Tee-hee. Such is the line in liberal circles concerning the federal district court decision striking down the federal Defense of Marriage Act on, among other grounds, those of “States Rights.” Including Massachusetts’ right to allow gay marriage without prejudice to the partners’ right to federal benefits. Congress, a decade and a half ago, voted that...
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The World Is Plenty
The last time we heard Jess Kirkman tell stories about his father’s wondrous, humble life was in I Am One of You Forever (1985), a work of power and humor and charm. That book reminded me, however, that the word “novel” has hardly any meaning nowadays, for the work seemed a suite of stories united...
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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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Trump Draws the Map to 2028
Donald Trump destroyed the Democrats’ blue wall and, with it, their hopes for 2028.
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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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Dropping the Ball on Us
The New Year is in full swing, and with it new laws and regulations carefully designed to enrich the lives of Americans who are insane. Because the essence of our approach to life together in our degenerate age is that, for every problem humanoids may encounter, there is a potential law that could solve it,...
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The Honorable Gentleman From New York
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...
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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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My Kavanaugh Hearing Nightmare and ‘Oprah Moment’ on Fox
One thing I learned from my ordeal in the limelight of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings and Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations is that the truth is always more complicated than the narrative.
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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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School of Rape: From Health Class to Hotties
America’s educational landscape is being transformed under the cover of “health.” This transformation began with sex education, which once was relegated to a subunit of physiology that addressed the science of human reproduction. But sex education suddenly required its own graphic, stand-alone how-to course, then morphed into a “nonjudgmental” monstrosity designed to transmit knowledge of...
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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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Back From the Brink
On July 11 President Obama said that thanks to his “swift and aggressive action . . . we’ve been able to pull our financial system and our economy back from the brink.” Six days later, Larry Summers repeated the analogy: “We were at the brink of catastrophe at the beginning of the year but we...
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Another Republican Retreats
It’s hard to know whether the dirty bomb the Washington Post detonated two months before the Virginia gubernatorial election will affect the outcome of the race. The Post dropped it August 30, instead of October 10 or 15, when it would have done maximum damage to its target, Republican Bob McDonnell. Other issues, such as...
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Cobden’s Pyrrhic Victory
Bill Clinton and Richard Cobden, a 19th-century English anti-Corn Law crusader, have more in common than consonants in their surnames. As economic internationalists, both trumpeted commerce as the panacea for attaining world peace and prosperity. In their own ways, both bear responsibility for the new international economic order which rests on the twin foundations of...
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Deal With the Devil
For several months after last November, the American media raved about Barack Obama’s achievement in becoming the first African-American president of the United States. I didn’t—and couldn’t—join in the jubilation, for several reasons. First, it had always seemed to me obvious that we would have a black president someday. When I was in junior-high school...
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Can’t Get No Satisfaction
Brokeback Mountain Produced and distributed by Focus Features Directed by Ang LeeScreenplay by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana from a story by Annie Proulx An enlightened colleague recently asked me what I thought of director Ang Lee’s film Brokeback Mountain. When I told him I thought it a dreary, sappy soap opera, he smiled pityingly...
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Charity Begins at Church
December can be a difficult month for American Christians, forced to look on passively as their sacred holy days are turned into a generic “holiday season.” The First Sunday in Advent has been replaced by “Black Friday,” the day on which retailers begin to turn a profit on holiday sales; and the end of the...
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Press Cowards’ Hypocritical Lament Over Media’s Lack of ‘Balls’ and ‘Swagger’
Mainstream press critics whine about the demise of journalism’s good ole days, while carefully avoiding writing anything that would offend their paymasters.
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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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An American Life
It is not impossible, merely difficult, for the author of a highly praised first novel to produce a second worthy of its predecessor. Perhaps paucity of imagination is responsible for the failure of many second novels; the writer emptied his quiver the first time or got lucky with a flash-in-the-pan and should not have tried...
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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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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 Grand Illusion
Twenty years from now, when future historians look back at the 1980’s, some of them may be tempted to call it the “Decade of the Grand Illusion.” For not since les années folles, as the French still call the giddy 1920’s, has the Western world lived in such a state of deceptive euphoria. The besetting...
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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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The World Bank’s Green Imperialism
The World Bank is the financial arm by which the liberal international order exercises control over poor and developing nations.
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9-11, Six Years Later
On Sept. 7, National Public Radio reported that Muslims in the Middle East were beginning to believe that the 9-11 attacks on the WTC and Pentagon were false flag operations committed by some part of the U.S. and-or Israeli government. It was beyond the ...
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CPAC moves to Rockford?
Here’s how you’ll know the conservative movement means something again: When the Conservative Political Action Conference, which just held its annual meeting, moves from Washington, D.C. to Rockford. Or Dubuque. Or Peoria. Or Helena. Or San Antonio. Or Bakersfield. Anywhere but the District of Corruption. I attended a couple CPACs back in the mid-1980s, at...
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Fateful Choices
There are few issues more emotional than abortion. The dogmatism of the respective combatants strikes fear in the hearts of lesser mortals—which means almost every politician. Three decades after Roe v. Wade, the issue of abortion is unlikely ever to be resolved politically. The major parties have largely followed the passions of their most active...
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Trans Lunacy: The Feminine Touch
The mothering instinct causes women to ensure everyone feels equally valued rather than “left out." This can have serious policy consequences when women occupy public office. Mothering does well in the home, but disastrously in government.
