In these troubled times of pandemics, racial conflict, and economic instability, disagreements over American conservatism may not sound particularly important. Yet, when “cancel culture” tactics are being applied to the right, the meaning of conservatism is no longer just an academic talking point. This hostile climate has rekindled robust debate on what exactly conservatism means....
About a hundred years before the Civil War, two British surveyors, Jeremiah Mason and Charles Dixon, with a crew of ax-men, marked out 270 miles of wilderness. They set a stone at every mile, and another grander one embossed with the arms of the Penn and Calvert clans every five miles. The resulting map pacified...
Tee-hee. Such is the line in liberal circles concerning the federal district court decision striking down the federal Defense of Marriage Act on, among other grounds, those of “States Rights.” Including Massachusetts’ right to allow gay marriage without prejudice to the partners’ right to federal benefits. Congress, a decade and a half ago, voted that...
Donald Trump destroyed the Democrats’ blue wall and, with it, their hopes for 2028.
The latest school massacre has all the do-gooders crying for more gun control, yet few have touched upon the blood-splattering, shoot-’em-up electronic games that the unhinged nerd who murdered 27 people in Newtown, Connecticut, played. His favorite was Call of Duty, a first-person-shooter game where participants use assault rifles, machine guns, and other weapons to...
The New Year is in full swing, and with it new laws and regulations carefully designed to enrich the lives of Americans who are insane. Because the essence of our approach to life together in our degenerate age is that, for every problem humanoids may encounter, there is a potential law that could solve it,...
Virginia is a newly blue state, with a Democratic governor and two Democratic senators, that Joe Biden won by 10 points. Hence, former Gov. Terry McAuliffe was an early and solid favorite to regain the office he vacated in 2017. But if McAuliffe loses Tuesday, the defeat will be measured on the Richter scale. For...
The invitation to the first symposium came from my old alma mater, the Free University of Brussels, founded by liberals, freemasons, and socialists, all united in their opposition to the Catholic Church, embodied by the 15th-century University of Louvain. Nostalgia drove me to the once well-known quartiers, or rather what remains of them now that...
Order withdrawal of troops and materiel from Afghanistan and Iraq. (Without bringing the indigenous population with you.) Perhaps a small CIA presence might be maintained just for intelligence-gathering, which is what they are supposed to be doing anyway. Join with Russia to destroy ISIS in preparation for a withdrawal from Syria. This will allow the...
“Missouri doesn’t have a death penalty,” a former prosecutor remarked to me last Christmas. He was wrong, as he well knew. The Revised Statutes of Missouri specifically allow for capital punishment. But as a practical matter, the man was right. At the time he spoke, Missouri had not put a person to death since 1965,...
I am “not isolationist, but I am ‘America First,'” Donald Trump told the New York Times last weekend. “I like the expression.” Of NATO, where the U.S. underwrites three-fourths of the cost of defending Europe, Trump calls this arrangement “unfair, economically, to us,” and adds, “We will not be ripped off anymore.” Beltway media may...
In the late 1980’s, I predicted that by the end of the century, which is also the end of the millennium, “The Soviet Union, or perhaps by that time, Russia, would be Christian, and the United States would be pagan.” The first, hesitant part of that prophecy, Russia, has already been fulfilled. And while Russia...
Kosta Tsipsis: Arsenal: Understanding Weapons in the Nuclear Age; Simon & Schuster; New York. Freeman Dyson: Weapons and Hope; Harper & Row; New York The peace movement has become a permanent fixture of democratic politics. The movement is most visible when its members are marching in the streets, but it is most effective when there...
As Hercules cleaned the stables of King Augeas so, too, must we divert all our ingenuity and strength to removing the accumulated filth of the D.C. swamp.
Gordon Wood shows how far we have drifted from the Founding Fathers' vision of a polity that would limit arbitrary power in order that the government might serve the people rather than tyrannize them.
George Dangerfield’s The Strange Death of Liberal England was published in 1935. It is an exceptionally well-written book and became a cult classic, its haunting title suggesting a mysterious crime, as in a thriller. Dangerfield’s theme was the decay of the civilization created by the British Liberal movement in the years that led up to...
Lewis P. Simpson, in his memorable preface to The Literary Correspondence of Donald Davidson and Allen Tate, evoked Thomas Carlyle’s description of Robert Burns to hail Davidson’s own achievement. Burns, wrote Carlyle, was a “piece of right Saxon stuff: strong as the Harz-rock, rooted in the depths of the world;—rock, yet with wells of living...
