American public schools are prisons. They even look like prisons. See the nearby picture of Century High School in Santa Ana. Even hoity-toity schools in Newport Beach look like that, although the facades are ritzier. And consider this Sept. 3 report from my old newspaper, the Orange County Register: “SANTA ANA – Santa Ana Unified...
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The Grit and the Gritless
True Grit Produced and distributed by Paramount Pictures Written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen The Green Hornet Produced and distributed by Columbia Pictures Directed by Michel Gondry Screenplay by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg The King’s Speech Produced by See-Saw Films Directed by Tom Hooper Screenplay by David Seidler Distributed by The Weinstein...
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Homeschooling: Fortifying the Family Castle
Amid the disasters happening in America today, there’s some excellent news. Homeschooling has won a solid place among roughly 1.5 million children and is mostly protected by law. It has become a refuge for families sick of their local public schools and the many copycat private and parochial schools. Even where decent private and parochial...
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An Arresting Moment
Five years ago, I wrote of the horror that Aaron Wolf and I experienced as we spent a morning photographing the old Turner School here in Rockford. Built in 1898, the massive brick-and-stone structure was closed 80 years later by a school board attempting in vain to avoid a lawsuit ...
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Ruffled Feathers
I’ll leave it for the birds to pick the salvageable bits out of Jason Michael Morgan’s vomitous screed (“Ride On, Proud Boys!” September 2019) and restrict myself to some much needed correction of this horrendously anti-cultural, anti-Christian, and therefore anti-Western (in the only sense in which “The West” has any real meaning) diatribe. The apparent...
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Unzism, A Dangerous Doctrine
Ron Unz, the neoliberal publisher of The American Conservative since the departure of Patrick J. Buchanan and Taki Theodoracopulos, penned an article for the March 1 issue of TAC entitled, like Geraldo Rivera’s recent pro-immigration book, “His-Panic,” where he argues that the notion of widespread Hispanic crime is largely a myth. He writes that conservatives...
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An Arresting Moment
Five years ago, I wrote of the horror that Aaron Wolf and I experienced as we spent a morning photographing the old Turner School here in Rockford. Built in 1898, the massive brick-and-stone structure was closed 80 years later by a school board attempting in vain to avoid a lawsuit over busing. Today, little effort...
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Manly Codes
When Chuck Yeager was shot down behind enemy lines in World War II, shrapnel wounds in his feet and hands, German Messerschmitts still above him, he remained calm and controlled. “Back home,” he said, “if we had a job to do, we did it. And my job now is to evade capture and escape.” When...
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Fake Indians
Promoting oneself as an American Indian, even when it's not true, can be a career enhancer ... until the lie is exposed.
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Be Sensitive—or Else!
Horror stories about punishments for insensitive behavior on college campuses are old news. But leftist hypersensitivity has permeated everyday life in the real world as well. In Manassas, Virginia, a white woman called 911 at 3:08 A.M. to report that some black men—whom she referred to as “niggers”—were trying to break into her house. According...
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Congress vs. the Second Amendment
“A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” —The Second Amendment Like a recidivist criminal free to strike at will, the United States Congress slashed the Bill of Rights last year, tearing through the widely ignored Second...
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Dalton Trumbo Had It Coming
“Dalton Trumbo was a socialist, but he loved being rich.” So says Bryan Cranston, who stars in Trumbo, out this week, and plays the screenwriter who went to prison with the Hollywood Ten in the time of Harry Truman. Actually, Trumbo was not a socialist. Bernie Sanders is a socialist. Trumbo was a Stalinist, a...
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Security Safari
“Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary, the Devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.” —1 Peter, V, 8 The scene is so identifiable that any American—in fact, almost anyone anywhere in the world—immediately recognizes it: a dun-baked, dusty street between rows of ramshackle, weather-beaten, false-fronted buildings. To the pounding...
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Letter From England: It’s Chavtastic, Baby!
