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...
2065 search results for: Supreme%2525252BCourt
Appealing to Prurient Interests
In 1857, the House of Lords engaged in a heated debate over a bill sponsored by an organization calling itself by the frank, but nonetheless quaint, name of the “Society for the Suppression of Vice.” The intent of the bill was to control, through legal penalties, the production and sale of “obscene publications,” and despite...
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.
After Lee, It’s Lincoln’s Turn
First, they came for the Confederates. And that purge is far from over. Jefferson Davis Highway in Arlington, named for the president of the Confederacy, has been re-christened Richmond Highway. An Arlington group is calling for the removal of Robert E. Lee’s name from Lee Highway to be replaced by “Mildred & Richard Loving Avenue.”...
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...
Tax Credits and Education Reform: No Simple Task
Over the last decade, the state of Arizona has made ground-breaking attempts at K-12 education reform. A 1997 law allowing taxpayers to steer a portion of their state income-tax liability toward a student at a private school now provides significant scholarship aid each year to 22,500 of the 54,000 students enrolled in private schools. With...
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...
The Woke-Enabling Act
In the first week of September 1792 the French Revolution entered its openly terroristic phase with the massacre of some 1,600 prisoners in Paris. It was an outrage euphemistically called les Journées du Septembre (or the September Days). It was justified by the claim that the country was in danger from foreign enemies and domestic...
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...
How Do You Make $100 Million Per Day?
How do you make $100 million per day? Goldman Sachs did it—and still does it. It even brags about it. Goldman’s net revenues for 2009 were over $45 billion. Most of this—$34.37 billion—came from trading. During the second and third quarters of 2009, Goldman made over $100 million per day on 82 out of 130...
Of Apes and Yahoos
Instinct Produced by Spyglass Entertainment and Touchstone Pictures Directed by Jon Turteltaub Screenplay by Gerald Di Pego and Daniel Quinn Released by Buena Vista Pictures Pushing Tin Produced by Art Linson Productions, 3 Miles Apart Productions Ltd., et al. Directed by Mike Newell Screenplay by Darcy Frey and Glen Charles Released by 20th Century Fox...
Democrats Are Stuck with Joe Biden as Their Presidential Nominee
Democrats have no choice but to take a deep breath, pray to the deity they probably don't believe in, and roll the dice with their impotent current ticket.
Dominion Mosque
If the definition of a liberal is a person who won’t take his own side in a fight, Adam Ebbin and Kaye Kory, Democrats who represent Virginia’s 49th and 38th districts in the commonwealth’s House of Delegates, should have their pictures next to the word in Webster’s. Ebbin, a homosexual Jew, invited Johari Abdul-Malik, a...
Gods of Inclusion
Although America remains overwhelmingly Christian in affiliation (if not necessarily in practice), the connoisseurs of multiculturalism like to pretend otherwise—often rather insistently. Public events involving religion must acknowledge Zoroaster and Zeus as much as Moses and Jesus. Multiculturalists find claims about the exclusive truth of any religion, particularly Christianity, especially offensive. They eagerly denounce as...
Waco in Moscow
The standoff between President Yeltsin and the Russian Parliament ended in flames and gunfire that can be compared to the sad scenes of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. Even the scare tactic of round-the-clock rap music was emulated by Russian spetsnats troops. Having crushed his opponents, Mr. Yeltsin returned Russia to its familiar...
Greek Diary II
The Plaka was once the heart of modern Athens, first Ottoman Athens and then the Athens built largely by German kings and queens and their philhellenic architects. It was ruined by the work of brilliant American archaeologists who tore out the heart of the neighborhood in digging up the ...
Phonic Booms
In Forked Tongue, her important new public policy study-cum-expose whose proposals seem as likely to create new problems as to solve some old ones, Rosalie Pedalino Porter doesn’t get down to root causes. That is, she nowhere notes that when activist judges create new opportunities for turf-hungry bureaucrats the result is similar to what it...
