Quebec’s sovreigntist movement could learn a thing or two from Liberal Party leader Jean Charest. His return to the premiership of the pro-vince should be a lesson to the sovereigntists that it is always darkest before dawn. The sovereigntists’ night, however, will last a while longer, as the provincial Liberals have smashed them to pieces...
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Our Heads Cut Off
“Language is the armory of the human mind; and at once contains the trophies of its past, and the weapons of its future conquests.” —Samuel Taylor Coleridge This remarkable French mathematician has written extensively on what he considers the fundamental spiritual problem of our day, the perversion of language, which he...
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Suicide of the GOP—or Rebirth?
“If his poll numbers hold, Trump will be there six months from now when the Sweet 16 is cut to the Final Four, and he will likely be in the finals.” My prediction, in July of 2015, looks pretty good right now. Herewith, a second prediction. Republican wailing over his prospective nomination aside, Donald Trump...
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America’s Race Paradigm
The Economist brands racism as “America’s constant curse,” and the question of race unnerves almost everybody, as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 airily outlaws discrimination in government, commerce, and schooling on grounds of race, gender, age, religion, or national origin, and the new, openly politicized White House policy on affirmative action (“mend it, don’t...
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The Russo-German Symbiosis in the First and Second World Wars
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the retreat of Leninist forces within the empire, hosannas have rung out in the Western world. “The Cold War is over, the Cold War is over,” the leaders of the West have exclaimed, and demands to turn swords into knitting needles have filled the air. At every...
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The Year in the Novel, 1991
What we have here—not even the President has had the effrontery to deny it—is an intellectual recession. I cannot think of a year in which more; bad books received more serious attention. These weren’t just lapses but a pattern, and one need not be paranoid to look for explanations. What people do is, mostly, what...
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The Paleoconservative Imagination
In January 1996, Norman Podhoretz delivered a self-congratulatory eulogy for neoconservatism in a lecture before the American Enterprise Institute. In addition to giving himself and his cohorts credit for the recent successes of the American right, Podhoretz boasted that “thanks to the influence of neoconservatism on the conservative movement in general, the philistine indifference to...
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Squeaking Through
George W. Bush, as President of die United States, can be counted on in the first six months to . . . well, I should be honest here (with hand on heart). I don’t think any of us can say with much precision what my governor will accomplish in the new office whose door he...
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Free Men of a Republic
“The Constitution gives every American the inalienable right to make a damn fool of himself.” I first heard this wise insight into the American way of life from Sam Ervin, who was, as I have since learned, quoting John Ciardi. I should not be surprised: Poets always get to the heart of the matter a...
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Pardon the Pardons
It is reported that “faithful adherence to legal principle sometimes [takes] a back seat to the more compelling demands of politics.” This appears to be a pointed assessment of a little-publicized controversy surrounding the pardon of four convicts by last year’s Acting Governor of Arkansas, dentist Jerry Jewell. As president pro tempore of the state...
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Of Candidates and Clowns
The Ides of March Produced by Smoke House Directed by George Clooney Written by Grant Heslov, George Clooney, and Beau Willimon from Willimon’s play, Farragut North Distributed by Columbia Pictures George Clooney’s film The Ides of March is a behind-the-scenes look at a presidential primary race in contemporary Ohio. The behavior of the candidates...
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A Multicultural Mugging of Uncle Joe
In his opening statement at Wednesday’s Democratic debate in Detroit, Joe Biden addressed Donald Trump while pointing proudly to the racial and ethnic diversity of the nine Democrats standing beside him. “Mr. President, this is America and we are strong and great because of this diversity, not in spite of it. … We love it....
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Portrait of Lincoln, With Warts
The publication of the last volume of William Marvel’s four-volume history of “Mr. Lincoln’s War” completes one of the more remarkable historical works of our time. Marvel is an “amateur,” nonacademic, historian. That is not a remarkable, but rather an old and honorable, thing. This is what is remarkable: I can think of no active...
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We CAN Have a Blacker Math
Since woke academics insist on imposing equality on math history, there is one thing left to do: declare the ancient Greek mathematicians to be black men.
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No, Antonin Scalia Is Not A Racist
Antonin Scalia has been a public critic of affirmative action since at least 1979, when the Washington University Law Review published his modest proposal of a “Restorative Justice Handicapping System.” Scalia’s position, simply put, is that the government should not engage in racial discrimination, a position reflected in numerous opinions authored by Scalia. There are...
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Syria: Avoiding Another Quagmire
Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee last April, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel warned of the potential consequences of U.S. military involvement in the Syrian conflict. It could hinder humanitarian relief operations, he said, embroil the United States in a significant, lengthy, and uncertain military commitment, and strain relationships around the world. “And finally,” he...
