If you thought “woke” hysteria killed comedy, fear no longer: Hollywood has come to the rescue. The Academy—a misnomer if there ever was one—has decreed that a movie can no longer be eligible for an award unless it meets certain criteria. All “Best Picture” nominees must include storylines about underrepresented groups, and a significant percentage of...
Recently, we marked the 100th anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution, an event sparked by the revolutionary fire in the minds of men that has burned for as long as there have been men on the earth. In the modern era, revolution ignited in France in the 18th century. It caught fire again in 1848,...
Kazan was preparing for her 1,000-year anniversary last August when Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived to address the World Tatar Congress in what once had been the center of a Tatar khanate. The goal of the congress was the “spiritual unification” of the Tatars, scattered across Russia and the world. I do not know whether...
On June 5, we lost not only one of our finest writers but a true American storyteller and one of the last of the book people. For Ray Bradbury, who passed away at the age of 91, was, like the remnant that Montag joins at the end of Fahrenheit 451, a book person, a walking...
In the year 1818, Aleksandr Pushkin penned these lines in his well-known verse “To Chaadaev,” addressed to his friend Peter Chaadaev, one of the leading Russian liberals of the period: Comrade, believe: joy’s star will leap Upon our sight, a radiant token; Russia will rouse from her long sleep; And where autocracy lies, broken. Our...
Chronicles readers may recall my “Old Route 66” (September 2013) and “Keep the Water on Your Right” (February 2015) motorcycle travelogues, in which I rode through small towns and rural areas to reconnect with the land and people of America. A road trip can do this like no other kind of journey, and doing one...
I read Roger McGrath’s engaging memoir, “Boys Will Be Boys” (Views, March), with real pleasure but found the skeptic in me thoroughly awakened afterward. McGrath offers a surprisingly romanticized vision of schoolboy fighting, which he regards as a healthy expression of boys’ natural competitiveness and, indeed, as a key institution, a defining ritual in an...
PERSPECTIVE The Good Life by Thomas Fleming VIEWS Another Reason Why the Agrarians Lost by Tom Landess Or did they? What
The prosecution of, and harsh sentences meted out to, two Border Patrol agents involved in a shooting incident at the Texas-Mexico border tell us all we really need to know about the Bush administration’s plans to erase U.S. borders once and for all. On February 17, 2005, Border Patrol agent Ignacio Ramos responded to a...
When Americans debate the merits of Wal-Mart, the discussions often become contentious, centering on whether this megaretailer is a corporate predator that drives wages down and Main Street businesses into ruin or is a corporate good guy because it offers decent jobs to the jobless and low prices to consumers. Whatever one’s opinion of Wal-Mart,...
“Darlin,’” she said, “I’ll get that. Go ahead and take it.” She was a weathered-looking woman with mousy light brown hair drawn back in a bun and the plain, honest look of one of those faces you see in Depression-era photos from the Dust Bowl, faces that don’t smile—they are just themselves, making the best...
On Tuesday, July 14, the Irvine, California-based Center for Medical Progress released the first of three videos aimed at exposing some of the horrifying practices of Planned Parenthood, including the harvesting of baby organs through elective abortion for sale to biomedical research groups. The hidden camera shows Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s Senior Director of...
Russia may have avoided a full-scale political crisis, at least temporarily, thanks to the Bush administration’s decision in mid-March not to pursue a U.N. Security Council vote on its latest resolution on Iraq. Russian President Vladimir Putin had appeared ready to accept Washington’s planned “regime change” in Baghdad in exchange for a piece of the...
The Roswell Alien Museum and Research Center is on Main Street, an avenue dotted with trinket shops and ads featuring a big-eyed “alien” hawking hamburgers, gasoline, and the wares of various convenience stores. At the north end of Roswell is the New Mexico Military Institute, while the flat, brown-gray expanse of the staked plains surrounds...
Legionnaire, Spy, and Marine Colonel Peter Ortiz is unknown today, but his daring exploits during WWII are incredible.
The rise to political prominence of former Airborne Forces General Aleksandr Lebed, and especially his emphasis on law and order as the only real basis for proceeding with reforms, has raised the specter in the Russian mind of the proverbial Man on a White Horse, the military savior whose iron-fisted rule puts the national house...
WWI veteran George O’Brien became a star in Hollywood with his breakout performance in John Ford’s silent film epic, The Iron Horse. Handsome and built like the top athlete he was, O’Brien appeared in 11 more Ford movies and 85 films altogether, a successful career punctuated by voluntary and selfless distinction in two more wars,...
I appreciated very much Scott P. Richert’s comments on what passes nowadays for American identity and how we wound up with rootless, abstract notions of “Americanism” (“Last Ride,” The Rockford Files, May). Referring to the Americanization campaigns of the past, Mr. Richert pointed out that “It is relatively easy, in a modern, affluent, industrial society...
