“There is no distinctly native American criminal class, except Congress.” —Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar Mark Twain, responsible for the foregoing, was being funny. His remark, however, is steadily becoming a little more true and a little less funny. The U.S. Congress, through indirection and guile rather than by overt vote, has managed to give itself a...
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The Immaculate Protection From the Shot That Reelected Trump
In 1775, there was the shot heard 'round the world. In 2024, there was the shot that got Donald John Trump reelected.
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Has America Lost Its Faith?
Here we are on the eve of Christmas, that day of joy set aside for celebrating the birth of Christ who came down to earth 2,000 years ago to show mankind the way to eternal salvation. Yet, the present mood of America at Christmas 2021 seems better captured by Jimmy Carter in his “malaise speech”...
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It Can’t Be Repeated Too Often (Until It Sinks In), Again
It Can’t Be Repeated Too Often (Until It Sinks In), Again by Clyde N. Wilson • March 12, 2009 • Printer-friendly “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” —Orwell (Things that are known but which Americans do not acknowledge or discuss.) Ruby Ridge. Your President George H.W. Bush sent...
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Release the Klan(s)!
Move over, Ashley Madison—there’s a new scandal in town. At least, that’s what the media is desperate to have you believe. In late October, the “hacktivist” group Anonymous, usually referred to oxymoronically as a “collective” of anarchists, announced that they had obtained the membership rolls of several Ku Klux Klan organizations. They planned to release...
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Sam Francis Was Right
It has been seven years since Sam Francis died. But the years since his untimely death merely show the accuracy of his insights. Francis’s writing was marked not only by loyalty to the people from whom he came but by an unswerving devotion to telling the truth about the way the world really is, not...
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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 current Albanian majority there was achieved more recently—the...
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Swiss Minarets
Swiss voters approved a constitutional amendment banning the construction of new minarets last November, to the howls of bien-pensant rage at home and abroad. The proposal was supported by 57.5 percent of the participating voters and 22 of the 26 Swiss cantons. It was originally drafted in May 2007 by a group of conservative politicians,...
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Fillet of Soul
Entertainment industry awards shows are, almost by definition, public orgies of televised backslapping. Still, TV viewers stick with them, not so much to discover what the best movie, TV show, or record is—for each viewer already knows what’s best—but in order to see personalities in environments that put them out of character and in competition...
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A Wilson for Our Times
John Lukacs has observed that our century’s two most significant revolutionaries were Lenin and Wilson. Of the two, according to Lukacs, the internationalist Lenin had less destructive influence in the long run than the democratic moralist but fervent nationalist Wilson; today it may be said that the Wilsonians have outlasted the Commies. Democracy and national...
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Confiscating Liberty
I first came upon Stephen P. Halbrook in 1984 when the University of New Mexico Press published his first book,That Every Man Be Armed: The Evolution of a Constitutional Right. Since Halbrook had both a Ph.D. in philosophy and a law degree, my expectations were high. I was not disappointed. Moreover, by the time I...
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Martyrs Inc.
“When I must define my own views,” writes Milovan Djilas in his latest book, Of Prisons and Ideas, “I identify them as ‘democratic socialist.'” For those who find this oxymoronic, Djilas’ whole book may seem like an exercise in contortion. True to his earlier autobiographical works, Djilas clings to the purity and the intensity of...
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On the Founders
In his review of Gordon S. Wood’s Revolutionary Characters (“Founders, Keepers,” January), James O. Tate avers that “we need to recover a vital connection to the spirit of the Founding Fathers . . . ” He notes that Wood identifies that spirit, but nowhere in the review does he describe it. That spirit was anti-Catholic—a...
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Tribal Politics
Was race a factor in the decision of Colin Powell to repudiate his party’s nominee and friend of 25 years, Sen. John McCain, two weeks before Election Day, and to endorse Barack Obama? Gen. Powell does not deny it, contending only that race was not the only or decisive factor. “If I had only that...