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Libertarian Humbuggery
At the heart of the Christmas story is the lowly birth of Christ, surrounded by beasts of the field and honored by Magi bearing gifts. But consider how differently the Christmas narrative might have unfolded if ancient Judea had been organized as a free-market economy of the sort trumpeted by our libertarian friends. Imagine Joseph...
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In Defense of Sam Francis
Open season has been declared on the late and longtime Chronicles columnist Samuel Francis. Evidence for this can be found in, among other places, a diatribe recently published by political journalist Michael Lind in Tablet, “The Importance of James Burnham.” Lind started his essay by analyzing Burnham but then segued into unkind remarks about Burnham’s...
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What We Are Reading: March 2023
Brief reviews of Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and The Death of Punishment, by Robert Blecker.
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The Ranchers and the Mandatory Minimum
Two Oregon ranchers, Steven Dwight Hammond and Dwight Lincoln Hammond, Jr., have been at the center of ethical and cultural clashes for several years. Even while a standoff purportedly held in their honor between armed militia and the federal government was occurring in January, the ranchers reported to the Bureau of Prisons to serve five-year...
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Kosovo and Its Impact on U.S. Foreign Policy
The struggle for Kosovo between Christian Serbs and Muslim Albanians dates back to 1389, when the Serbs were defeated by, and their lands annexed to, the Ottoman Empire. Muslim rule lasted over four centuries and resulted in several waves of forced migrations of Serbs from Kosovo. The ...
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Charlie Is Their Darling
On October 25, 2000, central Sydney’s traffic stood still for hours, for the first time since the Olympiad. Inside the late-Victorian Town Hall, approximately 2,000 pilgrims witnessed the Aboriginal faith’s latest canonization: the state funeral of Charles Perkins, who had died on October 18 after 29 years of daily medical dependence on the “whitefella” culture...
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Just Passed
Though the Crime Bill just passed by Congress toughens federal sentencing provisons and makes more federal crimes subject to the death penalty, it is irrelevant to people longing for safer streets and neighborhoods. Also largely irrelevant is the proposal to make more offenses federal crimes. There may be more federal crimes, but there won’t be...
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Faces of Clio
[This view first appeared in the October 1986 issue of Chronicles.] The obscurest epoch is today. —Robert Louis Stevenson Taken together, these three books serve nicely as a kind of group portrait of Clio and her several faces. In reverse order we have the historian as diarist and memoirist, as documentarian, and as reflective sage....
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Athens and Jerusalem
The holiday season is responsible for some of modern America’s most deeply felt traditions: cheap airline tickets on Christmas day, seasonal hymns like “Jinglebell Rock” and “Blue Christmas,” ACLU suits against the school Christmas pageant, and the Andy Williams Christmas special, for which the divorced Mr. Williams (one of whose wives killed her lover, Olympic...
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Culture War: Fighting On
“Transcend yourself and join in the universal struggle to bring about the self-transcendence of all men!” —Karl Marx Culture, as the term is used in America in our times, covers a vast territory with ill-defined frontiers. There is primitive culture (flint spearheads, animal and human sacrifice). There is high culture (Shakespeare, Michelangelo). There is, or...
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Crescent Moon Over Europe
Jean Raspail, the French novelist and explorer, now 90 and living in a suburb of Paris, must be experiencing the eerie feeling of living inside The Camp of the Saints, his most famous work, as he follows the contemporary news reports from across the Continent. The tens of thousands of Third World migrants are arriving...
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If I Could Turn Back Time
Here's the bottom line of today's SCOTUS decision regarding the incorporation of the Second Amendment, which amounts to an explicit rejection of traditional federalism on the part of the conservative majority. (Full disclosure: I'm of the Hestonian
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Our Inner Mason-Dixon
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...
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The Cowardice of Modern Journalism
More evidence of the diminished standards and dishonorable behavior of America’s fourth estate.
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Remembering St. Thomas Aquinas
St. Thomas Aquinas is a universally admired philosopher who was able to distill the whole of human discourse. His thought even influenced America's Founding Fathers, as seen in the biblical ordering of the new American nation in the Treaty of Paris.
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Donald Trump and Conservatism
Donald Trump has shattered the false consensus of the Republican Party, the hitherto unrecognized tautology that GOP is conservative because conservative is GOP, and vice versa. In the process, we’ve been confronted by an embarrassing reality: We really have no idea what we mean by the word conservative. There can be little doubt that Hillary...
