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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Long Before Trump, We Were a Divided People
In a way, Donald Trump might be called The Great Uniter. Bear with me. No Republican president in the lifetime of this writer, not even Ronald Reagan, united the party as did Trump in the week of his acquittal in the Senate and State of the Union address. According to the Gallup Poll, 94% of...
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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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Vol. 3 No. 3 March 2001
The pro-Gore bias of the American media during the five weeks of post-election legal and political wrangling was as unsurprising as it was obvious. Most foreign media were even less restrained. On December 14, BBC commentator Brian Barron told British television viewers that George W. Bush’s “mandate is all but invisible.” Radio 4 network commentator...
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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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Ukraine Bosnified, Putin Hitlerized
On March 6 President Obama said in Washington that the Crimean authorities’ plans for a referendum “violate the Ukrainian Constitution and violate international law.” “Any discussion about the future of Ukraine must include the legitimate government of Ukraine. We are well beyond the days when borders can be redrawn over the heads of democratically elected...
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Daffodils for Wordsworth
The name Philip Larkin (1922-1985) is a wonderfully poetic one, conjuring an image of a lover of horses on a carefree adventure. Such, however, is far from the temperament of this 20th-century poet, whose poetry is more suggestive of some horse in a Dickens novel, harnessed to an industrial wheel and moving forever round in...
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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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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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Celtic Justice
“For any displeasure, that they apprehend to be done unto them by their neighbours, they take up a plain field against him, and (without respect to God, King, or commonweal) bang it out bravely, he and all his kin, against him and all his.” —King James VI of Scotland, Basilikon Doron...
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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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Glorified on TV
Bounty hunters with a license to kill are glorified on television every week. The reality is uglier and more terrifying than most of us imagine. In Phoenix, a group of heavily armed bounty hunters, wearing ski-masks and body armor, sledgehammered their way through the front door of a private residence, tied up a mother, and...
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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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Why the Republicans Won’t Stop Obama’s Amnesty
Spending more than a minute or two to discuss Barack Obama’s latest assault on the Constitution that he has sworn to uphold is, quite frankly, a waste of time. Even before the announcement of his “executive action” plan for amnesty for five million illegal immigrants, the President’s defenders had claimed that he wanted to do...
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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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Memo to Trump: Defy Mueller
If Donald Trump does not wish to collaborate in the destruction of his presidency, he will refuse to be questioned by the FBI, or by a grand jury, or by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his malevolent minions. Should Mueller subpoena him, as he has threatened to do, Trump should ignore the subpoena, and frame...
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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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We Are Right on Foreign Affairs Because We Are Right on Everything
It is almost embarrassing to say that we are right on foreign affairs because we are right on everything else. It nevertheless has to be said, because it is true. We are right on foreign affairs because the behavior of our rulers abroad is a logical and inevitable extension of their behavior at home. Having...
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A True Vindication of Edmund Burke
Mr. Conor Cruise O’Brien’s “A Vindication of Edmund Burke,” (National Review, December 17, 1990), contains many long established truths about Burke’s politics—his consistency in principle, his remarkable insights and powers of prophesy, his strong critique of revolutionary ideology, and so forth. But amidst these trite truisms, which vindicate O’Brien’s subject only to the uninitiated, he...
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Getting Back to Nature
“Human rights are fictions—but fictions with highly specific properties.” —Alasdair MacIntyre In 1960 John Courtney Murray, S.J., warned of the possibility that America was slipping into a new barbarism. In his best known work, We Hold These Truths, Father Murray said that barbarism “threatens when men cease to talk together according to reasonable laws.” Argument...
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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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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 Duopoly Wins on Trade, You Lose
Sometimes a bellwether issue isn’t the most important issue. Abortion is more important than this week’s U.S. Senate vote on Trade Promotion Authority. But abortion is a decades-old issue that has involved many battles, and still does. The TPA vote, which affirmed the House vote, is a clear issue that shows who’s really in power....
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An Establishment in Panic
Donald Trump “appeals to racism.” “[F]rom the beginning . . . his campaign has profited from voter prejudice and hatred” and represents an “authoritarian assault upon democracy.” If Speaker Paul Ryan wishes to be “on the right side of history . . . he must condemn Mr. Trump clearly and comprehensively. The same goes for...
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The Litmus Test for American Conservatism
Abraham Lincoln is thought of by many as not only the greatest American statesman but as a great conservative. He was neither. Understanding this is a necessary condition for any genuinely American conservatism. When Lincoln took office, the American polity was regarded as a compact between sovereign states which had created a central government as...