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Parasite Control
One of the few parts of the U.S. Constitution that is still followed by the government concerns the granting of copyrights and patents. Article I, Section 8, reads, “Congress shall have the power . . . To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the...
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M.E. Bradford and the Barbarism of Reflection
“The hours of a wise man are lengthened by his ideas.”—Joseph Addison This is the first critical study of M.E. Bradford, whose untimely death in 1993 silenced the most eloquent voice ever raised on behalf of the permanent things as they are revealed in the Southern tradition. It would be a...
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Claudine Gay Is Not a Martyr
The disgraced former president of Harvard University is representative of the DEI regime and the massive undertaking it will be to dismantle it.
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The Unbeliever
Suppose you are tired of hearing about roulette. Suppose the very thought of gambling, despite the metaphorist’s efforts to depict it as the great commonwealth of epochal disillusionment and hence universalize the experience, strikes you as tedious. Suppose you are the sort of man who insists that the only thing duller than watching people take...
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An Adversarial Culture
Following the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, John Walker Lindh, also known as Suleyman al-Faris and Abdul Farid, got his 15 minutes of fame the hard way. Or perhaps it is more proper to say that he was the object of a Two Minutes Hate by many on the right, even as his arrest...
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Believe the Children?
We may begin with a nightmare. Imagine that you are the parent of a preschool child and that one day police and child-protection officials appear at your door. They inform you that a teacher or daycare worker suspects that your child has been abused and that subsequent interviews with therapists have proven this fact to...
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Unforgetting Franco
The history of Spain's peaceful transition to democracy from Franco's dictatorship is being rewritten by a left bent on vengeance and political control.
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Self-Indulgence Made Simple
This starry-eyed reappraisal of two unhappy decades in our nation’s history serves as a sobering reminder that “the revolt of the masses” is far from over. Its author, deaf to any appeal to duty or civility, is an unabashed apologist for “postdeprivational,” appetitive, man. Indeed, insofar as I am able to tell, there is almost...
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Back in the Cowboy State
On November 8 last year, Donald Trump prevented a resurrection of the Clinton administration 16 years after it left office. That same day, in an election paid scant attention by the national media, the spirit of George W. Bush’s administration was given new life in Wyoming, where Liz Cheney, a daughter of former Vice President...
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Pastor to the Pariahs
Dramatic conversions happen. F.F. Bruce, the noted New Testament scholar, is not alone in insisting that no one can understand Paul of Tarsus without considering his experience on the road to Damascus. And whether you believe, as Christians do, that he there met the resurrected Christ or not, all admit that he was not the...
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Never Mind the Cat-Eating; the Damage to Small Town America is Very Real
The media mind game, whereby they ‘debunk’ a minor part of a story so they can get you to swallow the rest of their narrative, is doing real harm to Americans.
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Trumpism Lives On!
Donald Trump may end up losing the 2020 election in the Electoral College, but he won the campaign that ended on Nov. 3. Democrats had been talking of a “sweep,” a “blowout,” a “blue wave” washing the Republicans out of power, capturing the Senate, and bringing in an enlarged Democratic majority in Nancy Pelosi’s House....
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End American Gerontocracy
Joe Biden's latest fall demonstrates again that he is a massive liability as president. It also shows how America is suffering from gerontocratic rule, with aging Baby Boomers in their 70s and 80s dominating leadership positions.
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On Art Felons
In 1994, a crackdown by New York City police on illegal street peddling on Soho’s narrow, crowded sidewalks resulted in sellers of paintings and photographs being hauled in by the dragnet. Since the Soho Alliance, a volunteer community group, draws its members from the artist residents of Soho, we felt a need to find a...
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The Yugoslav Mythology
One must agree with Georges Sorel that political myths have a long and durable life. For 74 years the Yugoslav state drew its legitimacy from the spirit of Versailles and Yalta, as well as from the Serb-inspired pan-Slavic mythology. By carefully manipulating the history of their constituent peoples while glorifying their own, Yugoslav leaders managed...