I stopped paying attention to Time many years ago. My twin brother and I, already plotting our emigration to the United States, subscribed as college students in England in the 1960’s to get some sense of this world-straddling “indispensable nation”—as Clinton administration Secretary of State Madeleine Albright later called it, possibly ...
President Bush was back in Yuma, Arizona, in early April, one year after making promises to secure the border in exchange for a “comprehensive” immigration-reform bill that would increase legal immigration, open the door for up to 20 million illegal aliens to remain in the United States, and encourage yet another surge of illegal aliens...
In the Cut Produced by Pathe and Red Turtle Productions Directed by Jane Campion Screenplay by Jane Campion and Susanna Moore Distributed by Screen Gems Shattered Glass Directed by Billy Ray Screenplay by Billy Ray from an article by Buzz Bissinger Produced by Cruise-Wagner Productions Distributed by Lions Gate Films Actors are exhibitionists. They feel...
The presidency of Donald Trump has made some things many of us suspected for a long time perfectly clear, as a former president used to say. Our enemies no longer hide what their agenda is, and job #1 on that agenda is replacing what Archie Bunker used to call “regular Americans” with foreigners. Thus, the...
Another week has come and gone, and here are some highlights and cultural trends. Republicans Want to Draft Your Daughter Whether your daughter ought to be compelled to sign up for spilling her guts in a regime-change adventure that will ultimately bring to power another Islamic regime is a question that has gone mainstream. And...
Vladimir Putin, prodded by a reporter’s question regarding the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime, remarked that Russia, for “economic and political” reasons, “has no interest in the defeat of the United States.” Putin’s comments were seen by Russian media observers as a sign that the Kremlin had come full circle on the Iraq question. ...
Here’s how you’ll know the conservative movement means something again: When the Conservative Political Action Conference, which just held its annual meeting, moves from Washington, D.C. to Rockford. Or Dubuque. Or Peoria. Or Helena. Or San Antonio. Or Bakersfield. Anywhere but the District of Corruption. I attended a couple CPACs back in the mid-1980s, at...
The new millennium brings with it the formal end of jazz’s 20th century, although serious historians recognize that some elements of the music trace back to roughly two-thirds of the way through the 19th. Yet even with the undeniable brilliance of much that was produced during the Dixieland, swing, bebop, and subsequent eras, as the...
“But what if Juárez is not a failure? What if it is closer to the future that beckons all of us from our safe streets and Internet cocoons?” —Charles Bowden, Murder City On September 30, 2010, David Hartley and his wife, Tiffany, were jet-skiing on Falcon Lake along the Texas-Mexico border when a speedboat approached...
At the first Congress on Racial Justice and Reconciliation, held in Washington in May, the Reverend Earl W. Jackson, the black director of the mostly white “Samaritan Project” of the Christian Coalition, told 500 mostly black Christians that, despite many blacks’ warnings that he was selling out to the “religious right,” “our agenda” is “the...
Last November, a delegation of citizens from the far West Texas border city of El Paso made the long journey to Plymouth, Massachusetts. The purpose of the El Pasoans’ visit was to challenge Plymouth’s long-held—and nearly universally accepted—claim that it was the site of the first Thanksgiving to be held on what is now United...
I first met Samuel Francis more than 30 years ago, when he was a graduate student in Chapel Hill and a stalwart member of the Carolina Conservative Society—subsequently, the “Orange County Anti-Jacobin League” when it lost its university recognition on a point of principle. I was a brand-new faculty member, a refugee from Columbia University,...
Sunday, on the eve of All Saints’ Day, Nov. 1, 2010, the faithful gathered at the Assyrian Catholic Church of Our Lady of Salvation in Baghdad. As Father Wassim Sabih finished the mass, eight al-Qaida stormed in, began shooting and forced him to the floor. As the priest pleaded that his parishioners be spared, they...
The “Fort Dix Six” may not be the smartest group of would-be jihadists we have seen, but their story should tell us something about how lax immigration and border-security policies put this country at risk. The six Muslims were arrested in New Jersey in May, for plotting to attack Fort Dix, which is known as...
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch a military “special operation” in Ukraine, which, through the fog of war, looks like an attempt to overthrow the current authorities there and “demilitarize” that country, has prompted the usual globalist/neo-con talking heads to throw around irresponsible comparisons of the Kremlin boss to Hitler. The truth is that...
In his 1935 essay “Religion and Literature,” T.S. Eliot argued that modern literature had become progressively secularized. In response he proposed that “literary criticism should be complemented by criticism from a definite ethical and theological standpoint.” Eliot introduced his arguments with the famous statement, “The ‘greatness’ of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards;...
Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight . . . —Psalm 144:1 According to the Washington Post, McAllen, Texas is an “all-American city,” albeit one “that speaks Spanish.” So it’s small wonder that “immigration isn’t a problem for this Texas town—it’s a way of life.” ...
And it came to pass that fear did grip all of the Swamp, from Foggy Bottom to DuPont Circle; and it did spread unto all of the region beyond the Potomac. For behold, Steve Bannon had come. Or, if we prefer not to use the familiar “Steve,” Stephen K. Bannon. The K must not be...
Sergey Yushenkov’s murder on April 17 may have been the result of machinations aimed at destroying Russian President Vladimir Putin politically and personally, as well as undermining U.S.-Russia relations, seemingly on track again after the rift over Iraq. Gunned down outside his Moscow apartment, Yushenkov, the leader of the Liberal Russia political party, joins a...
Here’s how you’ll know the conservative movement means something again: when the Conservative Political Action Conference moves its annual meeting from Washington, D.C., to Rockford. Or Dubuque. Or Peoria. Or Helena. Or San Antonio. Or Bakersfield. Or Murfreesboro. Anywhere but the District of Corruption. Conservatives flock from around the country to CPAC, expecting to advance...
With former president Bill Clinton settled into his new headquarters on New York’s 125th Street, in central Harlem, the danger for the culinary crowd is that he may now take to hanging out at Sylvia’s, the famous soul-food restaurant barely three blocks away on Lenox Avenue near 126th. For almost 40 years, the family-owned restaurant...
Terrorist bombings that killed 3 and wounded and maimed over 260 at the finish line of the Boston Marathon on April 15 prompted the militarized “lockdown” of an American city for days, as police in full combat gear took part in a massive manhunt that may have given us a glimpse of our future. As...
“Now in history,” wrote Chesterton, “there is no Revolution that is not a Restoration.” A collective memory, a vague but compelling collection of shadows that bind us to the past, seems to whisper a perennial, bittersweet hymn to the numbed ear of man, particularly modern man. Every nation, tribe, or clan has passed on tales...
Old now is earth, and none may count her days. Earth may be fair, and all men glad and wise. Age after age, their tragic empires rise, Built while they dream, and in that dreaming weep . . . —Old Hundred Twenty-Fourth A white-haired pastor, a white church, a white field. The snow is falling,...
The proxy war in Ukraine is a globalist creation that has little to do with American interests. Americans should not emotionally invest in a fight that is not their own, but focus on more important matters at their own borders.
One of the casualties of the current culture wars is the Western. No other genre, it seems, is so politically incorrect. The Western is accused of racism, sexism, and imperialism—three strikes and you’re out. These charges receive sophisticated expression in Jane Tompkins’ West of Everything, published under the prestigious imprint of Oxford University Press. According...
As the Midterm Election returns came in, one thing became clear: There would be no “blue wave.” The Democrats secured the House of Representatives, though not by a wide margin, and the Republicans held the Senate, gaining a few seats. The House Democrats and their GOP “NeverTrump” allies still skulking about the Beltway bubble will...
Vol. 20, No. 4—April 1996 PERSPECTIVE Athens and Jerusalem by Thomas Fleming Where neopagans go wrong. VIEWS With the Nietzscheans of Naumburg by Curtis Cate Mediocrity and the West. Ancient Greek Religion by Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones How it differed from Christianity. Monotheism vs. Polytheism by Alain de Benoist The neopagan critique. The Twilight of the Sacred by Thomas Molnar The Christian difference. OPINIONS Scholarship and ...
As American troops seized the center of Baghdad on April 9, looting, guerrilla warfare, and chaos continued across Iraq. In 21 days, U.S. forces had driven to the capital of Saddam’s Iraq, though arguably Washington had been making war on this long-suffering country for over a decade—a war of economic sanctions, diplomatic isolation, propaganda, occupation...
Despite my disagreements with him, I’m saddened at documentarian Michael Moore’s civil divorce. Raised a Catholic, his marriage likely is sacramental, which means he still would be married whatever decision is made by the courts of the civil government he loves so much and seeks to expand ad infinitum. Yet I also have some schadefreude...
When the 30-year-old blind British jazz pianist George Shearing came to America for good early in 1949, he ran into fellow transplanted Brit Leonard Feather, a prominent critic, producer, promoter, and songwriter, who suggested that the pianist enlarge his trio to quintet size by adding vibes and drums. Feather’s idea was that piano-bass-drums trios were...
Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s widow is no longer calling herself “Karima Tsarnaeva.” She is Katherine Russell again. Karima/Katherine is reportedly drifting away from the way of life she accepted when she converted to Islam and married the Boston Bomber, the terrorist killed by police last April following the bombings that left three dead and wounded as many...