It’s hard to know whether the dirty bomb the Washington Post detonated two months before the Virginia gubernatorial election will affect the outcome of the race. The Post dropped it August 30, instead of October 10 or 15, when it would have done maximum damage to its target, Republican Bob McDonnell. Other issues, such as...
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Race and Civil Rights
One would expect race-baiting liberals and leftists to try to glorify the “civil-rights movement” and the laws of the early 1960’s, insisting that we view all of it as earth shaking history, more important than the fall of the Roman Empire, the Norman Invasion, the battles of Tours and Lepanto, the Reformation, the American, French,...
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The Impoverished Debate
Politics, said Henry Adams, “has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.” In recent months, best-seller lists have helped to prove Adams’ point, by featuring many vituperative political tracts from the left and right. The undisputed queen of the genre is Ann Coulter, whose overheated book Slander sold like hotcakes in 2002; lately, she has...
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Charity Begins at Church
December can be a difficult month for American Christians, forced to look on passively as their sacred holy days are turned into a generic “holiday season.” The First Sunday in Advent has been replaced by “Black Friday,” the day on which retailers begin to turn a profit on holiday sales; and the end of the...
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Abortion’s Triple Crown
For four decades now, pro-life voters have been wedded to the national Republican Party by the vows of politicians whose actions, upon election, have proved that they had no intention ever of fulfilling them. Every two or four or six years, they would swear to defend the lives of the unborn, and then, after taking...
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2020: Socialist America or Trump’s America?
In the new Democratic Party, where women and people of color are to lead, and the white men are to stand back, the presidential field has begun to sort itself out somewhat problematically. According to a Real Clear Politics average of five polls between mid-March and April 1, four white men—Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, “Beto”...
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The War on Christmas
One of the signature features of Western politics in the last few decades is the rise of the cultural Marxism known as “political correctness.” As advocated by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, leftists have worked their way through the institutions of the West, leaving a trail of cultural devastation in their wake. A hallmark...
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Time for Disengagment
“I’ve spent my entire adult life with the United States as a superpower, and one that had no compunction about spending what it took to sustain that position,” outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates told Newsweek on June 19. “[F]rankly I can’t imagine being part of a nation, part of a government . . . that’s...
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The Constitutions in Our Brains
Tee-hee. Such is the line in liberal circles concerning the federal district court decision striking down the federal Defense of Marriage Act on, among other grounds, those of “States Rights.” Including Massachusetts’ right to allow gay marriage without prejudice to the partners’ right to federal benefits. Congress, a decade and a half ago, voted that...
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Whose Globe, Whose Europe?
A widely publicized essay, “The Collapse of Globalism and the Rebirth of Nationalism,” by John Ralston Saul, appeared in the March issue of Harper’s. It is an extended attack on the Enlightenment and its global effects, launched from the multicultural left, which dwells on the happy turn of events that has allowed “positive forms of...
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Calculated Acts of Goodness
How could this be? In a Catholic school? Here? This is what they’re teaching our kids? I stopped, transfixed. I had parked my car and sauntered into the Catholic middle school in search of my son. I was about to turn down the hall that led to his math class when I was struck by...
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The Tribute Which Vice Pays to Virtue
Hypocrisy, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld told us, is the tribute which vice pays to virtue. Tributes of this kind have been flowing lately from the members of the United States Senate and the mainstream press who clamored for some sort of censure of President William Jefferson Clinton, or who scrambled, for a while, to...
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Dropping the Ball on Us
The New Year is in full swing, and with it new laws and regulations carefully designed to enrich the lives of Americans who are insane. Because the essence of our approach to life together in our degenerate age is that, for every problem humanoids may encounter, there is a potential law that could solve it,...
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The Coming Republican Donkey
The end is near for our Golden Age of Republican Party rule. The first blow came in 2006, when horrified voters kicked the GOP back to minority status in Congress. And, come November, Republicans may emerge from elections without a veto-proof Senate and without one of their own demagogues occupying the White House. If the...
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Dead Sea Drama
Ever since Marshall McLuhan’s famous review of Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry and Parker Tyler’s Magic and Myth of the Movies in 1947, Western intellectuals have felt obliged to mix traditional scholarship with themes from popular culture. Needless to say, few could compete with McLuhan’s brilliance and erudition in taking Parry’s and Lord’s theories about the...
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I’ll Take My Sit
Because it’s reasonable to assume that Gerald Russello (“The Agrarian Burden,” Reviews, October) is highly knowledgeable of his chosen subject, the Southern Agrarians, I must conclude that his avoidance of their intellectual hypocrisy (or worse) is by choice and not by accident. I’ll Take My Stand was written by a dozen academics, most comfortably ensconced...
