Werner Herzog, in his new memoir, turns his attention to himself, and singles out essential elements of his life that have given birth to ideas, perceptions, and films.
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Blacks on Abortion
The U.S. black population has been disproportionately devastated by the practice of abortion, yet many black leaders have been cajoled into dutifully mouthing the abortion politics of their white leftist overlords.
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Trump—Once and Future King?
“I don’t know if he’ll run in 2024 or not. But if he does, I’m pretty sure he will win the nomination.” So says Mitt Romney, the sole Republican senator to have voted twice to convict President Donald J. Trump of impeachable acts. But is it possible Trump could win the nomination in 2024? What...
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Joe Sobran’s Timeless Lesson on America’s Role in the World
I met Joe Sobran in early 1997 at a conference near Chicago on the American intervention in the Balkans. It was not his area of primary interest, but he understood all of the key issues because he understood U.S. foreign policy and its domestic roots. His diagnosis, which applied then, in Bill Clinton’s second term,...
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On the Free Market
Llewellyn Rockwell’s article “How the Market Stamps Out Evil” in the December issue was challenging. But whereas his superb philippic on the presidency in the October issue (“Down With the Presidency“) left me baying at the moon, this time I was unconvinced. Can capitalism really be set against a tyrannical government as a force for...
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Progressive Pilgrim
One week after the 1984 Presidential election, while Ronald Reagan was still basking in the afterglow of a victory he takes as evidence that “America is feeling good about itself again,” the National Conference of Catholic Bishops meeting in Washington finally got a look at the 136-page draft of a “Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social...
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Is Thomas Woods a Dissenter? A Further Reply, Pt. 3
Next we must look at another rhetorical device of Woods which serves to distract the attention of the reader from the point at issue and to prejudice him against what I actually wrote. Woods mentions the interventions of bishops’ conferences into economic matters. As a matter of fact I said absolutely nothing in my article...
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Bing Crosby’s Irish and American Christmas
While much of the America at the heart of Bing Crosby’s famous Christmas movies seems lost, we should remember what is fundamental.
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Congress’s Romance with Cowardice
War Without War Powers (the Not-So-New American Way) On September 1, 1970, soon after President Nixon expanded the Vietnam War by invading neighboring Cambodia, Democratic Senator George McGovern, a decorated World War II veteran and future presidential candidate, took to the floor of the Senate and said, “Every Senator [here] is partly responsible for sending...
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A Difficult Decade
James Patterson’s controlling idea is that the 60’s became the 60’s in 1965, and that this represented an “Eve of Destruction.” One struggles for about 300 pages trying to find out . . . destruction of what? The title comes from a long-forgotten song by a long-forgotten singer, Barry McGuire. “Eve of Destruction” did get...
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Latter-Day Beggars
“He hath made us kings . . . ” —Revelation 1:6 Roman beggars, like Roman gypsies and Roman cats, not to mention Roman prostitutes warming themselves by their little winter chestnut fires, are the bearers of an ancient tradition, peculiar to the City of the Seven Hills, the caput mundi, which even her membership in...
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Border Insecurity is Election Interference
In what amounts to election interference and dilution of the franchise for citizens, sanctuary communities are allowing and even encouraging participation of noncitizens in their local and municipal elections. Citizens need to speak out now before it’s too late.
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A Few More Thoughts About Women In Combat
So we now learn that women might be drafted into the military. The news is a fitting coda to Tom Piatak’s post about women in combat, to which I added another. When I served on the first Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces, conservative commissioners warned about this development: that...
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Red Hot Harlequin Romances
Alice Walker: In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego. by Brian Murray Alice Walker, not yet 40, has been publishing poetry and prose since the late 1960’s. But only in recent years has her work been accorded the sort of fervid critical praise that the American literary establishment prefers to bestow...
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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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Abortion’s Other Victims
The ideology of feminism makes otherwise good and decent people support the murderous practice of abortion.
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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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What Is History? Part 12
Revolutions turn into institutions; revolts that renew the youth of old societies in their turn grow old; and the past, which was full of new things, of splits and innovations and insurrections, seems to us a single texture of tradition. . . . . ...
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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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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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A Moderate Proposal
In America today, nearly every month brings a new occasion to renew the Culture War over religion in the public square. By next year, our sensitive multicultural elites might insist on celebrating “Hearts and Flowers Day” on February 14 and “Drink Beer and Wear Green Day” on March 17. Americans have not always been such...
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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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Conservatives and the Free Market
When everyone “hastens through by-paths to private profit,” Samuel Johnson remarked confidently in 1756, “no great change can suddenly be made.” So the market can be conservative in its effects. The notion is startling, especially from the pen of an 18th-century Tory, and it hardly matters for the moment whether the market Johnson had in...
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Dirty Secrets: Race-Norming Lives On
A year after the nasty secret got out of how race-norming works on the nation’s most widely used job test, the establishment news herd suddenly discovered the story. There were spots on NBC Nightly News and the Today Show, a front-page story in the Washington Post, an editorial in the New York Times, and a...
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In Search of the New American Man
The evident purpose of Taming the Prince is to provide a respectable philosophical pedigree for the usurpations and abuses of power by American Presidents since FDR. (Professor Mansfield dedicates the book to his father, “constant advocate of a strong presidency from Franklin Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan.”) Where conservatives such as Corwin, Kendall, Burnham, and Samuel...