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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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To Regulate, or Not to Regulate?
One vocal U.S. political tribe argues vociferously that capitalism is the source of all economic problems. Another tends to ignore that the current economy is not working for all Americans. French economist Thomas Philippon’s work should interest those who aren’t satisfied with either the complaints of the left or the indifference of the right. Philippon...
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Leveraged Buyout
“Every nation has the government it deserves.” Joseph de Maistre’s hard saying can give small comfort to Americans. Oh, it is true, we have a paper Constitution that promises a republican form of government, but all three branches of that government have for several generations conspired to evacuate the republican content from the system, leaving...
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What’s Missing from Journalism: Journalists
Too many of today’s “journalists,” on both the right and the left, have no drive for pursuing the story or finding what is interesting in their subject. This, more than anything, is killing journalism.
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Tan, Rested, and Ready
“I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God.” The inauguration of the first black president of the United States on January...
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Is America Still a Nation?
In the first line of the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, Thomas Jefferson speaks of “one people.” The Constitution, agreed upon by the Founding Fathers in Philadelphia in 1789, begins, “We the people . . . “ And who were these “people”? In Federalist No. 2, John Jay writes of them as “one...
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Political Art and Artful Politics
We speak as readily of the art of politics as we do of the art of cooking or writing, and what we have in mind in each case is what the French call savoir faire. This sense of “art” claims excellence for the activity of which the term is predicated, and since to know what...
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Manifesto of a Paleo Fellow Traveller
The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return by Michael Anton Regnery Publishing 500 pp., $32.99 Michael Anton attracted widespread public notice in Sept. 2016 as the author of a pseudonymous article in the Claremont Review called “The Flight 93 Election.” It became one of the most widely debated and disseminated articles of the...
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The People Knew What Was At Stake
This is an extraordinarily great day for those of us who believe in the rule of law, separation of powers, and federalism. We in the academy, in particular, were constantly told that in the 21st century there was no place for the traditionally conservative ideas of adherence to the original understanding of the Constitution, in...
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The New Class Controversy
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, “neither businessmen nor manufacturers, blue-collar workers or farmers,”...
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Moral Regress
David Daleiden, the “mastermind” behind the Planned Parenthood sting videos of the Summer of Gay Marriage and Caitlyn Jenner, and fellow activist Sandra Merritt face a grand-jury indictment in Harris County, Texas, as of this writing. Both are charged with violating Texas law pertaining to “perjury and other falsification,” for having used phony drivers’ licenses...
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The Flies of Summer
Last summer I was standing next to a great bull buffalo in western Kansas. He was mad and had a right to be. My buddy Joe Kramer, along with other men from Kansas Fish & Game, had this great American bison in an animal squeeze while they took a blood sample and gave him a...
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An Epic Bogosity
Edmund Spenser (1554-99) decided while still a student to make himself into the great English poet on the model of Vergil. So he began his publishing career with a set of 12 pastorals, and planned an enormous 24-book allegorical romance-epic, The Faerie Queene, to glorify Elizabeth I and her Britain as Vergil had glorified Rome...
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National Love-Fest
Jackie, Tiger, and Ellen—not as catchy as Martin, Bartin, and Fish, or Abraham, Martin, and John, but good enough to mesmerize the press this spring. In one respect, the mainstream media were right: Jackie Robinson was a courageous man; Tiger Woods is an extraordinary golfer; and Ellen DeGenerate—well, two out of three ain’t bad. But...
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A Few Modest Suggestions for the Trump Administration
Order withdrawal of troops and materiel from Afghanistan and Iraq. (Without bringing the indigenous population with you.) Perhaps a small CIA presence might be maintained just for intelligence-gathering, which is what they are supposed to be doing anyway. Join with Russia to destroy ISIS in preparation for a withdrawal from Syria. This will allow the...
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An Infantile Disorder
“Why, we could lick them in a month!” boasts Stuart Tarleton soon after the Confederates fire on Fort Sumter in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. “Gentlemen always fight better than rabble. A month—why, one battle.” At that point, young Mr. Tarleton is interrupted by Rhett Butler, a rather darker character in Mitchell’s novel than...
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Crime and Capital Punishment
“Missouri doesn’t have a death penalty,” a former prosecutor remarked to me last Christmas. He was wrong, as he well knew. The Revised Statutes of Missouri specifically allow for capital punishment. But as a practical matter, the man was right. At the time he spoke, Missouri had not put a person to death since 1965,...
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Is Our Second Civil War—also a ‘Forever War’?
When the Electoral College meets Monday, it will almost surely certify former Vice President Joe Biden as the 46th president of the United States. And he will take the oath of office Jan. 20. There is, nationally, a growing if grudging realization of that reality. Yet millions of Americans will refuse to accept the legitimacy...
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On Europe and America
I would like to congratulate François Furet (“The Long Apprenticeship,” July 1996) on his Richard M. Weaver Award and do him the courtesy of taking his acceptance speech seriously. I start by confessing that here in England the sense of inexorable democratic/ constitutional progress which Furet claims for France and Europe seems tremendously problematic. England...
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The Reaper with Steel-Rimmed Glasses
Arnold Beichman and Mikhail S. Bernstarn: Andropov: New Challenge to the West; Stein and Day; New York. Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova: Yuri Andropov: A Secret Passage into the Kremlin; Macmillan; New York. by T. Mark Kulish On November 15, 1982, an overcast and cold day in Moscow, Leonid Brezhnev was buried. The new...