In medias res: Loud, booming, clanging in an industrial factory. Bottles and other loose articles shake and nearly crash to the floor with each successive pounding, rattle of the building. A figure falls to a low crouch holding a drawn pistol while glancing about like a cornered animal. Two calm men enter the room and...
2050 search results for: Supreme%2525252525252525252525252525252BCourt
Post
The Necessity of Christianity
According to an increasingly popular and influential narrative, the Founding Fathers were mostly crypto-atheistic deists who, as Christopher Hitchens is fond of pointing out, did not mention God in the Constitution, and gave us a First Amendment because they were, at best, suspicious of Christianity and wished to limit its influence. And it’s a good...
Post
Remembering Robert Nisbet
It is hard to imagine anyone today having a career like Robert Nisbet’s: professor at Berkeley, Arizona, and Columbia; dean and vice-chancellor at the University of California, Riverside; author of widely used sociology textbooks; and co-founder, along with his friend Russell Kirk and a few others, of postwar intellectual American conservatism. Nisbet greatly admired Edmund...
Post
Transatlantic Rifts
In the immediate aftermath of September 11, Europe was closer to America, politically and emotionally, than at any time since World War II. For a moment, the threat of Islamic terrorism had rekindled a dormant awareness on both sides of the Atlantic of just how much the Old Continent and the New World have in...
Post
With the Nietzscheans of Naumburg
The old cathedral town of Naumburg, where Friedrich Nietzsche spent 12 of the first 18 and seven of the last ten years of his life, is located in the southeastern corner of the Land (province) of Sachsen-Anhalt, roughly halfway between Weimar and Leipzig. In late April and early May of 1945, this part of Germany...
Post
Israel’s Judicial Reform Shows Growing Left-Right Divide Among Jews
The division among Jews worldwide regarding Israeli judicial reforms represents a growing gulf between Jewish liberals and conservatives, or "globalists" and "localists."
Post
Against the Rainbow Capitalists
Broad swaths of conservative opinion today would have it that the enemy of the right is some variant of Marxism. But this does not accurately describe people like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, or CNN’s Jeff Zucker. All the tech and media executives who are censoring and deplatforming voices on the right can hardly...
Post
Those Irrational Californians
California has long been called the land of fruit and nuts. Now a decision by a federal judge stands in the way of anyone who might wish to challenge that description. In Perry v. Schwarzenegger, Judge Vaughn R. Walker held that the 6.8 million Californians who voted in favor of Proposition 8, which amended the...
Post
Thinking About Internment
I am going to ask what Churchill would have called some naughty questions, and offer some impertinent answers. I apologize in advance for the extreme political incorrectness of what follows. In the hope of persuading the reader that I raise these issues with no pleasure at all, I shall preface them with some personal notes....
Post
The Facts and Fiction of Election Reforms
Two of the Clinton campaign’s central promises aimed at reducing the federal budget deficit and “reinventing” government. Unfortunately, President Clinton’s recently unveiled campaign finance reform plan will do neither. The most dramatic step the President could take toward accomplishing his goals would be to resist congressmen’s desires on the topic closest to their hearts: election...
Post
Solzhenitsyn and Democracy
The name of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has fallen on hard times. My many public lectures on this author convince me that his sympathetic admirers are legion, but even these admirers are troubled that the press commentary on him seems to be fairly consistently negative. While almost all of his Western critics allow that Solzhenitsyn is a...
Post
An Aristocracy of Warriors
In his seminal work, Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville noted that the nobility of medieval Europe reckoned martial valor to be the greatest of all the virtues. The feudal aristocracy, he said, “was born of war and for war; it won its power by force of arms and maintained it thereby. So nothing was...
Post
Money-Sucking Machines
Riverboat casinos are giant money-sucking machines. A $30 million riverboat casino operated by Harrah’s can suck in $200,000 a day from bettors, assuming a typical daily loss of $50 per customer. This kind of highstakes betting used to be called gambling. But liberals have come up with a new name—”gaming.” It was formerly recognized as...
Post
Trump & the Hillarycons
In 1964, Phyllis Schlafly of Alton, Illinois, mother of six, wrote and published a slim volume entitled A Choice Not an Echo. Backing the candidacy of Sen. Barry Goldwater, the book was a polemic against the stranglehold the eastern liberal establishment had held on the Republican nomination for decades. A Choice sold 3 million copies....
Post
Kennedy v. Kennedy
On the last day of August, Judge Richard J. Leon of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia found for March for Life in its suit against the Department of Health and Human Services, among other agencies. March for Life is a secular, nonprofit organization, founded after Roe v. Wade, that opposes abortion...