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Flag Country
I live in flag country. Here in east-central Illinois, amid the corn and soybean fields, the whistle-stop towns on their grid of well-maintained blacktops, the Stars and Stripes are as common as blue jeans. The banner flutters from angled rods on the pillars of wraparound porches, flies from big poles in front of white two-story...
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Who Speaks for the Jews?
Just before the Minnesota caucuses, one of the nation’s ten or so largest Reform Jewish synagogues, Minneapolis’s Temple Israel, cosponsored a political speech by Kitty Dukakis at the synagogue’s regular Friday evening sabbath service. Temple Israel is typical of many synagogues around the country where liberal Democrats are regularly endorsed from the pulpit. The fondness...
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Jonathan Gruber: Honest Liberal
Brought before a House inquisition, MIT professor and Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber burbled a recantation of his beliefs about how that triumph of liberalism had been achieved. Yet, something needs to be said in defense of Gruber. For while he groveled and confessed to the sin of arrogance, what this Ivy League con artist boasted...
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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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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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Culture Politics
“The results of political changes are hardly ever those which their friends hope for or their foes fear.” —T.H. Huxley In political circles, it has become fashionable to talk about “culture wars.” The discussions usually touch on the issues of abortion, euthanasia, sexual orientation, school prayer, gun control, and welfare, among others. These are issues...
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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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Bowling Alone in Columbine
Politics are over in America. Political maneuvering will go on, of course, but the old civics class view of American political life was based on a set of assumptions that are no longer operative. First, America was far more homogenous before the 1965 Immigration Act and the “New Left” political and social revolution of...
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What Robert Taft Could Teach Us Today
Since the end of the Cold War American foreign policy has been incoherent. The Clinton administration has sent U.S. troops under U.N. authority to Somalia, Bosnia, and Haiti; tried to broker peace talks in Northern Ireland and the Middle East; bombed Iraq; ordered American warships to the Taiwan Straits; and antagonized China and Russia—while simultaneously...
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A Necessary Realignment
As I write on the morning of Super Tuesday, March 1, the Republican establishment is in hysterics. The writing is on the wall. By the end of the day, Donald Trump will have all but sewed up the 2016 Republican nomination for president. And I write those words confidently, even though voting has just begun...
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No, This Is Not JFK’s Democratic Party
Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s House has more women, persons of color and LGBT members than any House in history—and fewer white males. And Thursday, the day Rashida Tlaib was sworn in, her hand on a Quran, our first Palestinian-American congresswoman showed us what we may expect. As a rally of leftists lustily cheered her on, Tlaib...
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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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Spain Embraces Change: Canceling the Past
For the last four years, change has been in the air in Spain, following the election of Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party. And thanks to his reelection in March of this year, we can look forward to more of the same. There have been abrupt changes to...
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The Righteousness of Rock?
The Fox Theatre—a grand movie palace of Detroit’s 1920’s, which is now used primarily as a venue for acts that won’t fill an arena—contained a chronologically mixed crowd in mid-March. Paul Young was in concert. Young, a slightly chubby, baby-faced British singer (he appears, to borrow a line from Elvis Costello, “teddy-bear tender and tragically...
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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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Attack of the Jacobins
Trent Lott—to the guillotine! The cry has gone up, the mob is implacable, and the once-powerful and seemingly unassailable Senate majority leader has gotten the message loud and clear: Confess your sins, bare your neck, and prepare to lose your head! And for what? What sin did this former muckamuck of the GOP commit that...
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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 Might
“I chant the new empire . . . “ —Walt Whitman Walt Whitman sang what he saw—in 1860, he gave a name to Madison’s and Jefferson’s vision of the new commonwealth. “[Our success],” Jefferson had said in 1801, “furnishes a new proof of the falsehood of Montesquieu’s doctrine, that a republic can be preserved only...
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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.