In recent months both San Francisco and New York have been the scene of triumphs for the homosexual rights movement’s efforts to legitimate single-sex liaisons. . . . Newsweek‘s Eleanor Clift, appearing on The McLaughlin Group, summed up the cases as evidence that in the 1980’s the American people were redefining the family. The American...
In noting that 55% of Donald Trump’s supporters are working class whites, the Wall Street Journal states the obvious: Although the Trump phenomenon has surprised nearly everyone, it becomes intelligible against the backdrop of recent American history. For decades, white working-class men have been the most volatile element in the American electorate. Changes in the...
Fontenelle Creek ran fast and brown at the crossing, the waves flashing backward, flooding islands of willow that bent before the strength of the water to show the gray undersides of the slender leaves. I left the jeep at the trailhead on the near side of the ford and commenced walking, taking along only binoculars...
Since September 11, I’ve heard it more than once and will likely hear it again. The argument goes like this: Yes, all this banal talk about Islam being a “religion of peace” is, of course, a lot of nonsense. But the problem is not their religion but all religion. “Religious” people, you see, are all...
Eleven months after the 2020 American presidential election, the official results remain so incongruous, they merit an empirical exegesis. The political establishment’s narrative is that Biden won an unexpectedly close race, and the outcome requires no further examination. Yet, Biden’s victory is so statistically suspicious, so riddled with ahistorical outcomes, that a detailed data examination...
Look, the Wendy Davis candidacy for Texas governor isn’t going anywhere. (Ain’t goin’ nowhere, Bubba, as we might say in Texas.) What’s with the New York Times Magazine cover story on Feb. 16 – Wendy looking sleepily seductive, blonde tresses streaming down to her shoulders; the headline inquiring in pseudo-provocative fashion, “Can Wendy Davis Have...
“We are exceptional people; we are among those nations that . . . exist only to give the world some terrible lesson.” —Pyotr Chaadayev Chaadayev’s words came to mind in the aftermath of a blizzard in Vladivostok, snowy peaks ringing the port city, the sky still obscured by thick clouds. It was November 1992. The...
Lanham is certainly ambitious enough. He proposes to resolve “three overlapping perplexities”: a literacy crisis so widespread it has shaken our national self-esteem as an educated democracy; a school and college curriculum that no longer knows what subjects should be studied or when; and a humanism so directionless, unreasoned, and sentimental that it seems almost...
In The Conscience of a Conservative, Barry Goldwater wrote: Foreign aid has been characterized by waste and extravagance both overseas and in the agencies that administer it . . . Our present Foreign Aid Program, in sum, is not only ill-administered, but ill conceived. It has not made the free world stronger, it has made...
The Supreme Court that has recently issued its anti-harassment decision sits in the middle of a city under siege. Justices who have pronounced the nation’s employers liable for “permitting a hostile environment” to exist in the workplace cannot walk within two blocks of the Supreme Court building without being confronted with the most hostile of...
The sun broke through the thin, whispery clouds, and its reflection in a pool of water collected from the previous night’s rain caught my eye. Suddenly the day was bright and the morning as clear and joyful as hope itself. Resurrection Day. It was Easter morning in a year that will surely be marked down...
PERSPECTIVE Peace in the Land of Sojournby Thomas Fleming Gods and promises. VIEWS A Brief History of Quagmireby Doug BandowSix decades of passionate attachment. A Tale of Two Citiesby Leon T. HadarDifferent visions of Israel’s future. Israel and Americaby Ivan ElandParallel lives, similar mistakes. The Christian Zionist Threat to Peaceby Aaron D. WolfSpend your vacation...
U.S. officialdom calls them “Special Interest Aliens,” as much because they might have a special interest in us as we in them. They are aliens from countries that are considered potential sources of terrorist attacks on the American homeland, and their numbers are reportedly growing. “People are coming here with bad intentions,” an anonymous Border...
Please hop into my time machine, and I’ll give you a short tour of Boonville, North Carolina in the summer of 1959, before bringing you back to the present day. Strolling around this small hamlet of 600, note the town’s most historic building, the old brick bank founded long ago by Mr. Shore. Take in...
“I too dislike it” —Marianne Moore The sculptress Malvina Hoffman found the poetry of her friend Marianne Moore hard to understand and would sometimes ask her to read a poem aloud. “Then I would say, ‘I really don’t know what that’s all about, because of my own ignorance, I’m sure, but just possibly you might...
