I gather that the Texas Board of Education has done something commendable, but I don’t know exactly what because the Washington Post (my source) was too busy deploring it to describe it. I assume it was something great because it reduced the Post to stammering incoherence. “Unbelievable” was only the beginning; “worse than silly ....
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An Establishment in Panic
Pressed by moderator Chris Wallace as to whether he would accept defeat should Hillary Clinton win the election, Donald Trump replied, “I will tell you at the time. I’ll keep you in suspense.” “That’s horrifying,” said Clinton, setting off a chain reaction on the post-debate panels with talking heads falling all over one another in...
On Property Rights
I applaud your interest in property rights in the April 2001 issue, “Your Land Is Their Land.” I was especially interested in the article “For Keeps! A Christian Defense of Property” by Scott P. Richert (Views), since I have come to know and work with two of the four families who are used as examples...
The Ideology of Technology
The technological age has been in gestation since the late Middle Ages, when the Sorbonne professors (Oresme, Buridan), the Catalan Ramón Lull, and the German Nicholas of Cusa directed their quest away from the Scholastic philosophy of essences toward a method that explores relationships. This quest was at the heart of modernity, and for centuries...
Latest Rallying Cry
“Remember Jonesboro” is the latest rallying cry of the “If it can happen here, it can happen anywhere” crowd. In one sense, of course, they’re obviously correct: no town is immune to the evil influences that convince an 11-year-old and a 13-year-old to shoot and kill their fellow students. But the Jonesboro groupies are disingenuous:...
Is Mitt on a Suicide Mission?
“It’s a suicide mission,” said the Republican Party Chairman. Reince Priebus was commenting on a Washington Post story about Mitt Romney and William Kristol’s plot to recruit a third-party conservative candidate to sink Donald Trump. Several big-name Republican “consultants” and “strategists” are said to be on board. Understandably so, given the bucks involved. With the...
The Best Government Money Can Buy
All of our history is now “indoctrination by historical example.” The academicians who write the officially approved, politically correct distortions of it have failed history, and us. They are of two types: the courtiers, smiling sycophants such as “presidential historian” Michael Beschloss and the insufferable Doris Kearns Goodwin; and their envious colleagues, politically correct pedants,...
Is It Time to End Prohibition?
The lessons of history are never quite definitive. History repeats itself, but not exactly, and the trick is to know where the differences come in. Nevertheless, in the case of drug abuse and its control we have as good a lesson and as close an analogy as history ever provides—Prohibition. Unfortunately, our politicians have no...
Princelings of Peace
“While at one time pacifists were single-mindedly devoted to the principles of nonviolence and reconciliation, today most pacifist groups defend the moral legitimacy of armed struggle and guerrilla warfare, and they praise and support the communist regimes emerging from such conflicts.” This is the thesis of Guenter Lewy’s study of the most enduring and successful...
The Pygmies Squeak … Again
Neocon intellectual midgets continue to smear Sam Francis long after his death because his writings represent an effective opposition to the ruling class.
American Delusions
“And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie . . .” —2 Thessalonians 2:11 American public life thrives on delusions treated as facts: *That you can have a First World economy and military with a Third World population. *That the U.S. government, which has almost unlimited access...
Judicial Taxation Without Representation
There is an unattributed quotation that says, “The average taxpayer is the first of America’s natural resources to be exhausted.” The American people have turned away from a big, activist federal government because they feel they have been forgotten; in fact, taxpayer resources have long been exhausted. Today, average Americans, forgotten by the bloated bureaucratic...
Running Afoul
William “Hootie” Johnson, age 71, poor man, has fallen afoul of public opinion and sensibilities, for which the consequences thus far were entirely predictable: the scorn of the best newspapers; hospitalization for a coronary-artery bypass, an aortic aneurism repair, and an aortic valve replacement; now, news of restlessness on the part of the natives. Might...
Trifkovic on Ukraine Peace Prospects: RT International Live
RT: Joining us in the studio now is Srdja Trifkovic, foreign affairs editor of Chronicles magazine. Thank you very much for joining us at the studio of RT International. So, we have the new peace plan that includes the greater autonomy for eastern Ukraine. Do you think this is something that can really work in...
Long Before Trump, We Were a Divided People
In a way, Donald Trump might be called The Great Uniter. Bear with me. No Republican president in the lifetime of this writer, not even Ronald Reagan, united the party as did Trump in the week of his acquittal in the Senate and State of the Union address. According to the Gallup Poll, 94% of...
James Bond, Luddite
The World Is Not Enough Produced by MGM-UA Directed by Michael Apted Screenplay by Neal Purvis and Robert Wade Released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer The World Is Not Enough (hereafter TWINE, as its promoters have dubbed the film) is the 19th official James Bond feature. As if that weren’t enough, it is also the first genuinely interesting...
Vol. 3 No. 3 March 2001
The pro-Gore bias of the American media during the five weeks of post-election legal and political wrangling was as unsurprising as it was obvious. Most foreign media were even less restrained. On December 14, BBC commentator Brian Barron told British television viewers that George W. Bush’s “mandate is all but invisible.” Radio 4 network commentator...
