It’s been some years since Tom Fleming and I have indulged in seven-day mad dashes across the Balkans, speaking, lecturing and giving interviews, meeting interesting people over good food and drink. Last week’s tour, which took us to Belgrade and Banja Luka, had the tempo and feel of the old times, but it was...
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What’s Behind Our World on Fire?
When the wildfires of California broke out across the Golden State, many were the causes given. Negligence by campers. Falling power lines. Arson. A dried-out land. Climate change. Failure to manage forests, prune trees, and clear debris, leaving fuel for blazes ignited. Abnormally high winds spreading the flames. Too many fires for first responders to...
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Trump, Vance, and FDR
Trump and his movement are following the path blazed by the Democrats before they became the party of woke: The old FDR playbook.
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Fighting the Dragon With Solzhenitsyn
Do great men make history? Or does history make great men? One thing’s for sure: History sometimes smothers great men, as Thomas Gray suggests in his famous elegy written in a country churchyard, and as the rows of endless graves from Arlington to the Somme demonstrate with brutal candor. “Some mute inglorious Milton here may...
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‘Bidenomics’ Gaslighting Reveals POTUS’s Impotence Lead-Up to 2024
Joe Biden and his cackler henchwoman, Kamala Harris, will run on "Bidenomics." And they will ask you not to believe your own lying eyes, but to believe that the turd sandwich they are offering up is actually a tasty filet mignon.
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Monumental Stupidity
There is a scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 classic North by Northwest in which the characters look out at a brooding Mount Rushmore from the dining-room terrace of the Sheraton-Johnson Hotel in Rapid City, South Dakota (since renamed the Hotel Alex Johnson). There are Lincoln, Jefferson, Washington, and Theodore Roosevelt peering back, and shortly after...
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A Doctor in Spite of Himself
On December 3, 1989, the London Telegraph included a piece of academic news from the United States: “Researchers in his native Georgia must soon decide whether to reveal that the late Dr. Martin Luther King, murdered in 1968, was—in addition to his other human failings—a plagiarist. There is now much doubt as to whether his...
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A New European Identity
In Europe today there is a youthful yearning for a new genesis and a desire to overcome the legacy of World War II. While a facile model of one generation rejecting the last is a tempting one to offer as explanation, in fact, the emerging “New Right” seeks both a connection and a rejection to...
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Decline and Fall
I am very far from original in noticing similarities in the histories of Rome and America—republics that became empires. The decline and fall of the former has often been thought to foretell the fate of the latter. A Frenchman some years ago wrote a fairly convincing book called The Coming Caesars. Such analogies are interesting...
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Sadly for Adlai
“Madly for Adlai,” proclaimed the campaign buttons in 1952. But Adlai Ewing Stevenson II wasn’t the kind of politician who aroused mad affections, or, for that matter, hostilities. He was a Stevenson. Passion isn’t the Stevenson thing; service is—service conducted with objectivity and a certain fidelity to the public weal. Jean Baker, professor of history...
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Sanity Begins at Home
To begin on a positive note: anyone who shuddered at the prospect of a barely thirty-something Edward Kennedy in the U.S. Senate cannot be wholly without redeeming social value. The year was 1962, and H. Stuart Hughes, grandson of the 1916 Republican presidential nominee of the same surname and devotee of a SANE foreign policy,...
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Mr. Kennan’s America
No admirer of George F. Kennan’s should be surprised by the angry tone of the reviews his recently published Diaries has been receiving. Of the several I have read, in the British as well as the American press, all were, to some extent or another, willfully unsympathetic. That is only to have been expected, Kennan...
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Rolling Stone Gathered No Facts
Last month, Rolling Stone published a story entitled A Rape on Campus, which described a brutal gang rape of a woman named Jackie during a party at a University of Virginia fraternity house, the University’s failure to respond to this alleged assault—and the school’s troubling history of indifference to many other instances of alleged sexual...
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Observing American Decencies
Joe Gould’s Secret Produced by First Cold Press and October Films Directed by Stanley Tucci Screenplay by Howard A. Rodman, from an article by Joseph Mitchell Released by October Films American Psycho Produced by Single Cell Pictures Directed by Mary Harron Screenplay by Mary Harron, from a novel by Bret Easton Ellis Released by Lions...
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On Might
“I chant the new empire . . . “ —Walt Whitman Walt Whitman sang what he saw—in 1860, he gave a name to Madison’s and Jefferson’s vision of the new commonwealth. “[Our success],” Jefferson had said in 1801, “furnishes a new proof of the falsehood of Montesquieu’s doctrine, that a republic can be preserved only...
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White House Sets Border Fire, Sues States for Trying to Put it Out
The current, temporary custodians of the executive branch are akin to landlords who took over a safe, secure apartment building and have let it become dangerous and crime infested.
