So you thought writing hard-core pornography was an easy way to earn a living? You remembered your adolescence and those turgid paperbacks in which the vocabulary was strictly four-letter, the plot rambling and forgotten halfway through the book, and the characters’ names changed periodically as though some of the chapters were lifted bodily from other...
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Trump and the GOP
In Our Interest Another Chronicles read cover to cover, with great delight. Srdja Trifkovic’s essay “Travel Ban, and Beyond” (The American Interest, August) was a thoughtful and excellent argument for a closer examination of immigrants and visitors to our great land. Thank you for another excellent issue. —Mayor David Theiss Ellaville,...
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Yes, America Is Being Invaded
Though most of the migrants crossing the U.S. southern border are in search of economic opportunity, some are used as tools by our enemies. The invasion is deliberate.
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The Heart of Darkness
When the Vietnam War ended in 1975, over 58,000 Americans had lost their lives over the course of almost 20 years. Whatever one may think of the justice or prudence of the U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia, only the most callous of souls regards that loss of life with complete indifference. When the Northern Illinois...
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Trump Dumps the Do-Nothing Congress
Donald Trump is president today because he was seen as a doer not a talker. Among the most common compliments paid him in 2016 was, “At least he gets things done!” And it was exasperation with a dithering GOP Congress, which had failed to enact his or its own agenda, that caused Trump to pull...
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Dionysus in the Trenches
In his masterly Ideas Have Consequences, Richard Weaver (who was fond of the long view) marked the decline of the West from the late 14th century with the development of William of Occam’s doctrine of nominalism. In the short view, though, it is obvious that the Great War was the watershed of modernity: what remained...
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Portrait of a Failed Society
To paraphrase one observer of Albanians, “Mexico is not a society with corruption; Mexico is a corrupt society.” Mexico has been undergoing a social crisis since the end of the Partido Revolutionario Institucional’s 71-year monopoly on political power. Gone is the state’s patronage of competing interests, populism that succeeded by co-opting all opponents. The coffers...
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Trusted Most—Men with Guns
Public confidence in Congress has plummeted to the lowest level of any institution since Gallup began asking the question in 1973. One-half of all Americans have little or no confidence in the Congress. Only 11 percent have a
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The Horrible Politics of “Equality for All”
Equality is a pernicious and dangerous political policy, but that’s exactly what President Obama declared in full voice in his Second Inaugural Address in January as the cause and preoccupation of his administration for the next four years. Of course equality in the abstract is meaningless. It becomes concrete only when we figure out what...
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The Rise and Fall of the Evangelical Elite
The current evangelical elite came of age at a time when secular influences tried to stay neutral toward Christianity; The faith competed as an equal in the marketplace of ideas. But those days are over. In our age of secularist hostility, evangelicals need new tactics.
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Planned Parenthood: Hearts and Minds, and Livers
On Tuesday, July 14, the Irvine, California-based Center for Medical Progress released the first of three videos aimed at exposing some of the horrifying practices of Planned Parenthood, including the harvesting of baby organs through elective abortion for sale to biomedical research groups. The hidden camera shows Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s Senior Director of...
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The Next Abortion Battle
Abortion opponents in South Dakota had a simple message for voters in the mid-term election: Vote what you know in your heart is right. More than 148,000 people heeded the call, voting to retain a state law that banned virtually all abortions in South Dakota. Their numbers, however, amounted to just 44 percent of the...
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Now, the Left Owns It All
That mob that split off from the Donald Trump rally of Jan. 6 to invade the Capitol has proven a godsend to the left. The death of a Capitol cop has enabled the left—which spent the summer after George Floyd’s death trashing “racist cops” and shouting, “Defund the Police!”—to posture as fighting allies of the...
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On Liberalism and Catholicism
James Hitchcock, in his review of my Heart of the World, Center of the Church (“City of Man, City of God,” September), argues that the book is “the summing up of a controversy over a . . . specifically Catholic . . . view of politics” which pits me against certain neoconservative Catholics and, behind...
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Grounds for Suspicion
Republican voters have every right to assume bad faith from Democrats and their vote-counters, who have unscrupulously tried to increase their party’s power while behaving unethically toward electoral opponents.
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Government: Good or Bad? Big or Little?
Toward the beginning of De Caelo (On the Heavens), Aristotle makes the well-known remark that “the least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold”—or, as it is sometimes phrased, “a small error in the beginning leads to a large error later on.” We can easily see that this is true, whether in...
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Blood Relations
In 1840, when Edgar Allan Poe wrote the first modern detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” an unsuspecting public scarcely realized it was witnessing the birth of a new genre that would actually become the most ecumenical of all literary forms. Since Poe’s time, the detective story has flourished among readers of every...
