The war in Iraq’s outcome was never in doubt, but the magnitude and speed of the Iraqi regime’s collapse are nevertheless puzzling and deserve closer scrutiny. In terms of numbers and available equipment, the Iraqi military was theoretically a foe worthy of respect. Its past performance was by no means abysmal. It suffered serious reverses...
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The Honorable Gentleman From New York
It shouldn’t be news to anyone that conservative middle-aged professors are rare birds. Until recently, right-wing academics have been almost as rare as black ones, and for pretty much the same reason: bright conservatives could generally do better elsewhere. So it didn’t go to my head a few years ago when I learned that the...
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Going Beyond Tink and Tank
Charles Edward Eaton, in New and Selected Poems, as elsewhere, is a remarkable poet, a fine metrist and stylist, and a close disciple of Wallace Stevens in artistic skill and finesse as well as in theory and topics. Many a poet who buys whole hog and pen Stevens’ often-prevalent view of poetics (and thus poetry)...
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The Lesbian Roommate Case
The lesbian roommate case in Madison, Wisconsin, that has been pending since 1989 was finally given a hearing this past fall. In a decision dated December 27, 1991, Madison Equal Opportunities Commission hearing examiner Sheilah O. Jakobson found that Anne Hacklander Ready and Maureen Rowe unlawfully discriminated against lesbian Caryl Sprague by refusing to rent...
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The Idea of Socialism
The received wisdom today seems to be that, with the downfall of Soviet communism, socialism has lost its pungency. Not only has Marxism proper reputedly crumbled, together with the Berlin Wall, but the somewhat watered-down type of socialism that survives Marxism has been forced to come to terms with its archrival, economic liberalism, which is...
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Abortion: Not Just for Women Anymore
Like childbearing, abortion isn’t just for women anymore. That is the message coming from the LGBT community and what were once thought of as women’s rights groups in response to Texas Senate Bill 8, the new Texas anti-abortion law. These culturally powerful groups are using the new law to promote current gender ideology, which views reproduction...
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The Star Chamber
In 1975, the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) launched a campaign for reparations for those Japanese who had been forced to evacuate the West Coast during World War II. A heavily financed lobbying effort came to fruition five years later when the House of Representatives passed a bill creating the Commission on Wartime Relocation and...
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Virulent Propaganda
“There is no God, and if there was. She made a mistake.” That statement came from a colleague of mine during a class in philosophy. That is also the extent to which most public college students will hear the “G” word mentioned during their years of “higher” education. Recent polls have shown that 89 percent...
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Books in Brief: August 2024
Short reviews of New Scientific Evidence for the Existence of God by José Carlos González-Hurtado, and The Paleolibertarian Guide to Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & the Aberrant Economy by Ilana Mercer.
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Courtesy
I have read somewhere that courtesy is the highest form of charity. Whether or not that is true (I like to think it is), courtesy is certainly charity in its least expensive form. Which prompts the question of why, in the age of what an anonymous wit a generation or so ago dubbed conspicuous benevolence,...
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Last Chance for the ‘Deplorables’
Speaking to 1,000 of the overprivileged at an LGBT fundraiser, where the chairs ponied up $250,000 each and Barbra Streisand sang, Hillary Clinton gave New York’s social liberals what they came to hear. “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” smirked Clinton to cheers and laughter....
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To See and to Speak
Most retrospectives take the Swinging Sixties, and more particularly Swinging London, on their own terms. “Society was shaken to its foundations!” a 2011 BBC documentary on the subject shouted. “All the rules came off, all the brakes came off . . . the floodgates were unlocked. . . . A youthquake hit Britain,” and so...
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Nordic Conquests
In Northfield, Minnesota, St. Olaf’s College was celebrating the 17th of May—the day the sons of Norway wrote their constitution in 1814, declaring self-government and independence from Swedish rule. It was 1907, just two years after the Swedes had released Norway and Prince Carl had become Haakon VII. Thirty-one-year-old first-year instructor Ole Rölvaag gave the...
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Deal With the Devil
For several months after last November, the American media raved about Barack Obama’s achievement in becoming the first African-American president of the United States. I didn’t—and couldn’t—join in the jubilation, for several reasons. First, it had always seemed to me obvious that we would have a black president someday. When I was in junior-high school...
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Letter From Pale: The War Industry
There were two reasons for my visit to Belgrade last fall. His Beatitude, the Serbian Orthodox patriarch Lord Paul (82 years old), invited me to his official residence to honor me for “my endeavour to interpret objectively the all-Serbian tragedy.” I was decorated with the Order of St. Sava I, the highest decoration of the...