Post
Cannibal Statistics
In debate, it is always possible to be right for the wrong reason. For instance, in supporting the proposition that cannibalism is immoral, I might argue that, historically, cannibalism encouraged the killing of human beings who might otherwise have been kidnapped by Arabs or rival African tribesmen and sold ...
Post
Congress, We’ve Got Your Number
Dear Members of Congress: Some of you who are doing your duty in representing your constituents need not pay attention to this letter. You know who you are. For the rest of you, I have a question: Where in the name of our country are you people? Since Jan. 20, we’ve had a crisis at...
Post
The Wolf Week in Review: The Great Political Christian Contest
Another week has come and gone, and here are some highlights and cultural trends. Celebrity Apprentices Here’s a lede you didn’t imagine five years ago: The Pope and Donald Trump are engaged in a public feud over illegal immigration. Trump is “not Christian,” says the pontiff. This latest brouhaha comes with Pope Francis’s visit to...
Post
The Left’s True Target
Arguments, as Malcolm Muggeridge astutely observed, are never about what they’re about. As when “You’re never on time anymore” turns out really to mean, “When are you going to quit sitting around and get a real job?” And so on. The national argument over Confederate symbols and monuments—assuming you want to call it an argument...
Post
He Got Them First
“Traitors’ words ne’er yet hurt honest cause.” —Scottish Proverb The destruction of Sen. Joe McCarthy, says M. Stanton Evans, was never about what he did: The real issue has always been the larger question of what happened to America—and the world—at the midpoint of the twentieth century, what it meant, and who was responsible for...
Post
For Fear of the Wolves
Pope Benedict XVI, in an appeal to the sheep newly his own on the day of his enthronement, said, “Pray for me that I may not flee for fear of the wolves.” We can be sure he knows who these wolves are after a quarter-century as head of the Holy Office. Here are some of...
Post
A Focused Trump Can Still Pull It Out
If Donald Trump loses the election, history will attribute his defeat to a pandemic that killed 200,000 Americans during his reelection campaign, and a historic depression deliberately induced to put the economy in a coma as the nation suffered through that pandemic. But despite the worst hand dealt a sitting president since Herbert Hoover in...
Post
Ancient Greek Religion
The religion of the ancient Greeks is startlingly different from Christianity. It has been misinterpreted by people who think that since it is a religion it must be like Christianity, and also by people who think that because it is not like Christianity it is not really a religion at all. The Greeks had poetry...
Post
What ‘Black’ Really Means to the Left
Kamala Harris’s ancestry matters less to the left in defining her than does Harris’s consistently woke politics which, for them, is part and parcel of black identity.
Post
The Death of Moral Community
“The opponents (of same-sex marriage) have no case other than ignorance and misconception and prejudice.” So writes Richard Cohen in his celebratory column about Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s role in legalizing gay marriage in New York state. Now, given that no nation in 20 centuries of Christendom legalized homosexual marriage, and, in this century, majorities in...
Post
Play It Again, Plum!
“It has been well said of Bertram Wooster that though he may sink onto rustic benches and for a while give the impression of being licked into a custard, the old spirit will come surging back sooner or later.” —P.G. Wodehouse, The Mating Season Robert McCrum demurs from critical comparisons of P.G. Wodehouse with the...
Post
The Unitary State of America
Our country’s name, the United States of America, is plural. Yet a more accurate description at this late date would be the Unitary State of America—singular, not plural. Consider some recent events: • “The Obama administration released a warning Monday telling the nation’s landlords that it may be discriminatory for them to refuse to rent...
Post
The Virtues of Property
Somewhere deep in their bones, Americans recognize that property is the paramount civil right—perhaps the paramount human right. Anyone who seriously studies American history, particularly that of the late 18th century, will discover that property, along with virtue, provided the foundation for American government. Indeed, the preservation of properly is arguably the chief reason we...
Post
Secession and American Republicanism
When the American colonists seceded from Britain in 1776, Europe was shared out among great monarchies. Only Switzerland was republican, but Americans were determined to enjoy a republican style of government in the New World. The republican tradition went back over 2,000 years to the ancient Greeks and consistently taught that a republic must satisfy...
Post
Mixed Signals
Rudolph Giuliani in one of his first actions as mayor of New York City, eliminated a controversial set-aside program that had been instituted in 1991 by the Dinkins administration. Considering the extent to which the use of quotas now permeates American society, any victory for the merit system is reason for celebration. The policy in...
Post
Chauvin, Houston, and Strange Racial Justice
“Justice” in America today is an arrangement where the living and dead are judged to be guilty or innocent on the basis of race.
Post
From the Family of the Lion
“There is a kind of revolution of so general a character that it changes the tastes as well as the fortunes of the world.” —La Rochefoucauld There is a popular myth of Abraham Lincoln, our 16th President, that is known to most Americans. According to the orthodox version of this highly sympathetic...