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On ‘Homeschooling’
Help! M’aidez! Salve! While perusing your excellent September 1992 issue, I was horrified to see two articles espousing inaccuracies about homeschooling. First, E. Christian Kopff. In his article “Ignorance and Freedom,” he repeatedly states (without any source) that “‘Bible-believing’ Christians are strongly opposed to learning [Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and German] and allowing their children to...
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Contemptible Familiarities
“Would you guys like somethin’ to drink?” I could not help smiling at the lady and two men sitting across the table from me in this California restaurant injected into the middle of North Carolina. We had just been deploring the use of this unisex slang expression to mean “ladies and gentlemen” and debating the...
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World War III With China: How It Might Actually Be Fought
[This piece has been adapted and expanded from Alfred W. McCoy’s new book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power.] For the past 50 years, American leaders have been supremely confident that they could suffer military setbacks in places like Cuba or Vietnam without having their system...
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Closing the Barn Door
Ethnic groups were reportedly highly successful in registering new voters in the months before the 1992 national election. In California, the Secretary of State’s office was deluged with requests for registration forms and, in at least two cases, countless thousands of those forms were sent to businesses like Domino’s Pizza and the 99 Cent Store,...
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A Balkan Tragedy
For the past two-and-a-half millennia, our civilization has cultivated tragedy as an art form that articulates some of the key problems of our existence. Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard III—these works speak timeless truths in an ever-contemporary language. In the case of Serbia’s former president Slobodan Milosevic, reality has proved equal to inspired imagination. His life, which...
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Comey & The Saturday Night Massacre
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce, said Marx. On publication day of my memoir of Richard Nixon’s White House, President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey. Instantly, the media cried “Nixonian,” comparing it to the 1973 Saturday Night Massacre. Yet, the differences are stark. The resignations of Attorney General Elliot Richardson and...
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Gianni, Get Your Gun
One of the most important reasons for the sweeping victory of Silvio Berlusconi and his House of Liberty in the recent Italian election was concern for public safety, which ranks as the number-one issue on the minds of voters, according to some polls. Berlusconi promised to do whatever was necessary to make people feel safer,...
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Macedonia unrest: ‘Warning to Skopje against new Turkish pipeline’
Srdja Trifkovic’s latest RT interview The Republic of Macedonia has become important to the U.S. policymakers in recent months, as it could be the only way for Russia’s proposed Turkish Stream pipeline to reach Central Europe. Washington does not want that to happen, as Srdja Trifkovic told RT in the latest live interview, and this...
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We’re Not as Dumb as They Think
It’s gone just about too far this time. In the past year, North and South Dakota were included in a group of states described as “America’s Out back” by Newsweek. As if that weren’t bad enough, both states were also left out of a Rand McNally photographic atlas. (The editors smiled urbanely, one imagines, and...
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True Reform
The Electoral College is an archaic institution designed by men who felt that they could not trust the people at large to choose the president—or so we are told every four years by the most ignorant members of the Fourth Estate. While it may have been true (the argument continues) that the people were relatively...
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Romney’s Last Chance
If we can believe most pollsters, President Obama has the election sewn up and in the bag. He is leading in most of the crucial swing states, and, insiders are saying, Governor Romney’s only chance is a knock-out blow in one of the debates. Given Romney’s rhetorical clumsiness, this is unlikely. Obama is not...
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Cannibal Statistics
In debate, it is always possible to be right for the wrong reason. For instance, in supporting the proposition that cannibalism is immoral, I might argue that, historically, cannibalism encouraged the killing of human beings who might otherwise have been kidnapped by Arabs or rival African tribesmen and sold ...
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Church Arsons: The Real Story?
It was one of the biggest stories of 1996: Black churches were burning all across the South, the seeming victims of a nationwide upsurge in racial hatred. Tens of thousands of horrified Americans rushed to contribute money toward the reconstruction of black churches. We now know there never was any firm evidence of a church-arson...
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Every State Is a Border State Now
The death of Jacques Price serves as a reminder of just how thoroughly our institutions have been turned against Americans at every level.
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The Natural Man
This issue brings together a number of discussions of man’s place in nature. Stephen R. L. Clark, Tibor Machan, and jay Mechling explore the implications of the animal rights movement. Debating the “moral status of animals” (to borrow one of Prof. Clark’s titles) is interesting not so much for what it reveals about beasts as...
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Books in Brief: November 2021
Klara and the Sun: A Novel, by Kazuo Ishiguro (Knopf; 320 pp., $28.00). A conservative disposition imposes costs but limits downside surprises. If you always expect rain, you have to lug your umbrella around wherever you go. But you never get wet. Likewise, if you see life through a Menckenian lens, worstcase scenarios sometimes play...
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Electoral Franchise Blues
If you want to create and preserve a constitutional republic, you must be careful about who gets to vote. Once this sacred right is granted, it can never be withdrawn.
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Educated at Home
“Let us eat and make merry.” —Luke 15:23 “This has been a happy time: I’ve spent all day with my family, eaten a fine meal, played with my grandchildren, been to a baptism, and I went to communion.” These were the words ...
