“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...
In any age, Samuel Francis would have been a remarkable man for the penetration of his mind, his unflinching pursuit of truth—regardless of current cant or personal consequences—and the gravity of his style. In our age, he is peerless, and his death represents an irreplaceable loss. Sam and I were friends and allies for over...
I find that local radio gives me a good view of the state of American consciousness, or unconsciousness. Just today I learned that the government is studying how to help “ailing mortgages.” Defaulters, it seems, have been struck by an unfortunate epidemic. Anyone can get sick, and sick people have to be helped. I also...
The presidential election is still one year away, but now is the time for American patriots of all stripes to reconsider their political attachments. Since the end of World War II, domestic opponents of the American Empire have struggled fruitlessly to contain its growth. As a philosopher friend recently remarked, we have no politics today...
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...
It is over 60 years since the Scopes Trial attracted journalists like Henry Mencken and Joseph Wood Krutch to Dayton, Tennessee, and yet the teaching of evolution is once again as controversial as—it was in 1925. Most of the debate is carried out between militant fundamentalists and equally militant materialists. While most of the fundamentalists...
U. S. leaders continue vindicating Chronicles with their disastrous foreign policy decisions. President Trump doesn't appear eager to break this trend.
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...
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]...
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...
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.
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...
For Americans, ebola is the new AIDS. It’s not only the nightmare plague that is supposed to obsess our imaginations, all day long and every day, as we sip the first cup of coffee or the first martini or the first 2000 calorie big gulp of diabetic shock at our favorite fat-food joint, but, wait,...
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 ...
Fisher Ames is the Founding Father who draws a blank. Few people today have heard of him, yet he wrote the final version of the First Amendment, and his speech on Jay’s Treaty, delivered when he was the leader of the Federalists in the First Congress, was called the finest example of American oratory by...
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...
“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...
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.
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...
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...
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.
My last (and only other) visit to the United States was early in 1986. I was visiting the Capitol at the invitation of a friend who, at the time, was working for a Republican member of the Senate. It was on the day of President Reagan’s State of the Union Address, hi the silence and...
Events are the building blocks of history. Narrative historians, starting with Thucydides, have focused on what they regarded as significant occurrences in order to present and evaluate the past. The import of some events can be recognized by astute observers almost as soon as they occur. Edmund Burke’s 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in...
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...
There is a picture in our family of my great-grandfather holding a Model 94 lever-action .30-30 carbine—”Treinta Treinta,” as it was affectionately called—with a cartridge belt strapped across his body. He fought in the Mexican Revolution with an American-made Winchester rifle. This little piece of family history pops into my mind now and then. Not...
In order to do research for a novel, I spent January and February of this year in Chile, thereby avoiding a particularly bitter winter in Washington, D.C. My intention was to pass most of my time in Santiago and spend only a couple of weeks touring the South. After about a week in the capital,...
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 I first met General Alexander Lebed, shortly after he was forced to retire from his military career in 1995, he was a crusty soldier with great political ambitions, itching for action but visibly uncomfortable in mufti. His tie knot was too wide and his parade-ground bass sounded coarse and unmodulated. His face, with more...
“In the Name of the most Holy & undivided Trinity.” A Thus begins the Treaty of Paris (1783) by which Great Britain formally conceded the existence of the independent United States of America. This matter-of-fact invocation of the Triune God of Christianity stands in sharp contrast to the stirring tributes to human authority in the...
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...
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, while...
George Garrett, Chronicles’ most distinguished contributing editor, can be relied upon, always, to tell it like it is. He is doing just that when he writes in a blurb to Reinventing the South: “[T]hese essays are splendidly written—mercifully free of contemporary critical jargon and easily accessible to the good and serious reader.” And he amplifies...
“The United States of America—the greatest potential force, material, moral, and spiritual, in the world.” —G. Lowes Dickinson For Paul Johnson, American history was a non-subject in his days at Oxford and its School of Modern History in the 1940’s. “Nothing was said of America, except insofar as it lay on...