Post
The Strongmen Straw Man
Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism by Anne Applebaum Doubleday 224 pp., $25.00 Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present by Ruth Ben-Ghiat W. W. Norton & Company 384 pp., $28.95 For some among the chattering classes, the electoral defeat of Donald Trump in November must have been a mixed blessing, though they doubtless could...
Post
Muse of Apollo
Is it really necessary to explain why President Trump’s proposed Space Force would be a boon to humankind? Do I have to contrast such a noble project with the other possible uses to which our tax dollars would be put? Perhaps a study of how transsexuals are prone to certain color combinations. Or one on...
Post
The Crusade to Nowhere
My last conversation with Edward Thompson, the Marxist historian, was at the gates of Durham Castle. That, on reflection, was how it should have been. There was always something slightly grand about him, as if a castle, or at least a country mansion, might be a natural place for him. Durham Castle is now a...
Post
‘Remember Us’: How to Fight Media Bombholing
A victim of media “bombholing” explains how the media drive their ratings and profits by publishing an unending series of wild, unsubstantiated stories, never stopping to correct the ones that came before.
Post
Regime Change—American Style
The campaign to overturn the 2016 election and bring down President Trump shifted into high gear this week. Inspiration came Saturday morning from the altar of the National Cathedral where our establishment came to pay homage to John McCain. Gathered there were all the presidents from 1993 to 2017, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and...
Post
The Heart of Darkness
When the Vietnam War ended in 1975, over 58,000 Americans had lost their lives over the course of almost 20 years. Whatever one may think of the justice or prudence of the U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia, only the most callous of souls regards that loss of life with complete ...
Post
The Justification for War
During the Cold War, occasional resorts to war or threats of war by the United States were justified by the need to keep communism in check. This justification had the advantage of being based on a real threat—notably in Berlin in 1949, in Korea in 1950, and during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. The...
Post
Why Are the Nutjobs Trying to Kill Political Opponents All Left-Wingers?
The Left has had a violent streak going back at least as far as Karl Marx's calls for a global revolution of the proletariat—and the French Revolution even before that.
Post
Empire of the West
A critique of the destinarian political philosophy of Francis Parker Yockey.
Post
Early Form
The Yale Lit. has returned, but not in the form that some Chronicles readers may remember from the early 80’s, when Andrei Navrozov was editor. The undergraduate magazine (est. 1836) he turned into a national quarterly of arts, letters, and politics finished its run through the courts in 1986 and has now returned to the...
Post
Social Security’s War on Families: A Current Crisis and a Coming Disaster
The war in Iraq has left many casualties; Social Security reform is one of them. For so long, Democrats surrounded the issue with demagoguery. And now that the Democrats control Capitol Hill, Republicans seem unwilling to acknowledge, let alone confront, Social Security’s impending financial collapse. And yet the need to confront the problem has never...
Post
Election Suspense
Where then shall Hope and Fear their Objects find? Must dull Suspence corrupt the stagnant Mind? —Samuel Johnson, “The Vanity of Human Wishes” At the time of writing in late August, the coming U.S. election is hard to call, so that dull Suspence must indeed prevail for a few more weeks. One need not let...
Post
In Focus – Embattled Preacher
Dinesh D’Souza: Falwell, Before the Millennium; Regnery Gateway; Chicago. The Rev. Jerry Falwell is one of the most frequently pilloried men in America today. Journalists and liberal politicians are fond of comparing him to Hitler, Khomeini, and Jim Jones and brand him a “racist,” “fascist,” and “intolerant bigot.” Ultrafundamentalists like Bob Jones denounce him as...
Post
“You Have To Commit!”
We were on the practice field preparing for a team that ran the option. Our scout team was running the upcoming opponent’s offense. To our surprise, the scouts executed the option perfectly, which left our outside linebacker frozen halfway between the quarterback, cutting off the block of a tight end, and a trailing halfback arcing...
Post
What We Are Reading: February 2024
Short reviews of The Life of Samuel Johnson, by James Boswell, and How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy, by Batya Ungar-Sargon.
Post
Unto the Least of These …
A few years ago Oral Roberts made national headlines when he confessed to having seen a 900-foot-tall Jesus in the heavens urging the faithful to donate to the “City of Faith,” as he called the medical school he was building at his university. Those who believed him, his “partners,” were asked to send monthly donations...
Post
1984 in 2024: Orwell Was Right
Our present world feels more and more like Orwell’s dystopia but unlike in his story, we have the power to stop the party we live under.
Post
Last Chance for the ‘Deplorables’
Speaking to 1,000 of the overprivileged at an LGBT fundraiser, where the chairs ponied up $250,000 each and Barbra Streisand sang, Hillary Clinton gave New York’s social liberals what they came to hear. “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” smirked Clinton to cheers and laughter....