The British tabloids couldn’t get enough of it. Photos of Prince William wearing multiple large gold chains, a baggy track suit, a baseball cap, and a menacing sneer on his face were splashed across their front pages. To the British, it was immediately clear that the prince was dressed up as a “chav.” Like most...
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Writing the West
The Northwest strikes me as a better place than the Southwest to live in—fewer people, better hunting, plenty of invigorating Arctic air and the cold dry snow—but the Southwest, probably, offers greater advantages for the Western writer. The presence of the Spanish and Mexicans, the more developed Indian populations, and the clashes between these and...
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Taking Down the Fiddle
The 75th anniversary of the publication of I’ll Take My Stand ought to cause traditionalist Southerners and other Americans to look closely not only at the current state of our society but at their own personal spheres of community, family, and church. The authors warned that the South was in danger of being snatched from...
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Lord, I Got Those Grays Ferry Blues
When I called Mike Rafferty to arrange a meeting to discuss a possible symposium on the demise of the local community, I had to choose a different date from the one I?wanted because Mike was busy that night. He was boxing at the Spectrum. Like Rocky Balboa, Mike Rafferty lives ten minutes from the Spectrum. ...
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Donald Siegel, R.I.P.
Few people, apart from film buffs, recognize the name Donald Siegel, but since the 1940’s Mr. Siegel had directed some of the best American films ever made. Critics either hated or despised him both for pandering to popular tastes and for refusing to pander to the political prejudices of the intellectuals. The original Invasion of...
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Outside the Law
“This is a wonderful country, my boy, but our legal system doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to.” —Harold Smith, in Remo Williams, The Adventure Begins America’s “major” film critics have been very busy—and very worried— lately. They have a lot to worry about; the movies just aren’t going their way anymore, which ought to...
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Full Force
Full Metal Jacket directed by Stanley Kubrick screenplay by Kubrick, Michael Herr, and Gustav Hasford based on the novel The Short-Timers by Hasford; Warner Bros. Funny, that a film about “Vietnam as it really was,” as Platoon was touted, should fall so wide of any mark of merit, and that Vietnam films with a surreal...
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When Hollywood Rode Right
Although Hollywood is now considered a monolithic bastion of leftist, “woke” political and cultural sentiment with almost no dissent tolerated, it was not always that way. Though Tinseltown was never a haven for conservative and traditionalist cinema, actors, and screenwriters, 60 years ago a person could still be on the right and have a career...
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Let Them Eat Brie
The Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy (BRIE) has been in the forefront in devising the new paradigm of strategic trade and industrial policy. This set of essays by BRIE members articulates the group’s view of how the major national economies grow, innovate, and compete with one another and examines the various alternative world orders...
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Two Oinks for Democracy
In the year 2000, many conservatives, with or without holding their noses, turned out to vote for George W. Bush. One of the Republicans’ strongest selling points during the campaign was Governor Bush’s oft-repeated declaration that his administration would not engage in nation-building experiments. After eight years of President Clinton’s busybodying in the Balkans, where...
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Talk of the Town
Many black Americans are convinced that they are the targets of a vast array of white-authored schemes designed to spike their food with contraceptives; force them to engage in self-destructive behavior, especially drug addiction; and kill them, to use their bodies for medical experiments or out of simple malice. In her new book I Heard...
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The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Flags of Our Fathers Produced by Clint Eastwood, Robert Lorenz, and Steven Spielberg Directed by Clint Eastwood Screenplay by William Broyles, Jr., and Paul Haggis, from the book by James Bradley and Ron Powers Distributed by DreamWorks Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures Because I thoroughly enjoyed the book, because Clint Eastwood is the director, and...
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Paparazzi
Andy Warhol used to say that the day would come when every American would have his five minutes on the Tonight Show. Warhol, although he squandered his talents on films and interviews with nonentities, was still a prophet of sorts: he must have realized that nothing drives a decadent society so much as the hunger...
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Feeling Like Russians Again
“The status of the American Negro is that of an oppressed national minority, and only a Soviet system can solve the question of such minorities,” William Z. Foster, long-time chairman of the Communist Party, U.S.A., wrote in his 1932 book, Toward Soviet America. Accordingly, the right of self-determination will apply to Negroes in the American...