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My Kavanaugh Hearing Nightmare and ‘Oprah Moment’ on Fox
One thing I learned from my ordeal in the limelight of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings and Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations is that the truth is always more complicated than the narrative.
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Leveraged Buyout
“Every nation has the government it deserves.” Joseph de Maistre’s hard saying can give small comfort to Americans. Oh, it is true, we have a paper Constitution that promises a republican form of government, but all three branches of that government have for several generations conspired to evacuate the republican content from the system, leaving...
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School of Rape: From Health Class to Hotties
America’s educational landscape is being transformed under the cover of “health.” This transformation began with sex education, which once was relegated to a subunit of physiology that addressed the science of human reproduction. But sex education suddenly required its own graphic, stand-alone how-to course, then morphed into a “nonjudgmental” monstrosity designed to transmit knowledge of...
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Tan, Rested, and Ready
“I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God.” The inauguration of the first black president of the United States on January...
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Fake Art
The problem of forged art, always a complicated one, has been made immeasurably more complicated in this century because of two factors. One, the appreciation of tribal art in its many varieties has coincided with the gradual disappearance of tribal living worldwide; thus some of the most vexing problems of authenticity in the art world...
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Is America Still a Nation?
In the first line of the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, Thomas Jefferson speaks of “one people.” The Constitution, agreed upon by the Founding Fathers in Philadelphia in 1789, begins, “We the people . . . “ And who were these “people”? In Federalist No. 2, John Jay writes of them as “one...
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Political Art and Artful Politics
We speak as readily of the art of politics as we do of the art of cooking or writing, and what we have in mind in each case is what the French call savoir faire. This sense of “art” claims excellence for the activity of which the term is predicated, and since to know what...
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The People Knew What Was At Stake
This is an extraordinarily great day for those of us who believe in the rule of law, separation of powers, and federalism. We in the academy, in particular, were constantly told that in the 21st century there was no place for the traditionally conservative ideas of adherence to the original understanding of the Constitution, in...
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The Flies of Summer
Last summer I was standing next to a great bull buffalo in western Kansas. He was mad and had a right to be. My buddy Joe Kramer, along with other men from Kansas Fish & Game, had this great American bison in an animal squeeze while they took a blood sample and gave him a...
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National Love-Fest
Jackie, Tiger, and Ellen—not as catchy as Martin, Bartin, and Fish, or Abraham, Martin, and John, but good enough to mesmerize the press this spring. In one respect, the mainstream media were right: Jackie Robinson was a courageous man; Tiger Woods is an extraordinary golfer; and Ellen DeGenerate—well, two out of three ain’t bad. But...
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Cobden’s Pyrrhic Victory
Bill Clinton and Richard Cobden, a 19th-century English anti-Corn Law crusader, have more in common than consonants in their surnames. As economic internationalists, both trumpeted commerce as the panacea for attaining world peace and prosperity. In their own ways, both bear responsibility for the new international economic order which rests on the twin foundations of...
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No Good Deed . . .
Sheriff Joe Arpaio, hated by the open-borders crowd but loved by those who want to uphold America’s immigration laws, has always been surrounded by controversies—they whirl around him like dust storms in the Arizona desert. Now an even bigger storm is brewing around him, in the wake of the Trump administration’s pardon. And what, you...
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An Infantile Disorder
“Why, we could lick them in a month!” boasts Stuart Tarleton soon after the Confederates fire on Fort Sumter in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. “Gentlemen always fight better than rabble. A month—why, one battle.” At that point, young Mr. Tarleton is interrupted by Rhett Butler, a rather darker character in Mitchell’s novel than...
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Dahrendorf and Burke, 1789 & 1989
Just two centuries on, an echo of Edmund Burke and his most celebrated book has opportunely come out of Oxford. It is by Sir Ralf Dahrendorf, a German-born political scientist who is now warden of St. Antony’s College there; and it is called Reflections on the Revolution in Europe in a Letter Intended to have...
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Is Our Second Civil War—also a ‘Forever War’?
When the Electoral College meets Monday, it will almost surely certify former Vice President Joe Biden as the 46th president of the United States. And he will take the oath of office Jan. 20. There is, nationally, a growing if grudging realization of that reality. Yet millions of Americans will refuse to accept the legitimacy...
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On Europe and America
I would like to congratulate François Furet (“The Long Apprenticeship,” July 1996) on his Richard M. Weaver Award and do him the courtesy of taking his acceptance speech seriously. I start by confessing that here in England the sense of inexorable democratic/ constitutional progress which Furet claims for France and Europe seems tremendously problematic. England...
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Press Cowards’ Hypocritical Lament Over Media’s Lack of ‘Balls’ and ‘Swagger’
Mainstream press critics whine about the demise of journalism’s good ole days, while carefully avoiding writing anything that would offend their paymasters.