A first-grade teacher in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., concludes that while some of her pupils suffer various degrees of parental neglect, others seem to be experiencing the opposite extreme: such pampering at home that they cannot even tie their own shoes, and must have it done for them. It takes a while before she...
The news descended with crushing force: I must be getting really old. Rising from the dinner table, I had pulled back my wife’s chair, and our waiter complimented me. He complimented me for the kind of civil and reflexive action to which my generation was bred in the post-World War II years? Ah, yes; he...
I did not expect to like the Basilica of Sacré Coeur, which is why I had never bothered to go up to Montmartre. The basilica was commissioned by Catholics who had survived the Paris Commune of 1870-71, when churches were destroyed and the faithful were persecuted. Even as the revolution was sputtering out, the communists...
Heather Mac Donald documents the absurdities imposed on America by those who put racial equity above all else.
The use of NATO military strikes against the Bosnian Serbs, at the urgings of the Clinton administration, camouflages for the moment a rift that has occurred in the Western alliance. Sooner or later recriminations over “who lost Yugoslavia?” are certain to come. And though it may be a while before historians render a verdict, there...
“There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader,” is a remark attributed to a French politician during the turbulent times of 1848. Joe Biden’s Wednesday declaration that President Donald Trump should be impeached is in that tradition. Joe is scrambling to get out in front of the sentiment for impeachment...
Putin’s war on "woke" had me cheering, especially when he urged nationalists, conservatives, and traditionalists to unite and reject multiculturalism. But as his army shells Ukraine, it is hard to blame anyone but him for the situation there.
Revolutionary Road Produced and distributed by Dreamworks and BBC Films Directed by Sam Mendes Screenplay by Justin Haythe from Richard Yates’ novel The Lemon Tree Produced by Eran Riklis Productions and Heimatfilm Directed by Eran Riklis Screenplay by Suha Arraf Distributed by IFC Films British director Sam Mendes has turned Richard Yates’ 1961 novel,...
For Southerners, the hatred of so many of their “fellow Americans” comes so steadily and predictably that it is usually best simply to ignore it and let the heathen rage. We are an easy-going, non-ideological, and Christian people, so most of us don’t even notice. However, the Washington Times has usefully exposed a particularly egregious example, an...
The really important news from Egypt is not the “martyrdom” of some hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood supporters and underage human shields set up for sacrifice by their leaders. It is not the brutality of the security forces fighting the emergence of a Khalifate within the state. It is the targeting of dozens of Christian churches, institutions and...
In medias res: Loud, booming, clanging in an industrial factory. Bottles and other loose articles shake and nearly crash to the floor with each successive pounding, rattle of the building. A figure falls to a low crouch holding a drawn pistol while glancing about like a cornered animal. Two calm men enter the room and...
Dear Mr. Romney: In spite of the Herculean labors of their spin doctors, politicians on the stump often say stupid things in the heat of the moment, and you are probably right to resent the unfairness of journalists who exaggerate the importance of such mundane stupidities. But rarely are politicians’ unconsidered remarks so remarkably unconsidered...
David Brock, scourge of Anita Hill and Bill Clinton, the young man who gave new meaning and currency to the phrase “Arkansas state trooper,” has made a second career of repenting of his years in the conservative movement. He has now retold the story of his disaffection from the movement in Blinded by the Right:...
The old cathedral town of Naumburg, where Friedrich Nietzsche spent 12 of the first 18 and seven of the last ten years of his life, is located in the southeastern corner of the Land (province) of Sachsen-Anhalt, roughly halfway between Weimar and Leipzig. In late April and early May of 1945, this part of Germany...
The division among Jews worldwide regarding Israeli judicial reforms represents a growing gulf between Jewish liberals and conservatives, or "globalists" and "localists."
“Nado alert! Nado alert!” people were screaming about 1 am outside my room at Michaels Barracks in Hoechst, West Germany, a couple of days after I was posted there on Sept. 12, 1979. My roommate said it likely was just a drill, sending us out in our jeeps and trucks into the Fulda Gap to...
Eerdmans justly enjoys a reputation as one of America’s leading Christian publishers; however, as modern Christianity itself becomes increasingly fragmented and secularized, publishing books that try to represent the whole of it, as these two volumes do, becomes increasingly problematic. Though the United States has never been united by a single communion or creed, until...