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A Long Time Gone
“How shall we sing the Lord’s songin a strange land?” —Psalm 137:4 “[Man] has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart,...
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Child Abuse at Waco
“For the sake of the children” has emerged as one of the most dangerous phrases in American politics. President Clinton has invoked children’s alleged dependence on the federal government not just for his putatively child-oriented programs (such as the misnamed Department of Education), but also for issues that have only a tenuous connection to children,...
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Bomb Iran—July 2008
PERSPECTIVE Bush's Whips, McCain's Scorpions by Thomas Fleming VIEWS John McCain on Foreign Policy by Ted Galen Carpenter Even worse than Bush. Neo-McCainism by Leon Hadar The highest stage of neoconservatism? The Dream Ticket by Srdja Trifkovic The most dangerous man in America, bankrolled by the most evil man in the world. A ...
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After Lee: Charlottesville and Beyond
Was it for this That on that April day we stacked our arms Obedient to a soldier’s trust? To lie Ground by the heels of little men, Forever maimed, defeated, impugned? —Donald Davidson, “Lee in the Mountains” There are times when I feel as though I’ve awoken in a madhouse, a madhouse that cannot possibly...
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The Caravan of Peace
The teeming masses yearning to be free . . . The Caravan of Peace approaches. The massive, marching throng grows by the day. It’s an Act of Love. And another is already forming, ready to bring more peace and love our way, thousands ready to sacrifice everything and enter our racist, white supremacist country seeking...
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The Counterrevolution Against Globalism
On August 19, 1991, the people of the Soviet Union awoke to music from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake playing on national television. Swan Lake would play continuously that day as the “hard line” State Emergency Committee staged its coup against the first and last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, who had been arrested at his Crimea vacation...
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Both Symbol and Symptom
Batman Returns–as much as Easy Rider, Saturday Night Fever, and Wall Street-is both symbol and symptom of its cultural time. Fans looking for anything like Jack Nicholson’s psychotic comedy will be disappointed, for this sequel is all too serious and somber. The entire movie is cast in an eerie purple blue, and this time the...
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“Tech Totalitarians” vs. the Right
The “tech totalitarians” of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Google have been joined by financial services corporations like Paypal in not only “de-platforming” and censoring alternative voices on the Right but “de-financing” them by blocking access to their services. Paypal is teaming up with the leftist, anti-Christian Southern Poverty Law Center to determine who to ban...
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Field of Schemes
Except for the filming of 61¤, the upcoming movie about the home-run race between Yankees Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris in 1961, there was no action last summer at Tiger Stadium. The Detroit Tigers have ditched their historic home at the corner of Michigan Avenue and Trumbull and are entering their second season at their...
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Spying on the American Remnant
As a boy, your author lived in a working-class neighborhood just outside Houston’s city limits. My parents were the children of rural people who had come to Houston looking for work during the Great Depression. They lived in frame houses sitting on cinder blocks in Houston’s West End, a community of people Larry McMurtry called...
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Little Pink Churches for You and Me
For pietist Lutheran pastors in America, it was an embarrassment that would not go away. Since the Reformation, it had always been one of the people’s favorite hymns, penned by Martin Luther himself—second only to “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” Written in 1541, “Lord, Keep Us Steadfast in Thy Word” had been an anthem—sometimes...
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It’s Not Okay to Be White
The left now roundly denounces anyone to the right of Jeb Bush as a “white nationalist,” which it appears is now being equated with “white supremacist,” with the apparently immortal Adolph Hitler acting as the once-and-future ringleader of a group of bad guys and gals that includes everyone from George Washington and Betsy Ross to...
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James Stewart
James Stewart was born 100 years ago, on May 20, 1908, the same week that Constantin Stanislavski published his “grammar” of acting at the Moscow Arts Theatre, essentially an effort to formulate a codified, systematic approach by which the actor psychologically wrenches himself into “becoming” his fictional character. There is no doubt in my mind...