Taking Back the Culture
By the time you read this, “the most important election of our lifetime” will be headed for the history books. If the last six most important elections of our lifetime are any indication, however, we will once again have a chance to vote in the most important election of our lifetime in 2020. Or perhaps...
Pro-Life: The Political Disadvantage
Pro-life Republicans must somehow convince their opponents that opposition to abortion is a deeply held belief about human life—not an attack on women.
Anarcho-Tyranny: The Perpetual Revolution—April 2005
PERSPECTIVE Synthesizing Tyrannyby Samuel Francis The last word. VIEWS The Real Fight Is Here at Homeby Roger D. McGrathFallujah, California. Global Anarcho-Tyrannyby Srdja TrifkovicA game of chess. Samuel T. Francis, R.I.P.Clyde Wilson and Thomas Fleming remembertheir fellow Tarheel conspirator. NEWS Final Solutionby B.K. EakmanThe hostile takeover of America’s schools. REVIEWS My Favorite Justiceby Stephen B....
The Unbearable Bulldozers of Walmart
A theory about the mafia that was advanced in these pages by the late Samuel Francis about 15 years ago explains how Walmart, Costco, and Home Depot drive out your corner grocery, the local pharmacist, and Joe’s Hardware. The national expansion of these blights isn’t free enterprise. It’s more akin to the nationwide expansion of...
The American Covenant
“It is extremely frustrating to write history today because so much effort must go toward correcting the countless distortions that have been inserted into accounts of our heritage by militant secularists who twist facts to suit their narrow anti-religious political agendas.” So writes Benjamin Hart near the end of Faith and Freedom: The Christian Roots...
The Habsburgs and the Balkans: A Rich, Uneven Tapestry
Much ill-informed and superficial nonsense has been published in recent weeks on the Habsburgs in general and on their role in the Balkans in particular. This is a pity because that role is genuinely interesting, often filled with drama and heroism, and in its final stages marked by hubris, folly, and tragedy. Well worth a...
You Shall Be as Gods
“It’s awesome”: A young relative of mine loves the word and uses it profusely. Since she applies it to a restaurant or a vacuum cleaner she finds extraordinary, I doubt she realizes its real meaning. This is a typical instance of the degeneracy of a word caused by the search for quick superlatives, and mainly...
Going Nowhere
Agostino Carrino, a Neapolitan legal theorist now associated with the University of Naples Frederick II, has published a series of tracts (available in Italian, German, and French) aimed at the European Union and its claims to legitimacy. Particularly in his last two works, Democrazia e governo del futuro (2000) and L’Europa e il futuro delle...
Planning to Fail
“What did Republicans get for 16 days of a government shutdown with people being hurt? We have absolutely nothing to show for it, other than a damaged brand.” This is how second-term Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) described the events of October. And the young Tea Partier is right. Polls show that eight in ten Americans...
Downsizing Detroit Motown’s Lament
Detroiters have a deeply ironic way of looking at their beloved city. The irony is evident in a once-popular T-shirt that showed a muscular tough gripping a ferocious dog around the neck while holding a loaded gun to the animal’s head. “Say Nice Things About Detroit,” the T-shirt read. The T-shirt is a commentary on...
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...
Tyranny in Our Time
There is a saying among jurists that hard cases make bad law. Similarly, every book critic knows that the best books make for hard reviewing. Faced with a truly fine work, the reviewer is tempted simply to reproduce the author’s thesis in abbreviation, while scattering as many of the most quotable sentences as space allows. ...
The First Ring of Hostility
Cows sacred, evil, and venal are shot by Vladimir Voinovich in this satiric look at the Soviet Union that reads like a combination “Ivan in Wonderland” and Zamiatin’s WE. The hero of Moscow 2042, like Voinovich, is a Soviet émigré writer living in West Germany. Our protagonist, Vitaly Kartsev, takes a 30-day trip by airplane...
Who’s Wearing the White Hat?
