Harris has no excuses, no substance, and nothing recommending her other than convenience and enthusiasm for her race and gender among people who insisted until only a short time ago that Biden was perfectly fine. He wasn’t, and neither is she.
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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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The Necessary Century
“He saith among the trumpets, Ha, Ha! and he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting.” —Job 29:25 According to the fashion current in the publishing world today, the title of a book is a bit of catchy fluff, and the subtitle a ponderous, plonking sentence fragment indicating the...
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Must the West Beg the World for Forgiveness?
As the Democratic Party quarrels over reparations for slavery, a new and related issue has arisen, raised by the president of Mexico. Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has written Pope Francis I and King Felipe VI to demand their apologies for the Spanish conquest of Mexico that began 500 years ago with the “invasion” of Hernando...
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Everything In Its Place
On December 9, 2008, as I read through the federal criminal complaint against the latest Illinois governor to be indicted for the merest portion of his crimes, I could not help but feel uneasy. Sure, it was great fun to imagine Governor Hot Rod sweating it out in his holding cell, awaiting arraignment later in...
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The Flexible Second Term
The presidential election of 2012 was no ordinary contest. The University of Colorado’s political-science department had developed a model, based on the state of the U.S. economy, that had accurately predicted the outcome of every presidential election between 1980 and 2008. This year, the model predicted a Romney victory. The explanation for Obama’s victory lies...
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English Tracts
“England, with all thy faults, I love thee still.” —William Cowper, The Task, II For the last 300 years, “England” and “Britain” have been largely synonymous. When Glasgow-born General Sir John Moore lay dying at Corunna, his last words were “I hope the people of England will be satisfied. I hope...
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The Eurozone: Time for a Divorce
The events of recent months present the eurozone as a dysfunctional bourgeois family, the latter-day Buddenbrooks morphing into Karamazovs. At the plot’s core is the loveless marriage of two incompatible, increasingly embittered partners. Teutonius is a rich yet parsimonious workaholic who abhors mortgages and long holidays. His much younger spouse, Meridiana, has inherited all the...
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FBI and Justice Department Are Greatest Threat to Constitution
The Constitution was never intended to justify surveillance and political interference by un-elected bureaucrats.
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Frankenstein’s Children
“Monstrum horrendum, informe ingens.” —Vergil, Aeneid In 1974, I first encountered one of the creatures E. Michael Jones writes about in Monsters From the Id. It appeared in the guise of one of my graduate-school classmates. She was a bright, pretty woman who seemed unusually self-possessed and accomplished for a 22-year-old. My impression changed, however,...
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The Logic of ‘Laci and Conner’s Law’ is Undeniable
A society that treats the death of the unborn son of Scott Peterson at the hands of his father as an unspeakable crime but would have licensed his death at the hands of his mother will eventually be forced to confront its own incoherence.
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A Melancholy Parade
Russian President Vladimir Putin had nothing to offer that could be passed off as victory at this year's traditional military parade. His power may be weakening after a long list of failures—but the world may come to regret the consequences if he falls.
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The Southern League
The Southern League, which was founded in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in June 1994, seeks to advance the social, cultural, economic, and political wellbeing and independence of the Southern people. According to Southern League President Michael Hill, the South, though it has been subsumed by the American Empire, remains a distinct historical entity: “The South has its...
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Academic Freedom
When IAS (the institute for Advanced Study), the research center that takes pride in having housed Einstein, told the National Endowment for the Humanities last December to take its money and shove it, the New York Times responded with a front-page, four column headline: “Endowment Embattled Over Academic Freedom.” But it appears there was much...
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The Cultural Middleman
To start with, the process of Americanization began at birth. Within the space of one week at the Metropolitan Hospital, I started life as a Hebrew child, with the name Yitzhak-Isaac. This apparently was too cumbersome for record-keeping purposes, so I was entered on the birth certificate as Isadore. But my sister, or at least...
