There must be some mistake. After finishing Bob Djurdjevic’s “Wiping Out the Middle Class” (May), I suspect someone has sneaked the latest issue of Mother Jones inside a Chronicles cover. Such hand-wringing over an alarmist report on “income inequality” released by a liberal Washington think tank whose mission is to lobby for more redistribution of...
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Immigration Misinformation
The debate over immigration policy has been marked by inaccurate reporting in an astonishing number of instances. Errors and material omissions by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the Census Bureau, and the Department of Education are only the beginning of misinformation about immigration. News releases and publications by experts, including some associated with...
Global Implications of U.S. Failure in Ukraine
After Ukraine, Beltway grandees will have to choose between accepting that America is but one great power among other great powers in a multipolar world, or continuing to pursue their insane obsession with America being the world’s “benevolent global hegemon.”
Frozen Souls
Kelli Moye has become the pretty young face of America’s culture of death. Standing trial for the cold-blooded murder of her newborn daughter, she has provided us with a test case for Middle America. Should Roe v. Wade ever be overturned, states and municipalities will once again be free to pass legislation regulating abortion. How...
Homme Sérieux
Kipling should be a fascinating subject for literary history. He was enormously gifted and successful, the child of a modest, nonconformist Anglo-Scot family that, besides producing him, also produced his cousin, the conservative prime minister Stanley Baldwin. One of his aunts married Edward Burne-Jones; another married Sir James Baldwin, chairman of the Great Western Railway,...
Aere Perennius
“Who?” This was said in a tone of voice that could only be described as doubtful. I was on the phone with an Italian friend in London, explaining that I could not call him back later that evening because I was off to a concert. “It’s Gergiev, Valery Gergiev. Don’t you know? He’s the most...
God Bless America
Every president since Ronald Reagan has employed this invocation to punctuate the conclusion of a major speech. Coming from Reagan, it was sort of a tip of the hat to the official pieties of the World War II generation. In the mouth of Bill Clinton it was a blasphemy. Now, the phrase is on the...
Fundraising Scandal
The China lobby was in full swing this summer, and once again the “If We Can Sell Every Chinaman Just One” crowd carried the day. By a wider than expected margin, the House of Representatives defeated a resolution revoking China’s Most Favored Nation status, letting both the Senate and the President off the hook. As...
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 Oligarchy is Losing Its Grip, But Its Death Throes May Prove Fatal – to Us
“How American Media Serves as a Transmission Belt for Wars of Choice” Several weeks ago the mainstream media (MSM) gave saturation coverage to a picture of a little boy pulled from the rubble of Aleppo after his home and family were crushed in what was dubiously reported as a Russian airstrike. Promptly dubbed “Aleppo Boy,”...
America’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ Into Socialism
Just seven weeks into his presidency, Joe Biden signed a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill. Among the largest spending bills in history, it was passed without the vote of a single Republican. The plan sent direct payments of up to $1,400 to most Americans, extended a $300 per week unemployment insurance boost until Sept. 6...
Recessional
“Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken . . . ” P.G. Wodehouse reached for Keats to describe his emotions when he read the first of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman saga. Fraser had already joined the glorious company of famously successful authors who were turned...
A Besieged Trump Presidency Ahead
After a week managing the transition, vice president-elect Mike Pence took his family out to the Broadway musical “Hamilton.” As Pence entered the theater, a wave of boos swept over the audience. And at the play’s end, the Aaron Burr character, speaking for the cast and the producers, read a statement directed at Pence: “(W)e...
The President’s Painted Corner
A prudent power will always seek to keep open as many options as possible in its foreign-policy making. An increasingly rigid system of alliances, coupled with mobilization blueprints and railway timetables, reduced the European powers’ scope for maneuver in the summer of 1914 and contributed to the ensuing catastrophe. The United States, by contrast, entered...
The Iceberg Cometh
Throughout the Introduction and into the first chapter of Ship of Fools you seem to be seated before a television screen listening to, and watching, Tucker Carlson in his nightly broadcast. The voice is the same, the tone is the same; so is the manner. Then, almost imperceptibly, you find yourself slipping—or rather being slipped—from...
Common App Letter Showcases Politics as Educational Endgame
I taught seminars in Latin, history, composition, and literature to homeschool students in Asheville, North Carolina for more than 15 years, including Advanced Placement courses. As a result, students often asked me to write college recommendation letters for them, such as letters for the Common Application, or Common App as it is known. Though I...
On Saving Ireland
In his “Letter From Cork” (“The Polonization of Ireland,” Correspondence, March), Christie Davies hopefully predicts that recent Polish immigrants will reevangelize postmodern Ireland. From his lips to God’s ears, although I doubt that the Almighty will be listening. I, in turn, predict (but do not hope) that what is now a sizable Polish community will...
What We Are Reading: June-July 2023
Short reviews of Noble Savages, by Napoleon Chagnon, and The Natural Family Where It Belongs, by Allan C. Carlson.
