Talk about a case of sore winners. Over at The New York Times opinion page, Neal K. Katyal and Sam Koppelman argue that a recent audio recording of President Donald Trump talking to Georgia’s secretary of state and asking him to overturn the state’s presidential election results should serve as grounds for new impeachment proceedings against the president. “But...
“For there is no longer Jew nor Greek, neither free man nor slave, neither man nor woman,” says Pseudo-Paul, the apostle to the Americans, “but all are equal in Christ Jesus.” He has been studying his Pseudo-John, wherein the risen Lord says to Peter, “I have been praying for you, Simon, that you might strengthen...
For two years, this writer has been consumed by two subjects. First, the presidency of Richard Nixon, in whose White House I served from its first day to its last, covered in my new book, Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever. The second has been...
“Blacks for Gray, Whites for Fenty,” ran the nuanced headline on page one of the Washington Examiner. The story told of how black Mayor Adrian Fenty, who got rave reviews for appointing Michelle Rhee to save District of Columbia schools, was crushed six to one in black wards east of the Anacostia River, as he...
“Don’t mention the war,” my grandfather told me a few minutes before our guest, an old friend from the Business Administration faculty at the nearby university, joined us for lunch. This was in Tacoma, Washington, in the summer of 1975, and I was visiting from England, on vacation from college. In that particular summer, it...
One thing that distinguishes the French from the Americans is that the French have the good grace to number their failed political experiments—two kingdoms, two empires, and five republics. Americans, on the other hand, profess “American exceptionalism.” They assert that the United States is unique among the countries of the world because she alone has...
Ronin Colman’s aptly subtitled “The Second War Against Gunowners” (“Back From the Brink,” December 1995) is likely to be considered “a bit paranoid” by those who love liberty yet see no harm in “reasonable gun control laws.” But there is no such thing as a “reasonable gun law” if it focuses on an inanimate object...
In 1973 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., published The Imperial Presidency. He argued that the stretching of presidential power by Democrats Roosevelt and Truman had been necessary and benevolent, but that such behavior by Nixon was a dark threat to the commonwealth. Schlesinger’s childishly partisan and superficial tirade was soon forgotten. Time has moved on, and...
In his latest interview for Serbia’s top-rated Happy TV channel, Dr. Trifkovic dwells on the geostrategic and political dynamics behind the current crisis in the Middle East. The first question was whether we are at the threshold of a major war. [Interview transcript below, translated from Serbian and abbreviated.] ST: The odds of...
Is the Ashcroft Justice Department busily engaged in shredding the Constitution under the cover of September 11? We are, the President tells us, at war, and in war, we are often told, the first casualty is civil liberties. Some feared that this was the case when Attorney General John Ashcroft, in July, unveiled his TIPS...
This selection from around 65,000 pieces of correspondence, edited by Learned Hand’s granddaughter, a professor emerita of English at the Claremont Graduate School, could not have been better done. Both Hand’s letters and the letters of his correspondents are included; some of the most notable exchanges are with Bernard Berenson, Philip Littell, Walter Lippmann, and...
You can see how seriously Obama is taking the hot populist temper of the American people and their eagerness to strangle every banker with the entrails of every insurance executive. In an altogether welcome departure from past presidential form in State of the Union addresses at least since 1973 (the ...
For all the investment the United States has made in prosecuting the “War on Terror” in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Saudi presence in the United States has gone largely unnoticed—although it may be the most lethal terror front of all. U.S. politicians have been intoxicated by Saudi petrodollars for decades. Saudi greenbacks led Spiro Agnew...
American Catholic: The Politics of Faith During the Cold War by D. G. Hart Cornell University Press 280 pp., $29.95 “What the hell is an encyclical?” is probably the most honest and articulate response ever uttered by a Catholic politician in the United States. It was mouthed by New York’s first Catholic governor, Al...
Japan feared the Soviets, not the bomb For a generation after the Japanese Instrument of Surrender was signed on Sept. 2, 1945, the standard narrative remained fairly straightforward. By deciding to use nuclear weapons—against Hiroshima on Aug. 6 and on Nagasaki three days later—President Harry Truman enabled the realists in Tokyo, also called the peace faction,...