In the heartland’s fiercest modern-day shoot-out—farmers versus lawyers and bankers—it’s hard to tell the good guys from the bad. Charles Niska, farmer and father of eight, is serving two consecutive one-year sentences in the North Dakota State Penitentiary for illegal practice of law and jumping bail. Niska got into trouble helping his neighbor Richard Schmidt...
Reality Dysphoria Update
The dictatorship of the subjunctive mood colonizes athletics, the courts, and public opinion.
What’s Good for Rockford Acromatics
Dean Olson, the chairman of Rockford Acromatic Products, an after-market auto-parts manufacturer, is a longtime supporter of Republican candidates. Still, he is not optimistic about the November election: “Even though the Democrats are in full rout, we’re not able to mount an effective challenge. I don’t see the leadership there.” While Rockford voters lean Democratic,...
America’s Second Civil War
“They had found a leader, Robert E. Lee—and what a leader! . . . No military leader since Napoleon has aroused such enthusiastic devotion among troops as did Lee when he reviewed them on his horse Traveller.” So wrote Samuel Eliot Morison in his magisterial The Oxford History of the American People in 1965. First...
Nazi Russians and “Basic Morality”
A burbling controversy of Olympic proportions has found its way to Moscow via Lausanne. On one side the forces of evil are arrayed behind the stallion-riding Vladimir Putin and his “anti-gay” law (which sailed through the Duma in June). On the other are the forces of absolute equality, led by the bribe-swilling International Olympic...
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...
A Wilderness of Mirrors: Litvinenko, Putin, and the West
The death of exiled former FSB (the domestic-security successor to the KGB) officer Aleksandr Litvinenko in London last November momentarily relegated Britney and K-Fed, Oprah, and Madonna to the second pages of Western tabloids. It also sparked a frenzy of speculation about who stands behind the apparent murder—or “murders,” since talk of political assassination was...
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....
Down Ecuador Way, Part I
Latin elections are such vibrant theater, unlike our plastic-coated, high-tech soap operas, I thought I might catch the presidential election in Ecuador this year. Besides, there was an off-again, on-again war with Peru to give an edge to the trip. Not long into the journey I got all the edge I would need for the...
North Korea and Iran
The United States faces twin crises involving nuclear proliferation, as both North Korea and Iran seem poised to barge into the global nuclear-weapons club. (There are indications that North Korea may have already done so, since she has processed enough plutonium to build as many as 13 weapons.) U.S. policy toward those two rogue states...
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...
What a Swell Party This Is
The final presidential election of the millennium is still more than a year away, but by last summer rumblings of discontent with the plastic dashboard figurines who are the leading candidates of the two major plastic dashboard political parties were already audible. The rumblings first attracted national notice when Pat Buchanan, in the course of...
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...
Who Speaks for the Unborn in Massachusetts?
In its most recent exercise of liberal democracy, the state senate of Massachusetts voted 32-8 to override Gov. Charlie Baker’s veto of what is called the Roe Act. One day earlier, Monday, the state house had voted to override. The Roe Act is now law in the Bay State. And what does it say? ...
On Adultery and the Military
Although Katherine Dalton’s comments about the Kelly Flinn case (Cultural Revolutions, August) are well-taken, they do not quite find the bulls-eye on why the Uniform Code of Military Justice outlaws adultery. Adultery reveals an egregious lack of integrity, by far—at least in the opinion of this former commander of Marines—the most important moral virtue for...
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 ...
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,...
Great American Musical Artists in their Roaring Nineties
Great musical artists approach the coda, without the recognition they deserve. As the year closes, we’d do well to remember (or discover) their work.
The End of Obamaworld
In denouncing Republicans as “scared of widows and orphans,” and castigating those who prefer Christian refugees to Muslims coming to America, Barack Obama has come off as petulant and unpresidential. Clearly, he is upset. And with good reason. He grossly, transparently underestimated the ability of ISIS, the “JV” team, to strike outside the caliphate into...