Stripped of its excesses, Donald Trump’s Wednesday speech contains all the ingredients of a campaign that can defeat Hillary Clinton this fall. Indeed, after the speech ended Clinton was suddenly defending the Clinton Foundation against the charge that it is a front for a racket for her family’s enrichment. The specific charges in Trump’s indictment...
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A Doctor Reflects on the Plandemic
A brilliantly orchestrated, seemingly preplanned program of medical tyranny has followed the release of a probable bespoke germ known as SARS-Cov-2, which I call the Faucivirus. A striking feature of this program is the massive effort to frighten, cajole, threaten, and shame the public into taking experimental injections represented as “vaccines.” The whole dystopian spectacle brings to mind something...
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The Establishment’s Hatred Can’t Stop Boris Johnson
“The necessary man” is the term that explains everything in British politics. Boris is the target of all the focused loathing of the Establishment, a force so powerful and widespread that no man can say who drives it. But in a myriad outlets—BBC, The Times, the Platonically-named Guardian, the City of London, academe high and...
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The Need for Real Majority Rule
Democracy, Churchill is supposed to have said, is a very unsatisfactory form of government—only it’s better than any other kind that has been tried. If man cannot be trusted to govern himself, Jefferson wrote, how can he be trusted to govern others, which was a definitive reply to the elitism of Hamilton (and all of...
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Nick Kristof’s Shamhill Clown Show
Nick Kristof will not be on the Oregon ballot in November. Even in liberal Oregon, you can't identify as a state resident unless you actually are one.
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When Duty Doesn’t Call
Americans will cease arguing over the federal Voting Rights Act and its intricacies—oh, I imagine around the time Texas starts exporting ground water to Minnesota, or the Lord returns to judge the quick and the dead. Mandatory voter ID laws passed by Republican legislatures in Texas, Arkansas and Wisconsin have been under legal assault by...
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On Janet Reno
As this article and this issue of Chronicles go to press, the United States Senate Judiciary Committee will be considering whether Dade County State Attorney Janet Reno is, by her character, fit to serve this nation as Attorney General. My own opinion is, no. In the 1988 Dade County, Florida, general election, I was Attorney...
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An Electorate of Sheep
Even the weariest presidential campaign winds somewhere to the sea, and this month, as the ever dwindling number of American voters meanders into the voting booths, the sea is exactly where the political vessels in which the nation sails have wound up. Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink. It is symptomatic of...
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The Fun of Brexit
Arron Banks looks out proudly and pugnaciously from the cover of Bad Boys of Brexit like a character in a Hogarth engraving, flanking the equally Hogarthian Nigel Farage in a photo taken as Farage faced the globe’s agog media on the auspicious morning of June 24, 2016. The four men pictured—Banks, Farage, Richard Tice, and...
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The Progressive Racism of the Ivy League
If the definition of racism is deliberate discrimination based on race, color, or national origin, Yale University appears to be a textbook case of “systemic racism.” And, so, the Department of Justice contends. Last week, Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband charged that “Yale discriminates based on race… in its undergraduate admissions process, and that race...
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Pimping for Africa
Thirty years after publishing Black Mischief, his hilarious novel about Abyssinia, the only independent African monarchy at that time, Evelyn Waugh wrote that the unthinkable in 1932 had come to pass. The Europeans were departing Africa, leaving the administration of the benighted natives to Ministries of Modification presided over by Basil Seals of the United...
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Hating Babies, Hating God
When I sat down to write this article, Google reminded me that, when it comes to the issue of contraception, the stakes are very high. To check the date of publication of Dr. Charles Provan’s important work The Bible and Birth Control, I typed “Charles, Provan, Bible, Birth Control” into the mother of all search...
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Netanyahu, the Mufti and Hitler
Last Tuesday Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu caused a stir when he told the World Zionist Congress that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, inspired Hitler to proceed with the mass murder of European Jews during the Second World War. “Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel...
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Shaming
Knocked Up Produced and distributed by Universal Pictures Directed and written by Judd Apatow Juno Produced and distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures Directed by Jason Reitman Screenplay by Diablo Cody 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days Produced by Mobra Films Directed and written by Cristian Mungiu Distributed by IFC Films Thirty-five years ago,...
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Born Again Again
Abortionists are apt to be a mite diffident in speaking of their calling—hardly surprising, given the nature of their work and its attendant hazards. How many abortionists have you encountered socially? None, I’d wager. After all, open avowal of their daily labors would hardly invite exchange of further pleasantries. Picture the scene over the hors...
