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.
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Haider: The Death of a Populist
Jörg Haider, the best known Austrian politician, was killed in a car crash on October 11. His death marks the end of a colorful career untypical for a “far-Right” figure. Armani-clad fitness fanatic, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s pal with a permanent tan, Haider cut a figure vastly different from the bland establishmentarians who have ran Austria for...
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Portraits: Some Notes on the Poetry of Growing Old
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...
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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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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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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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Stupid Conservatives
“A Conservative is only a Tory who is ashamed of himself.” —J. Hookham Frere On page 62 of this book, the author recalls with irritation having once been accused by Murray Kempton of dishonoring the “legacy” of His Master’s Voice, H. L. Mencken, by “conformism.” How, Tyrrell demanded incredulously, was it possible for him to...
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The True Source
Phyllis Schlafly, in the spring of 1973, squared off in debate at Illinois State University against archfeminist Betty Friedan. The subject was the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, at the time just a few states short of ratification. Those were the years when feminists went out of their way to look bad: frumpy clothes;...
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Confessions of an Autodidact
Is self-education a good idea? The greatest of my teachers, Walter Starkie, in his delightful autobiography Scholars and Gypsies, recalls a comment made in 1914 by his godfather, J.P Mahaffy, the legendary provost of Trinity College, Dublin, about W.B. Yeats: “Poor fellow! He is an autodidaktos—he never worked under a Master.” Yeats did not end...
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Bumpy BRICS Road
Until a year ago it had seemed that BRICS, the association of five emerging economies—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—was morphing from a loose economic alliance into a geopolitical force willing and able to challenge the global order. Its members’ potential to do so appeared impressive: They account for three billion people (two fifths...
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The French Center Holds—In a World Coming Apart
“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” So wrote William Butler Yeats in the wake of the Great War of 1914-1918 that had ravaged the Christian civilization he had known. In France on Sunday, the center held, as President Emmanuel Macron rolled up a crushing 59 percent to 41 percent victory in the runoff election...
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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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Iran: The Score, the Options
In recent weeks the proponents of an American war against Iran have been getting impatient with President Obama’s apparent unwillingness to get with the program. Joe Lieberman, Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman, and Howard Berman, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, now press the President to impose a short time limit on...
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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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An America First Moment
Donald Trump has refused to go to war with Iran. He has refused to go to war in Syria. He has imposed tariffs to save American jobs. He is capping the number of refugees coming into America–as opposed to all the countries they have to cross to get to America–at a very manageable number. And...
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Jefferson’s Cousin
There are probably more judicial biographies of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall than of all the rest of the Supreme Court justices combined, so why another one? R. Kent Newmyer, historian and law professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law, undertook to write a work that would not mirror the standard hagiographical...
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Taking Over the Board
The Sierra Club’s reactivation of its eight-year intra- and extra-mural war over its policy concerning immigration is the latest exhibit opening at the Great American Madhouse. In 1996, the club officially announced itself neutral on the subject of immigration and population control. Two years later, a faction proposed a measure advocating immigration restriction in behalf...
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CPAC Moves to Rockford?
Here’s how you’ll know the conservative movement means something again: when the Conservative Political Action Conference moves its annual meeting from Washington, D.C., to Rockford. Or Dubuque. Or Peoria. Or Helena. Or San Antonio. Or Bakersfield. Or Murfreesboro. Anywhere but the District of Corruption. Conservatives flock from around the country to CPAC, expecting to advance...
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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 Third Way?
I went into the 2000 presidential campaign an enthusiastic supporter of Pat Buchanan’s bid for the White House as a third-party candidate. I emerged more convinced than ever that Buchanan would have made an outstanding president but skeptical that a serious right-wing party will be able to emerge, at least in the short run. I...
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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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Death of a Propositional Nation
The mythical nation dedicated to a proposition is dying, and rioters, looters, and social justice warriors are playing Dr. Kevorkian. Because the United States has not reached their construct of the purest Platonic form of equality, it must be euthanized to make room for a new empire to rise in its place. It’s fitting that activists,...
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Phenomenon of Popular Movements
The phenomenon of popular movements of protest succeeding and then being swallowed up by the Establishment is not a new story in American history, but the fate of “conservatism” in the last decade or so gives a remarkable case study. Not long ago, after ages of liberal dominance, conservatism seemed to be in the ascendancy...
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Jihad’s Fifth Column
No one on the planet, by now, has not heard of the violence that greeted Pope Benedict’s references to Emperor Manuel II and his reflections on Islam. Manuel, invariably (and unfairly) described as “obscure” or “forgotten,” lived in one of those interesting ages of the world that teach lessons to those who are not blind...
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Not Nostrums, but Normalcy
One year into his tenure as Australia's prime minister, center-left Labor PM Anthony Albanese has had a stabilizing influence on the country following the misrule of Liberal Party PM Scott Morrison.