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Stakhanovism in Reverse
Last April, Claude Imbert, editor in chief of the moderately conservative weekly Le Point, dared to make an astonishing mea culpa. In a minor masterpiece of melancholic irony, he confessed the awful truth that he was a “liberal”—which, in present-day French parlance, means someone who believes in free enterprise as a necessary antidote to socialistic...
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The New Math: 66 < 60
How much would you pay for a library card? In Rockford, if you are not a resident, you have to pay $140 per year for the privilege of using the Rockford Public Library system. With six branches scattered throughout the city and over 400,000 volumes, most avid readers who aren’t relying on the library for...
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A Special Prosecutor for Criminal Leaks
Who is the real threat to the national security? Is it President Trump who shared with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov the intelligence that ISIS was developing laptop bombs to put aboard airliners? Or is it the Washington Post that ferreted out and published this code-word intelligence, and splashed the details on its front page, alerting...
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How to Win the War Against Christmas
In the seven years since my first essay on the War Against Christmas appeared in Chronicles, I have had no trouble writing at least one such essay per year, because each year brings new and outrageous attempts to suppress the public celebration of Christmas. My favorite example was the 2002 winner of VDare.com’s invaluable War...
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Spying on the American Remnant
As a boy, your author lived in a working-class neighborhood just outside Houston’s city limits. My parents were the children of rural people who had come to Houston looking for work during the Great Depression. They lived in frame houses sitting on cinder blocks in Houston’s West End, a community of people Larry McMurtry called...
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Can Miss America Restore America’s Faith in Merit?
Air Force pilot, Harvard grad, and Top Gun hopeful Madison Marsh was crowned Miss America on Sunday in Orlando, Florida, on a platform of hoping to dismantle stereotypes about women in the military. Through no fault of her own, her bigger challenge will be to restore America’s faith in merit and accomplishment.
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Deformations of Justice
If a U.S. administration formally attempted to establish an authoritarian police state, its efforts would almost certainly encounter bitter and even violent resistance; recent experience, however, has shown that remarkably authoritarian and unconstitutional methods can be established without provoking serious protest, provided they are introduced piecemeal and justified by the rhetoric of good intentions. In...
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The Chic and the Psychic
I already sounded the alarm in last month’s letter. This really is an impossible city to get out of And so, having bid my farewells, I’m still here, despite the fact that the rent has been paid in advance on a perfectly adequate little aerie over the Grand Canal in Venice. The place even has...
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Prometheus in Overalls
When my fellow Iowan Norman Borlaug started what came to be called the Green Revolution, he had only the best of intentions for farmers. Using chemicals, farmers could be converted into superhuman producers able to supply society with cheap and abundant food. In 1970 Borlaug won the Nobel Prize—a kind of trumpet sounding for the...
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Sinkin’ Down in Youngstown
If you really want to know what’s going on in a city, consult the motel clerk working the graveyard shift—not the clerk at the chain motel, but his counterpart at the inn that advertises the cheapest rates at the interstate exit with the truck stop. The kind of inn where you find cars patched with...
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Witchfinder: The Strange Career of Morris Dees
The trial, conviction, and death sentence of Timothy McVeigh for the Oklahoma City bombing of April 19, 1995, passed quietly this year, far more quietly than most reporters and some political leaders wanted. The main reason for the calmness of the McVeigh proceedings was probably the utterly uninteresting mind, character, and personality of the defendant....
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A Historic Presidency
In the first two decades of the century, President-elect Joe Biden’s choice for secretary of state supported U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. He was an ever-reliable liberal interventionist. This same Antony Blinken could spend the first years of a Biden presidency helping extricate our country from the misbegotten wars he championed....
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It’s 10 A.M. on a School Day—Do You Know Who Has Your Child?
Americans generally agree that our public schools are not what they should be, but the strongest resistance to improvement comes from the jokes some people refer to as “teachers’ unions.” Take the strange ease of a Minneapolis nonprofit corporation. Public School Incentives (PSI), which has proposed some interesting measures for public schools. PSFs founder, Ted...
