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...
Even as we, in our own time, go about revising, or refusing to revise, our fundamental law, so did our Fathers in the beginning vote to put such law in its place: that is, one state at a time, reflecting, after vigorous dispute, 13 different majorities, some of them very belated—and very reluctant. All of...
Our elite political class has manipulated illegal immigration to entrench themselves in power and disenfranchise Americans.
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.
The terms liberal and conservative (nearly always paired in that descending order) are now so confused as to be almost entirely useless. Originally, liberal was used to denote the ideology that aimed at the liberation of human individuals from the restraints of Church establishments, aristocratic and monarchical privileges, and legal restrictions on business and international...
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,...
As an environmentalist with four decades of observation and experience with The Cause, I would like to respond to Chilton Williamson’s May column (“What Do Environmentalists Want?“). I think most citizens (and environmentalists) want a safe, clean, long-lasting, biologically diverse, and desirable place to live. Even, eventually, a population more in balance with what our...
During a recent lecture tour I had occasion to reacquaint myself with the Pacific Northwest, where I used to teach some thirty years ago. The region offers lessons in the difference between American conditions and economic management and most of the rest of the world, to which the New World Order promises paradise: democracy, capitalism,...
Traditional Christians should unite against the satanic vision of liberal-democratic nirvana, which continually threatens the West.
Just because it looks like a Republic and quacks like a Republic doesn’t mean it’s really a Republic. In ancient Rome, after Julius and Augustus Caesar got through with the civil wars, proscriptions, and purges that spelled death to the remains of the old Roman nobility, the state still looked and quacked like the republic...
Those of us who grew up under communism remember well the ritual of the Leader’s Speech. At a Party congress—invariably dubbed “historic” even before it began—or on the occasion of the opening of a new steel mill, the Dear Comrade would deliver a much-heralded oration. It usually contained three main ingredients: “We” are making great...
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,...
In this issue we present two views of the “conservative” news media giant Fox News. The essay by Douglas Burton verges on the celebratory and recounts the merits of the Fox News enterprise and the bold vision of Rupert Murdoch, the Australian press baron, who launched this 24-hours-a-day American news service on Oct. 7, 1996. Murdoch...
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...
With the drowning deaths of 27 migrants crossing the Channel from France to England, illegal migration from the Third World is front and center anew in European politics. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has proposed that France take back to its shores all migrants who cross the Channel illegally and come ashore in Britain. In the...
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...
” . . . 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...
Wednesday morning, Nov. 9, 2016, Republicans awoke to learn they had won the lottery. Donald Trump had won the presidency by carrying Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. All three states had gone Democratic in the last six presidential elections. The GOP had won both houses of Congress. Party control of governorships and state legislatures rivaled the...
Emotional outbursts and misleading rhetoric from our political class and TV opinionators leave Americans confused about everything from Putin's motives to Caitlyn Jenner's degeneracy.
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...
“The magnificent cause of being, / The imagination, the one reality / In this imagined world . . . ” —Wallace Stevens Though ten years have passed since his death on April 29, 1994, Russell Kirk has yet to be the subject of a definitive intellectual biography. In his own posthumously published autobiography, The Sword...
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...
Images of those traumatized by the election of Donald Trump are indelible. I mean specifically the sight of empaneled experts, red-eyed, choking, and stuttering as they said things like “CNN is now prepared to call the state of Wisconsin for Donald Trump.” Or of rainbow mobs of sign-wavers in urban centers declaring (absurdly and solipsistically)...
The ancient Western tradition of political thought, appropriate to men seeking freedom and virtue in community, has in our century been hounded into obscure corners by materialists and romantic revolutionaries. Yet, here and there, the tradition remains alive and even shows signs of a renewed vitality. One such sign is the work of William C....
In the run-up to the November elections, Republicans comforted themselves by passing around an analysis by the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office showing that spending on the Iraq war so far has been “only” $709 billion. They pointed out that President Obama’s wasteful stimulus actually cost $100 billion more. And they touted the $709 billion number...
It is in the American interest to avoid the risk of direct intervention in Ukraine regardless of the course of the war because neither the security nor the prosperity of the United States depends upon its outcome.
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,...
Never did I appreciate so much the genius of the Founding Fathers as after finishing this remarkable biography of President Clinton. The authors of the Constitution created a government which makes it impossible for the United States to be transformed into a continental Dogpatch some millions of square miles in extent, which is precisely what...
