Recently, a columnist-friend, Matt Kenney, sent me a 25-year-old newspaper with his chiding that my column had been given better play. Both had run in The Orange County Register on June 30, 1991. “Is there no room for new nations in the New World Order?” was my title, and the column began: “In turning a...
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Learning At the Periphery
“Soldiers are the only hope against democrats.” —Wilhelm von Merckel The Bush administration’s crusade to overthrow Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and build Iraq into a democratic model for the Middle East has become a highly controversial and divisive undertaking. Larry Diamond was not a supporter of the war in Iraq, but when his old friend...
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Justice for All
Five years before Michael Brown and Eric Garner would become household names, there was Mark Barmore. On August 24, 2009, Rockford, Illinois, police officers Oda Poole and Stan North were patrolling in a prisoner-transport van when they received a notice from a dispatcher that 23-year-old Mark Anthony Barmore was wanted for questioning in a domestic...
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White Slaves
For many years I taught a U.S. history survey course. One of my lecture topics was American slavery. I made a real effort to put the peculiar institution into historical perspective. I noted that slavery was not something reserved for blacks here in America but was as old as man himself and recognized no racial...
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Europe’s Migrant Crisis
Srdja Trifkovic’s interview with Sputnik Radio International RS: What is your take on the migrant crisis inside Europe, and what’s happening between Serbia and Croatia? ST: “Migrant crisis” is the right term. I wouldn’t use the term “refugees” because, strictly speaking, most of these people had already been safe and sound in Turkey and other countries...
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How Would Aunt Mary Vote?
Polish Americans should detest the Democrats for wanting to destroy the good old U. S. of A. I know my Aunt Mary would.
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Letter from Spain: Post-Election Imbroglio
This year my winter retreat in Gran Canaria coincides with an unprecedented political crisis in Spain which may herald some trouble for the Brussels-based superstate. More than a month has passed since the inconclusive general election on December 20. It has marked the end of the decades-long duopoly enjoyed by the center-right People’s Party (Partido...
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Growing Weary of Racial Hypocrisy
The demands of submission from the left-wing race hustlers and the ritual apologies from so-called conservative influencers are getting old.
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Reining in the Rogue Royal of Arabia
If the crown prince of Saudi Arabia has in mind a war with Iran, President Trump should disabuse his royal highness of any notion that America would be doing his fighting for him. Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS, the 32-year-old son of the aging and ailing King Salman, is making too many enemies for his...
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The Supreme Court v. the American Dream—March 2006
PERSPECTIVE The Royal Prerogativeby Thomas FlemingIndispensable means. VIEWS Does the Federal Government Protect Private Property?by Stephen B. PresserLife, liberty, and takings. Latter-Day Beggarsby Hugh Barbour, O.Praem.A lesson in apocalyptic economics from the City on Seven Hills. Unjust Compensationby Scott P. RichertWhat’s not to love? NEWS Property Rights Redefinedby Steven GreenhutA new kind of blight. REVIEWS...
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Mercenary Dick’s and the Assault on Liberty
Dick’s Sporting Goods is using 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz’s evil act of killing 17 innocents and wounding many others in a child warehouse known commonly as a “public school” in Parkland Florida to boost its flagging sales and brandish its liberal bona fides. On Wednesday, the retailer issued a press release that could’ve been written by...
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The Big Dusty
A friend says her secret wish is for some very old distant relative, who she’s never met and won’t miss, to die and leave her a fortune. Waiting for rain this summer is a lot like that—only less realistic. In what threatens to be our third virtually rainless summer, I watch the ten o’clock news...
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Science Fictions
While the genre of science fiction is hardly a century old, the roots of science fiction go deep into our history. Men have always told stories, and in telling them they have inevitably recast the world of their perceptions into something easier to grasp, more beautiful or more terrible than it really is. At bottom,...
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A Huge and Healthy Pessimism
In his splendidly sardonic Devil’s Dictionary, that old gringo Ambrose Bierce defines pessimism as “a philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile.” Bierce would have smiled—or, rather, frowned—kindly upon John Derbyshire’s new book, an often droll demolition of the...
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Taking Leave of Our Census
Illegal aliens will be counted in the 1990 census—that’s right, illegal aliens. As a result, one or more states with a disproportionately large number of illegal residents will gain seats in the House of Representatives at the expense of states with few illegal immigrants. According to calculations by the Congressional Research Service, the inclusion of...
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Veepstakes Give Trump an Edge
Small though the influence of a VP pick usually is, Trump has several ways to turn the right choice into a winning hand.
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Time to Plan Mask-Burning Parties
As COVID restrictions begin to fall there seems to be a new problem emerging, namely, Americans’ inability to ditch the masks. Masks, it seems, have become a type of “security blanket” for many, reporter Karin Brulliard claims in a recent Washington Post article. She explains how David Díaz, a vaccinated 29-year-old, struggles to go for a run...
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Meddling in World Affairs
Wilsonian meddling in world affairs produces a corollary that other nations must abhor. American citizens not only take an active and sympathetic interest in the welfare of the “old country”—whether England or Poland or Haiti—they also insist on instructing the uneducated folk who stayed home on how to conduct their affairs in accord with the...
