As founder of the intellectual tradition of the West, Saint Augustine has one peer: Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, a Roman of noble antecedents who spent his life in the service first of literature, then of the Gothic kingdom of Theodoric, and always, throughout a life that compassed literary success, high office, and political disgrace, of...
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....
What winter quarters were to the soldier, summer vacations are to the politician of today. The fall campaign has now opened with a surprise Government offensive. Boris Johnson has made the brusque announcement that Parliament will be prorogued for most of September and the first part of October. That will limit to a few days...
Some of the best-loved characters in English literature are observed only dimly through the eyes of an unreliable first-person narrator; like fish seen through the glass of a tank, they swim toward us, momentarily dazzling in their colors, before receding again into the murk. Such is surely the case with P.G. Wodehouse’s immortal creation Reginald...
On Tuesday, July 14, the Irvine, California-based Center for Medical Progress released the first of three videos aimed at exposing some of the horrifying practices of Planned Parenthood, including the harvesting of baby organs through elective abortion for sale to biomedical research groups. The hidden camera shows Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s Senior Director of...
Last spring I picked up our student newspaper to read this sentence in a front-page story: “Statistics show that one out of every four UNC females will be sexually assaulted while in college.” Wow. The University of North Carolina has roughly 15,000 undergraduates (leave the graduate students out of it), something over half of them...
At last night’s gala ceremony, President Obama handed out the Presidential Medal of Freedom to what is inevitably described as a diverse group, though most of the winners run to a predictable type: Toni Morrison, an incompetent and dirty writer of anti-American fictions, Madeline Albright an incompetent and brutally savage statesgirl, John Glenn the showboating...
Republican voters have every right to assume bad faith from Democrats and their vote-counters, who have unscrupulously tried to increase their party’s power while behaving unethically toward electoral opponents.
As a cradle Catholic and recipient of Notre Dame’s Laetare Medal, Joe Biden is outspoken in declaring that the principles and beliefs of his Catholic faith guide his public life. “Joe is a man of faith,” was a recurring theme at the Democratic convention that nominated him to become our second Catholic president. Biden has...
“The Noise of the City Cannot Be Heard” was the title of a very popular song in the Soviet Union just after World War II. According to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the song was so much in demand that “no singer, even the most mediocre, could perform it without receiving enthusiastic applause.” The Soviet Chief Administration of...
India’s prime minister Narendra Modi paid his second visit to the White House in two years on June 8. President Barak Obama was greatly pleased by Modi’s stated willingness to proceed with ratification of the Paris agreement to limit greenhouse gases, and this was the theme duly emphasized in the Western media coverage of their meeting....
The now famous video of the Los Angeles police beating did not, for me, evoke the formulaic outrage that the media intended. Instead, strangely, it brought back a flood of memories from my misspent youth, a year of which was passed as a reporter on the “police beat” of a daily newspaper in a medium-sized...
Well, it sure didn’t take long for the Tucson Truce to collapse. After Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot on Jan. 8 by a berserker who killed six others, including a federal judge and a 9-year-old girl, and wounded 13, the media were aflame with charges the right had created the climate of hate in...
“Truths would you teach, or save a sinking land? All fear, none aid you, and few understand.“ —Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Man” Although the raw figures from Census 2000 have been in the public domain for months already, the American public’s response to the latest decennial survey is still not...
“Naval Academy Professor Challenges Rising Diversity,” ran the headline in the Washington Post. The impression left was that some sorehead was griping because black and Hispanic kids were finally being admitted. The Post‘s opening paragraphs reinforced the impression. “Of the 1,230 plebes who took the oath of office at the Naval Academy in Annapolis this...
A mojito is a Cuban mint julep, mixed with rum rather than bourbon. It was Ernest Hemingway’s second-favorite drink. The shot of gin first thing in the morning from the bottle beneath the bed took top honors. Somewhere just on the dark side of dawn in an Eivissa nightclub, I was trying to convince the...
A paleoconservative thinks about the law the way Edmund Burke did. The basis of all law is the will of God or, to use the term employed by Blackstone (another hero of paleoconservatives), “natural law.” According to natural law as understood by Blackstone, Burke, and our late 18th-century American Founding Fathers (as paleoconservatives can still...