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Swiss Minarets
Swiss voters approved a constitutional amendment banning the construction of new minarets last November, to the howls of bien-pensant rage at home and abroad. The proposal was supported by 57.5 percent of the participating voters and 22 of the 26 Swiss cantons. It was originally drafted in May 2007 by a group of conservative politicians,...
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Better Together
Brion McClanahan penned two able critiques of President Trump’s “1776 Report” for the April/May and July 2021 issues of this magazine. I notice that his charge (in “Stop Playing the Left’s Game,” July 2021 Chronicles) that “our allies at Claremont…give unwitting aid and comfort to the left” is mirrored by Michael Anton’s assertion (in “Americans Unite,” in the online magazine American Greatness) that Chronicles does...
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Low-End Education
Not too far from my house in Phoenix, Arizona, stands a Christian school that may just say everything about the educational reform debate in this country—and why it is so often impossible to make any sense of it, in particular. One assumes that what this school has to offer is back-to-basics education, superior teachers, a...
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Don’t Tread on Us
In the closing days of 1993 two familiar specters, recently absent from our nightmares, returned to haunt the global consciousness: the Russian bear, in the person of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and the Yellow Peril, in the form of North Korea. There were, of course, other bugbears to frighten the children of democracy—the parade of new Hitlers...
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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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Arguments Against Global Free Trade
Sir James Goldsmith’s The Trap (New York, 1994) is the clearest introduction to the arguments against global free trade and its consequences for the nation. The English translation adds helpful notes and bibliography to the French original, Le Piège (Paris, 1993). In some places, however, rearrangement and omission change Goldsmith’s message. The last chapter of...
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Unto Them a Child Was Born
Normality is a fragile concept, and that observation is nowhere more true than in sexual matters. In making that point, I am not questioning the existence of absolute moral standards—quite the contrary. Rather, I am suggesting that, once a society loses its religious moorings, it drifts into startling novelties with a haste even more vertiginous...
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A Pig in a Poke
Never did I appreciate so much the genius of the Founding Fathers as after finishing this remarkable biography of President Clinton. The authors of the Constitution created a government which makes it impossible for the United States to be transformed into a continental Dogpatch some millions of square miles in extent, which is precisely what...
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Just Win, Baby
In 1968, George Wallace said that there wasn’t a “dime worth’s of difference” between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey. Implicit there was the suggestion that Americans were not satisfied with echoes and preferred choices. As it happens, Wallace was the last third-party presidential candidate to win Electoral College votes. Besides 14 percent of the popular...
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Democracy and Declarations of War
The winter Balkan lull has let Congress off the hook for rolling over and playing dead in response to President Clinton’s dispatch of troops to Bosnia. It is cruel irony that the fewer casualties American troops sustain, the more likely we are to continue permitting further such devaluations of democracy. That will accentuate the eternal...
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Two Between the Ribs
How does he get away with it? Ever since Bonfire of the Vanities, I have wondered at Tom Wolfe’s success. The success itself is well deserved: Wolfe is a dazzling writer, without peer as an observer of contemporary American life. But can’t the brilliant social and literary critics of New York figure out what he...
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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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Too Much is Never Enough
Researchers report significantly increased rates of suicide among U.S. military personnel, college students, and baby boomers. Until now, suicide was most prevalent among teenagers and elderly persons. Journalists have suggested a number of explanations for the phenomenon, among the more plausible of them the structural collapse of the American family in which troubled, lonely, and...
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Calling Dr. Johnson
On September 30, at 3 P.M., our longtime colleague and friend Joe Sobran passed away. This is the last column he was able to write for us, published in the July 2010 issue. The Dear Leader of the United States reminds me of Robert Frost’s quip that a liberal is ...
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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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Let Us Now Praise Famous G-Men
Over the past few years, the United States federal government attempted a coup d’état against its own chief executive. Working from “opposition research” paid for by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, the Deep State and its partners in the media came within a hair’s breadth of taking down a sitting president. This was the...
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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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The Return of Due Process
In the post-Kavanaugh age, Americans are clamoring for a return to due process and the presumption of innocence.
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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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Hunter’s Gun Indictment Is Moment of Truth for Biden Regime
The Biden Regime's handling of the Hunter indictment will tell us whether we actually have a two-tier justice system as conservatives claim.
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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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Confiscate ‘Em, Dano!
Hawaii is a liberal state. Despite being heavily Catholic, it was the first state to legalize abortion. There is no death penalty, or even life sentences. Labor unions still wield considerable power. The Democratic Party enjoys one of its most solid majorities in the country. Most of the few Republicans in elected office are barely...
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Christianity and Slavery in the Old South
“Slavery is as ancient as war, and war as human nature.” —Voltaire Americans, with their strong tendency to externalize the evil within them and to project it onto others, have been waging crusades to extirpate or crush one kind of evil or another for almost 200 years now. The Pelagian belief...
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Whither the Republic?
This month, we shall have an answer to an all-important question: Which arm of our bipartisan party state will occupy the White House for the next four years? This is an issue second in importance only to such urgent American questions as “When will Britney Spears be allowed to see her kids?” “How much weight...