Although the U.S. seems to be as woke and post-biblical as any other transformed Western country, our abortion laws since Roe v. Wade (1973) have been wildly out of line with those of the rest of the West. Betsy Clarke, writing in Chronicles’s sister publication, Intellectual Takeout, offers this well-considered observation on the subject: ...
The Democrats’ strategy is failing. But it is up to the American people to make them pay for it.
Is the development of the modern sciences and related technologies a good or a bad thing? The question is by no means a recent one. Not only was it raised at the inception of such development by its very promoters, like the humanist Rabelais, but it dates back to the beginnings of Western civilization, since...
Since the time of the Founding Fathers, Protestantism appeared to be the default religion in the United States. At the end of World War II, when the United States began to enjoy superpower status, Mainline Protestantism (comprising the older denominations that sprang from the Reformation) began to drift away from its moorings. Then, in the...
As the queen of opposition research, Harris has a long history of deploying it against her opponents and ties to a notorious practitioner of the art.
Religion is a very sturdy creature. For two centuries, various atheist regimes have tried to eliminate religious practice in their societies and, without exception, have ended up restoring the forms of the old worship, but with newer and far lamer excuses. The French revolutionaries who tried to free their subjects from the curse of Christianity...
A favorite exhortation of those seeking to further restrict or remove the private possession of firearms in the United States is to “look at other countries,” where lower murder rates are supposed to be a result of gun control laws. The underlying presumption beneath these laws is that guns cause crime. Getting rid of guns,...
Short reviews of Tearing Us Apart, by Ryan T. Anderson and Alexandra DeSanctis, and Dollars for Life, by Mary Ziegler.
Back in the innocent days of 1967-70, I attended Benjamin Franklin Junior High School in the Wayne-Westland Community School District in Michigan. District motto: “Absolutely, entirely, completely dedicated to mediocrity.” Like most junior high schools, grades 7-9, it mysteriously has been transformed into a middle school, grades 6-8. In 1967-68, Franklin had a simple dress...
As we approach the end of this century, and indeed of a millennium, there is more than the usual tendency to reflect on things human and divine. One thing we should ponder is that the 20th century, often praised as the most enlightened, progressive, and humane period in history, has in fact been the most...
Almost five years ago I wrote for ChroniclesMagazine.org a piece attacking Thomas Woods’ views on the relationship between Catholic social teaching and the science of economics. In brief, my complaint was against Woods’ contention that certain teachings of the popes on social matters overstep the boundaries of legitimate Church teaching because they contradict the findings...
The gap between Middle Americans and our cultural elite is nowhere wider than on questions of crime and punishment. While activists on the bench and in academia have crafted ever more rights and privileges for those accused and even convicted of crimes, they have given short shrift to the rights and welfare of current and...
When I delivered Liberty: The God That Failed into the hands of my publisher, I did so with no little trepidation. Supported entirely by Protestant, secular academic, and other non-Catholic sources, including the work of numerous historians of the first rank, its detailed, 700-page counternarrative of the rise and fall of what the moderns call...
Every four years our political intellectuals kick off the presidential campaign season by putting forward proposals to reform the system by which Americans choose their leaders. The will of the people has been frustrated by all this elaborate machinery of voter registration, party primaries, and media hype, so they say, and those few who have...
From the October 1993 issue of Chronicles. A favorite exhortation of those seeking to further restrict or remove the private possession of firearms in the United States is to “look at other countries,” where lower murder rates are supposed to be a result of gun control laws. The underlying presumption beneath these laws is that...
No one has yet explained how Trump would end “democracy,” but as usual for the left, it seems to be a case of projection.
In accepting the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 1908, this century’s greatest populist warned: “How can the people hope to rule if they are not able to learn, until after the election, what the predatory interests are doing?” The man was, of course, William Jennings Bryan, and he offered a “complete and effective” solution...
The Underwear Bomber case indicates that whoever is behind these bomb scares is laughing at our gullibility. How realistic is it that al-Qaida, an organization that allegedly pulled off the most fantastic terror attack in world history, would in these days of heightened security choose for an attack on an airliner a person who is...
The E.U. Charter of Fundamental Rights, approved in Nice on December 8, 2000, sets forth the principles upon which the future European constitution should be based. Drafted by a commission of experts from various countries, the document consists of a preamble and 54 articles. It was presented to the E.U. Council as “unamendable”: The charter...