We once had a book about Eastern Europe at home, in between the encyclopedias and Robinson Crusoe. I do not remember its title nor the author’s name, but it contained highly atmospheric black and white photographs of Rumanian scenes. There were baroque chateaux, sturgeons, eagles, wolves, bears, wild boar, bends in the Danube, flowered meads...
The contrived conviction of Roger Stone showed that America has a profoundly serious problem with its legal system. The reaction to President Trump’s commutation of Stone’s sentence by mainline media, and former and current prosecutors tells us that the president himself is likely to be prosecuted after leaving office. The roots of this problem lie...
“The way to have power is to take it.” —W.M. Tweed When on January 3, 1949, Lyndon Baines Johnson of Texas was sworn in as a United States senator, an era in the politics of his state had come to an end, a period that had begun when Reconstruction concluded. Similar events occurred in other...
As members of the House of Representatives were moving toward impeachment hearings that should make Bill Clinton—whatever the outcome—one of the most infamous politicians in American history, Republicans in both houses of Congress decided to give the President everything he was asking for—more federally funded teachers to corrupt the children and $18 billion of boodle...
Intolerable Cruelty Produced by Alphaville Films and Imagine Entertainment Written and Directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen Distributed by Universal Pictures Lost in Translation Produced by American Zoetrope and Elemental Films Written and Directed by Sofia Coppola Distributed by Focus Features Intolerable Cruelty should by prosecuted for intolerable smugness, the besetting sin of...
Jerry Seinfeld’s otherwise genius combination of childhood nostalgia and comedy is marred by a lack of political temperance that deflates the experience for at least half the audience.
Max Hayward: Writers in Russia: 1917-1978; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego, CA. by Charles A. Moser At the time of his premature death in 1979, Max Hayward was among the finest Western interpreters of contemporary Russian literature in the Soviet Union. As one of Britain’s most accomplished Slavists, he had obtained a research position at...
Well, it sure didn’t take long for the Tucson Truce to collapse. After Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot on Jan. 8 by a berserker who killed six others, including a federal judge and a 9-year-old girl, and wounded 13, the media were aflame with charges the right had created the climate of hate in which...
This latest book by the former secretary of state illustrates the difficulty of separating a piece of writing from its creator (Alan Greenspan on macroeconomics, Bill Gates on information technology, Steven Spielberg on cinematography. Would a similar, slim volume attract national attention if came from an assistant professor at a Midwestern college? Would it be...
Five months ago, in its January 1 issue, Time magazine chose to honor Mikhail Gorbachev as the “Man of the Decade.” Although several prominent Frenchmen have suggested that Pope John Paul II has had an equal influence on the tumultuous events in Europe (notably because of his powerful support of the Solidarity movement in Poland),...
The customary division of national laws of citizenship into the “principles” of jus soli (place of birth) or jus sanguinis (line of descent) denotes the objective criteria most often used to determine one’s citizenship. But the conceptions of political membership that have vied for supremacy in Anglo- American law implicate a different, more fundamental dichotomy—one...
It is no exaggeration to say that the entire Polish nation was outraged and insulted by President Obama’s clumsy reference in a May 28 speech to “Polish death camps.” Not only did the Poles play no part in setting up and running the Nazi camps where millions of Jews were murdered, but when the killings...
In their British North America (BNA) Act of 1867, the Fathers of Canada’s confederation produced a work of genius. The two senior levels of government were awarded separate and exclusive powers: Ottawa over national matters; provincial governments over property and civil rights and “generally all matters of a merely local or private nature in the...
In a previous column I expressed irritation at those numerous folks who confess to having voted for George W. Bush in 2000 (and even 2004) because they were deceived into believing he was a “conservative.” For anyone believing that Bush was a “conservative” in 2000 the only deception going on was self-deception. Here is a...
Early last February, Representative John Lewis took the House floor and demanded, “How can our constituents expect Congress to address the nation’s economic ills when tens of thousands may have been embezzled and stolen right here in the Capitol? How can they expect Congress to deal with a drug epidemic if cocaine is in fact...
While many Asians have welcomed the election of George W. Bush, leading Europeans are nervous. In particular, they fear that President Bush will reduce their continent’s free defense ride, especially as the Balkans begins to explode vet again. But it is time to expect Europeans to behave like adults in securing their own interests. The...
