Army was imposing its bloody Bolshevik rule on half of Europe, and NATO was needed to keep Stalin’s armies from...
It felt as strange flying west—not south, not east—from Salt Lake City as if the earth had reversed its rotation and were spinning in the opposite direction. Basin and range, range and basin: the long barrier mountains were heavy with snow, but now in early March the desert separating them lay bare, dramatizing the topographical...
The proxy war in Ukraine is a globalist creation that has little to do with American interests. Americans should not emotionally invest in a fight that is not their own, but focus on more important matters at their own borders.
We live in an era of unprecedently widespread lying. Yet lying itself, is an art—albeit an unadmirable one—in decline in a decadent age. Our leaders have set a spectacularly bad example. Former President Trump lied continually and shamelessly, as do his noisiest enemies and his successor. But they are bad liars—clumsy, unconvincing, and incredibly short-sighted,...
In the 1970’s, Mel Bradford and I were teaching at the University of Dallas, which offered a doctoral program in politics and literature. Students took courses in both disciplines. It was a well-designed curriculum and produced some first-rate scholars. Bradford had long been interested in political theory, but the program probably encouraged him to read...
A dozen years ago (give or take), I tried to commission a piece for Chronicles on how Big Business was increasingly pushing a leftist social and cultural agenda. For years, the conservative orthodoxy in the United States had been that capitalist institutions, from mom-and-pop shops up to the largest corporations, were essentially conservative. (In the...
The future of NATO looms large in the Clinton administration’s attempt to create an autonomous zone of American military presence and political influence in the Balkans that would be independent of the ups and downs of Washington’s relations with its Western European partners. By imposing its own post-Yugoslav architecture, this administration hopes to ensure that...
In the Anglo-American experience, the partisans of concentrated wealth and advocates for political centralization have long been connected. Over the last three centuries, that connection has grown stronger, and in the United States this process accelerated dramatically during and after the Lincoln administration. Lincolnism, the idea that the central state can and should use its...
Here’s how you’ll know the conservative movement means something again: When the Conservative Political Action Conference, which just held its annual meeting, moves from Washington, D.C. to Rockford. Or Dubuque. Or Peoria. Or Helena. Or San Antonio. Or Bakersfield. Anywhere but the District of Corruption. I attended a couple CPACs back in the mid-1980s, at...
“The feeling between this city and the hayseeds . . . is every bit as bitter as the feelings between the North and South before the War. . . . Why, I know a lot of men in my district who would like nothin’ better than to go out gunnin’ for hayseeds.” —George Washington Plunkitt...
Some years ago I was interviewed by a reporter for Corriere della Sera, Italy’s most prestigious newspaper. He had heard that I was a follower of Umberto Bossi, leader of the secessionist Lega Nord, and he wanted to know what plans I had for breaking up the United States. After disclaiming any secessionist political agenda,...
The contrived conviction of Roger Stone showed that America has a profoundly serious problem with its legal system. The reaction to President Trump’s commutation of Stone’s sentence by mainline media, and former and current prosecutors tells us that the president himself is likely to be prosecuted after leaving office. The roots of this problem lie...
From Afghanistan to Somalia, Special Ops Achieves Less with More At around 11 o’clock that night, four Lockheed MC-130 Combat Talons, turboprop Special Operations aircraft, were flying through a moonless sky from Pakistani into Afghan airspace. On board were 199 Army Rangers with orders to seize an airstrip. One hundred miles to the northeast, Chinook...
A friend of mine was having a theological discussion with his cleaning lady one day (people do that sort of thing in the South), and the subject of the End of Time came up. They agreed that the signs are all in place, and that it must be coming soon, if the Bible is to...
If the media could invent a headline that comprehensively described the definitive news of the world today, it would be something like Experts Confirm Top Rail Is on Bottom. For almost my entire working life I have been hearing how the upper classes are being displaced by the lower ones, the American native-born by immigrants...
Concerning Scott P. Richert’s reservations about secession, as expressed in the October Rockford Files (“To Secede or Succeed?”): Maybe “many proponents of secession seem reluctant to consider” some of the alleged drawbacks of secession. There certainly are risks. The architects of unitary nationalism weren’t dummies. The grants economy, the safety net, Social Security, and the...
With all the mud spattered on the Confederate Battle Flag of late, you knew it wouldn’t be long before Ol’ Virginny scrubbed up for Jamestown’s 400th anniversary with a grandiloquent apology for slavery. And Georgia, New York, and other former colonies of the original 13 will soon join the state in the confessional tub and...
The international crisis may be over, but the multisided war in Syria is continuing. On Friday government planes bombarded rebel positions in the eastern city of Deir al-Zor after heavy clashes claimed the life of one of President Bashar al-Assad’s top military intelligence officers. In the long-contested city of Aleppo, a renewed rebel assault on the city’s...
Monday, MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” hosted a spirited discussion with Donald Trump on whether he was right in asserting that Muslims in New Jersey celebrated as the towers came down on 9/11. About Muslim celebrations in Berlin, however, there appears to be no doubt. In my chapter “Eurabia,” in “State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion...
What a marathon of Jefferson-bashing we have had in the last few years. This book by the “global statesman” O’Brien follows several other critical biographies, all of which have been highlighted in the fashionable reviews. More than usually offensive to Jefferson admirers were a collection (The View from Monticello) by University of Virginia professors trashing...
In recent years Actors Theatre of Louisville’s artistic director Jon Jory has come under fire for the relative weakness of his new play festival. He should be happy that this year’s season was stronger. Like any other genre, playwriting is a craft, and if nothing else was evident, it was clear from the eight plays...
This book is mistitled, in the sense that Richard Nixon is the least interesting of the multivarious subjects covered herein. The author, of course, is not to blame for that fact; and perhaps it was modesty that kept him from perceiving where the strengths of his collection really lie. These essays differ in depth and...