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Can’t Get No Satisfaction
Brokeback Mountain Produced and distributed by Focus Features Directed by Ang LeeScreenplay by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana from a story by Annie Proulx An enlightened colleague recently asked me what I thought of director Ang Lee’s film Brokeback Mountain. When I told him I thought it a dreary, sappy soap opera, he smiled pityingly...
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Market-Driven Solutions to Public Education
“If we elect new school board members or run for the board A ourselves, we can expect improved schools.” This is our national misunderstanding. Nothing in the traditional public school system inherently promotes excellence. Even the free election of school board members—a token nod to democracy—fails to overcome this system’s fatal flaws. As a good...
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A Book That Needs No Sequel
Rachel Maddow plays up the danger of a reemergence of America’s 1930s and 1940s domestic fascist movements to an absurd extent.
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A Pope and His People
Notice the Washington Post-ABC News poll on Pope Francis. The results indicate that people over here love him. He throws open doors too long closed. “He’s calming, he’s relaxing, and he’s reassuring,” says one Catholic quoted by the Post. Another—a sociologist at Catholic University—says, “He talks like a person who actually knows something about human...
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Gay Times on the Right
Hardly a day goes by that someone does not email or telephone me with the news that some allegedly conservative writer has finally endorsed “Gay Marriage.” I’d rather not name names, but the most amusing so far has been an online screed declaring Andrew Sullivan the “most important political writer of his generation.” All...
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Dynamic Paralysis
Appearances, as we all know (or should know), are often deceptive, just as one’s memory is often fallible and by no means a sure guide as to what one has really and truly observed. It may be that I was not sufficiently observant when I first visited Moscow in the summer of 2003. I must...
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On ‘The Re-Possessed’
In response to Lee Congdon’s review of The Pied Piper: Allard K. Lowenstein and the Liberal Dream (Chronicles, July 1986), I would like to make the following points. Allard Lowenstein’s affiliation with the CIA is well-documented in the book. My sources in military intelligence and the CIA, while wishing to remain anonymous, are well-in formed....
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Farewell to a Good Pope
Christian believers will remember Benedict XVI as a great teacher of the faith who was never willing to subject Christianity to the destructive standards of post-Christian Western culture.
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The End of the Rove Era in Republican Politics
A few weeks after the Republicans were routed in the November 2006 elections, a longtime Bush Republican from Texas told me that it was time for Karl Rove to go. That comment spoke volumes, for it came from someone who had worked closely with Rove ever since his early days as a political consultant in the...
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A New Global Strategy
Over the years we have often lamented the absence of grand-strategic thinking within the U.S. foreign-policy establishment. For the past quarter-century, successive administrations have displayed a chronic inability to deploy America’s political, military, economic, and moral resources in a balanced and proportionate manner, in order to protect and enhance the country’s rationally defined security and...
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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, which just held its annual meeting, moves from Washington, D.C. to Rockford. Or Dubuque. Or Peoria. Or Helena. Or San Antonio. Or Bakersfield. Anywhere but the District of Corruption. I attended a couple CPACs back in the mid-1980s, at...
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Our Triumph in Iraq
Iraq is conquered; unfortunately, winning the peace is proving far more difficult. Bringing down an unpopular, isolated dictatorship in a wreck of a country is one thing. Creating a liberal, multiparty, multiethnic democracy where one has never existed is quite another. Officially, the Pentagon proclaims that we will stay “as long as necessary” and leave...
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Letter From a Hot Town
Cimabue the painter, passing on the road to Bologna, saw, as he walked through the village of Vespignano, a boy called Giotto drawing a sheep on a flat piece of rock. This was the moment with which, more than a century later, Lorenzo Ghiberti, the sculptor and the first art historian of the Renaissance, began...
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“We Hold These Truths”
Is the Declaration of Independence part of the federal Constitution? The short answer, of course, is “no.” For the Declaration to be part of the Constitution, it would have to have been included in the original document ratified by at least nine of the conventions held in the original 13 states between 1787 and 1789,...
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To Regulate, or Not to Regulate?
One vocal U.S. political tribe argues vociferously that capitalism is the source of all economic problems. Another tends to ignore that the current economy is not working for all Americans. French economist Thomas Philippon’s work should interest those who aren’t satisfied with either the complaints of the left or the indifference of the right. Philippon...
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The Family Under Assault
Journalist Andrew Sullivan was discovered in 2001 anonymously soliciting partners on homosexual websites. Thus, it might seem odd that Sullivan, who is HIV-positive, now champions marriage. He has not mainstreamed orthodoxy into his lifestyle, however, but is crusading for “gay marriage,” an absurdity that is no laughing matter. Sullivan’s mission is not impossible. While 37...