The Present Age begins with the First World War, the Great War as it is deservedly still known. No war ever began more jubilantly, among all classes and generations, the last including the young generation that had to fight it. It is said that when Viscount Grey, British Foreign Minister, uttered his epitaph of the...
Who Were The Fascists: Social Roots of European Fascism; Edited by Stein Ugelvik Larsen, Bernt Hagtvet, and Jan Petter Myklebust; Distributed by Columbia University Press; New York. Richard F. Hamilton: Who Voted for Hitler?; Princeton University Press; Princeton, NJ. Who Were The Fascists consists of more than 800 pages of papers (replete with notes) which...
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...
Karl Marx's support for Lincoln and condemnation of the South, both during and after the Civil War, create an awkward paradox for establishment conservatives.
The question that has smoldered in the Republican mind for the last couple of years is not who will be the presidential nominee of the party in 2000, but rather, will George W. Bush win the Hispanic vote? Since some time in 1998, it has been an unquestioned assumption of many, if not most. Republicans—at...
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...
“As fire is kindled by fire, so is a poet’s mind kindled by contact with a brother poet.” —John Keble, Lectures on Poetry, XVI Dear Jimbo, I am sending this c/o the Dead Poets Society. I hope it reaches you all right. Sure, it’s doubtful, I know. But, then again, why not? About the afterlife...
Alabama Republican congressman Mo Brooks generated outrage among the usual suspects this week by telling Laura Ingraham that the Obama Adminstration’s push for amnesty for illegal immigrants is “a part of the war on whites that’s being launched by the Democratic Party. And the way in which they’re launching this war is by claiming that...
I’ve just learned I may be a terrorist. On Aug. 13, the Secretary of Homeland Security issued a statement warning about an increase in domestic and foreign terrorism. At the end of the document’s summary were these words: “Such threats are also exacerbated by impacts of the ongoing global pandemic, including grievances...
Accusations of racism, unlike protestations of patriotism, are the first, not the last, refuge of scoundrels. In today’s world the charge is the ultimate rhetorical weapon, the H-Bomb of public discourse. Even without accurate aim or effective delivery, it is guaranteed to destroy not only the intended target but associates and bystanders for miles around,...
On Monday, Oct. 5, our occasional contributor James G. Jatras gave a lecture at the Institute of European Studies in Belgrade entitled “Does America Have a Future? Options Before a Declining Hegemon.” He presented a complex and rather bleak picture of America’s condition to an audience of some 30 scholars and analysts from Serbia’s leading research...
I do not normally take pronouncements from show-business folk seriously—they are almost always publicity ploys—but in the Mia Farrow and Steven Spielberg case against Beijing’s “Genocide Olympics,” I will gladly make an exception. We all know that there is something rotten at the heart of modern sport, starting with the Olympics, which was, once upon...
John Ellis, a well-known British military historian, has made a major contribution to our understanding of the nature of World War II with an unflattering reappraisal of the effectiveness and leadership of the Allied forces. His views are not always just, but he raises issues that, while not totally ignored, have usually been confronted only...
Robert Frost published 11 books of poetry, won four Pulitzer Prizes, established himself as the unofficial poet laureate of the United States, and acquired a national and international literary reputation. Despite his fame as a poet and public speaker, and because of his friendship with such liberal Democrats as Vice-President Henry Wallace and President John...
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...
In an interview with the Iranian English-language network Press TV Srdja Trifkovic discusses the significance of President Xi Jinping’s emergence as China’s most powerful leader in decades, following the end of the Communist Party congress on October 25. Video (interview starts after 50 seconds) Q: What do you think of Xi’s reelection, considering the fact...
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...
One of the subjects that most self-styled conservatives seem incapable of discussing in any depth—indeed, it is one they often flee from like mice before the hungry house cat—is race. The general feeling always seems to be that anything a prominent conservative might say on the topic—unless he is offering some sort of fearful confirmation...
In America today, we seem to face two alternatives: accepting hordes of invaders with alien cultures and ideologies, who are unwilling to assimilate and whose presence endangers the vestiges of our civilization; or homogenizing America into a rootless, soulless melting pot—a “proposition nation” without a past or local or family customs. Families and learning matter. ...
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...
Remembering the significant contributions of former Chronicles executive editor Aaron Wolf on the fifth anniversary of his passing.
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...