Natural Born Killers Produced by Jane Hamsher, Don Murphy, and Clayton Townsend Directed by Oliver Stone Story by Quentin Tarantino Screenplay by David Veloz, Richard Rutowski, and Oliver Stone Released by Warner Brothers The release of Oliver Stone’s new film Natural Born Killers was heralded by the sort of publicity barrage that arouses the skepticism...
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Importing Multiculturalism—June 2010
perspective Cursing the Darknessby Thomas Fleming views Immigration: A History Lessonby John Willson Cannibal Statisticsby Chilton Williamson, Jr. news Double Down: Illegal Aliens and Crimeby Roger D. McGrath reviews Great Cooptationsby W. James Antle III [Edward M. Kennedy, True Compass: A Memoir andSarah Palin, Going Rogue: An American Life] Past, Present, and Futureby Darío Fernández-Morera...
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Georgians In Londonistan
In February, when 52-year-old Georgian billionaire and political exile Badri Patarkatsishvili died at his Surrey mansion, British media wondered if this might be a Georgian version of the Litvinenko affair. Patarkatsishvili had been a supporter of President Mikheil Saakashvili’s 2003 “Rose Revolution” but had lately been in opposition to the Georgian president, running against him...
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Those Deadly, Depressing, Syncopated Semiautomatic Assault Rifle Blues
An Exercise in Calculated Hysteria The semiautomatic rifle has been part of the American scene for nearly a century. In 1903 the Winchester Repeating Arms Company marketed the first commercially successful semiautomatic rifle. It was not designed as a military arm, and no sales were made to the US Army. The new rifle was marketed...
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Peace in the Promised Land
Almost three years have passed since the unseasonably warm day in June 2002 when a number of the authors who have contributed to this issue of Chronicles met near O’Hare Airport to sketch out one of the most ambitious projects that we at The Rockford Institute have ever undertaken. We approached the project with a...
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You Had One Job
Our southern border is being overwhelmed by waves of “migrants” and interior immigration enforcement has collapsed, as the president continues to threaten closing the border. Trump has made plenty of threats before, threats about halting the “caravans,” making Mexico pay for a border wall, forcing “migrants” to wait in Mexico, and refusing to sign any...
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America: From Village to Empire—October 2004
PERSPECTIVE The Call of Bloodby Thomas Fleming Old Europe versus the New World Order. VIEWS There Once Was a New Englandby John WillsonTimothy Dwight’s New England catechism. Tocqueville’s America and America Todayby Claude PolinLiberty, Equality, Materialism. NEWS H.R. 3313 and the Imperial Judiciaryby William J. QuirkA welcome constitutional crisis. What? Are You Crazy?by B.K. EakmanThe...
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Managed Democracy
Russia’s parliamentary elections, held December 7, produced a wave of alarmed reactions in the Western press that betray the ignorance and hypocrisy of Western elite thinking regarding Russia and the West’s—particularly Washington’s—relations with Moscow. The Kremlin-backed United Russia party carried the day, winning nearly 38 percent of the vote, while other Kremlin-backed—or created—parties (the Liberal...
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Obama’s Manufactured Border Crisis
This summer’s border crisis—the near total collapse of any controls or security at our southern border, especially in South Texas—was manufactured by the Obama administration as a means of forcing through a mass amnesty, either via Congress or by executive fiat. Legalizing millions of illegal aliens now resident in these United States is the immediate...
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The Rise and Fall of the Evangelical Elite
The current evangelical elite came of age at a time when secular influences tried to stay neutral toward Christianity; The faith competed as an equal in the marketplace of ideas. But those days are over. In our age of secularist hostility, evangelicals need new tactics.
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Preaching to a Strange Nation
“Receive me, then, O Lord and lover of Mankind, even as the harlot, as the robber, as the publican, as the prodigal . . . “ —The Prayer of St. Basil the Great The Law on Religion passed this year by the Russian State Duma restricts the activities of “non-traditional” religions...
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The Economic Impact of Immigration
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 not for our reasons—and also...
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The Bubble Economy
“Why,” Sheila Ramus asked, “if there are so many pro-lifers here, does Rockford have an abortion clinic?” Sheila, my wife and I, and our pastor, Fr. Brian Bovee, were waiting to check in at Rockford’s annual Pro-Life Banquet. An hour before the dinner was scheduled to begin, the Holy Family ...
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Something Big
We passed the hand warmer around on a cold day in December. Matthew, my 11-year-old son, got creative and stuck the thing in his shoe. Rachel, who was spotting for us, didn’t like it much, but she used the hand warmer anyway. It was that cold; our fingers and toes burned. I look through the...
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The Little People
Dunkirk Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Written and directed by Christopher Nolan Chuck Produced by Millennium Films Distributed by IFC Films Written by Jeff Feuerzeig and Jerry Stahl Directed by Philippe Falardeau You wouldn’t think a director who’s made three extravagantly fanciful Batman movies would be interested in turning his hand to a realistic...
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Sterile Prairie
“Look how wide also the east is from the west: so far hath he set our sins from us.” —Psalm 103 It has been said that an intellectual is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger. But the life of the mind hardly requires that William and...
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Think Locally, Act Locally
The reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last June in Kelo v. City of New London has largely been edifying. Most commentators, and even many politicians, have greeted with horror the news that local and state governments are free to take property from one private owner to give it to another, as long as...