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Nation-Building
Bosnia is the United Nations’ first major experiment in nation-building, and the experiences of this multiethnic/multicultural state provide discouraging evidence that the “international community” is no more virtuous or high-minded than the old rogues who governed nation- states. Take the case of Thomas Miller, the United States ambassador in Sarajevo, who is rumored to have...
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The End of Another Panacea
Nineteen-ninety-one was an exhilarating year. The simultaneous col-lapse of the Soviet regime and the apartheid system in South Africa appeared an unexpected international bonanza for moral activists, both liberal and conservative. Outstanding accounts were miraculously settled. The gloomy predictions of trade and race wars were swept aside. Old verities were dusted off and promoted as...
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Butch Cassidy, Part 2
A station agent tried to telegraph Price, Utah—the direction the outlaws were headed—but Butch Cassidy and Elzy Lay had cut the wires. The paymaster had the train’s engine uncoupled. Men grabbed a variety of weapons and jumped aboard. The locomotive steamed down the narrow gorge of Price Canyon right past the unseen robbers, who were...
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Progressives Make a Half-Hearted Call for Peace in Ukraine
Now that the American empire has become explicitly leftist—committed to gay rights, feminism, abortion, and “democracy”—the left has become bloodthirsty cheerleaders for its wars.
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On Gabriel Garcia Moreno
William Mills was right about so much in his account of Ecuador (“Down Ecuador Way,” Part I and II, December 1996 and January 1997) that it is unfortunate that his only reference to Gabriel Garcia Moreno was a passing one having to do with this “ruler of the country during part of the 19th century”...
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Getting Here From There
If you can remember the 1960’s, the old line goes, you weren’t really there. “There,” of course, means the counterculture represented by Woodstock, hallucinogenic drugs, antiwar protests, and Haight-Ashbury. “The 60’s” didn’t actually begin in 1960, but by the “Summer of Love” in 1967 they had clearly arrived. The Beatles eventually became counterculture icons while...
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That Wedding
“She’s such an inspiration. She’s class.” That’s how 17-year-old Bianca, in her gold-lamé miniskirt, summed up Kate Middleton, 90 minutes before the British royal wedding. Like many others, Bianca was positioned alongside the Mall in central London, but unlike most she had the advantage of a view. She was being carried on the shoulders of...
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Unwinnable War?
“Taliban Are Winning: U.S. Commander in Afghanistan Warns of Rising Casualties.” Thus ran the startling headline on the front-page of the Wall Street Journal. The lead paragraph ran thus: “The Taliban have gained the upper hand in Afghanistan, the top American commander there said, forcing the U.S. to change its strategy in the eight-year-old conflict...
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Time and the Cross
“[They] assemble before daylight and recite by turns a form of words to Christ as god. I discovered nothing else than a perverse and extravagant superstition.” –Pliny the Younger The New Testament is not a book. In common with the Old Testament, to which it can in some ways be regarded as an appendix, like the Apocrypha,...
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Biden’s Department of Homeland Sleaze Chief
Everything old is new again. The corruptocracy of the Obama administration is back with a vengeance in the White House. Once more, the “S” in “DHS” stands not for security—but for sleaze. Our nation is back for sale to the highest foreign bidders and their “America last” cronies. Last Thursday, the Senate Homeland Security Committee...
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The Limits of Compassion
Something’s bothering me about the Polanski business. No, unlike Harvey Weinstein and Bernard-Henri Lévy—not to mention that Mitterand pedophile—I will not defend Roman’s actions with a 13-year-old, but I will say that with friends like his making fools of themselves defending him, it will be a miracle if he gets off with a slap on...
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Booklog: Liberal Books
I have started work on a piece analyzing the rights and wrongs of the classical liberal tradition. To do it properly, I am going to review a number of major works in that tradition, specifically, Mandeville, Condorcet, Smith, Godwin, JS Mill, Fitzjames Stephen, and Hayek. I do not intend to spend a great deal...
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Strange Words for Strange Days
Charity. Old version: Open-handedness toward our neighbour in need. New version: Getting the government to spend other people’s money on politically favoured groups, at home and abroad. All Men are Created Equal OV: We are all made in the image of God and deserve respect. (Besides, an Englishman over here is just ...
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Time’s Ugliest Children
Between the two world wars, Robinson Jeffers watched as the old American Republic settled into empire. Jeffers was an honest man, a patriotic Democrat who knew that the extension of American hegemony into Europe and Asia could only mean an “empire.” Since candor has never been an American virtue, American imperialists prefer kinder, gentler expressions,...
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An Establishment Unhinged
Calling for a moratorium on Muslim immigration “until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on,” Donald Trump this week ignited a firestorm of historic proportions. As all the old hate words—xenophobe, racist, bigot—have lost their electric charge from overuse, and Trump was being called a fascist demagogue and compared to...