I pretty much devoured the “Minority Cultures” issue (February) in one sitting. Every issue is stellar, but the great thing I find again and again is that reading all these fine writers is like loving so many different works of a particular composer that it is hard to make up one’s mind as to which...
On July 21, President Joe Biden held a townhall in Cincinnati, taking questions from gushingly friendly CNN “journalists.” The room in which he spoke was half empty. From all appearances, Biden confirmed the suspicions of his critics that he is failing mentally and that what his “advisers” told him to say parroted the views of the left...
Pick up any newspaper at random, and you will come upon story after story of children being murdered, beaten, and molested. I begin this chapter on Monday, October 19, 1992, and looking over the Chicago Tribune I discover: a frontpage story on Chicago schoolchildren venting their grief over the murder of their friends, a headline...
“These monstrous views, . . . these venemous teachings.” —Pope Leo XIII on socialism According to the jacket copy of Doing Well and Doing Good, Richard John Neuhaus is “one of the most prominent religious intellectuals” of our time (which helps explain our time). Neuhaus argues that while “Christianity has had nothing to say” to...
“This is the biggest contract in the history of the gas sector of the former USSR,” Vladimir Putin said after the $400 billion agreement to supply Russian natural gas to China was signed in Shanghai on May 21. It is much more than that, Putin went on: It is an “epochal event.” China’s President Xi...
Seldom in France’s recent history has the difference between what is truly urgent and important and what the public is concerned with been so apparent as during the past twelvemonth. Last October, at a time when international attention was focused on the flood tide of East German refugees that was surging through the breach in...
To mainstream environmental activists, Ron Arnold merits special disdain. A former Sierra Club conservation committee member, Arnold now runs, with associate Alan Gottlieb, the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise in Bellevue, Washington. Together they wrote a 1993 expose of the environmental movement, Trashing the Economy: How Runaway Environmentalism is Wrecking America, which remains...
French President Emanuel Macron’s three-day visit to Washington started on an awkward note when he kissed an obviously uncomfortable President Donald Trump. The scene was a symbolic reminder that the two leaders do not enjoy an “intense, close relationship” invented by the media. In reality Macron is, both ideologically and temperamentally, the polar opposite of...
Kennedy mythology will be on full display for the 60th anniversary of JFK's murder. Despite all the adulation, the real JFK was a man who can only be described with a four-letter word: Fake.
After a lengthy legal battle concluded in September, Spain’s Supreme Court gave its approval to the socialist government’s plans to exhume and remove the remains of General Francisco Franco from the Valley of the Fallen, where they have lain since his death in 1975. The controversial general led Spain’s Nationalist forces to victory over their...
For much of American history, it was understood that no one had a right to immigrate to America, that Americans had the unfettered right to decide who should come to America, and that immigration should be judged on whether it benefited America and Americans, not on whether it was good for immigrants. Applying these principles,...
Texas Politics, by Wilbourn Benton, professor of political science at Texas A&M, is a textbook that surveys the constitution of the state of Texas, with heavy emphasis on the written, legal structure of how the state is run. Much of the book is a dry summary. When he can, the author tells the story of...
Most of my news this month has to do, one way or another, with country music. In a roundabout way, a story out of South Carolina last fall got me thinking about that particular contribution of the South to world civilization. It seems the dean of student affairs at the University of South Carolina asked...
California, once the American Mecca of milk and honey, has fallen on hard times. Though its degradation and decline are largely self-inflicted, California’s condition is nonetheless an American tragedy and a dire portent for the rest of us. The state is fast becoming a colony and milk cow for Mexico, with a few enclaves...
After Dobbs, the many-headed ruling class is licking its wounds … and itching for a rematch. The upcoming midterm election will measure the resistance to the Court's attempt to return to America's constitutional origins.
“If anyone is looking for a good lawyer,” said President Donald Trump ruefully, “I would strongly suggest that you don’t retain the services of Michael Cohen.” Michael Cohen is no Roy Cohn. Tuesday, Trump’s ex-lawyer, staring at five years in prison, pled guilty to a campaign violation that may not even be a crime. Cohen...