Pedestaled Power
Post-Christian beliefs permeate the culture. A stroll across the majority of university campuses, five minutes of channel surfing, the U.S. Supreme Court’s First Amendment case law, popular behavior and that of the American elite—these are proof positive that Christianity in the 21st century bears little resemblance to the Christianity of America’s not too distant past. ...
Our President-Elect
Driving out from town to feed my horses the morning of November 5th, I passed a house in West Laramie with the Stars and Stripes waving from the front gate. The flag hung upside down. A fitting salute, surely, for the most radical candidate ever to become president-elect of the United States. The election of...
Essay: The Literature of Order
Nature imitates art: so Oscar Wilde instructs us. Whether or not natural sunsets imitate Turner’s painted sunsets, surely human nature is developed by human arts. “Art is man’s nature,” in Burke’s phrase: modeling ourselves upon the noble creations of the great writer and the great painter, we become fully human by emulation of the artist’s...
All That Jazz
Extraordinary writing about music doesn’t come along very often, as I have been forced to notice by my own experience—as have my own put-upon readers! But in the realm of classical music, I would suggest that Donald F. Tovey’s Essays in Musical Analysis is an imposing composition, a stunt of writing—the freight of its assertions...
A Billion Sordid Images
Disconnected is not an amusing book. The subtitle’s “digitally distracted” doesn’t hint at its grim findings. This short text—a long one might be too dispiriting—is nevertheless lengthy enough to expose the digital revolution as an outright calamity, though the author generally eschews the apocalyptic tone. Of course, there is the familiar boast that children now...
Konstantin Chernenko Lives Here
The last thing Middle America needs is an American Chernenko. America cannot afford a dying leader at this time.
Black Lives Shatter
The media and the hand-wringing politicians who are dancing on the grave of the career of Columbia, South Carolina, School Resource Officer Ben Fields are pulling a fast one. They claim that, because “black lives matter,” the young woman who refused to relinquish her smartphone and leave math class at Spring Valley High School should...
Elena Chudinova on the Fall of Europe
Russian traditionalist conservative writer and publicist Elena Chudinova recently gave a lengthy interview to Srdja Trifkovic and was the subject of my article in the latest issue of this magazine. Her recent article, “Eurovision’s Blue Beard” describes the current atmosphere in Europe with the author’s characteristic verve and bluntness. Chudinova’s friend, a religious Christian mother...
It’s Morning Again in Rockford
Tuesday, April 5, was a beautiful day in Rockford. By the time the sun had burst through our windows in a blaze of red and orange, the chill had already left the air. The pitter-patter of little feet—squirrels on the rooftop; children on the floor below—was accompanied by the excited trills of songbirds. With few...
Girls of the Golden West
Prospective readers should not be put off by the words “women writers” in the title of this book. Catharine Savage Brosman’s emphasis is not on the ideological but rather on the intellectual and artistic identity of her subjects, which complement the masculine sensibilities of their male counterparts—Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Tom Lea, John S. Van...
You Get What You Need
So what do I know anyway? I didn’t want him to begin with. I didn’t want him until it became painfully, obviously clear that he alone stood between us and the cultural and economic pillage contemplated by Hillary Clinton. And so, with never a backward look, my wife and I colored in the straight-Republican oval...
Vivek Ramaswamy and Conservative Victimhood
Vivek Ramaswamy once condemned conservative victimhood, especially Trump's Jan. 6 narrative. Now he's indulging it, in order to cultivate Trump supporters.
Promise, Progress & Confusion
Ruth Horowitz: Honor and the American Dream: Culture and Identity in a Chicano Community; Rutgers University Press; New Brunswick, NJ. Carlos G. Velez-Ibanez: Bonds of Mutual Trust: The Cultural Systems of Rotating Credit Associations among Urban Mexicans and Chicanos; Rutgers University Press; New Brunswick, NJ. Mexican-Americans have been more maliciously stereotyped than blacks at times,...
The American Proscenium
Politics and Prayer One of the high points of this fall’s campaign season was the vigorous debate over the place of religion in America’s public life. In retrospect, it may some day be regarded as the most meaningful public discussion of the question in this century. The exchange began early in the campaign when...
Teaching Religion and Religious Teaching
Some years ago, I was in Washington, D.C., for the annual convention of the American Academy of Religion, a vast gathering of college professors teaching in the area of Religious Studies, when an astonished cabdriver asked me who all these hordes of people were. When I explained the conference to him, he whistled and said,...
Roger Stone, Jeffrey Epstein, and the Crackup of America’s Leadership
Roger Stone was recently convicted in federal court on seven felony charges, stemming from the since-closed Russian collusion investigation. Stone’s main crime was lying to Congress about who he had, or had not, spoken to about Russia. By the time Stone’s trial began in Washington, nobody was talking about WikiLeaks anymore. Nobody cared. Yet prosecutors...