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The Truest Polyartist
It need hardly be said again that Laszlo Moholy-Nagy was one of Modernism’s primary figures, whose art, writing, and life remain for many a continuing inspiration. He was a polyartist, a true polyartist, who made consequential contributions to the traditions of several nonadjacent arts—painting, book design, artistic machinery, and photography—amidst lesser achievements in film, theater...
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The ‘Marxism’ Narrative Has Gone Too Far
Conservatives who fixate on Communism misunderstand the dynamic driving today’s left and bringing it to power. They are defending a Maginot Line around which the left has already made an end run.
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The Poet: Companion of the Common Man
What is the role of the poet in society? In a frequently misunderstood remark, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in “A Defence of Poetry” (1821) that poets are the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Shelley’s idea is that poets shape our view of ourselves and the world, which in turn shapes the very course of history...
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Editors’ Round Table on Sarah Palin: Energized—For What?
I will resist the temptation to steal my own thunder for next week’s John Randolph Club meeting in Philadelphia, where I intend to talk about the most important aspect of the Palin Pandemonium: the conservative Christian rejection of the natural order. There are at least two other aspects of McCain-Palin that are troubling: abortion and...
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Selling the Golden Cord
Free trade, according to the usual pundits, is an issue that divides the right. The usual pundits are, as usual, wrong. Free trade, which has never been more than an undocumented alien on the right, is an ideal that does unite much of the left. It is a point on which socialism converges with both...
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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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How Do You Solve A Problem Like Francis?
Pope Francis is not dumb or naive. He is a subversive determined to destroy the Roman Catholic Church.
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The Blind Ape
In the 1970’s, one hardly ever heard the word atheist. One had the impression that the impassive majority never considered the subject long enough to have made the term a part of their active vocabulary; while the typical exception would proffer, with an upraised finger and a coy smirk, something along the lines of “let’s...
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How to Win the War Against Christmas
In the seven years since my first essay on the War Against Christmas appeared in Chronicles, I have had no trouble writing at least one such essay per year, because each year brings new and outrageous attempts to suppress the public celebration of Christmas. My favorite example was the 2002 winner of VDare.com’s invaluable War...
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Roman Spies and Spies in Rome
In the summer of 1943, as Allied forces reached Italy, U.S. Army counterintelligence warned GIs, “You are no longer in Kansas City, San Francisco, or Ada, Oklahoma, but in a European country where espionage has been second nature to the population for centuries.” That “second nature” extends all the way back to early Rome and...
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Democracy and Adultery
A bill proposed in Turkey that would have made adultery a punishable offense was retracted shortly after its introduction. Hailed as a decisive move by the European Commission, this resulted in a proposal to open negotiations on the entrance of Ankara into the European Union. This attitude befits the ideology of the fundamental rights of...
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Who You Talkin’ To, Robert De Niro?
The actor’s self-indulgent rant in New York is the latest example of the all-too-human temptation to garner admiration through performative outrage.
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Tyranny in Our Time
From the December 2013 issue of Chronicles. There is a saying among jurists that hard cases make bad law. Similarly, every book critic knows that the best books make for hard reviewing. Faced with a truly fine work, the reviewer is tempted simply to reproduce the author’s thesis in abbreviation, while scattering as many of...
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A Cold and Distant Mirror
A review of The White Ribbon (produced by Canal+ and Wega Film; written and directed by Michael Haneke; distributed by Sony Pictures Classics). German director Michael Haneke loves to sneer at his middle-class patrons. In Funny Games (1997, remade in the United States in 2007) and Caché (2005), his affluent characters are shown to be...
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Some Things You Have to Face Alone
“Always do what you are afraid to do.” —Anonymous Fall 2000 already seems like a long time ago, and it actually is. Perhaps I remember in a haze of nostalgia for that period, a brief entertainment of hope for the American polity, one which was soon snuffed in a blizzard of dimpled chads and a...
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Hollywood Does History
At 0825 on 20 November 1943, the first of six waves of Marines left the line of departure and headed for the beach on Betio Island, the principal objective for the United States in the Tarawa Atoll. At 4,000 yards out, shells from Japanese artillery pieces started splashing around the amtracs carrying the Marines. At...
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Whose is the Wrong Rally?
By telling people shouting “Jesus Is Lord” that they didn’t belong at her rally, Kamala Harris demonstrated the deep divide over religion between the parties.
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The Importance of Bahkmut
After the fall of Bakhmut, the moment of truth will come if the Ukrainian counteroffensive fizzles out, and especially if the Russians respond by starting a major advance of their own.
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On Internment
Roger McGrath’s article “American MAGIC and Japanese-American Spies” (Sins of Omission, October 2002) deserves a reply. I am not ignorant of the MAGIC?intercepts, but I insist that the United States was wrong to put the Nisei into concentration camps. California Japanese born in Japan did become enemy aliens on December 7, 1941, subject to internment. ...