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Movie Czar
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...
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University The New Overseas Campus
The inauguration of Lagado University’s new campus in Plagho-Plaguo, the capital of Dismailia, is generating great excitement throughout the Diversity Community. As President Bleatley has said, LU’s “Semester in Dismailia” is guaranteed to challenge Eurocentric cultural values on every level and at every turn. It centers the Other, presents the Absent, privileges Multiplicity, and promises...
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Who Decides What Kids Should Be Taught?
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...
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Can Biden Buy the Voters?
Biden knows what he has to do to win—but the educated whites who are the backbone of his party have little in common, culturally or economically, with the lower-class whites whose interest is in work, not woke.
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Intellectual Operator
It is a distinct possibility that we leave to posterity writers and works from which the future curious will conclude that this century was the stupidest, most verbose and obscene, altogether the worst in the historical record. What else can you say of a century that elected Michel Foucault as one of its mâitres à...
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Last Call?
It was quiet at Drea’s Tavern on St. Patrick’s Day. It might seem unusual for an Irish bar to have so few souls stop in the third week of March, but there were reasons. “It’s tough to have it during the middle of the week,” bartender Larry Drea said. “So few people can get time...
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The Rule-or-Ruin Republicans
“Things reveal themselves passing away,” wrote W. B. Yeats. Whatever one may think of Donald Trump, his campaign has done us a service—exposing the underbelly of a decaying establishment whose repudiation by America’s silent majority is long overdue. According to the New York Times, super PACs of Trump’s GOP rivals, including PACs of candidates who...
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Liz Truss Takes Britain’s Helm Amid Stormy Seas
Britain's new Prime Minister Liz Truss, of the Conservative Party, has her work cut out for her in a country poised to undergo a difficult winter.
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The Wonder of Academe
“The high-minded man must care more for truth than for what people think.” —Aristotle While being interviewed on William Buckley’s Firing Line, Harry Ashmore remarked that he had allowed the subject of his Unseasonable Truths: The Life of Robert Maynard Hutchins to tell the story of his life and work through the numerous quotations that...
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Dump Senate Cloture, Bring Back “Mr. Smith’s” Filibuster
Letter from Pergamum-on-the-Potomac As the Stupid Party licks its wounds after the not-too-surprising disintegration of its bid to repeal and replace Obamacare, talk is again turning to abolishing the Senate filibuster with a “nuclear options” that would allow legislation to clear the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body (WGDB) with a simple majority of 51 votes (or...
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Conspiring With Terror in the West
The liberal paradigm is dying before our eyes. At twelve midday on March 22, Theresa May announced at Prime Minister’s Questions that she had sent her condolences to the family of Martin McGuinness, who had been the capo di capi of the IRA. She had been preceded at the BBC by a high priest of...
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The Last Laugh
In Ironies of Faith: The Laughter at the Heart of Christian Literature, Anthony Esolen argues that Christianity introduced into European literature a new understanding of irony, an understanding found neither in the classical literature of the pre-Christian West nor in the various strains of post-Christian literary theory that infect the academy today. Rejecting self-contradicting and...
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Mondo Quasimodo
Last June, the 19,000 delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention voted to boycott the Walt Disney Company for its “promotion of homosexuality” and the other “anti-family” values. The convention pointed to Gay and Lesbian Days sponsored by Disney theme parks; to such twisted fare as Priest, Powder, and Kids, all films produced by Disney’s Miramax;...
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The Left Conspires to Keep Election Fraud Quiet. Wonder Why?
Emails released by the House Judiciary Committee should outrage Americans. The federal government devised a scheme to covertly stamp out public debate over election fraud.
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Washington Politics
Teddy Kennedy, the famed moral exemplar, read his former senatorial colleague John Ashcroft the riot act during confirmation hearings. Ashcroft was extreme; his constitutional understanding of gun control was “radical.” The senatorial face grew flush—presumably with anger, since it was a bit early in the day for more potent stuff. Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware...
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Wallow in the Mire
One of the less appreciated perils of literary fame is the risk a writer runs every hundred years as the anniversary of his birthday approaches. This year marks the 200th birthday not only of Darwin but of Lincoln, a completely irrelevant coincidence that inspired Smithsonian—the trivializing newsletter of “the nation’s attic”—to celebrate the two men...
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Closer to Becoming Reality
The ICC, the International Criminal Court—the proposed judicial arm of the New World Order—is one step closer to becoming a reality. For five weeks this summer, the United Nations engaged in a protracted, angry, and dangerous debate on the establishment of the ICC. In the mainstream Western media, the ICC was portrayed as a permanent...