May, Macron—TRUMP
Immediately after Emmanuel Macron was elected president of France in May 2017, progressive Americans fairly swooned with envy. If only they could have a president like M. Macron: young, handsome, progressive, cosmopolitan, polished, globally minded and dedicated to the European Union’s dream of uniting all of Europe into a single state! And Mrs. May across...
Ukraine Bosnified, Putin Hitlerized
On March 6 President Obama said in Washington that the Crimean authorities’ plans for a referendum “violate the Ukrainian Constitution and violate international law.” “Any discussion about the future of Ukraine must include the legitimate government of Ukraine. We are well beyond the days when borders can be redrawn over the heads of democratically elected...
Daffodils for Wordsworth
The name Philip Larkin (1922-1985) is a wonderfully poetic one, conjuring an image of a lover of horses on a carefree adventure. Such, however, is far from the temperament of this 20th-century poet, whose poetry is more suggestive of some horse in a Dickens novel, harnessed to an industrial wheel and moving forever round in...
Wills’ Way
Garry Wills is, of course, the talented apostate conservative whose interpretative political reporting avoids the usual journalistic cliches. No one will disagree that Wills penetrates events more deeply than do, say, the editorial writers for the New York Times, any more than he will deny that Wills’ insight and wit are broadly in service to...
See the USA in Your Chevrolet in 1964
Pop pulled the sky-blue 1963 Chevy Impala out of the driveway in Wayne, Michigan. With Mom and three kids along for what our family would call our 9,000-mile trip, he jogged a block to Michigan Avenue, which, as US 12, always beckoned West to Chicago and, beyond that, to California. The kids: Johnny, nine; Caroline,...
Celtic Justice
“For any displeasure, that they apprehend to be done unto them by their neighbours, they take up a plain field against him, and (without respect to God, King, or commonweal) bang it out bravely, he and all his kin, against him and all his.” —King James VI of Scotland, Basilikon Doron...
The Ultimate Tax Protest
In Suzanne M. Bartley et al v. United States, a class-action suit filed on April 17, 1995, in federal district court in Milwaukee, my wife, on behalf of herself and all others who paid federal taxes for the years 1991-93, has sued for a refund of approximately 70 percent of the revenue collected during those...
Democrats’ Open Border Trickery: Gaming the Census
The raw political interest of Democrats is at work in gaming the census numbers to increase the headcount in America’s leftist cities to maintain the political power.
Glorified on TV
Bounty hunters with a license to kill are glorified on television every week. The reality is uglier and more terrifying than most of us imagine. In Phoenix, a group of heavily armed bounty hunters, wearing ski-masks and body armor, sledgehammered their way through the front door of a private residence, tied up a mother, and...
Revisiting Suffrage
One hundred years have now passed since both houses of Congress passed the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granting women the right to vote. For a long time, both major parties were ready to grant the suffrage, should American women clearly ask it of them. The question was never whether women were worthy of...
Why the Republicans Won’t Stop Obama’s Amnesty
Spending more than a minute or two to discuss Barack Obama’s latest assault on the Constitution that he has sworn to uphold is, quite frankly, a waste of time. Even before the announcement of his “executive action” plan for amnesty for five million illegal immigrants, the President’s defenders had claimed that he wanted to do...
Memo to Trump: Defy Mueller
If Donald Trump does not wish to collaborate in the destruction of his presidency, he will refuse to be questioned by the FBI, or by a grand jury, or by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his malevolent minions. Should Mueller subpoena him, as he has threatened to do, Trump should ignore the subpoena, and frame...
USA Today’s Shoddy Statistical Analysis and Even Shoddier Morality
In reporting an infant mortality increase in Texas in the wake of the Dobbs decision, the newspaper suggests it would have been better had these children never been born.
We Are Right on Foreign Affairs Because We Are Right on Everything
It is almost embarrassing to say that we are right on foreign affairs because we are right on everything else. It nevertheless has to be said, because it is true. We are right on foreign affairs because the behavior of our rulers abroad is a logical and inevitable extension of their behavior at home. Having...
Rockefeller Republicans
Is the Republican establishment losing it? Is the party leadership capable of uniting a governing coalition as Richard Nixon did before Watergate and Ronald Reagan resurrected in the 1980s? Observing the hysteria and nastiness of Karl Rove and the GOP establishment at the stunning triumph of Tea Party Princess Christine O’Donnell, the answer is no....
A True Vindication of Edmund Burke
Mr. Conor Cruise O’Brien’s “A Vindication of Edmund Burke,” (National Review, December 17, 1990), contains many long established truths about Burke’s politics—his consistency in principle, his remarkable insights and powers of prophesy, his strong critique of revolutionary ideology, and so forth. But amidst these trite truisms, which vindicate O’Brien’s subject only to the uninitiated, he...
