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...
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Roger Stone’s Case Shows the Left’s Control of U.S. Courts
The contrived conviction of Roger Stone showed that America has a profoundly serious problem with its legal system. The reaction to President Trump’s commutation of Stone’s sentence by mainline media, and former and current prosecutors tells us that the president himself is likely to be prosecuted after leaving office. The roots of this problem lie...
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.
Poisoned at the Source
“The way to have power is to take it.” —W.M. Tweed When on January 3, 1949, Lyndon Baines Johnson of Texas was sworn in as a United States senator, an era in the politics of his state had come to an end, a period that had begun when Reconstruction concluded. Similar events occurred in other...
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...
Turn to the Dark Side
As members of the House of Representatives were moving toward impeachment hearings that should make Bill Clinton—whatever the outcome—one of the most infamous politicians in American history, Republicans in both houses of Congress decided to give the President everything he was asking for—more federally funded teachers to corrupt the children and $18 billion of boodle...
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...
In the Beginning
If it is true that the Constitution of the United States is to be construed by its intent rather than by mysterious and highly malleable forces of “evolution,” then recovery of the intellectual context out of which it arose is of the highest priority. However, the discovery of intent is primarily a question of historical...
Christian Nationalism—A Catholic Integralist View
Natural law, not liberalism, directs Man to his proper end.
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,...
The Coming Ordeal
This latest book by the former secretary of state illustrates the difficulty of separating a piece of writing from its creator (Alan Greenspan on macroeconomics, Bill Gates on information technology, Steven Spielberg on cinematography. Would a similar, slim volume attract national attention if came from an assistant professor at a Midwestern college? Would it be...
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...
Consensual Citizenship
The customary division of national laws of citizenship into the “principles” of jus soli (place of birth) or jus sanguinis (line of descent) denotes the objective criteria most often used to determine one’s citizenship. But the conceptions of political membership that have vied for supremacy in Anglo- American law implicate a different, more fundamental dichotomy—one...
Archie Bunker Back Stories
Carl Reiner’s son, Rob, takes part in a grand tradition on the left of demonizing normal, religious people after being advanced, personally, by powerful relationships. On the left, it’s all relative and “all in the family.”
Biting the Bullet
The flyleaf of this book sports a quote (“One finally gets the musical whole of Dostoevsky’s original”) from an enthusiastic notice in the New York Times Book Review of a new translation of The Brothers Karamazov, which the Pevear-Volokh onsky tandem unleashed upon the English-speaking world a quarter of a century ago. As the author...
Loose Rigging: Scandal and the 102nd Congress
Early last February, Representative John Lewis took the House floor and demanded, “How can our constituents expect Congress to address the nation’s economic ills when tens of thousands may have been embezzled and stolen right here in the Capitol? How can they expect Congress to deal with a drug epidemic if cocaine is in fact...
Money-Sucking Machines
Riverboat casinos are giant money-sucking machines. A $30 million riverboat casino operated by Harrah’s can suck in $200,000 a day from bettors, assuming a typical daily loss of $50 per customer. This kind of highstakes betting used to be called gambling. But liberals have come up with a new name—”gaming.” It was formerly recognized as...
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,...
Thunder on the Right
National Reviewhas been the flagship of the conservative movement for almost 30 years. From the very beginning, its editors set the agenda for American conservatism. NR’s peculiar mixture of capitalist anticommunism with the concerns of traditional Catholicism defined the movement. Even before being cursed with the name “fusionism,” it was a potent combination. Where else...
It’s 10 A.M. on a School Day—Do You Know Who Has Your Child?
Americans generally agree that our public schools are not what they should be, but the strongest resistance to improvement comes from the jokes some people refer to as “teachers’ unions.” Take the strange ease of a Minneapolis nonprofit corporation. Public School Incentives (PSI), which has proposed some interesting measures for public schools. PSFs founder, Ted...
Dulce et Decorum
One of the most moving war memorials I know is on a wall outside the reading room of the British Museum. It is a simple plaque with the names of a hundred or so librarians killed in the Great War. Librarians. Think about it. That plaque makes a point, doesn’t it, if not perhaps the...
Angels From the Time to Come
Certain moments in a good story possess a quality that is logically very strange indeed, and that renders them often haunting and unforgettable. Consider Dorothea’s choice of Ladislaw as her lover in Middlemarch: the logic of fiction would dictate that Dorothea should pair up with Lydgate, who is a heavyweight like her, and if after...
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...
Men Men Men Men Manly Men Men Men
Some insomniacs do endless sequences of sums in their heads, while more traditional conservatives rely on counting sheep—or sheep in elephants’ clothing. An instinctive Machiavellian even as a child, and dimly conscious of the reality of power, I preferred to count rulers. In elementary school I learned the American presidents, and in high school I...
Forty Years After
Americans have grown fond of celebrating anniversaries of one kind or another. I first noticed this new habit during the national thrombosis over the Statue of Liberty back in 1986, but more recently the habit has swollen into something like an epidemic. In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, we have endured the anniversaries of...
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...
A Most Consequential Presidency
As Donald Trump is about to be nominated for a second term, how his presidency has already altered the orientation of his party is on display. Under Trump, the GOP ceased to be a party of small government whose yardstick of success was how close it came to a balanced budget. Trump signed on, this...