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Rise of the Alt-Left: After This, the Deluge
Images of those traumatized by the election of Donald Trump are indelible. I mean specifically the sight of empaneled experts, red-eyed, choking, and stuttering as they said things like “CNN is now prepared to call the state of Wisconsin for Donald Trump.” Or of rainbow mobs of sign-wavers in urban centers declaring (absurdly and solipsistically)...
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Dulce et Decorum
One of the most moving war memorials I know is on a wall outside the reading room of the British Museum. It is a simple plaque with the names of a hundred or so librarians killed in the Great War. Librarians. Think about it. That plaque makes a point, doesn’t it, if not perhaps the...
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Paz
“Amazed at the moment’s peak, flesh became word—and the word fell.” —Octavio Paz, A Draft of Shadows Upon a confirmed gringo like me, contemporary Spanish language poetry makes much the same impression as contemporary Spanish or Latin American concert music. Broad prairies of cadenza enclose a garden patch of melodic theme, an orotund thunder of...
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The French Revolution in Three Acts
Taken as a whole, the French Revolution, like any other historical event, may be understood in many ways. Excluding material or circumstantial causes, I see it as a sort of drama, each act of which is performed by characters—sometimes the same, sometimes different—who all, driven by some idea, strive to achieve a certain goal that...
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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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Fatal Amendments
Enthusiastic defenders of the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution are fundamentalist cultists—and women and minorities are their victims. At least, that is the thesis of University of Miami law professor Mary Anne Franks’ new book, The Cult of the Constitution, an unforgiving disparagement of the Constitution’s white male origins and the allegedly unwoke...
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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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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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The Undemocratic Coup
In effect, the Democrats have successfully executed nothing short of a coup d’état, the first in American history.
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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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Two Skeptics
H.L. Mencken has been given a fairly free ride by his various biographers. That ride is now officially over. It might have ended even sooner, had Terry Teachout been able to make up his mind about his subject. For years, Teachout has advertised himself as being “at work” on a biography of Mencken. Now, the...
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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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The Reign of Grantham
“The results of political changes are hardly ever those which their friends hope or their foes fear.” —T.H. Huxley Media commentators covering David Cameron’s incumbency as Tory leader have remarked—often gleefully—on how unpopular Cameron’s Labour-like policies are with the “traditional right.” By this, they mean the Thatcherite rump of the party (probably still the numerical...
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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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Constitutional Convention Would Open Pandora’s Box
Despite the increasing volume on both the right and the left of calls for a constitutional convention, the solution to our problems is not to change the Constitution or even throw it out, but to obey it.
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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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Nationalism Über Alles
There are probably as many theories of nationalism as there are nationalisms. Quite apart from the often extremely complex typologies used to classify nationalism, there are two principal definitions worth noting. In the first sense, nationalism is defined as a more or less voluntary aspiration of a people to establish itself as a nation, whether...
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Odysseys
O Brother, Where Art Thou? Produced by Buena Vista Pictures and Touchstone Pictures Directed by Joel Coen Screenplay by Ethan Coen with help from Homer Released by Buena Vista Pictures All the Pretty Horses Produced by Columbia Pictures and Miramax Films Directed by Billy Bob Thornton Screenplay by Ted Tally from a novel by Cormac...
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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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Forlorn Hopes
Writing your Congressperson. An unindicted Illinois governor. The American people ever understanding that government debt does not exist to cover necessary expenditures but to provide risk-free, tax-free income to capitalists. American leaders ever understanding the difference between defense and aggression. American leaders ever understanding the concept of “blowback,” that what goes around comes around. President,...
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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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Can Humanity Forget What It Knows?
Civilization hangs suspended, from generation to generation, by the gossamer strand of memory. If only one cohort of mothers and fathers fails to convey to its children what it has learned from its parents, then the great chain of learning and wisdom snaps. If the guardians of human knowledge stumble only one time, in their...