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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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Expanding Every Day
The definition of racism is expanding every day. For example, some New Jersey residents say a community that erects anticrime walls and gates, common in California and other states, is guilty of racism, no matter who lives there. But don’t we have a right to self-protection? In Georgia, a drugstore chain is accused of racism...
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The American Muse
[I]n populous Egypt they fatten up many bookish pedants who quarrel unceasingly in the Muses’ birdcage.” —Timon of Phlius, 230 B.C. For almost as long as there have been literary works, there have been literary canons, largely established by bookish pedants who do, indeed, “quarrel unceasingly.” The quarreling began early in the third century B.C....
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Good Books That Sell Good
Gore Vidal’s “American chronicle” is a roman fleuve that looks beyond Powell’s The Music of Time to Roger Martin du Card’s Les Thibaults series of the 1920’s and 30’s, and what it demonstrates is that our assumptions about popular culture are incomplete, if not actually wrong. The notion that commercial success varies inversely with quality...
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A Client State Pushes Eighty
The U.S. occupation and reconstruction of Japan began nearly 80 years ago and is considered by many to be an unqualified success. But Japan's national character was hollowed out in the process; what remains is a shell of a country still obedient to its conquerors.
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A Balkan Travelogue
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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The Iceberg Cometh
Throughout the Introduction and into the first chapter of Ship of Fools you seem to be seated before a television screen listening to, and watching, Tucker Carlson in his nightly broadcast. The voice is the same, the tone is the same; so is the manner. Then, almost imperceptibly, you find yourself slipping—or rather being slipped—from...
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The Cajuns of Louisiana
In the 1980’s, “Cajun” suddenly became “cool.” From rotund Chef Paul Prudhomme and high-rolling Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards to the music of Beausoleil and “blackened” redfish, anyone and anything associated with the remnants of French culture along the Gulf Coast was “in.” The nation eagerly embraced the battle-cry of the Cajun: “Let the good times...
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Something to Remember
Francis Parkman concluded his monumental account of France and England in North America with the Peace of Paris of 1763, by which France ceded Quebec, once and for all, to the British Empire. In an uncharacteristically smug observation on the aftermath, Parkman described the French Canadians as “a people bereft of every vestige of civil...
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Are China’s Threats to Taiwan a Bluff?
Monday, four dozen Chinese military aircraft flew into Taiwan’s air defense zone, climaxing a weekend of provocations that saw nearly 150 sorties of China-based fighters and bombers. The U.S. State Department countered by issuing a stern statement warning Beijing about the adverse effect on regional “stability” of such “provocative military activity.” Yet even as the...
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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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VDARE Case Another Example of New York’s Weaponization of the Law
What is happening to Peter and Lydia Brimelow exemplifies the kind of lawfare that the same cast of characters are now waging against Trump. New York voters, ultimately, are the ones to blame.
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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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Remembering William Pitt
Long after his death, William Pitt is remembered as one of England’s finest statesmen, a man who valued his country's mixed constitution and unique combination of high regard for the rights of man and a stable social order where king, nobles, and commoners all had their place.
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The Doors of Deception
One of the many sociological uses of Hollywood is its dramatic availability when things go wrong in America. Michael Satchell, for instance, has raised the question in Parade of whether the movies by too often glamorizing drugs and alcohol encourage their use among young people. He cites Goldie Hawn, Jane Fonda, Dolly Parton, Lily Tomlin,...
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The Christian Zionist Threat to Peace
In assessing the political conditions necessary to establish a lasting peace in Israel-Palestine, Americans are confronted with a theological question: Does the Bible insist that Christians take a certain view regarding the treatment of the Jewish people in particular, their presence in the Holy Land, or the placement of the borders of Israel? One particular...
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A Legendary Failure of Liberalism
When Brown v. Board of Education, the 9-0 Warren Court ruling came down 60 years ago, desegregating America’s public schools, this writer was a sophomore at Gonzaga in Washington, D.C. In the shadow of the Capitol, Gonzaga was deep inside the city. And hitchhiking to school every day, one could see the “for sale” signs...
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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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What I Saw (and Prayed) in New Orleans
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always...
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Monocultural Resilience
At the end of the ongoing global melodrama’s first quarter, it seems reasonable to predict that this will be a two-act play with the final curtain coming down in July. It will end as a tragedy, not because the outcome was preordained in a world impervious to human choices, but because men have free will....
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The Conquest of the United States and Puerto Rico
On the matter of statehood, Puerto Rico’s outstanding novelist has written . . . actually, I have no idea what he has written, because I do not read Spanish, nor do I plan to learn. Should our flag be defaced by a 51st star for Puerto Rico—which is, admittedly, more deserving of stellification than the...
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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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The Last Pioneers
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....
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Exploring Beyond the Internet
The only certainty is that uncertainty is one of the best prompts for asking what it means to be human.
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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...