It’s become an accepted opinion that marine biologist Rachel Carson, the author of Silent Spring (1962), was the founder of the modern environmentalist movement. But this may very well be a myth. Recent historical scholarship suggests that this title more likely applies to controversial Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich, author of the 1968 best seller...
When President Bush signed an executive order on November 13 that authorized the trial of non-U.S. citizens on charges of terrorism before special military tribunals, the response from the political right was almost—though not quite—unanimously supportive. Not only did the attorney general himself enthusiastically defend the tribunals, so did such luminaries as the conservative movement’s...
Lew Rockwell (“Flies in the Ointment,” September) and I have the same ultimate objective: “an educational market in which parents are responsible for paying for their own children’s education.” We agree also on the “twin evils of public education: involuntary funding and compulsory attendance.” In our ideal (libertarian) world, government would play no role in...
“Look, men, there is Jackson standing like a stone wall! Let us determine to die here, and we will conquer! Follow me!” —General Bernard E. Bee, C.F.A., shortly before falling, mortally wounded, in First Manassas The era of the War for Southern Independence illuminates the present time for what it is,...
If you were a patriotic “American” of Mideast origin, wouldn’t you willingly cooperate with “ethnic profiling” since it would help to save the lives of your “fellow” citizens? Want to know how many traffic deaths in my State last year were caused by aliens, mostly drunk illegals? 807. How many Americans are aware that Osama...
The December 2, 2015, killings of 14 people in San Bernardino, California, by Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, is the sort of story that garners the label “only in America,” with plot twists that include arranged marriage, Facebook jihad, and irrelevant gun laws. It also includes Enrique Marquez, Jr., an Hispanic-American. Farook...
Once a marginal figure, Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni's success on the European stage stems partly from the rising popularity of the European right, but, above all, from what she has accomplished.
In the early months of 1985, national headlines recounted lurid tales of an impending right-wing bloodbath in the United States. In New York City Bernhard Goetz admitted to the shooting of four Blacks who he believed were about to assault him on a subway car, and he promptly became a national hero. In the Washington...
The nine states that ratified the Constitution on June 21, 1788, created an entirely new government. This government was not patterned after the one established under the Articles of Confederation, which was created by the 13 states just seven years before. The Articles actually transferred very little power to the agent they called the “central,”...
If someone is overheard referring to the system of U.S. public finance as “socialist,” most Americans within earshot will write him off as a conservative crank who is being dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. After all, Karl Marx is long gone, and so is his most ardent American disciple, Franklin Delano Roosevelt,...
The feminist movement, it has just been learned, was actually concocted by men. Specifically, a small group of planners meeting in 1962 set in motion the developments of the next 30 years concerning men and women. These men acted in a selfish spirit of personal aggrandizement. The heretofore secret minutes of their planning group are...
I am very far from original in noticing similarities in the histories of Rome and America—republics that became empires. The decline and fall of the former has often been thought to foretell the fate of the latter. A Frenchman some years ago wrote a fairly convincing book called The Coming Caesars. Such analogies are interesting...
You Can’t Say That! The Growing Threat to Civil Liberties From Antidiscrimination Laws by David E. Bernstein Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute; 197 pp., $20.00 A Miller Brewing Company executive is fired for retelling a racy segment of a Seinfeld episode at the watercooler. An unwed teacher successfully sues the parochial school that fired her for becoming pregnant...
Reading all the various, though scarcely varied, opinions on the Ukraine “crisis” – after nearly 100 years of Russian misrule in Europe, one may think the word would be safely devalued, but no, they use it like St. James’s clubmen circa 1855 discussing the latest from Balaclava – one again becomes conscious of the political...
Douglas Young was a tall man, six feet six inches; with his beard he looked like a Calvinist Jehovah. At St. Andrews, he acquired the nickname “God” by eavesdropping on a political discussion about the Balkans. (In the 1930’s, the Balkans were full of angry ethnic factions, fighting and killing one another.) The group was...
The Education of John Adams; by R. B. Bernstein; Oxford University Press; 368 pp., $24.95 It is not fashionable these days to admire the Founding Fathers, and yet the flood of books, articles, and even Broadway musicals devoted to them has not ceased. Attention is usually focused on George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jeff erson,...
In its almost 60 years, much has been written about National Review, especially about those present at its creation. Most attention, of course, has been given to founder William F. Buckley, Jr., but others there at the beginning, such as James Burnham and Frank Meyer, have not been neglected. Yet no one, until now, has...