Regarding my last post on working class support for Trump, a Breitbart report on a Reuters poll tells us something important about America’s state of mind: According to the Reuters survey, 58 percent Americans say they “don’t identify with what America has become.” While Republicans and Independents are the most likely to agree with this...
It is a beautiful April evening in Hico, Texas. My wife and I are having dinner with my in-laws, and I am eyeballing a statue of Billy the Kid across the street from Lilly’s Restaurant. Hico, you see, was the home of “Brushy Bill” Roberts, widely believed around these parts to have been the notorious...
“(Wendy) Davis is running (for governor) against Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, who is heavily favored to win in a state that remains strongly Republican.” Katie Glueck, in “Wendy Davis and the ever-longer odds,” Politico, Oct. 19. Yes, yes, lady, fine; you got it. But this is barely to scratch the surface of the thing....
“For me,” wrote P.D. James in her “fragment of autobiography,” Time To Be in Earnest, “one of the fascinations of detective fiction is the exploration of character under the revealing trauma of murder inquiry.” Murder “is the unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim.” As a writer...
“By retaining one’s love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable.” —George Orwell With the death of Edward Abbey, aged 62, in March of last year, the Western portion of what once was really the United States lost her greatest defender of...
President Trump has taken significant criticism for his recent comments on low-income government housing from a speech in Texas late last month: You know the suburbs, people fight all of their lives to get into the suburbs and have a beautiful home… There will be no more low-income housing forced into the suburbs.… It’s been going...
George W. Bush’s man at the CIA, Porter Goss, is now purging the agency, an act prompted by the persistence of certain parties in the CIA in presenting the White House with “reality-based analysis.” Since such analysis presented a road block to war plans, Goss was ordered to rid the agency of “disloyal” employees, meaning...
“Some races increase, others are reduced, and in a short while the generations of living creatures are changed and like runners relay the torch of life.” —Lucretius Reading student applications for scholarships, as I have done on and off now for a dozen years on the undergraduate scholarships committee of the University of California, Davis,...
As in a number of cases involving minority criminals, mass media initially appeared reluctant to identify the perpetrators in the San Bernadino shootings that left fourteen people dead, Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik. The Los Angeles Times seemed to play down the agency of the shooters, with a by-now familiar description of gunfire...
A group of parents and kids have been hounding school officials about the bizarre presence of "furries" in Colorado since February 2022. This is not a joke. It's real, it's disruptive, and it's sick.
A blood-red sun is setting on the horizon, distant but familiar, dull but glowing, like the bloodshot eye of a wounded Titan. Layers of pasty-blue, thin, translucent clouds drape the blood-eye image, as if they themselves were the misty, cloudlike shimmerings of heat rising from the sunbaked pavement, cooled by a late-summer rain. I stand...
President Obama’s July trip to Moscow was intended to “reset” U.S.-Russian relations but also suggested that there is a continuing tug-of-war in the administration between realists and “democracy builders” regarding Russia policy. The struggle was publicly kicked off by the March report of a commission headed by former Sen. Gary Hart and Sen. Chuck Hagel...
Twenty-two years ago Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb. In an effort to dramatize his thesis, he included a number of scenarios about the future. These tended to obscure the thrust of his work, for many viewed them as predictions. When they failed to come to pass, it was easy—especially for conservatives—to conclude that Ehrlich’s...
“The United States shall guarantee to every state in this Union a republican form of government.” —Constitution of the United States, Article IV Until the triumph of the civil-rights movement at the end of the 1960’s, probably the most disruptive and recurrent conflict in American politics came from the struggle between...
It’s mid-September, and the sun already seems to be setting lower in a sky of lengthening shadows. The temperatures have noticeably dropped off. Autumn, such as it is in this part of the country, appears to already have begun settling in, like an early and unexpected guest. I was walking along a sidewalk in my...
PERSPECTIVE El Gringo y El Mexicanoby Thomas FlemingAn amalgamation. VIEWS The Economic Realities of U.S. Immigrationby David A. HartmanCounting the cost. Pure Personalityby Chilton Williamson, Jr.The meaning of Francisco “Pancho” Villa. Immigration, the Border, and the Fate of the Landby Gregory McNameeNotes on a crisis. How Santa Ana Became SanTanaby Steven GreenhutAn irrelevant border. Islam,...
Iraq’s Christians may be on their way to extinction, thanks to the Bush administration’s decision to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime. Today, Iraq’s mostly Catholic and Orthodox Christians are fleeing the country, with their destination of choice being, ironically, Syria, another target for “regime change” on the neoconservative hit list. More than two years ago, Chronicles...