Where the Action Is
Between now and the turn of the century, 16 eastern and southeastern states will celebrate 200 years of statehood. Here in the hinterlands, seven more states will have their 100th birthday. Then there will be just five state centennials left, with Alaska and Hawaii as late desserts in 2059—when many East Coast states will be...
Getting Back to Nature
“Human rights are fictions—but fictions with highly specific properties.” —Alasdair MacIntyre In 1960 John Courtney Murray, S.J., warned of the possibility that America was slipping into a new barbarism. In his best known work, We Hold These Truths, Father Murray said that barbarism “threatens when men cease to talk together according to reasonable laws.” Argument...
The Satan Club
At last, the Tacoma Public Schools’ board has recognized the obvious educational potential of the Prince of Darkness. For years, this hopelessly hidebound and reactionary institution has restricted itself to providing what it calls “a welcoming, nurturing environment [to] . . . provide the knowledge and skills for students to become respectful, responsible life-long learners...
Conservatism at Midwinter Spring
[What follows is a meditation on T.S. Eliot’s poem “Little Gidding.” All indented quotations, with apologies to their author, are taken from Eliot.] What we call the beginning is often the end And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from . . . The first step,...
The Judgment of History
Satire is a difficult form these days. Reality keeps calling, and raising. Let me tell a story that illustrates the difficulty. Last November, when President Reagan’s Teflon began to wear thin, pundits began to write about how his “place in history” was being jeopardized. My buddy Tim, a historian, casually suggested that a President really...
An Establishment in Panic
Donald Trump “appeals to racism.” “[F]rom the beginning . . . his campaign has profited from voter prejudice and hatred” and represents an “authoritarian assault upon democracy.” If Speaker Paul Ryan wishes to be “on the right side of history . . . he must condemn Mr. Trump clearly and comprehensively. The same goes for...
A New Logic of Human Studies
Consider the following paradoxes. A welfare system designed by well-meaning politicians guided by the advice of the wisest sociologists and economists available, costing billions of dollars, whose net effect is radically to increase the numbers of the poor, especially women and children, and to deepen their misery, incapacity, and despair. A stock market which rises...
More Maxims of American Life
Silence is unhealthy and un-American. Everybody has a right to talk and play their media as much as they want to, anywhere any time. Every child has the right to a quality education. A college education is the key to a well-paying job. Same-sex couples have the same right to government benefits as everybody else....
The Twilight of the Sacred
At the center of the contemporary pagan/Christian controversy are the nature, the localization, and the psychological-mythological motivation of the sacred. The last one dominates the debate because as the transcendent God becomes less focused the sacred turns into a basically human domain. The question, no longer addressed to heaven, is not over how God communicates...
Rockford Schools Controversy
The Rockford schools controversy, approaching its tenth anniversary, is taking on the mythic stature of the Little Rock, Cleveland, and Kansas City cases. While still in its infancy (as desegregation cases go) and relatively inexpensive (only $166 million through the end of the 1997-98 school year, compared to $2 billion in Kansas City), the Rockford...
New England Against America
“The fiction of Mr. Simms gave indication, we repeat, of genius, and that of no common order. Had he been even a Yankee, this genius would have been rendered immediately manifest to his countrymen, but unhappily (perhaps) he was a Southerner. . . . His book, therefore, depended entirely upon its own intrinsic value and...
The Lady From Niger
“There once was a lady from Niger Who smiled as she rode on a tiger. They returned from the ride With the lady inside And the smile on the face of the tiger.” —Ogden Nash Christopher Patten warns at the start that his engagingly written book is not a memoir. Though the core of it...
Neoenvironmentalism
The environmentalist movement, as usual, is one theoretical jump ahead of the practical results produced by its previous level of ideological development-results it now deplores and blames on the enemy. After arson destroyed three buildings and damaged four ski lifts on Vail Mountain in Colorado last October, Earth Liberation Front took the credit for destroying...
After the Deluge (Review: Immigration and the American Future)
It should be obvious to anyone who has taken the slightest trouble to examine the immigration question that America is faced not with an immigration “problem,” or even a “crisis,” but with a massive ...
Will the Honduras Column Intimidate America?
There is something about “column” that alerts the mind. It is not the same as “crowd,” and is active, purposive. My Chambers dictionary gives for column “a body of troops forming a long, narrow procession,” reminding us that the word is quasi-military. Napoleon’s infantry always attacked in columns. The Honduras column now commanding the news...
Big Tech as Big Brother
Conservatives more than anyone else view with a gimlet eye the rise of the Internet and the gigantic tech companies that are taking over ever larger parts of our lives. Even the place where most of these companies dwell, Silicon Valley, is a bastardization of its real name, Santa Clara, or St. Claire of Assisi,...
Recovering the Dignity of Truth
We Episcopalians—we’re just so special, don’t you know? We worship in such special ways. Our churches look so special, as do we ourselves—an indication of our social gifts. And when we fight, when we commence to break the church furniture over one another’s heads—at such moments we’re just, you might say, disgustingly, regurgitatingly special; so...