Free Trade and the Sacrificialists
Mainstream economics “experts” constantly attempt to lull the fears of anybody worried at seeing our manufacturing sector relocated abroad and our factories turned into ghost towns. They invoke Adam Smith’s arguments against mercantilism, arguing that it is a matter of free trade, that free trade always is the best policy, and insist that “protectionism” is...
Alternative California
It felt as strange flying west—not south, not east—from Salt Lake City as if the earth had reversed its rotation and were spinning in the opposite direction. Basin and range, range and basin: the long barrier mountains were heavy with snow, but now in early March the desert separating them lay bare, dramatizing the topographical...
Viva la Musical Comedy
A few months before I saw the musical Les Miserables—actually a few months before it opened at the Kennedy Center last December—I heard it. The show’s publicist had sent me a tape of the London version. When I first listened to it, I felt disappointed. It sounded more than a little like Evita, with the...
Jolly Good Fellow
“The more I began to think about and read Coward, the more convinced I became that the history of British entertainment in the first half of this century was essentially the history of his own career.” With that observation, Sheridan Morley, drama critic and arts editor of Punch, begins his biography of Noel Coward. The...
Mayhem and Civility
Joker Directed and written by Todd Phillips • Produced by Creative Wealth Media Finance and DC Entertainment • Distributed by Warner Brothers Downton Abbey Directed by Michael Engler • Screenplay by Julian Fellowes • Produced and distributed by Focus Features The Conversation Directed and written by Francis Ford Coppola • Produced by The Coppola Company...
Dump Senate Cloture, Bring Back “Mr. Smith’s” Filibuster
Letter from Pergamum-on-the-Potomac As the Stupid Party licks its wounds after the not-too-surprising disintegration of its bid to repeal and replace Obamacare, talk is again turning to abolishing the Senate filibuster with a “nuclear options” that would allow legislation to clear the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body (WGDB) with a simple majority of 51 votes (or...
I Spit on Your Grave
Flamboyant William Stewart Simkins, during his professorial heyday at the University of Texas a century ago and more, was known for his long, white mane and his charisma as a teacher of law. He wrote standard textbooks on equity, contracts, and estates. But, dadgum, he took pride all his life (1842-1929) in helping, as an...
The Highlights and Lowlights of Last Night’s Debate
While Trump showed some rough edges and had some inarticulate moments, compared to Biden’s performance, he clearly did the better job of making his case to be the next president.
The Other Lindbergh
While the most famous member of the Lindbergh clan is undoubtedly the aviator and World War II-era isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr., the qualities for which he won renown—his courage, his Scandinavian severity, his willingness to stand against the tide of popular opinion, his dislike of cities and the elites they spawned, and (most of...
Up From Sharpton
If I were a North Korean leader, or even an ISIS head chopper, I’d be reveling in the fact that a former American black basketball star spoke more plainly about race in America than any member of our political class or media. Charles Barkley doesn’t mince words. Many of his fellow blacks were not pleased...
The Devils in the Demonstrators
I was chairman of the Annual Confederate Flag Day at the North Carolina State Capitol in March of 2019 when our commemoration was besieged by several hundred screaming, raging demonstrators—Antifa-types and others. It took a mammoth police escort for us to exit the surrounded Capitol building. I clearly recall the disfigured countenance, the flaming eyes,...
Silver or Lead: The Reverse Assimilation of the Southwest
Texas attorney general and gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbot committed what is commonly called a political gaffe earlier this year when he said what every thinking person this side of the Rio Grande already knew: Mass immigration from Mexico means the importation of Mexican corruption and the steady erosion of law and social trust that too...
Here, on the Other Side of the Ring of Fire
Americans read the increasingly panic-stricken reports of deepening catastrophe at Fukushima 1, speed to the pharmacy to buy iodine and ask, “It’s happened there; can it happen here?” Along much of California’s coastline runs the “ring of fire,” which stretches round the Pacific plate, from Australia, north past Japan, to Russia, round to Alaska,...
Down Home—& Out to Lunch
James Wilcox: Modern Baptists; Dial Press; New York. Joan Williams: Pariah and Other Stories; Atlantic/Little, Brown; Boston. by Fred West First novels can be wonderful events, given the shrinking market for fiction these days. In general, creative writers have hit the bottom of the totem pole, as indicated by the endless string of credits flashed...
Tribalism Returns to Europe
Is Europe’s adventure in international living about to end? At Potsdam, Germany, this weekend, Chancellor Angela Merkel told the young conservatives of her Christian Democratic Union that Germany’s attempt to create a multicultural society where people “live side by side and enjoy each other” has “failed, utterly failed.” Backing up her rueful admission are surveys...
Maybe Forever
Is the current wave of immigration to America, mainly from the Third World, an invasion? Wayne Lutton and John Tanton maintain that it is. The authors effectively argue that our unprecedented level of immigration, forced on the country by selfish interests, is remaking America in many negative ways, especially by eroding our national culture. But...