Election 2024 will not end or save humanity. What’s at stake in a presidential election is something far different from the all-or-nothing outcome that the rival campaigns envision.
“A crocodile has been worshipped, and its priesthood have asserted, that morality required the people to suffer themselves to be eaten by a crocodile.” —John Taylor of Caroline “The Father of Waters now flows unvexed to the sea,” Lincoln famously announced in July 1863. He was, according to a reporter, uncharacteristically “wearing a smile...
The third annual observance of the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. passed happily enough in the nation’s capital, with the local merchants unloading their assorted junk into the hands of an eager public. It is hardly surprising that “King Day,” observed as a federal legal public holiday since 1986, has already become part of...
“A system-grinder hates the truth.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson During the 25 years of its existence, contemporary feminism has received a measure of gentle chiding for its excesses. Not even the most indulgent eye can completely overtook feminist comparisons of marriage to prostitution, childbirth to defecation, or the use of the pronoun “he” to Jim Crow....
Asked what he did during the French Revolution, Abbe Sieyes replied, “I survived.” Donald Trump can make the same boast. No other political figure has so dominated our discourse. And none, not Joe McCarthy in his heyday in the early ’50s, nor Richard Nixon in Watergate, received such intensive and intemperate coverage and commentary as...
J. Douglas Johnson, executive editor of Touchstone Magazine, critiques Tom Piatak's column in the August issue, and Mr. Piatak replies.
The pro-life movement today almost completely identifies with the Republican Party, despite its support by a few Democrats such as Pennsylvania Sen. Robert Casey (sometimes). It wasn’t always so. In 1972, at the age of 17, I worked against Michigan’s Measure B, which would have legalized abortion in the state. It lost, with 61 percent...
“It is best that laws should be so constructed as to leave as little as possible to the decision of those who judge.” —Aristotle Here Lies Edward Coke, Knight of Gold, of Imperishable Fame, Spirit, Interpreter, and Inerrant Oracle of the Law, Discloser of its Secrets—Concealer of its Mysteries, Thanks Almost Alone to Whose Good...
“Teachers who teach Western education? We will kill them! We will kill them in front of their students and tell the students to henceforth [sic] study the Koran,” declared Abubakar Shekau, leader of the Nigerian Islamist group Boko Haram, which killed 46 students in a boarding school on July 6 (Time, July 19). Willingly or...
Last June, Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, loosed a posse of some 700 well-armed and irate citizens to win back control of the streets and parking lots of Phoenix from the local goons. The sheriff’s pronouncement, “We’re going to get the bad guys,” alarmed the local ACLU, which likened the militia to “a...
“A Republican marriage,” said a French actress of the 18th century, “is the sacrament of adultery.” This bon mot is recorded by Sir Walter Scott in the description of the French Revolution with which he begins his Life of Napoleon. In passing the first no-fault divorce law in Christendom, he concludes, the Jacobins had reduced...
It has been nearly 30 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. By banning discrimination in employment and public accommodations the law was meant to minimize the role of race in the daily lives of Americans. Its result has been the opposite. The doctrine of “disparate impact” has had the astonishing...
“Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon . . . terrible as an army with banners?” —Song of Songs 6:10 “Si direbbe che persino la luna si è affrettata stasera—osservatelo in alto—a guardare a questo spettacolo.” (“One might almost think that the moon—just look at him up there—hurried...
What (to ask one bizarrely unfashionable question) is civilization? Set aside geography, climate, genetics, and luck. The high classical civilizations are marked by certain indispensible accomplishments: a serious respect for facts; related to this, a steady application of work toward stable wealth; a conception of justice moving in two directions, toward society as a whole...
A successful War of Independence established 13 free and independent states in North America in 1783. This was followed, unfortunately for us, by the French Revolution and then by the 19th century, preeminently a time of violent government centralization. Subsequent events, as well as nationalist emotion and propaganda, have seriously damaged our ability to see...
In 1935, as president of France, Pierre Laval banned “weapons of war” and decreed that all firearms should be registered with the government. In 1945 he was tried and found guilty of treason for his collaboration with the German occupation. Between those two years, Hitler built his strong war machine, and in 1940 he invaded...
There are lots of freckles, red hair, and Celtic names in Catron County, New Mexico. Though almost everyone in the county has some Indian or Mexican blood, this is home to the families and culture which David Hackett Fischer describes in Albion’s Seed as Scotch-Irish, double distilled, first by the Highland clearances and then by...
