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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Crime Story
“Behind every great fortune there is a crime,” wrote Honoré de Balzac in a cynical sentiment that Mario Puzo chose as the epigraph of The Godfather. The line at once establishes the metaphor that dominates the book as well as the films and carries us into the essentially Machiavellian worldview that pervades them and to...
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On Quebec
Kenneth McDonald’s article (“The French Revolution in Canada,” April) illustrates why Quebec may secede from Canada. The legal mechanisms have been explained, but the political dynamics need to be understood. First, McDonald complains that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (in Sections 16-22 of the Constitution Act of 1982) has entrenched French and English...
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Henry James at the Sacred Fount
It has long been self-evident that Henry James was thoroughly apolitical in any practical sense of the term. He did not involve himself in public affairs as such and hardly took more than passing notice of the Civil War, even though his two younger brothers, Wilkinson and Robertson James, served with distinguished records in the...
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CRAP Happens
My summer vacation along Lake Superior’s western shore into Canada took place just before the anniversary of a milestone, although it was marked by no celebrations or remembrances, and nobody I saw on mv quick stay in Thunder Bay showed any sign of acknowledging it. The anniversary was not the subject of conversation in the...
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Be Sensitive—or Else!
Horror stories about punishments for insensitive behavior on college campuses are old news. But leftist hypersensitivity has permeated everyday life in the real world as well. In Manassas, Virginia, a white woman called 911 at 3:08 A.M. to report that some black men—whom she referred to as “niggers”—were trying to break into her house. According...
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Twenty Years After the Fall, Part 2
Moscow, so the film title went, does not believe in tears, and stories of massacres by criminal gangs who control major enterprises, contract killings over business and political disputes, and savagely beat or kill journalists who don’t recognize the limits of Russian press freedom still pop up in today’s “middle class” Russia, where this sort...
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The Paleoconservative Imagination
In January 1996, Norman Podhoretz delivered a self-congratulatory eulogy for neoconservatism in a lecture before the American Enterprise Institute. In addition to giving himself and his cohorts credit for the recent successes of the American right, Podhoretz boasted that “thanks to the influence of neoconservatism on the conservative movement in general, the philistine indifference to...
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Stupid Is Not Enough
When Donald Trump defeated Ted Cruz in the 2016 Indiana presidential primary, the race for the Republican Party nomination was over. The prize was Trump’s. The next day, House Speaker Paul Ryan announced that he was not yet ready to endorse the standard-bearer. George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Jeb Bush quickly followed suit,...
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Kurosawa begins
Whenever the president of the Rockford Institute and I chat about movies, the conversation always runs into the brick wall of the Japanese cinema. I especially like the films of one of its acknowledged masters, Yasujiro Ozu, whose later movies are his best-known in the West, especially Tokyo Story (1953) and Floating Weeds (1959). “Ach,...
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Those Dying Generations
Elegy Produced by Lakeshore Entertainment Directed by Isabel Coixet Screenplay by Nicholas Meyer from a novel by Philip Roth Distributed by Samuel Goldwyn Films Burn After Reading Produced by Relativity Media and Studio Canal Directed and written by Joel and Ethan Coen Distributed by Focus Features Elegy, Spanish director Isabel Coixet’s adaptation of Philip Roth’s...
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The Dark, Dark Wood of Suicide
Among the many haunting and piteous images from the Inferno of Dante is this one. The travelers, in Canto XIII, enter a pathless wood. Dante, on Virgil’s coaching, snaps a twig from a thorn tree. The tree yelps in pain, and no wonder. The tree is the transmuted personage of a formerly great Florentine, Pier...
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Portrait of Lincoln, With Warts
The publication of the last volume of William Marvel’s four-volume history of “Mr. Lincoln’s War” completes one of the more remarkable historical works of our time. Marvel is an “amateur,” nonacademic, historian. That is not a remarkable, but rather an old and honorable, thing. This is what is remarkable: I can think of no active...
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We CAN Have a Blacker Math
Since woke academics insist on imposing equality on math history, there is one thing left to do: declare the ancient Greek mathematicians to be black men.
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Will Joe Repudiate His Segregationist Friends?
“Apologize for what? Cory should apologize. He knows better. There’s not a racist bone in my body.” Thus did a stung Joe Biden answer rival Cory Booker’s demand he apologize for telling contributors, in a southern drawl, “I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland, He never called me ‘boy.’ He always called me...
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War Without End, Amen
I have often complained that the self-styled progressive of our time never tells us where he wants to go. Progress implies a destination, and rest—sweet and blessed rest—once you have arrived. But that would imply a natural human order to return to, or to attain. And then what? Then what? The progressive sweats. He...
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The Self-Sabotage of Abortion ‘Rights’ Absolutists
Abortion rights absolutists don’t realize how unsafe and unsavory abortion can be when the civilization that values female safety and health is destroyed.
