Terrorism in France has usually come—in recent years—from clandestine Muslim groups engaged in a perpetual jihad against the West. But recent attacks attributed to Corsican separatists provide another example of a violent nationalism rearing its head at precisely the time when Europe’s policy elite is proclaiming a new era of unity and cooperation. The immediate...
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Honest Words
It may be an embarrassing admission for somebody who has been a book review editor for the last 14 and a half years, but the truth is I had never heard of Tony Hillerman until May 1989, when I began traveling in the Southwest in connection with a book-writing project I am working on and...
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Comment
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...
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Reflections on Immigration Reform
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...
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Time to Get Over the Russophobia
Unless there is a late surge for Communist Party candidate Pavel Grudinin, who is running second with 7 percent, Vladimir Putin will be re-elected president of Russia for another six years on March 18. Then we must decide whether to continue on course into a second Cold War, or engage Russia, as every president sought...
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What We Are Reading: February 2024
Short reviews of The Life of Samuel Johnson, by James Boswell, and How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy, by Batya Ungar-Sargon.
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Roots of a New World Order
Though Thomas Knock draws no explicit comparisons between Woodrow Wilson’s plans for a post- Great War world and the policies George Bush tried to fashion for a post-Cold War world, his use of the term “New World Order” in the title of his book is clearly meant to steer the reader to think in parallel...
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The Remnants of Realism
Philip Roth: The Anatomy Lesson; Farrar, Straus & Grioux; New York. Louis Auchincloss: Exit Lady Masham; Houghton Mifflin; Boston. In the opinion of Tom Wolfe, “the introduction of realism into literature… was like the introduction of electricity into machine technology. It was not just another device. It raised the state of the art to a new magnitude.”...
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The Secret, Sordid Mouth of Krystle Matthews
In her unguarded moments, South Carolina politician Krystle Mathews provided a glimpse into the philosophy and methods of racial intimidation used by some blacks to gain and maintain political power.
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The Closing of the Conservative Mind
Why do we call it liberal education? When an eighteen-year-old graduates from high school and goes off to college to pick up a smattering of history and literature, why should we describe his course of study as the liberal arts? Educators once knew the answers to these questions, but it has been many years since...
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September 11: Ten Years After
Ten years ago, on the morning of September 11, I was in my apartment in California getting ready for work when a friend called. “Turn on the TV,” she said. “What’s going on?” “Just turn on the TV.” I turned on the tube in time to see the second airliner crash into the south tower...
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A Tale of Two Disasters: The Balkans and the Middle East
Yesterday and today (October 14-15) I’ve been taking part in an interesting conference at the Patriarchate of Pec, in the occupied Serbian province of Kosovo. Organized by Bishop Jovan (Culibrk), an old friend of Dr. Fleming’s and mine, The Balkans and the Middle East Mirroring Each Other marks the centenary of the First Balkan War and...
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A Very Russian Drama
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.
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The Corporate Citizen National vs. Transnational Economic Strategies
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...
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Mongrels All! or, Slaves With New Masters
Of late, our demographic soothsayers have been assuring us that by 2040 or thereabouts America will no longer be a Caucasian-majority country, and that with the eclipse of the white majority there will be, to belabor the obvious, no majority culture. For many this is cause for celebration. Among minorities, or at least those who...
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Give Us Your Huddled Masses
“Send these, the homeless, tempest tossed to me.” —Emma Lazarus The publication of a Julian Simon book is a cause for rejoicing among advocates of laissez-faire and open-border immigration. According to Dr. Simon, who teaches business administration at the University of Maryland and is an adjunct scholar at the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute,...
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Imperialism From the Cradle to the Grave
In the first year of Cyrus the king the same Cyrus the king made a decree concerning the house of God at Jerusalem, Let the house be builded, the place they offered sacrifices, and let the foundations thereof be strongly laid. Mesopotamia was the cradle of empires, but it was also their grave, as the...