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Identity Politics Means Rule by Useful Idiots
Identity politics is now the term du jour and its meaning is clear enough on a superficial level—choosing people according to their physical characteristics and sexual preferences. The left wants more people of color, women, and gays in influential positions, while the right insists that these traits are secondary to competence in a given job....
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Alien Invasion of Europe: Now a Deluge
The Italian navy rescued 3,000 “migrants” aboard more than a dozen boats in the Mediterranean on Saturday. Like hundreds of thousands of others before them, they were taken to Europe for de facto permanent settlement. At the same time, any semblance of border control along the southeastern land route has collapsed. Thousands of migrants stormed...
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Lonesome No More
All literary genres have their loyalists, but few have more devoted—and querulous—readers than the Western. So when in the mid-1980’s rumors began to circulate that Larry McMurtry, hitherto known for his angst-ridden tales of modern Texas, was at work on an epic oater, shoot-’em-up fans began looking for a noose, sure that the bespectacled belletrist...
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Are the Good Times Over for Joe?
“When sorrows come,” said King Claudius, “they come not single spies but in battalions.” As the king found out. So it seems with President Joe Biden, who must be asking himself the question Merle Haggard asked: “Are the good times really over for good?” Consider the critical issue with voters today: the state of the...
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The Right’s ‘Rocky’ Redux: The Tide Is Turning
The June debate between Biden and Trump was that Rocky moment when the opponent was sent bloodied and reeling back to his corner. But the fight is by no means over.
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Letter From the Lower Right
Taxing Matters In a North Carolina newspaper not long ago-a North Carolina newspaper – I actually read an editorial urging Tar Heel legislators to raise the state tax on cigarettes. What is the world coming to? The state’s present tax, I gather, is the lowest in the nation. You would think North Carolinians would join...
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Britain’s Leftists: Allies of the Islamists
The people of England, after very considerable provocation, have lately come to fear England’s Muslims. Britain’s leftists have shifted in the opposite direction. From an entrenched hostility to the mores of their own country and out of sheer perversity, the leftists have intensified their attacks on the Catholic Church, while making a point of defending...
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An Arrogance Justified by Nothing
It was a revealing moment. Former GOP consultant turned Never Trumper Rick Wilson began ridiculing Trump supporters on CNN as “credulous Boomer rube[s]” who believe “Donald Trump is the smart one and y’all elitists are dumb.” Muslim activist and New York Times contributor Wajahat Ali joined in, mimicking the rubes’ supposed disdain for “You elitists,...
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The Last Kulak in Europe
In the autumn of 1909, a troupe of Sicilian actors, led by Giovanni di Grasso, arrived in St. Petersburg to satisfy a refined craving of the Russian intelligentsia, then widely shared in fashionable circles throughout Europe, for the experience of the primitive. Still, only a hundred or so spectators turned up to savor art at...
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Nationalism, True and False
Ruling classes exercise power through combinations of coercion and manipulation—what Machiavelli called force and fraud, or the habits of the lion and the fox that he recommended to princes who wish to stay in power. Like most princes, most ruling classes tend to be better at one than the other, and depending on their talents,...
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The Federal Courts, a Menorah, and the Ten Commandments
A recent phenomenon in the United States is that no one knows any longer to what extent the country, our states, or our municipalities can participate in the display of such traditional religious symbols as crèches, crosses, menorahs, or even the Ten Commandments. Until the last half of the 20th century, no one seemed too concerned...
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The Brazil of North America
To observe the decades-long paralysis of America’s political elite in controlling her borders calls to mind the insight of James Burnham in 1964—”Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide.” What the ex-Trotskyite turned Cold Warrior meant was that by faithfully following the tenets of liberalism, the West would embrace suicidal policies that would bring about...
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Threatened Security
Russian security is threatened in the east as well as in the south and west (through NATO expansion). In an interview in Moscow’s elite-oriented Nezavisimaya Gazeta on April 25, Prof. Vilya Gelbras of Moscow State University’s Asia and Africa Institute called Russia’s East Siberia and Far East regions the “weakest link” in the “system” of...
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LA’s Cult of the Dead
One of the many hearses that ply Hollywood Boulevard is different from all the others. The long gray Cadillac sports a sunroof, air-conditioning, and a cargo of live bodies, not dead ones. The vehicle is the flagship of Grave Line Tours, and every day its driver leads his seven passengers, each with a window seat,...
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Welcoming Migrants Creates War-Rationing Scenario
The sacrifices Americans make today do not serve any greater good, such as winning a war, preserving our way of life, or giving their children a chance at a better future. Instead, our government is making us sacrifice to meet the needs of foreign nationals here illegally.
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Do We Want a Federal Police Force?
Probably the last thing that would have occurred to New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer on his way to meet “Kristen” in Room 870 of D.C.’s Mayflower Hotel was that both he and the Emperor’s Club VIP were under FBI surveillance for federal crimes—prostitution and a financial crime called “structuring.” Traditionally, the enforcement of criminal law...