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The Death of the Western: Back-Trailing for Affirmation
Westerns have never enjoyed much of a highbrow audience or much literary distinction. Many people tend to sneer at the traditional form, because it seems to represent something obvious and a little dumb. As one of my students responded to my discussion of western historical fiction as a viable and valuable category of popular culture,...
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Watching the Money Brought to You by Nokia™
It’s Friday evening, and you have arrived at your local multiplex with your ten- and twelve-year-old boys and two of their very closest friends. You’ve come to see the best movie $150 million can make. You cannot remember just when, but it seems you idly mentioned to your wife earlier in the week that you...
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Print the Wrong Legend
The two takes on American Sniper in the April issue (Wayne Allensworth’s “An American Tragedy,” Correspondence; George McCartney’s “Hopalong Rides the Iraqi Range,” In the Dark) were both great reads . . . but allow for a little Dr. Lecteresque correction: “No no no, Dr. McCartney, you were doing fine. You had established trust with...
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Like a Snowball
Merle Haggard: truancy, auto theft, robbery, drug problems, prison in San Quentin, five-times married—all of this, according to your three writers in the June issue (Wayne Allensworth, Roger D. McGrath, Aaron D. Wolf). Talented musician? Yes. “Merle Haggard: A Conservative American”? When? I suggest you check the definitions of conservative and sociopath. I think I...
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Jeans to Flag Ban in 46 Years
Back in the innocent days of 1967-70, I attended Benjamin Franklin Junior High School in the Wayne-Westland Community School District in Michigan. District motto: “Absolutely, entirely, completely dedicated to mediocrity.” Like most junior high schools, grades 7-9, it mysteriously has been transformed into a middle school, grades 6-8. In 1967-68, Franklin had a simple dress...
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Abortuary Hero
Wayne Webster’s Rockford abortuary takes the lives of about 35 babies per week. In that same time frame, however, there are two or three “turnarounds”—mothers who decide at the last moment not to execute their children. The most likely cause is the doughty band of Christians who gather to pray outside the slaughterhouse on the...
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Dope Nation—August 2004
PERSPECTIVE Doing Death by Thomas Fleming Be not proud. VIEWS Afghanistan: Opium Market to the World by Doug Bandow No end in sight. The Global Pharmacy by Kevin Michael Grace A reason for Americans to love Canada. NEWS Anything That Ails You by B.K. Eakman Women on tranqs in a self-serve society. The Bush Clan at the “Oligarchs’ Ball” by Wayne Allensworth Helping out ...
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Cultural Suicide—May 2004
PERSPECTIVE Cultural Suicideby Thomas Fleming Multiculturalism and Western self-loathing. VIEWS America in Europe, Europe in Americaby Claude PolinA shared disease. Europe and Americaby Srdja TrifkovicIdentity of decrepitude. Dreams of Old Placesby Anthony BukoskiA personal essay. NEWS Europe’s Population Implosionby David A. HartmanA diagnosis. Strange Bedfellowsby Wayne AllensworthBush and Soros unite against Georgia. REVIEWS Smear Campaignby...
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Brief Mentions
[The Fatten Mind: The Professional Development of an Extraordinary Leader, by Roger H. Nye (Wayne, NJ: Avery Publishing Group) 224 pp., $12.95] The perfect gift for the armchair warrior. The Patton Mind traces the intellectual development of a “profane man of action” who, Roger Nye notes, “left behind the most complete record of exhaustive professional...
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Men of the West—July 2005
PERSPECTIVE Heroes in the Age of the Antiheroby Thomas Fleming Unbreaking glass. VIEWS Guys of the Golden Westby Chilton Williamson, Jr.A glorious sunset. A Place to Standby Wayne AllensworthTexas and the making of men and heroes. Cowboy Heroesby Roger D. McGrathLearning the Code of the West. Effeminate Gospel, Effeminate Christiansby Aaron D. WolfFrom authority to...