Republicans routinely portray themselves as fiscal guardians. In truth, they, like the Democrats, are irresponsible wastrels. Outlays are up by one third under President George W. Bush, making him the biggest spender since Lyndon B. Johnson. As the Cato Institute’s Stephen Slivinski observes, “Even after excluding spending on defense and homeland security, Bush is still...
In 1984, Richard John Neuhaus, then still a Lutheran pastor, published The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America. The book was, as they say, an “immediate sensation,” in no small part because Neuhaus’s central claim—that religious voices were being forced out of political debate by the federal courts’ mistaken emphasis on the separation...
Voter cynicism and apathy are at an all-time high, and as such we can expect the unexpected come November. Those Middle American Radicals whom Sam Francis has been writing about will either revolt at the polls or sit at home, disgusted. Thus far, during the primary season, someone has been staying home, since turnout has...
As tens of thousands marched in the streets of Tehran on Wednesday in support of the regime, the head of the Revolutionary Guard Corps assured Iranians the “sedition” had been defeated. Maj. Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari is whistling past the graveyard. The protests that broke out a week ago and spread and became riots are...
In 1983 I noted in Just and Painful: A Case for the Corporal Punishment of Criminals that there were approximately 315,000 individuals incarcerated in federal and state prisons, plus some 158,000 persons in jails of various kinds. The annual cost of this incarceration was estimated then to be $20,000 per inmate, amounting to an annual...
Too many of today’s “journalists,” on both the right and the left, have no drive for pursuing the story or finding what is interesting in their subject. This, more than anything, is killing journalism.
It often happens that when a Greek or Latin word is given a new lease on life in one of the major modern languages, and especially in English, the original meaning of the word may be replaced by a rather different one. This is particularly the case when a word, which was a strongly transitive...
“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” —Blanche DuBois, A Streetcar Named Desire Sometimes, enlightenment, like confusion, can come from an unexpected source. Take the comedian, George Carlin, for example. I think that his broadcasting of dirty words is a bit less than profound, as is his hostility toward most civilized conventions; some...
The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return by Michael Anton Regnery Publishing 500 pp., $32.99 Michael Anton attracted widespread public notice in Sept. 2016 as the author of a pseudonymous article in the Claremont Review called “The Flight 93 Election.” It became one of the most widely debated and disseminated articles of the...
The greatest criminal and most profitable enterprise in the world is FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association). As I write, billions are watching obscenely overpaid footballers competing for a cup that is long overdue for a total remake. The World Cup was a very good idea long ago, but so was selective democracy and waging...
The recent successes of the American right depend, in part, on its ability to deflect lower-middle-class resentment from the rich to a parasitic “new class” of professional problem-solvers and moral relativists. In 1975, William Rusher of the National Review referred to the emergence of a “verbalist” elite, “neither businessmen nor manufacturers, blue-collar workers or farmers,”...
David Daleiden, the “mastermind” behind the Planned Parenthood sting videos of the Summer of Gay Marriage and Caitlyn Jenner, and fellow activist Sandra Merritt face a grand-jury indictment in Harris County, Texas, as of this writing. Both are charged with violating Texas law pertaining to “perjury and other falsification,” for having used phony drivers’ licenses...
American society is widely recognized as youth-oriented, but it has been a long time since any authoritative source has given us really good news about the young. Recent reports from the American Medical Association, the National Research Council, and the Council of Physical Fitness have been especially discouraging: the young exercise too little, eat too...
One day after warning Russian President Vladimir Putin he would face “severe” economic sanctions, “like ones he’s never seen,” should Russia invade Ukraine, President Joe Biden assured Americans that sending U.S. combat troops to Ukraine is “not on the table.” America is not going to fight Russia over Ukraine. “The idea that the United States...
William J. Watkins’ comment on states being forced to adopt the .08 blood-alcohol standard for drunken driving (Cultural Revolutions, January) is a narrow objection to federal power. The feds are not threatening to jail the entire population of any state which does not adopt the standard; they are only threatening not to return some of...
I spent March 1985 in South Africa as a guest of several South African universities. I lectured to academic audiences, traveled in the rural areas of Transvaal and the Cape Province, spent a day in Soweto, visited the Crossroads slum in Cape Town and the Black township of Alexandra in Johannesburg. I talked to Black ser vants and Black leaders,...