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SSM: Yawning at SCOTUS
There are two sides to the same-sex “marriage” debate, as SCOTUS sees it: Decide now for federally mandated pretend marriage, or rule in favor of “wait and see,” which amounts to a declaration that “gay marriage is inevitable.” We don’t need to wait with baited breath for the ruling. Like old milk, the culture has...
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Importing Prosperity
When I first heard of the topic “Small Is Beautiful,” I thought of the wonderful motto of Chilton Williamson’s friend Edward Abbey: “Growth Is the Enemy of Progress.” Abbey went right to the heart of the matter. The false but pervasive premise of American life is that progress and growth are the same thing and...
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Now the Left is Quick to Convict
We can’t seem to have a news event (and everything that happens in our capital city is a capital-E event these days) without the searing cry in the background, drowning out all other discourse: “Impeach! Impeach!” You might call it an echo of the old exhortation, “Hey, somebody get a rope!” One thing must be...
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Protect Kids or Confiscate Guns?
In days gone by, a massacre of students like the atrocity at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School would have brought us together. But like so many atrocities before it, this mass murder is tearing us apart. The perpetrator, the sick and evil 19-year-old who killed 17 innocents with a gun is said to be contrite....
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A Number of Requests
Our “Letters From Prison“ (Correspondence, May 1992) elicited a number of requests for an update. The letter ended with “Frank,” a 26-year-old black man imprisoned in Illinois, in solitary confinement at a medium-security prison. He had been placed in isolation for his own protection, because the gang he had once belonged to, the Black Gangster...
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The Unnatural Aristocracy
A little-remembered provision of the U.S. Constitution: “No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States” (Article I, Section 9). By this proviso the Founding Fathers affirmed the republican principle that nobody is entitled to power merely because of who he is. Americans wanted to repudiate the hereditary privilege of the Old World...
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Corrupt-a-Homa: Judicial Abuse in the Heartland
Thanks to Britney Spears’ court battles over her hard-earned fortune, more Americans than ever before are learning about how predatory lawyers, judges, doctors, conservators and guardians collaborate to defraud and destroy the lives of innocent victims. The 39-year-old Spears went public last week with her 13-year-long struggle against her father and court-appointed guardian Jamie Spears—who...
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On the Other War
While Ted Galen Carpenter makes some valid points about the situation today in Afghanistan (“America’s Other War,” News, August), his attempt to blame everything on an alleged shift of focus from Afghanistan to Iraq is nonsense. This is an old, tired charge made mainly by antiwar Democrats in the last election but abandoned when it...
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Social Security’s Coming Crash
The welfare state was born in Otto von Bismarck’s Germany, a ploy of the famed Iron Chancellor designed to counter the electoral appeal of the rival Social Democrats. Thus, social security was created in 1889 and eventually spread, under several guises, to many nations. Here, the Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance program (Social Security)...
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College Football Is Not and Should Not Try to Be the NFL
College football is a regional game and the old system is the one fans still long for today.
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Will Mideast Allies Drag Us Into War?
The New Year’s execution by Saudi Arabia of the Shiite cleric Sheikh Nimr Baqir al-Nimr was a deliberate provocation. Its first purpose: Signal the new ruthlessness and resolve of the Saudi monarchy where the power behind the throne is the octogenarian King Salman’s son, the 30-year-old Defense Minister Mohammed bin Salman. Second, crystallize, widen and...
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Nixon—Before Watergate
It has been a summer of remembrance. The centennial of the Great War that began with the Guns of August 1914. The 75th anniversary of the Danzig crisis that led to Hitler’s invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. The 70th anniversary of D-Day. In America, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights...
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Lieutenant Ramsey’s War
Ed Ramsey never aspired to be a hero. He was only 12 years old when his father committed suicide. He was a natural-born hell-raiser; bootleg whiskey and fighting were his passions. His mother thought the Oklahoma Military Academy might salvage him. He loved horses and all things martial. The academy had both. Ramsey thrived at...
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By Their Fruits
Is a lone wolf any less a wolf because he is alone? An eight-year-old boy could answer that question correctly, but many adults apparently cannot. Here in Rockford, Illinois, on December 3, just as the “holiday shopping season” was in full swing, Derrick (a.k.a. “Talib Abu Salam Ibn”) Shareef was arrested by the FBI in...
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The Flat Tax
When the new guru of the Grand Old Party waddled up to the Speaker’s chair and took his oath, the clock began ticking. The GOP had 100 days to fulfill a good measure of its “Contract with America.” Since House Speaker Gingrich has been planning his takeover of Congress for more than two decades, just...
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Gonna Take a Dysfunctional Journey
Monday, 9: 30 A.M.—Arose after an evening of drinking, soft-shell Jazz and mainstream crabs: oops—dyslexia margarita. My sister’s cleaning lady arrives with an armload of Tito Puente records and an Electrolux without a muffler: I decide to skip coffee and head right to the train station: looking forward to a leisurely trip back to Boston...
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Is Bernie’s Hour of Power at Hand?
Can a septuagenarian socialist who just survived a heart attack and would be 80 years old in his first year in office be elected president of the United States? It’s hard to believe but not impossible. As of today, Bernie Sanders looks like one of the better, if not best, bets for the nomination. Polls...