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The Political Lynching of Derek Chauvin
Chauvin was accused of a modern-day lynching, but mob justice is what Chauvin received as evidence was withheld, expert medical testimony ignored, and even his safety in prison neglected.
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The Twilight of the Sacred
At the center of the contemporary pagan/Christian controversy are the nature, the localization, and the psychological-mythological motivation of the sacred. The last one dominates the debate because as the transcendent God becomes less focused the sacred turns into a basically human domain. The question, no longer addressed to heaven, is not over how God communicates...
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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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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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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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A Masque of State–and Its Parody
“Soft Power” is real power. The State Banquet at Buckingham Palace earlier this month showed royals and the President at their best, with an unstated but perfectly clear implication: no other country can do this. It were well to keep on good terms with the people who can put on a show like this. Everyone was at the top of their form: Trump behaved impeccably, and...
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Why Garry Wills?
Garry Wills identifies himself as a Christian. He says he accepts the creeds, along with prayer, divine providence, the Gospels, the Eucharist, and the Mystical Body of Christ as the body of all believers. He thinks it a bad thing that “article by article, parts of the Creed are fading from some churches.” He also...
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The Perils of Greatness
The thing about Lyndon Johnson—and you may be sure I kept a close adolescent eye on him while he was one of my two U.S. senators—was that he knew what he was doing. There was more to it even than that. He knew how to get things done. The faint breezes from the ’50s...
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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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Knights of the Invisible Empire
Back in the days when Southern merchants had to take the Ku Klux Klan seriously, the knights of the Invisible Empire liked to play a neat little trick on a store owner who had strayed too far from the path of racial rectitude the secret society demanded of him. Several Klansmen in plain clothes would...
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The New Gun Control
Just after 1 a.m. on July 22, 2019, Tyler Wingate, a 24-year-old white male, was driving on Livernois in Detroit when Lawrence Davis, a 24-year-old black male, bumped into him. The two pulled into a gas station to resolve the minor fender bender. Both got out of their cars. Wingate took one step when Davis...
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Will JFK’s Party Become Sanders’ Party?
Sen. Bernie Sanders may be on the cusp of both capturing the Democratic nomination and transforming his party as dramatically as President Donald Trump captured and remade the Republican Party. After his sweep of the Nevada caucuses, following popular vote victories in Iowa and New Hampshire, Sanders has the enthusiasm and the momentum, as the...
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The Revolution in Waco: Torching the Constitution
A hundred years from now historians, if they are still permitted to research and write, will argue about when the United States started down the slippery slope to totalitarianism. Many Southern historians believe it began with the erosion of the U.S. Constitution occasioned by President Lincoln’s disregard of that document and by the Reconstruction Era....
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Pico Della Mirandola’s Oration On the Dignity Of Man
I once read that Abdala the Muslim, when asked what was most worthy of awe and wonder in this theater of the world, answered, “There is nothing to see more wonderful than man!” Hermes Trismegistus concurs with this opinion: “A great miracle, Asclepius, is man!” However, when I began to consider the reasons for these opinions,...
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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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MODI ANTE PORTAS
Two important recent events – Narendra Modi’s landslide victory in India last week and the massive energy and trade agreement which Russia and China signed in Beijing on Wednesday – have the potential to alter Asia’s strategic landscape. Modi is an assertive politician unafraid to take risks, a market-oriented reformer, but also a Hindu nationalist....
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A Man of Inaction
In 1912, at dusk walking home, Henry Adams spotted something he thought to be a hippopotamus in the nation’s capital. As he drew nearer he saw it was President Taft. He gave me a shock. He looks bigger and more tumble to pieces than ever . . . but what struck me most was the...
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Immigration, the Border, and the Fate of the Land
One hundred and seventy miles southwest of Tucson, hard by the Mexico line, stands a weathered mountain range called the Cabeza Prieta. It is a place of weird landforms and scarce but formidable vegetation, a graduate school for desert rats that only the best prepared dares enter. The geography of the place says, Stay away. ...
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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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In Georgia, a Reminder of a Halcyon West
Even in the beginnings of winter, Georgia’s capitol Tbilisi emits a warmth. One should expect this from a city known for its many hot springs, but the warmth experienced goes much beyond the sulfur baths popular with tourists and locals alike. Tbilisi, with its 1.4 million residents, is inviting in a way that few cities...
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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.