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. For 30 years country music has alternately ignored and embraced that small truth, always bouncing between the apparent threat of extinction and last-minute rescue. And now, after a decade of “evolution” and “transition,” the country music industry again is surprised that the real thing was good enough all...
In the summer of 2014, a “surge” was on at the southern border, particularly in my home state of Texas, stimulated by the Obama administration’s signals that it was planning a mass amnesty and had no intention of enforcing immigration laws. It became painfully obvious that the border crisis—the near total collapse of any controls...
Hispanic voters remain the chief target of GOP strategists, at least in Texas. In the wake of Republican Orlando Sanchez’s December 1 runoff loss to Houston’s incumbent black mayor, Lee Brown—Sanchez garnered 48 percent of the vote to Brown’s 52 percent—news media and Republican apparatchiki were busy gushing about the growing electoral weight of “Hispanic”...
“The curious have observed that the progress of humane literature (like the sun) is from the East to the West. . .” —Nathaniel Ames As both a reality and an interpretive problem, the American West has retained its long-established hold on the attention of our scholars. And the same is true of Western American literature:...
Arguments, as Malcolm Muggeridge astutely observed, are never about what they’re about. As when “You’re never on time anymore” turns out really to mean, “When are you going to quit sitting around and get a real job?” And so on. The national argument over Confederate symbols and monuments—assuming you want to call it an argument...
By the end of 2009, the word on the Moscow grapevine was being picked up by pundits and journalists: Putin’s “return” is in the works, and the premier’s reoccupation of the Kremlin may take place sooner rather than later. The tandem of Vladimir Putin and his handpicked successor, Dmitri Medvedev, is said to be coming...
Almost alone among the peoples of the world, the United States has largely been spared—at least until recently—the bitter conflicts that plague countries whose citizens do not share a common language. Since the early 17th century, immigrants from diverse backgrounds have settled here. In the past, it was understood that in exchange for enjoying opportunities...
Almost immediately after the attacks of September 11, the open-borders lobby knew it was in trouble. The immediate, obvious, and logical implication of 19 aliens legally entering the country and proceeding to carry out the biggest single act of mass murder in human history is that the United States needs to close its borders, at...
A day like today reminds you of how you got here, of the struggle, of the good in your life—and of a tiger, a lion, and an old man. The sun shines stark white, shimmering in a way that reminds you that it is a star, technically a yellow dwarf, but it seems not so...
PERSPECTIVE The Root of All Evilby Thomas FlemingPolicy, purpose, and pleonexia. VIEWS It’s Hard Times, Cotton Mill Girlsby Tom LandessManufacturing, gone with the wind. How Neutral Is the Fed?by Greg Kaza A measure of humility. Giving America Priority in Trade Policyby William R. HawkinsFreeing American trade. The Price of Globalismby David A. HartmanAssessing the fallout....
When President George W. Bush met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Bratislava, Slovakia, this past February, the first item on the White House’s laundry list of discussion points for the summit was nuclear programs, including Russian aid to Iran’s nuclear-power effort. After the meeting, Putin told reporters that the issue of nuclear proliferation was...
“The banality of evil” is one of those vapid and misleading phrases that can churn up a tidal wave in a mud puddle. In a trivial sense, Nazi bureaucrats were banal enough, but there was a heroic dimension to the evil of Hitler and Goering, a delirious striving toward the superhuman that commands our attention,...
How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? —Psalm 137:4 But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel. —1 Timothy 5:8 The county that became...
” . . . Words strain, Crack and sometimes break. . . . “ —T.S. Eliot The ancients, wiser than modem theorists, recognized language as a gift and (at Babel) a curse from the heavens. Even pagans recognized a Word behind words and a Muse beyond music. The Creator of the world was everywhere acknowledged...
It’s near the end of October, and the air is crisp and cool. The wind blows hard here on the prairie, the thermometer failing to reflect the chill you feel on your skin and in your bones. A smattering of pinks, reds, and oranges coat the white-cored, cottony fingers floating against the pale-blue morning sky. ...
“The curious have observed that the progress of humane literature (like the sun) is from the East to the West. . .” —Nathaniel Ames As both a reality and an interpretive problem, the American West has retained its long-established hold on the attention of our scholars. And the same is true of Western American literature:...
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...
The November murder of a missionary Orthodox priest in Moscow highlighted the threats to Russia’s stability from extremist groups, including Muslim terrorists and the far right. The priest, Daniil Sysoyev, and his aide, Vladimir Strelbitsky, were shot down in a church in Moscow’s Southern Administrative Okrug on November 19. The gunman, whom some sources described...