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Dashing Through Asia
“Down to Gehenna and up to the throne, He travels the fastest who travels alone.” —Rudyard Kipling Not as horrible as Calcutta or as ugly as Seoul, Bangkok, spreading along the flat flanks of the Chao Phraya river, is the whorehouse of Asia. Berth girls and boys will do anything you...
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Dark Clouds Ahead
If America’s contested election ends in Joe Biden’s inauguration, the world will be less safe. Biden is an instinctive interventionist who has supported bad policies for decades. He was an outspoken advocate of Bill Clinton’s military interventions in the Balkans in the 1990s, and in the early 2000s he supported both the War in Afghanistan and...
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The Christian and Creation
Where does man fit into nature? What is his response to the created universe? Lynn White has argued that the Christian position is at the very heart of the environmental crisis. He, and others, see the biblical view of the dominion of man over nature as being responsible for our misuse of our natural resources....
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Alternative California
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...
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Rice Paddies and Tea Houses
The schedule is rather monotonous for a lecturer invited to the big cities where universities are usually located. First comes the airport, then the car with the polite, smiling young man as a guide, then hotel room and restaurant, podium, introduction, photo graphs, the lecture itself-then the whole thing in reverse order the next day....
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The Decline of the Art of Lying
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,...
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“A Pure American Type of a Rather Rare Species”
Dean Gooderham Acheson was born in Middletown, Connecticut, on April 11, 1893, into a stable world of which Europe was the center and where America was poised to attain hemispheric dominance. That world’s certainties were shattered in the trenches of Northern France, but the shock was less profound among America’s northeastern aristocracy—to which Acheson belonged...
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Red Cloud’s War
The Oglala Sioux chief Red Cloud is generally portrayed as someone who chewed up the U.S. Army in battle after battle. He was, in the words of one author, “the first and only Indian leader in the West to win a war with the United States.” This conclusion is based on the Army’s decision to...
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Lincolnism Today
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...
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Left Behind
How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? —Psalm 137:4 But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel. —1 Timothy 5:8 The county that became...
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New York vs. New York
“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...
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A Monumental Proposal
I was recently perplexed to see in the news that Harvard, the oldest institution of higher learning in the nation, had declared that, though master has no etymological relation to slavery (but rather to magister), the word would nevertheless be abandoned as a title for a resident supervisor of student housing, and be replaced by...
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The Middle-Class Moment
With a whoop and a holler, politicians have suddenly discovered that there’s a wild animal called the American middle class prowling around, the voting booths, and officeholders are pounding down the stairs to make sure the rough beast does no damage once it gets inside the house. Almost every issue that has emerged in national...
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Books in Brief: March 2021
America’s Revolutionary Mind, by C. Bradley Thompson (Encounter Books; 584 pp., $32.99). Thompson’s examination of colonial America’s natural rights political culture and the effects of the Declaration’s oft-quoted passage about unalienable rights is not likely to please members of the traditional right, and as such I consider it required reading. Thompson presents copious evidence that...
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DEMOCRATISM
The move toward mass, direct democracy in the large nationstate derives much of its appeal from an image of direct democracy reminiscent of the Athenian Assembly, or of the New England town meeting. But such an appeal is mistaken. The social conditions for face-to-face interaction and deliberation present on a small scale are not present...
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The Women Come and Go. . .
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...
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From Bryan to Buchanan
It is an unwritten law of American politics that the politicians who devote themselves to the single-minded pursuit of power and wealth must pretend to be men of the people. The 1996 presidential campaign might have been scripted by Frank Capra, since virtually every candidate is a would-be John Doe or Jefferson Smith, taking on...
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Mr. Trump: America Doesn’t Need Tiny, Corrupt Montenegro in NATO
During the presidential campaign Donald Trump horrified the bipartisan foreign policy mandarinate by suggesting that NATO was “obsolete” and useless against the only real threat faced by Europe: the massive influx of violent Muslims applauded by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the “EuSSR” bureaucracy in Brussels, and the Obama Administration. Trump also indicated that America’s treaty...