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The Doctors and the Bomb
The furor caused by the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize to the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, represented by its two leading sponsors and leaders. Dr. Bernard Lown of the United States and Dr. Yevgeny Chazov of the Soviet Union, provides a fine opportunity to review the revival of the politics of nuclear...
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Foregone Conclusion
The now famous video of the Los Angeles police beating did not, for me, evoke the formulaic outrage that the media intended. Instead, strangely, it brought back a flood of memories from my misspent youth, a year of which was passed as a reporter on the “police beat” of a daily newspaper in a medium-sized...
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The Third Compartment
“Truths would you teach, or save a sinking land? All fear, none aid you, and few understand.“ —Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Man” Although the raw figures from Census 2000 have been in the public domain for months already, the American public’s response to the latest decennial survey is still not...
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Dumbing-Down the U.S. Navy
“Naval Academy Professor Challenges Rising Diversity,” ran the headline in the Washington Post. The impression left was that some sorehead was griping because black and Hispanic kids were finally being admitted. The Post‘s opening paragraphs reinforced the impression. “Of the 1,230 plebes who took the oath of office at the Naval Academy in Annapolis this...
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The God With Feet of Clay
Liberty: The God That Failed is Christopher Ferrara’s second 90-caliber salvo against liberalism, left and right. His first, The Church and the Libertarian: A Defense of the Catholic Church’s Teaching on Man, Economy, and State, smashed the anti-Christian dogma of Austrian economics. This 699-page tome goes further. It will send the neocons into the corner...
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Diseconomies of Scale
“Free trade,” like “free love,” is a beguiling abstraction that hides more than it reveals. Absolute free trade would be an exchange of commodities between two people without the coercive intervention of a third party. But economic exchange is always embedded in a cultural landscape of noneconomic values, which impose restraints. Blue laws prevent trade...
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Andrew Lytle and the Cultivation of American Letters
The name of Andrew Lytle should be better known than it is: he has been a distinguished novelist and author of some widely anthologized short stories; an essayist, historian, and memoirist; an editor of the Sewanee Review for many years; and a teacher of creative writing at the University of Florida and the University of...
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Freedom of Conscience
The Illinois legislature recently overrode Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s veto of what the newspapers are describing as mandatory-school-prayer legislation. Predictably, the state’s editorial pages are filled with denunciations of this arbitrary attempt to impose religion on the helpless children of Illinois, but in fact, the new law, requiring a minute of silence at the beginning of...
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Are Abortion & Gay Rights American Values?
“My religion defines who I am. And I’ve been a practicing Catholic my whole life,” said Vice President Joe Biden in 2012. “I accept my church’s position on abortion as . . . doctrine. Life begins at conception. . . . I just refuse to impose that on others.” For four decades, Biden backed the...
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Don’t Take Down The Flag
Last week, Dylann Roof walked into the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston and slaughtered nine of the innocent people he found there. Roof’s act of slaughter has rightly been greeted with universal revulsion. But the media and politicians from both parties seized the opportunity to inaugurate a self-righteous crusade against a flag he displayed in...
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Sunset in the Head
Proust wrote, in Time Regained, that “Style is a question not of technique, but of vision.” Technique may be said to inform and undergird the style, but the artistic vision has priority: It is the style. In Charles Edward Eaton’s recent collection, his 17th, comprising new verse (some published previously in Chronicles) and a generous...
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Grand Strategy Revisited
In an election campaign dominated by domestic issues, foreign themes have appeared as isolated snippets. Questions regarding what to do about Syria or Iran, or how to manage relations with China and Russia, produce stock responses unrelated to the broad picture. These are among the most important questions facing political decisionmakers, foreign-policy practitioners, and their...
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What Pat Buchanan Gets Wrong About the Contested Election
Despite Pat Buchanan’s record as a Trump-supporter sans pareil, his most recent column, on why Trump’s challenges to the Biden victory are both futile and possibly harmful, is profoundly unsettling. It is also based on questionable assumptions. “It seems a certainty that not enough electoral votes could be flipped from Biden to Trump to overturn’s Joe Biden’s...
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Trump and the Culture of Political Correctness
Why would the much-married Donald Trump, billionaire, self-promoter, real-estate developer, and leading figure in the world of flashy entertainment, a man who until recently apparently accepted the views of his class on hot-button political and social issues, suddenly become the leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination? The man’s been successful in a variety of...
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Debate-o-mania
The wild rhetoric of Harris and Trump in their epic debate-o-mania should be compared with a general ledger of political actions. Election '24 needs an accountant!
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Extravagant Abandon
On May 22, the Irish people voted by a large majority to permit marriages between two men or two women. Of the two million people who voted—a 60-percent turnout—62 percent supported same-sex “marriage.” It had been a very one-sided contest, with all the major political parties urging their supporters to vote yes. Only 22 years...