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The Reaper with Steel-Rimmed Glasses
Arnold Beichman and Mikhail S. Bernstarn: Andropov: New Challenge to the West; Stein and Day; New York. Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova: Yuri Andropov: A Secret Passage into the Kremlin; Macmillan; New York. by T. Mark Kulish On November 15, 1982, an overcast and cold day in Moscow, Leonid Brezhnev was buried. The new...
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An American Life
It is not impossible, merely difficult, for the author of a highly praised first novel to produce a second worthy of its predecessor. Perhaps paucity of imagination is responsible for the failure of many second novels; the writer emptied his quiver the first time or got lucky with a flash-in-the-pan and should not have tried...
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Rethinking U.S. Naval Strategy
As we enter the century’s third decade, an openly interventionist team will imminently take back control of America’s foreign policy. Geopolitical instability may become acute, and a dispute over maritime rights is the most likely form of escalation. Asia-Pacific is the most likely theater. And the most important underlying factor leading to military conflict is a...
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Blurred Lines
What’s with Pope Francis? What has been his effect on the Church? To understand the situation we need to look at secular culture, the state of the Church, and Francis himself. Public culture today is atheistic. It excludes God, natural law, and higher goods; bases morality on individual preferences; and views reason as a way...
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The Grand Illusion
Twenty years from now, when future historians look back at the 1980’s, some of them may be tempted to call it the “Decade of the Grand Illusion.” For not since les années folles, as the French still call the giddy 1920’s, has the Western world lived in such a state of deceptive euphoria. The besetting...
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The World Bank’s Green Imperialism
The World Bank is the financial arm by which the liberal international order exercises control over poor and developing nations.
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9-11, Six Years Later
On Sept. 7, National Public Radio reported that Muslims in the Middle East were beginning to believe that the 9-11 attacks on the WTC and Pentagon were false flag operations committed by some part of the U.S. and-or Israeli government. It was beyond the ...
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An Education in Imagination
For a conservative, no engagement can be more important than edu cation. A conservative is one who distinguishes his outlook from others—socialist and liberal, for example—by his concern, not with the standpoint of here and now, but with the perspective of those who have come before us and those as yet unborn. Where liberalism and...
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Obama and the Army of Sodom
Homosexuals coast-to-coast have been doing the slow burn in the past few months because their jug-eared leader, Barack Obama, has delayed fulfilling a key campaign promise: to scrap the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule. The policy is actually federal law, and it’s very simple: Keep your mouth shut, and you can serve. Ten months...
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Crazy Hopes
A very interesting British man named Simon Parkes has become a YouTube phenomenon in just a few days following the events of the Capitol Hill riot on Jan. 6 and Trump’s apparent concession speech the following day. Parkes has told disappointed Trump supporters that he is in direct contact with “Q,” the shadowy figure supposedly...
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Letter From Egypt: The Battle for the Nile (Pt. 1)
My annual Middle Eastern tour this winter is limited to Egypt, mainly due to the less rigid Corona-related restrictions there than elsewhere in the region. An additional motive is the fact that this country of over a hundred million souls faces an unprecedented geopolitical crisis that is not sufficiently known in the outside world yet...
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Trans Lunacy: The Feminine Touch
The mothering instinct causes women to ensure everyone feels equally valued rather than “left out." This can have serious policy consequences when women occupy public office. Mothering does well in the home, but disastrously in government.
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In the Wake of November
George W. Bush’s electoral victory stunned pundits and pollsters. I was more surprised by the preelection polls than by the President’s margin of victory, which I had been correctly predicting for several months. When the Zogby numbers were brought to me at the end of the day, predicting a Kerry victory by 100 electoral votes,...
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What’s Missing from Journalism: Journalists
Too many of today’s “journalists,” on both the right and the left, have no drive for pursuing the story or finding what is interesting in their subject. This, more than anything, is killing journalism.
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The Habsburgs and the Balkans: A Rich, Uneven Tapestry
Much ill-informed and superficial nonsense has been published in recent weeks on the Habsburgs in general and on their role in the Balkans in particular. This is a pity because that role is genuinely interesting, often filled with drama and heroism, and in its final stages marked by hubris, folly, and tragedy. Well worth a...
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Going Nowhere
Agostino Carrino, a Neapolitan legal theorist now associated with the University of Naples Frederick II, has published a series of tracts (available in Italian, German, and French) aimed at the European Union and its claims to legitimacy. Particularly in his last two works, Democrazia e governo del futuro (2000) and L’Europa e il futuro delle...
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Welcome to Dodge City
On the American frontier of previous centuries, the possession of a firearm was often a key to survival. In this regard, the frontier of 20th-century America, although different geographically, is very much like earlier frontiers. As different waves of Europeans arrived in North America, each took a distinct approach to trading guns with the Indians....