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Censorship: When to Say No
Every April since 1981 the American Society of journalists and Authors sponsors an “I Read Banned Books” campaign. They routinely trot out copies of children’s books like Alice in Wonderland or Mary Poppins and modern classics like Ulysses—all of which have been censored by somebody somewhere. One of them inevitably quotes Jefferson on tolerating “error...
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The Long Apprenticeship
Prizes are a particular pleasure for people who engage in the peculiar metier of writing books, because they are reassuring. Writing in fact involves a great deal of anxiety both before, during, and after; rewards allow one, at least for a time, to put those anxieties to rest. But my gratitude for your prize has...
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Are We Still Entitled to Some Privacy?
More often than not, current events offer an opportunity for meditation. This is the case today: The friends of a politician turned international financier, now to be tried for rape, have rallied round him, claiming his privacy has been invaded. Though in this case the claim is downright preposterous, by appealing to the right to...
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For Now, the American Republic Stands
Before the November 3 election, a foundational principle of the American republic—checks and balances—was on life support. The same inaccurate pollsters who predicted a blowout win for Biden also predicted the Democrats would take control of the Senate. With one-party Democratic control, America as we know it would disappear. The results of the election didn’t match...
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Boris Johnson’s Fall Offensive
What winter quarters were to the soldier, summer vacations are to the politician of today. The fall campaign has now opened with a surprise Government offensive. Boris Johnson has made the brusque announcement that Parliament will be prorogued for most of September and the first part of October. That will limit to a few days...
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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 into slavery in the southern United...
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Cashiering Andy Jackson
Andrew Jackson was sort of a rough-and-tumble president, undoubtedly, but the United States, in the 1820s and ’30s, was sort of a rough-and-tumble country. Notice how refined and civilized we’ve gotten since then, to the point that a coalition of lady activists is ready to pull President Jackson’s mug off the $20 bill, substituting—well, that’s...
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The Tyranny of Democracy
Winston Churchill’s backhanded praise of democracy as “the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried” is usually cited as the last word on the subject. It is a good way of closing off a dangerous topic of discussion, and it works quite well with that vast majority of people...
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Twenty Years After the Fall, Part 2
Moscow, so the film title went, does not believe in tears, and stories of massacres by criminal gangs who control major enterprises, contract killings over business and political disputes, and savagely beat or kill journalists who don’t recognize the limits of Russian press freedom still pop up in today’s “middle class” Russia, where this sort...
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Will the Catholic Bishops Call Out Joe?
As a cradle Catholic and recipient of Notre Dame’s Laetare Medal, Joe Biden is outspoken in declaring that the principles and beliefs of his Catholic faith guide his public life. “Joe is a man of faith,” was a recurring theme at the Democratic convention that nominated him to become our second Catholic president. Biden has...
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Piltdown Man
Virginia Woolf once wrote that human nature suddenly changed in the year 1912. Such things tend to be at the whim of later generations of critics, but there’s no doubt that the idea of an acceptable form of public entertainment underwent a rude shock in the years just before the outbreak of World War I. ...
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Muffled Voices
“The Noise of the City Cannot Be Heard” was the title of a very popular song in the Soviet Union just after World War II. According to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the song was so much in demand that “no singer, even the most mediocre, could perform it without receiving enthusiastic applause.” The Soviet Chief Administration of...
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Stupid Is Not Enough
When Donald Trump defeated Ted Cruz in the 2016 Indiana presidential primary, the race for the Republican Party nomination was over. The prize was Trump’s. The next day, House Speaker Paul Ryan announced that he was not yet ready to endorse the standard-bearer. George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Jeb Bush quickly followed suit,...
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India, America’s Necessary Partner
India’s prime minister Narendra Modi paid his second visit to the White House in two years on June 8. President Barak Obama was greatly pleased by Modi’s stated willingness to proceed with ratification of the Paris agreement to limit greenhouse gases, and this was the theme duly emphasized in the Western media coverage of their meeting....
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Those Dying Generations
Elegy Produced by Lakeshore Entertainment Directed by Isabel Coixet Screenplay by Nicholas Meyer from a novel by Philip Roth Distributed by Samuel Goldwyn Films Burn After Reading Produced by Relativity Media and Studio Canal Directed and written by Joel and Ethan Coen Distributed by Focus Features Elegy, Spanish director Isabel Coixet’s adaptation of Philip Roth’s...
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Hate Speech Makes a Comeback
Well, it sure didn’t take long for the Tucson Truce to collapse. After Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot on Jan. 8 by a berserker who killed six others, including a federal judge and a 9-year-old girl, and wounded 13, the media were aflame with charges the right had created the climate of hate in...