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A Judicial Putsch
During oral argument on the cases challenging the definition of marriage upheld by the voters in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee, Justice Anthony Kennedy remarked, “I don’t know how to count the decimals when he talk about millennia. The definition [of marriage] has been with us for millennia. And it’s very difficult for the court...
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Stan Evans: Unsung Hero of the Right
Despite his significant contributions to the post-WWII right in America, M. Stanton Evans is not as well-known as his many accomplishments warrant. Steven Hayward's new biography sets the record straight.
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Obama’s Victory
The conventional wisdom is simple: when there is an uninspiring incumbent and a lackluster challenger, the people will opt for the incumbent. The formula is unsatisfactory in this case, however. Obama was not just any incumbent. He is the embodiment of an anti-America–culturally, spiritually and morally—that is hell-bent on destroying the surviving vestiges of...
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Kelly Loeffler’s Missed Opportunity in the Georgia Run-off Debate
On the evening of Dec. 6, I watched the debate between Sen. Kelly Loeffler and the Reverend Raphael Warnock, who are running against each other for a U.S. Senate seat from Georgia with the runoff election scheduled for Jan. 5. As a non-leftist I am anxious to see the Georgia Senate seats now up for...
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Maryland, the South’s Forgotten Cousin
As recently as the 1930’s, elderly black people in rural Maryland were still keeping headstrong children in line with the admonition that something called “pattiroll” would “get” them if they didn’t behave themselves. “Pattirolls,” or patrols, were gangs of Union Army soldiers who rode throughout the moonlit countryside enforcing curfews in occupied Maryland during the...
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Turning Bad Into Good
In 1983 I noted in Just and Painful: A Case for the Corporal Punishment of Criminals that there were approximately 315,000 individuals incarcerated in federal and state prisons, plus some 158,000 persons in jails of various kinds. The annual cost of this incarceration was estimated then to be $20,000 per inmate, amounting to an annual...
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Images, images, ima…
The Work of Atget: The Ancient Re gime; The Museum of Modern Art; New York. Bill Harris: New York at Night; Stewart, Tabori & Chang; New York. Robert Freson: The Taste of France; Stewart, Tabori & Chang; New York. Ansel Adams: Examples; New York Graphic Society/Little, Brown; Boston. William Manchester: One Brief Shining Moment: Remembering...
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Culture War: Fighting On
“Transcend yourself and join in the universal struggle to bring about the self-transcendence of all men!” —Karl Marx Culture, as the term is used in America in our times, covers a vast territory with ill-defined frontiers. There is primitive culture (flint spearheads, animal and human sacrifice). There is high culture (Shakespeare, Michelangelo). There is, or...
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On Liberal Education
My definition of liberal education as the education of liberals no longer sounds provocative. Liberalism, having failed and failed disastrously in all its political experiments from church disestablishment to women’s suffrage to food stamps, still reigns triumphant, with hardly a rival, in the empty corridors of the Western mind. How failed? The church is disestablished,...
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Crescent Moon Over Europe
Jean Raspail, the French novelist and explorer, now 90 and living in a suburb of Paris, must be experiencing the eerie feeling of living inside The Camp of the Saints, his most famous work, as he follows the contemporary news reports from across the Continent. The tens of thousands of Third World migrants are arriving...
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If I Could Turn Back Time
Here's the bottom line of today's SCOTUS decision regarding the incorporation of the Second Amendment, which amounts to an explicit rejection of traditional federalism on the part of the conservative majority. (Full disclosure: I'm of the Hestonian
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The Kindness of Strangers
“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” —Blanche DuBois, A Streetcar Named Desire Sometimes, enlightenment, like confusion, can come from an unexpected source. Take the comedian, George Carlin, for example. I think that his broadcasting of dirty words is a bit less than profound, as is his hostility toward most civilized conventions; some...
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Their America, and Ours.
“Meet you at Peace Cross.” In northwest D.C. in the 1950s, that was an often-heard comment among high schoolers headed for Ocean City. The Peace Cross, in Bladensburg, Maryland, was a 40-feet concrete memorial to the 49 sons of Prince George’s County lost in the Great War. Paid for by county families and the American...
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The Cowardice of Modern Journalism
More evidence of the diminished standards and dishonorable behavior of America’s fourth estate.
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Remembering St. Thomas Aquinas
St. Thomas Aquinas is a universally admired philosopher who was able to distill the whole of human discourse. His thought even influenced America's Founding Fathers, as seen in the biblical ordering of the new American nation in the Treaty of Paris.
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Donald Trump and Conservatism
Donald Trump has shattered the false consensus of the Republican Party, the hitherto unrecognized tautology that GOP is conservative because conservative is GOP, and vice versa. In the process, we’ve been confronted by an embarrassing reality: We really have no idea what we mean by the word conservative. There can be little doubt that Hillary...