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...
Commendables
Original Thought & Triplicate Forms George Roche: America by the Throat: the Stranglehold of Federal Bureaucracy; Devin-Adair; Old Grennwich, CT. Edwin J. Feulner, Jr: Conservatives Stalk the House: the Republican Study Committee 1970-1982; Green Hill; Ottawa, IL. Conservatives come in at least two types: those who wish to conserve principles and those who wish to...
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 ...
Strategic Consequences of Erdogan’s Countercoup
Two weeks after the failed coup and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s subsequent mass purge, three facts seem clear. Turkey has ceased to be a democracy in any conventional sense. The army’s reputation and cohesiveness have suffered a massive blow, with uncertain consequences for its operational effectiveness. Most importantly, Turkey’s foreign policy and regional security strategy...
English Tracts
“England, with all thy faults, I love thee still.” —William Cowper, The Task, II For the last 300 years, “England” and “Britain” have been largely synonymous. When Glasgow-born General Sir John Moore lay dying at Corunna, his last words were “I hope the people of England will be satisfied. I hope...
The Persecution of John Demjanjuk
“John Demjanjuk Guilty of Nazi Death Camp Murders,” ran the headline on the BBC. The lede began: “A German court has found John Demjanjuk guilty of helping to murder more than 28,000 Jews at a Nazi death camp in Poland.” Not until paragraph 17 does one find this jolting fact: “No evidence was produced...
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.
Frankenstein’s Children
“Monstrum horrendum, informe ingens.” —Vergil, Aeneid In 1974, I first encountered one of the creatures E. Michael Jones writes about in Monsters From the Id. It appeared in the guise of one of my graduate-school classmates. She was a bright, pretty woman who seemed unusually self-possessed and accomplished for a 22-year-old. My impression changed, however,...
Bias Crimes
Bias crimes will no longer be tolerated in New York City, say the proponents of the city’s new “bias crimes” statute. Its sponsors call it one of the toughest such laws in the nation, and it will for the first time allow judges to award unlimited punitive damages to victims of bias attacks, as well...
From the Family of the Lion
“There is a kind of revolution of so general a character that it changes the tastes as well as the fortunes of the world.” —La Rochefoucauld There is a popular myth of Abraham Lincoln, our 16th President, that is known to most Americans. According to the orthodox version of this highly sympathetic construct, Lincoln was...
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...
On ‘Governor John Engler’
Although Greg Kaza has political pretenses [sic], a recent article in Chronicles (Cultural Revolutions, June 1992) suggests that he has not learned even the most elementary lessons of American politics-least of which that it is “the art of the possible.” The problem with Kaza is that he is an ideologue. Like most ideologues, he would...
Academic Freedom
When IAS (the institute for Advanced Study), the research center that takes pride in having housed Einstein, told the National Endowment for the Humanities last December to take its money and shove it, the New York Times responded with a front-page, four column headline: “Endowment Embattled Over Academic Freedom.” But it appears there was much...
Trump Stands His Ground on Putin
“Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Under the Constitution, these are the offenses for which presidents can be impeached. And to hear our elites, Donald Trump is guilty of them all. Trump’s refusal to challenge Vladimir Putin’s claim at Helsinki—that his GRU boys did not hack Hillary Clinton’s campaign—has been called treason, a...
Abortion’s Other Victims
The ideology of feminism makes otherwise good and decent people support the murderous practice of abortion.
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. . . . . ...
The Necessity of Christianity
According to an increasingly popular and influential narrative, the Founding Fathers were mostly crypto-atheistic deists who, as Christopher Hitchens is fond of pointing out, did not mention God in the Constitution, and gave us a First Amendment because they were, at best, suspicious of Christianity and wished to limit its influence. And it’s a good...
Transatlantic Rifts
In the immediate aftermath of September 11, Europe was closer to America, politically and emotionally, than at any time since World War II. For a moment, the threat of Islamic terrorism had rekindled a dormant awareness on both sides of the Atlantic of just how much the Old Continent and the New World have in...
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...
Those Irrational Californians
California has long been called the land of fruit and nuts. Now a decision by a federal judge stands in the way of anyone who might wish to challenge that description. In Perry v. Schwarzenegger, Judge Vaughn R. Walker held that the 6.8 million Californians who voted in favor of Proposition 8, which amended the...
The Facts and Fiction of Election Reforms
Two of the Clinton campaign’s central promises aimed at reducing the federal budget deficit and “reinventing” government. Unfortunately, President Clinton’s recently unveiled campaign finance reform plan will do neither. The most dramatic step the President could take toward accomplishing his goals would be to resist congressmen’s desires on the topic closest to their hearts: election...
Sinkin’ Down in Youngstown
If you really want to know what’s going on in a city, consult the motel clerk working the graveyard shift—not the clerk at the chain motel, but his counterpart at the inn that advertises the cheapest rates at the interstate exit with the truck stop. The kind of inn where you find cars patched with...
An Aristocracy of Warriors
In his seminal work, Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville noted that the nobility of medieval Europe reckoned martial valor to be the greatest of all the virtues. The feudal aristocracy, he said, “was born of war and for war; it won its power by force of arms and maintained it thereby. So nothing was...