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Still Sorry After All These Years
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...
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Trump’s Comprehensive Volte-Face
During the presidential campaign and in the immediate aftermath of his election victory, Donald Trump had made a number of conciliatory remarks about Russia’s president Vladimir Putin and the possibility of substantial improvement in relations between Washington and Moscow. On the campaign trail he also made the well-publicized statement that NATO was obsolete, and last...
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The Monk From Mt. Athos
Our Greek host on Santorini, a young hotelier and newly married tour promoter, is trying to sell us a Mount Olympus excursion. “Half the German tourists frown, they are unhappy, and you wonder why,” he explains. “We Greeks, we drink, we dance, we smile, we enjoy life. When you are on holiday, you should enjoy...
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Why They Hate Jefferson
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...
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How Republican Supreme Court Justices Gave Us Affirmative Action
A Dubious Expediency: How Race Preferences Damage Higher Education ed. by Gail Heriot and Maimon Schwarzchild Encounter Books 336 pp., $28.99 Scholars increasingly treat the issue of race with kid gloves. As the cancel culture accelerates, race—always a sensitive topic—has become nearly taboo. Any serious exploration of the correlation of intelligence and race is...
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A “Goodwill” Tour
Hillary Clinton’s visit to Africa in late March, which was billed as a “goodwill tour” to strengthen America’s ties with developing nations, combined business with pleasure. In between meetings and photo-opportunities with African heads of state, Mrs. Clinton and her daughter Chelsea did a little taxpayer-funded sightseeing in the wilds of Uganda, Tanzania, and other...
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On the Road to Somewhere
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...
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Small-Town Schizophrenia
“I see the rural virtues leave the land. “ —Oliver Goldsmith Garrison Keillor, the writer, has finally made it big. Five years ago a regional cult figure and occasional contributor to the New Yorker, Keillor has now vaulted on to the cover of Time and to the top of the New...
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Old McDonald’s Farm
Now, when world food supplies are more uncertain than they have been for more than a century, the United States badly needs a national agricultural policy. While Congress and its agricultural committees are putting the finishing touches on another farm bill to replace the one expiring, it is not likely that we’ll get what we...
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Grappling With Armageddon
The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War; by Fred Kaplan; Simon & Schuster; 384 pp., $18.00 In 1958, former RAF officer Peter George (under the pseudonym Peter Bryant) wrote Red Alert, a novel about a communication accident that almost triggers a nuclear war. In a series of short, increasingly tense, time-stamped chapters,...
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Is Mayor de Blasio an Anti-Asian Bigot?
“Though New York City has one of the most segregated schools systems in the country,” writes Elizabeth Harris of the New York Times, until now, Mayor Bill de Blasio “was all but silent on the issue.” He was “reluctant even to use the word ‘segregation.'” Now the notion that the liberal mayor belongs in the...
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Pro-migrant Dems Playing Russian Roulette with Our Safety
Allowing migrants—or anyone—to board airplanes without photo ID, and promoting ID cards that blur the lines between legal and illegal, sabotage us.
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Shattering North America
When President George W. Bush, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and Mexican President Felipe Calderón met in Quebec in mid-August, they were greeted by news stories that had migrated into the mainstream media from the populist fringe, alleging that the three national leaders were conspiring to create a supranational North American Union (NAU). Responding to...
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The High Cost of Getting Started
Living at home with one’s parents and saving money is an increasingly attractive option for young, working adults facing high housing costs.
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Passionate and Incorruptible
This beautiful little book—one that does much credit to its publisher— appears as a blessing amid the clutter and noise and ugliness that characterize the publishing industry as well as literary discourse today. A pleasure to hold and to behold, this volume is also the vehicle for rendering words, thoughts, and values that seem new...