Wednesday morning, Nov. 9, 2016, Republicans awoke to learn they had won the lottery. Donald Trump had won the presidency by carrying Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. All three states had gone Democratic in the last six presidential elections. The GOP had won both houses of Congress. Party control of governorships and state legislatures rivaled the...
In the closing years of the 19th century, Indians throughout the American West began to dance. Dervish-like, they danced for hours and days on end, in the belief that their ecstasy would call forth the gods, bring back the dead, and banish the conquering Europeans from North America. A Paiute elder named Captain Dick explained...
The death of a social movement is an instructive and sobering phenomenon. After years of greatness and influence, an idea eventually sickens and dies, until its adherents are reduced to a pathetic handful. Somewhere in history, there must have lived the last Albigensian, the last Ranter, the last native practitioner of ancient Egyptian religion. Somewhere...
“Viva Mexico! Viva Mexico!” As he spoke those words, murderer and rapist Humberto Leal felt the gush of pentobarbital run into his arm. Like the late, lamented Mexican hero José Ernesto Medellín, whom Texas executed in 2008, Leal and his legal backers, including the Mexican government, argued that his guilty verdict was null. The Vienna...
I am a Cornishman, a Celt, born in the far southwest of England. Apart from the six years of the Second World War and my time as a student at a college of education, I have lived the whole of my life not only in the small market-town of Launceston, where I was born, but...
Americans are getting a taste of unintended consequences from overly broad public-accommodation laws enacted in the past half-century. Christian business owners are especially burdened when individuals practicing what once was considered perversity are deemed “suspect classes” and are thus entitled to heightened legal protection. A prime example is Elane Photography v. Willock. Elane Photography is...
In the past, Republican primaries in Texas were won and lost on a wide variety of issues—taxes, ties to the community, money, education, abortion, agriculture. Usually, candidates who can unite a handful of major GOP donors (most of whom own large businesses in the state) have a major advantage in the primaries. Then, in 2006,...
Since at least the 1960’s, federal judges in the United States have overturned a number of state and federal laws dealing, broadly speaking, with marriage, sexuality, and the family—most notoriously in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision on abortion. And numerous commentators have pointed out the constitutional absurdity of these decisions, based on no clear...
Harris’s ties to sketchy opposition research figures are well-established and her fingerprints linger on several significant “oppo” hits. What will this mean for November?
For Englishmen, the Roman Forum was nearly as much a part of their political heritage as the Tower of London or Westminster Abbey. Since Colonial America was a part of British culture, educated American colonists shared in the British reverence for antiquity. Eighteenth-century Englishmen (and those Americans who could manage it) traveled to Italy—Rome in...
Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. The ongoing enthusiasm of the Western elites for Islam, in general, and for the misnamed Arab Spring, in particular, is a case in point. The bitter fruits of the latter—simultaneously visible but differently manifested in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Syria—are rooted in the character of the...
In the “nihilistic politics of the 1990’s,” warns a newswriter for the Wall Street Journal, “party loyalty counts for almost nothing.” The writer means obeisance to the two major parties, which the civics books imply are ordained by God to rule us. In fact, America needs a breakup of this two-party system, which looks more...
If someone is overheard referring to the system of U.S. public finance as “socialist,” most Americans within earshot will write him off as a conservative crank who is being dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. After all, Karl Marx is long gone, and so is his most ardent American disciple, Franklin Delano Roosevelt,...
In 2006, lawmakers in the Lone Star State were horrified that a large percentage of Texas high-school graduates required remedial courses to gain the skills needed to succeed in college. So they directed the commissioner of higher education and the commissioner of education to assemble teams of college and high-school faculty to recommend changes to...
Are the Dixie Chicks traitors? Lead singer Natalie Maines boldly announced at a concert in London, just before the beginning of our recent armed incursion into Iraq, “Just so you know, we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.” The firestorm that ensued involved coordinated radio boycotts of the Chicks’ music...
Peaceful Valley is a bucolic residential neighborhood in Clemson, South Carolina. The middle-class homeowners who live there are not land speculators hoping to turn a profit. Many are like Kathleen Dickel, a 50-year-old high-school German teacher, who owns a two-story contemporary house with a deck surrounded on two sides by deep woods. Kathleen stained the...