Though most of the migrants crossing the U.S. southern border are in search of economic opportunity, some are used as tools by our enemies. The invasion is deliberate.
Every April since 1981 the American Society of journalists and Authors sponsors an “I Read Banned Books” campaign. They routinely trot out copies of children’s books like Alice in Wonderland or Mary Poppins and modern classics like Ulysses—all of which have been censored by somebody somewhere. One of them inevitably quotes Jefferson on tolerating “error...
With Democrats howling that Vladimir Putin hacked into and leaked those 19,000 DNC emails to help Trump, the Donald had a brainstorm: Maybe the Russians can retrieve Hillary Clinton’s lost emails. Not funny, and close to “treasonous,” came the shocked cry. Trump then told the New York Times that a Russian incursion into Estonia need...
Public confidence in Congress has plummeted to the lowest level of any institution since Gallup began asking the question in 1973. One-half of all Americans have little or no confidence in the Congress. Only 11 percent have a
Through the mysterious alchemy of “social justice,” criminals become martyr-saints. Habitual criminal Rodney King is now spoken of in the same pious tone once reserved for icons like plagiarist/philanderer Martin Luther King, Jr. William Andrews, who was executed last year by the state of Utah for his role in the 1974 torture-slayings of three people,...
Popular culture in the West, and especially in North America, is an illusion, mostly electronic, that does not feed the soul. Indeed, it claims to do nothing but feed the senses, and as such it tends toward universal barbarism, fostering ignorance and encouraging violence. Beneath the illusion there is, however, one great civilization, and it...
Scene: the House of Commons. Speaker Bercow announces that he will stand down on October 31. Labour benches applaud wildly—the convention that members do not clap is so retro—and the Conservative benches are grimly silent, other than two or three malcontents who are headed out of the party anyway. Bercow, first elected as a Conservative,...
The current evangelical elite came of age at a time when secular influences tried to stay neutral toward Christianity; The faith competed as an equal in the marketplace of ideas. But those days are over. In our age of secularist hostility, evangelicals need new tactics.
It shouldn’t be news to anyone that conservative middle-aged professors are rare birds. Until recently, right-wing academics have been almost as rare as black ones, and for pretty much the same reason: bright conservatives could generally do better elsewhere. So it didn’t go to my head a few years ago when I learned that the...
Some insomniacs do endless sequences of sums in their heads, while more traditional conservatives rely on counting sheep—or sheep in elephants’ clothing. An instinctive Machiavellian even as a child, and dimly conscious of the reality of power, I preferred to count rulers. In elementary school I learned the American presidents, and in high school I...
Americans have grown fond of celebrating anniversaries of one kind or another. I first noticed this new habit during the national thrombosis over the Statue of Liberty back in 1986, but more recently the habit has swollen into something like an epidemic. In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, we have endured the anniversaries of...
The right must defend and restore the early modern-era values of classical liberalism, rather than abandoning them just because they have been perverted by the postmodern left.
As Donald Trump is about to be nominated for a second term, how his presidency has already altered the orientation of his party is on display. Under Trump, the GOP ceased to be a party of small government whose yardstick of success was how close it came to a balanced budget. Trump signed on, this...
David Reimer, the 38-year-old man who was raised as a girl (“Brenda”) following a botched circumcision in infancy, committed suicide on May 4, 2004. As the left rushes to validate sodomy by judicial fiat and “homosexual marriage,” perhaps now is an appropriate time to revisit his case. It reveals more about the public-policy effect of...
Original Thought & Triplicate Forms George Roche: America by the Throat: the Stranglehold of Federal Bureaucracy; Devin-Adair; Old Grennwich, CT. Edwin J. Feulner, Jr: Conservatives Stalk the House: the Republican Study Committee 1970-1982; Green Hill; Ottawa, IL. Conservatives come in at least two types: those who wish to conserve principles and those who wish to...
Two weeks after the failed coup and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s subsequent mass purge, three facts seem clear. Turkey has ceased to be a democracy in any conventional sense. The army’s reputation and cohesiveness have suffered a massive blow, with uncertain consequences for its operational effectiveness. Most importantly, Turkey’s foreign policy and regional security strategy...
The ship of state is without a captain. The willingness by so many to put party and programs ahead of the best interests of the country is appalling.