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Citizenship Degraded
The traitor class seeks to destroy distinct communities by degrading and devaluing citizenship. They want the whole world to share their death wish.
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DEMOCRATISM
The move toward mass, direct democracy in the large nationstate derives much of its appeal from an image of direct democracy reminiscent of the Athenian Assembly, or of the New England town meeting. But such an appeal is mistaken. The social conditions for face-to-face interaction and deliberation present on a small scale are not present...
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The Decline and Fall of the Midwest
Even more than Vachel Lindsay, who liked to say that the Mason-Dixon line ran straight through his heart, Booth Tarkington embodied the regional conflict that defined the Midwest. Born in Indianapolis only five years after the end of the war between the regions, Newton Booth Tarkington was descended on his father’s side from Southern Democrats...
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How Do You Make $100 Million Per Day?
How do you make $100 million per day? Goldman Sachs did it—and still does it. It even brags about it. Goldman’s net revenues for 2009 were over $45 billion. Most of this—$34.37 billion—came from trading. During the second and third quarters of 2009, Goldman made over $100 million per day on 82 out of 130...
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One in Big Brother
On January 2, 2016, I will celebrate 20 years of employment at The Rockford Institute. It seems like a long time in many ways, but a rather short time in others. One of my first acts here was to write a fundraising letter for the Center on the Family in America, explaining why the Defense...
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Abortionists Thwarted
The murder of children in the womb in Aurora, Illinois, has been stayed, for the moment. Planned Parenthood, the company that encourages and equips teenagers to fornicate so that it will have a steady stream of babies to kill (over a quarter of a million per year), began building a 22,000-square-foot, $7.5 million abattoir last...
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Christmas in Sodom
How do you celebrate Christmas in Sodom? I know—it’s not a cheery thought. And by posing the question, I run the risk of anachronism. There were over four centuries between the time when Abraham pleaded on behalf of his favorite nephew’s adopted hometown and Moses’ accounting of it in Genesis. And of course, Christmas was...
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The Balkan Terror Threat
A chain is as strong as its weakest link. In President Bush’s “War on Terror,” that weak link is not in the Middle East or North Africa or the Subcontinent but in Europe. For years, Chronicles has been warning that flawed pro-Muslim Western policies would turn the Balkans from a “protectorate of the New World...
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An Epic Bogosity
Edmund Spenser (1554-99) decided while still a student to make himself into the great English poet on the model of Vergil. So he began his publishing career with a set of 12 pastorals, and planned an enormous 24-book allegorical romance-epic, The Faerie Queene, to glorify Elizabeth I and her Britain as Vergil had glorified Rome...
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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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Americans Don’t Die!
Americans do not believe in death. At least, they live as if they will never die. This has been the case from colonial times. It is a consequence of seemingly limitless opportunity and a drive for upward mobility, denied to generations of Europeans. Indentured servants, laborers, persecuted minorities, and peasants tilling the soil of the...
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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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Tyranny In a Good Cause
Democracy or Republic? might well be the title of the D debate between liberals and conservatives on the nature of the American political system. (In the view of some liberals, the easiest way to spot a conservative is the habit of referring to America as a republic.) Democracy, in the strict procedural sense of one...
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Back to Parmenides
It is reported that when one of Pythagoras’s followers revealed the Pythagorean brotherhood’s deepest secret, the discovery of irrational numbers, he was killed. The discovery of irrational numbers came about as a direct result of the Pythagorean theorem, for the hypotenuse of a right triangle whose legs are one inch equals the square root of...
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Is the System Rigged? You Betcha.
“Remember, it’s a rigged system. It’s a rigged election,” said Donald Trump in New Hampshire on Saturday. The stunned recoil in this city suggests this bunker buster went right down the chimney. As the French put it, “Il n’y a que la verite qui blesse.” It is only the truth that hurts. In what sense...
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An Englishman in His Near Abroad
Samuel Johnson was nearly 64 when he made an unexpected journey. One day in 1773, the internationally renowned lexicographer, essayist, poet, and novelist, who somehow combined being one of the great thinkers of Europe with being a personification of bluff Englishness, suddenly switched his great gaze north, in search of a dream of youth. His...
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Apocalypse Now
“If a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.” American evangelicals, according to former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “are the Israelis’ best friend in the whole world.” In return, they dubbed him “the Ronald Reagan of Israel.” That so many are still surprised by those statements indicates that, by and large, those...
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Calling Dr. Johnson
The Dear Leader of the United States reminds me of Robert Frost’s quip that a liberal is a man who won’t take his own side in a fight. More precisely, his own country’s side. Barack Obama seems to hate calling anyone our enemy. It isn’t nice. It’s not Christian, as he understands Christianity. Well, Christ...