Short reviews of Dollars for Life, by Mary Ziegler, and The Encyclopedia of Confederate Generals, by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.
It took only 22 years after he left the White House for conservatives to turn Ronald Reagan into a totem. The celebrations surrounding his 100th birthday on February 6 made George Washington look like a back-bench legislator. Conservatives hailed Reagan as the apotheosis of political wisdom and prudent action. Liberals conceded that he had done...
In his latest book, Day of Reckoning, Pat Buchanan argues that hubris, ideology, and greed are among America’s deadliest enemies. Hubris led to overreach. Hegemonic neoconservative ideology turned most of the world against the United States. And free trade has become a no-think cult that permits a greedy few to destroy America’s economic position for...
Judge Roy Moore of Etowah County, Alabama, was sued by the ACLU and something called the Alabama Freethought Association (Unitarian-Universalists, I believe they are) back in 1995 for displaying the Ten Commandments on his courtroom wall and for beginning each session with a prayer by a Christian clergyman. Over the past year, the affair has...
Boerne, Texas, is an unlikely location for a contest over religious freedom, but in 1996 the local Catholic Archbishop decided to sue the city for refusing to allow him to expand a church situated in a zoned historic district. The Archbishop based his case on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which forbids religious persecution and...
Former President Bill Clinton declared his strong support for the Ground Zero mosque in an interview broadcast on September 12. He also suggested a clever new spin to the promoters of the project. Much or even most of the controversy, he said, “could have been avoided, and perhaps still can be, if the people who...
We suffer an oligarchic, feminizing regime that is hostile to most of the defining elements of traditional American identity. But, we also enjoy a golden age of dissent. Now is not the time for despair.
“An historian is a prophet in retrospect.” —A.W. von Schlegel Wir sind mit Hitler noch lange nicht fertig (“We are nowhere near done with Hitler”): the warning by two contemporary German historians provides an apt opening line to John Lukacs’s delightful book. His “history of the evolution of our knowledge of...
“Ideas rule the world and its events. A revolution is a passage of an idea from theory to practice. Whatever men say, material interests never have caused and never will cause a revolution.” —Mazzini My grandmother, the daughter of a Confederate “high private,” always said that if someone had done something particularly good, you could...
Pat Buchanan’s new biography of Richard Nixon’s presidency is the first volume anyone looking at that tumultuous time should turn to. Having served as Nixon’s researcher and speechwriter starting in 1966, Buchanan, not yet 30, followed the victorious President into the White House in 1969. In Nixon’s White House Wars, Buchanan makes it clear that Nixon’s tragic...
Public-school finance, as a topic of concern, reminds us that the egalitarian impulse lives on imperishably. Mankind must be hard-wired to scratch the ears of the perceived—generally self-defined—underdog, before siccing him on the perceived top dog. Public schools, financed with public monies, were probably overdue their share of the action; but, boy, are they catching...
Michael Schiavo has decided that his wife’s life is without merit. Since her collapse in 1990, he has worked to free himself from the burden of caring for the one he vowed to love in sickness and in health. After she awakened from a brief coma, Terri Schiavo’s condition improved slightly, and, though unable to...
My first stroll through Fountain Square in the walking district of Baku, Azerbaijan, revealed the warp and woof of the city. If I didn’t know otherwise, had someone told me that I was on the Zeil promenade in Frankfurt, Germany, rather than in a country just north of Iran, I would have believed him. The...
“For there is no longer Jew nor Greek, neither free man nor slave, neither man nor woman,” says Pseudo-Paul, the apostle to the Americans, “but all are equal in Christ Jesus.” He has been studying his Pseudo-John, wherein the risen Lord says to Peter, “I have been praying for you, Simon, that you might strengthen...
“Blacks for Gray, Whites for Fenty,” ran the nuanced headline on page one of the Washington Examiner. The story told of how black Mayor Adrian Fenty, who got rave reviews for appointing Michelle Rhee to save District of Columbia schools, was crushed six to one in black wards east of the Anacostia River, as he...
“Don’t mention the war,” my grandfather told me a few minutes before our guest, an old friend from the Business Administration faculty at the nearby university, joined us for lunch. This was in Tacoma, Washington, in the summer of 1975, and I was visiting from England, on vacation from college. In that particular summer, it...