On June 30, 2002, the Rockford school-desegregation lawsuit came to an end. After 13 years of busing; the closing of numerous neighborhood schools, one of which is now a mosque and Islamic school; the construction of several massive (and massively overpriced) magnet schools, including a Spanish-language-immersion school and an environmental-science academy; white and middle-class flight...
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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...
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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...
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Fire in the Minds of Men
Recently, we marked the 100th anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution, an event sparked by the revolutionary fire in the minds of men that has burned for as long as there have been men on the earth. In the modern era, revolution ignited in France in the 18th century. It caught fire again in 1848,...
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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...
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Against the Pessimists
America in Black and White is an ambitious project, at once a massively detailed review of race relations this century and a provocative manifesto for the future. As such, it demands comparison with Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944), which did so much to place racial injustice at the center of American politics for decades...
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The Rise and Collapse of Fox News
So many Americans, particularly on the right, have taken Fox News for granted over the past 20 years. It has become a fixture as an alternative to what is known as the mainstream media. In confirmation of the old saying, “You never know what you’ve got til it’s gone,” Fox’s abrupt change during the era of Donald...
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What This Country Needs
“The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right!” —Hamlet, Act I, Sc.5 The Amazing Media Machine, dripping oil and self-satisfaction, roared to new life with Jeb Bush’s declaration of his presidential candidacy. At last—something to talk about. We have Jeb—”Jeb!” as the campaign button puts...
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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...
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America: Ostrich or Eagle?
“Republics exist only on tenure of being agitated.” —Wendell Phillips As a gorgeous American call girl lies murdered on the 46th floor of Los Angeles’ Nakamoto Tower—a Japanese conglomerate’s newly erected American headquarters—a grand opening celebration with Washington and Hollywood notables is in full-swing on the floor below. Security cameras have recorded the murder, but...
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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.
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Caesar’s Column
If anything could make the modern presidency look good, it is the modern Congress. Intended by the Framers, through a misinterpretation of the British constitution, to offer a check to the executive branch, the federal legislature has in fact evolved into merely its partner and more often its lackey. The President now openly intervenes in...
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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...
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Who Owns the Future? Dems or GOP?
For Republicans, the returns were mixed on Nov. 3. Though he carried burdens unrivaled by a president since Herbert Hoover—a plague that has killed 230,000 Americans in eight months and crashed the economy to depths not seen since the ’30s—Donald J. Trump amassed 72 million votes, the largest total in Republican Party history. And while...
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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...
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The Maastricht Mystique
Even an expert must be mystified by the legal structures of the European Union Parliament and the European Commission. The EU Parliament has roughly 620 deputies, elected every five years from 15 Western European states. Voters from ElU countries have no decision over the election of other countries’ deputies to the EU Parliament. The president...
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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...
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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.
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Biblical Values—or Vegas Values?
Almost all of the declared and undeclared Republican candidates for 2016 could be found this weekend at one of two events, or both. The first was organized by the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition, and held in Point of Grace Church in Waukee. Dominated by Evangelical Christians, who were 60 percent of Republican caucus-goers in...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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‘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.
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Bad Hombre Gets His
Only one thing would have been more gratifying than watching a filthy scumbag like José Ernesto Medellín wince as he felt the chilling gush of sodium thiopental run into his arm. That would have been watching him wiggle like a Mexican jumping bean as 2,000 volts of lightning fried him like an Old El Paso...
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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 ...
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The Conservative Search for Order
The terms liberal and conservative (nearly always paired in that descending order) are now so confused as to be almost entirely useless. Originally, liberal was used to denote the ideology that aimed at the liberation of human individuals from the restraints of Church establishments, aristocratic and monarchical privileges, and legal restrictions on business and international...
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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.
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A Big Beautiful Horse
As an experiment in social reconstruction, ObamaCare was nothing compared with what’s coming down the line as a result of the Obama administration’s Friday the 13th diktat that all public schools in the United States must allow every student to use the bathroom of his/her/zis/zir choice, or risk federal civil-rights lawsuits and the withholding of...
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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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Rejecting ‘Systemic Racism’
The latest election cycle did not deliver happy results for the political right. Our dismay is compounded by the strong impression of an unfair result. Whatever you think of the integrity of last November’s elections, it cannot be denied that in the months prior a great many very big thumbs—Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the...
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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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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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Never Paranoid Enough
“Trust no one.” The landmark TV series The X-Files used that catchphrase in depicting a world riven with conspiracies that reach to the highest levels of the U.S. government. Dana Scully and Fox Mulder, the fictional FBI agents who attempted to unravel these grand conspiracies, make the occasional appearance in Kathryn Olmsted’s Real Enemies. Man...
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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.
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Remembering Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle was a bundle of intellectual and literary energy in the Victorian age, but his forceful ideas may have even more relevance to our present-day problems.
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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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Progressive Pilgrim
One week after the 1984 Presidential election, while Ronald Reagan was still basking in the afterglow of a victory he takes as evidence that “America is feeling good about itself again,” the National Conference of Catholic Bishops meeting in Washington finally got a look at the 136-page draft of a “Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social...
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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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Our Presidents in Song
Bill Clinton and George Bush, Sr., share something: They are the only presidents since George Washington who were elected without having a campaign song written for them. Perhaps as a reflection of the vacuousness of their platforms, the two candidates used popular songs for their campaigns. George Bush surely made Woody Guthrie spin in his...
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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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The New Class Controversy
[This article first appeared in the June 1990 issue of Chronicles.] The recent successes of the American right depend, in part, on its ability to deflect lower-middle-class resentment from the rich to a parasitic “new class” of professional problem-solvers and moral relativists. In 1975, William Rusher of the National Review referred to the emergence of a “verbalist” elite,...
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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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Bleep You, Liberals!
Political correctness has, since the 1990’s, been a tool the left has used to silence the proponents of traditional morality, society, and culture. Under the banner of “sensitivity,” which has the veneer of a Higher Morality, p.c. has infected the university, the high school, the grade school, the media, business, public office, and public discourse. ...
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A Difficult Decade
James Patterson’s controlling idea is that the 60’s became the 60’s in 1965, and that this represented an “Eve of Destruction.” One struggles for about 300 pages trying to find out . . . destruction of what? The title comes from a long-forgotten song by a long-forgotten singer, Barry McGuire. “Eve of Destruction” did get...
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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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Latter-Day Beggars
“He hath made us kings . . . ” —Revelation 1:6 Roman beggars, like Roman gypsies and Roman cats, not to mention Roman prostitutes warming themselves by their little winter chestnut fires, are the bearers of an ancient tradition, peculiar to the City of the Seven Hills, the caput mundi, which even her membership in...
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Bait and Switch
According to pious American folklore, there was in 1787 a “Miracle at Philadelphia” in which demigod Founding Fathers gathered and gave the world the “U.S. Constitution”; thereby, as chanted by former Chief Justice Burger in a juvenile bicentennial panegyric, they changed human history forever—and got rid of the awful Articles of Confederation, which stood in...
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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 Politics of Rape
When an acquitted William Kennedy Smith emerged from the Florida courtroom last December declaring his faith in the system, a viewer could only query, “Why?” There stood a young man who was indicted for rape and forced to spend over one million dollars defending himself on the basis of the word of one person, the...
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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...