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Character and Nuclear Anxiety
American society is widely recognized as youth-oriented, but it has been a long time since any authoritative source has given us really good news about the young. Recent reports from the American Medical Association, the National Research Council, and the Council of Physical Fitness have been especially discouraging: the young exercise too little, eat too...
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Remembering the Twenty-Teens
Decades provide a useful, if not infallible, structure for organizing and understanding our historical experience. However frayed and disputed their limits, terms like “the twenties,” or “the eighties” each conjure their particular images and memories. Whatever we call the decade we have just completed—the twenty-teens?—it is one with landmarks arguably as important as any in...
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Letter From South Africa
I spent March 1985 in South Africa as a guest of several South African universities. I lectured to academic audiences, traveled in the rural areas of Transvaal and the Cape Province, spent a day in Soweto, visited the Crossroads slum in Cape Town and the Black township of Alexandra in Johannesburg. I talked to Black ser vants and Black leaders,...
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It’s a Wonderful Racket
Q magazine once regularly asked rock musicians the question, “How do you react when you see a nun?” Bryan Adams replied that he had the highest respect for nuns and thus reacted accordingly. He added that he had recently learned that nuns no longer wore their traditional habits, and that he was distressed by this change. ...
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Busing and Its Consequences
Ten years ago, federal district judge Leonard B. Sand ordered the city of Yonkers, New York, to integrate its public schools. Sand accused the city of 40 years of discrimination by concentrating public housing projects in southwest Yonkers. To comply with Sand’s ruling, many neighborhood schools closed their doors as busing became de rigueur. Parents...
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Can Biden Buy the Voters?
Biden knows what he has to do to win—but the educated whites who are the backbone of his party have little in common, culturally or economically, with the lower-class whites whose interest is in work, not woke.
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The American (Not Christian) Century
In the late 1980’s, I predicted that by the end of the century, which is also the end of the millennium, “The Soviet Union, or perhaps by that time, Russia, would be Christian, and the United States would be pagan.” The first, hesitant part of that prophecy, Russia, has already been fulfilled. And while Russia...
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Will Bishops Deny Biden Communion?
Last week, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops voted 168-55, more than 3-1, to provide new guidance for receiving Holy Communion. Behind the decision? Bishops’ alarm that the public religious practice of President Joe Biden is conveying a heretical message to the faithful and the nation. At Sunday Mass, Biden regularly receives Communion. Yet he...
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The Novel of Ideas
“Death must be distinguished from dying, with which it is often confused. “ —Rev. Sydney Smith The rarest entity in American writing is the novelist with ideas—that is to say, one who is capable of writing the ideological novel. Of course, the term is enough to put a chill on what is in fact the...
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Liz Truss Takes Britain’s Helm Amid Stormy Seas
Britain's new Prime Minister Liz Truss, of the Conservative Party, has her work cut out for her in a country poised to undergo a difficult winter.
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A Pocket Full of Sovereigns
Downtown Montreal was full of revelers last March 10. Despite subzero temperatures, they hit the streets, some wearing little more than a smile. But each had a maple leaf somewhere, on a flag, a piece of clothing, a sign, or even in place of the proverbial fig leaf. Such was the scene described by Macleans...
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Remembering Donald Davidson
Lewis P. Simpson, in his memorable preface to The Literary Correspondence of Donald Davidson and Allen Tate, evoked Thomas Carlyle’s description of Robert Burns to hail Davidson’s own achievement. Burns, wrote Carlyle, was a “piece of right Saxon stuff: strong as the Harz-rock, rooted in the depths of the world;—rock, yet with wells of living...
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Is a New GOP Being Born?
The first four Republican contests—Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada—produced record turnouts. While the prospect of routing Hillary Clinton and recapturing the White House brought out the true believers, it was Donald Trump’s name on the ballot and his calls for economic patriotism, border security, and an end to imperial wars that brought out...
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The Left Conspires to Keep Election Fraud Quiet. Wonder Why?
Emails released by the House Judiciary Committee should outrage Americans. The federal government devised a scheme to covertly stamp out public debate over election fraud.
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Pretenders
Revolutionary Road Produced and distributed by Dreamworks and BBC Films Directed by Sam Mendes Screenplay by Justin Haythe from Richard Yates’ novel The Lemon Tree Produced by Eran Riklis Productions and Heimatfilm Directed by Eran Riklis Screenplay by Suha Arraf Distributed by IFC Films British director Sam Mendes has turned Richard Yates’ 1961 novel,...
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Keeping Taxes Highest
A Stalinist show trial was held on May 21 by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee. Their aim was to investigate “how individual and corporate taxpayers are shifting billions of dollars offshore to avoid U.S. taxes.” In the dock that day, Apple CEO Tim Cook found...