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Trusting Whitey
On June 30, 2002, the Rockford school-desegregation lawsuit came to an end. After 13 years of busing; the closing of numerous neighborhood schools, one of which is now a mosque and Islamic school; the construction of several massive (and massively overpriced) magnet schools, ...
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The Progressive Impulse
The debate over gays in the military has highlighted the progressive impulse to look anywhere but to America for cultural truth. On talk shows and in editorials, Americans are urged to emulate “other industrialized nations” (read “increasingly decadent Western Europe”) that permit openly homosexual soldiers and sailors. Often praised is Holland, whose ponytailed, hairnet-coiffed legions...
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The Abolition of Learning
In 1997, the headmaster of the English secondary school in which I was teaching ordered a bibliocaust. The inspectors were coming, and he wanted our library to look up-to-date. All the old stuff had to go; only bright, modern volumes relevant to the contemporary curriculum were to be on the shelves. Each department was told...
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Race and Civil Rights
One would expect race-baiting liberals and leftists to try to glorify the “civil-rights movement” and the laws of the early 1960’s, insisting that we view all of it as earth shaking history, more important than the fall of the Roman Empire, the Norman Invasion, the battles of Tours and Lepanto, the Reformation, the American, French,...
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Bound by History
Most of us objected to The New York Times’ notorious “1619 Project” because it trashes the great achievements of Americans (creating free institutions and conquering a continental wilderness), substituting a story of supposed victimization as the core of our history. Alas, Professor Hall, in his speculations in the March issue (“Slavery and the American Founding”)...
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The Impoverished Debate
Politics, said Henry Adams, “has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.” In recent months, best-seller lists have helped to prove Adams’ point, by featuring many vituperative political tracts from the left and right. The undisputed queen of the genre is Ann Coulter, whose overheated book Slander sold like hotcakes in 2002; lately, she has...
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Will NFL Demand Respect for Old Glory?
“America refuses to address the pervasive evil of white cops killing black men, and I will not stand during a national anthem that honors the flag of such a country!” That is the message Colin Kaepernick sent by “taking a knee” during the singing of “The Star Spangled Banner” before San Francisco ’49s games in...
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The Highlights and Lowlights of Last Night’s Debate
While Trump showed some rough edges and had some inarticulate moments, compared to Biden’s performance, he clearly did the better job of making his case to be the next president.
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Education to the Rescue
In the early 1900’s, Reconstruction studies (excluding the work of W.E.B. DuBois) approved quick restoration of states, Andrew Johnson’s strict constitutionalism, and white Southerners’ revolt against military and Republican rule (which consisted of carpetbaggers, scalawags, and freedmen). These studies—named the “Dunning School” for historian William A. Dunning, whose students applied his interpretation to individual Southern...
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The Cowardly American Corporation
The woke bullies of American capitalism are not really bullies at all. The current corporate aborti-mania is driven by abject fear and quivering compliance with cultural authoritarianism.
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Conservative Credo: Abortion, Conclusion
If the state is to protect life at any cost, doesn't this imply a financial obligation to preserve the life of any child, no matter how deformed or hopeless, no matter what it takes? That means a considerable outlay of tax money, and in parallel cases, when the state assumes ...
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Myths of Terrorism
It’s been a bad year for terrorism in the United States. Not bad, fortunately, in the number of actual attacks (at least at the time of this writing), but in the continuing debasement of the word terrorism, so that it ceases to be a useful characterization of behavior and becomes merely a propaganda slogan for...
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The Economic Realities of U.S. Immigration
Mass immigration is changing the fundamental character of America—our culture, institutions, standards, and objectives. Until recently, our society was the envy of the world, so why are these changes even necessary? In addition to the ruling class’s commitment to globalism and multiculturalism, the chief reason that is given in support of open borders is the...
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Vivek Ramaswamy and Conservative Victimhood
Vivek Ramaswamy once condemned conservative victimhood, especially Trump's Jan. 6 narrative. Now he's indulging it, in order to cultivate Trump supporters.
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Trump—Once and Future King?
“I don’t know if he’ll run in 2024 or not. But if he does, I’m pretty sure he will win the nomination.” So says Mitt Romney, the sole Republican senator to have voted twice to convict President Donald J. Trump of impeachable acts. But is it possible Trump could win the nomination in 2024? What...
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On the Free Market
Llewellyn Rockwell’s article “How the Market Stamps Out Evil” in the December issue was challenging. But whereas his superb philippic on the presidency in the October issue (“Down With the Presidency“) left me baying at the moon, this time I was unconvinced. Can capitalism really be set against a tyrannical government as a force for...
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Classical Liberalism Must Endure
The right must defend and restore the early modern-era values of classical liberalism, rather than abandoning them just because they have been perverted by the postmodern left.