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Against the Barbarians
The 21st century is a return to the Age of Walls. As historian and archeologist David Frye writes in his important new book, Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick, few have noticed that a new era of wall building is now upon us, driven by mass migration and Islamic terrorism. While the...
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Firing the Government
Vladimir Putin’s surprise firing of the Russian government on February 24 and his appointment of “technocratic” Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov on March 1 had Western officials and observers buzzing about another round of “reform” and Russian cooperation with the West, while Western investors were optimistic that the new government would favor them. Nevertheless, Washington should...
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An American Tragedy
American Sniper has generated more commentary, both scathingly critical and laudatory, than any film in recent memory. The story of “America’s deadliest sniper,” Texas-born and -bred Navy SEAL Chris Kyle (credited with more than 160 “confirmed” kills), himself shot down in 2013 by a disturbed war veteran he was trying to help, has become a...
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The Face of Battle
Saving Private Ryan Produced by Steven Spielberg Directed by Steven Spielberg Screenplay by Robert Rodat Released by Paramount and DreamWorks SKG If you visit the American cemeteries near the beaches at Normandy—there are two of them—you may pick up a booklet describing the landings of June 6, 1944, as I did over 15 years ago....
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American Babel
Back in June, a belligerent New York City attorney briefly became a symbol of “xenophobia” for those who make it their business to deconstruct what’s left of American identity. Viral video of his tirade in a restaurant over staff speaking to customers in Spanish served as but the latest example of what the media portray...
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We Happy Few
Regarding Jeff Minick’s April 2019 article, “Happy Warriors:” The reason the Left is winning is because they actually fight for their side in the culture war while the Right does not. And since, as the saying goes, politics is downstream of culture, the winner of the culture war is going to dominate the political system....
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Of Infants and Geezers
Unplanned Produced and distributed by Pure Flix Entertainment Directed and written by Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon Cold Pursuit Produced by Studio Canal Directed by Han Peter Moland Screenplay by Frank Bladwin, adapted from the Norwegian film Kraftidioten Distributed by Summit Entertainment The Mule Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Directed by Clint Eastwood Screenplay...
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Wings of the Navy
Technology can exalt as well as dwarf the individual. The Great War’s machine guns staged a chattering pageant of impersonal slaughter; yet its warplanes brought forth paladins such as Frank Luke, Billy Bishop, and Baron von Richtofen, their decidedly individualistic exploits providing civilian newspaper readers with a pleasant contrast to the muddy anonymity of trench...
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Ritual, Tragedy, and Restoration
The Deer Hunter received the Academy Award for best picture at the Oscars ceremony in 1979. The film was much criticized by some for its Russian roulette sequences, especially the alleged “racism” on display in the film’s depiction of the Viet Cong. But The Deer Hunter is truly a mythic, poetic work of art. The...
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Strange Bedfellows
Last November’s “Rose Revolution” in the Caucasian republic of Georgia made political bedfellows of an unlikely couple: George W. Bush and billionaire “philanthropist” and global meddler George Soros. The apparent cooperation between the Bush administration and Soros in backing the ouster of President Eduard Shevardnadze seems all the more bizarre in light of Soros’ stated...
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The Rise and Fall of the Texas Republican Party
How did the Texas Republican Party, which was in the forefront of the battles to win the Republican presidential nomination for Barry Goldwater in 1964 and Ronald Reagan in 1976 and 1980, become a wholly owned subsidiary of Karl Rove and George W. Bush? Today, the Republicans in Texas control every statewide elected office, yet...
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Manual Control
Russian political analyst Vladimir Pastukhov once wrote that state power, or vlast, and not law “holds a sacred status in Russia.” Russians, according to Pastukhov, experience state power as a “mystical entity,” a “life giving substance,” a “deity” in its own right, from whom, in times of trouble, the narod (the people) expects answers. Anna...
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Jury-Rigging
Throughout our legal history we are familiar with incidents of jury-tampering, the act of buying off or frightening one or more of the 12 men good and true called upon to decide a case. This is done to predetermine a verdict, usually to assure a “not guilty.” We have heard of vicious gangsters, corrupt union...
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Sources of Contention
Cultural symbols are sources of contention everywhere. In Russia, a squabble over a monument rings a bell with this proud Southerner. The powerful Communist (CPRF) faction in the Duma recently raised the question of returning “Iron Feliks” Dzerzhinsky, the Soviet Unions first secret policeman, to his pedestal facing the Lubyanka, the one-time home of the...
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Talking Facts: The New Anti-Semitism
In October 1992 Commentary printed an “observation” by David Glasner, “Hayek and the Conservatives,” which abounded in glaring disinformation. The pictures there given of the America First movement as a rallying point for anti-Semitic kooks and of the Old Right as a collection of bigoted psychopaths, pending the arrival of the neoconservatives and their Hayekian...
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Anarcho-Tyranny in Action
In a recent column, Chuck Baldwin (lately nominated as the Constitution Party’s presidential candidate) pointed to something ominous that was largely ignored in the media reporting on the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal. Spitzer had been found out because of “suspicious” financial transactions his bank reported to the authorities. Dr. Baldwin (who is pastor of a...
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What the Editors Are Reading
Dostoevsky’s great 1866 novel Crime and Punishment reads like a frenetic vision. A compulsive gambler and one-time political radical who was condemned to Siberia and forced labor, Dostoevsky created the novel’s Rodion Raskolnikov, a half-mad dreamer who expressed the radical, nihilistic ideas of the time. Drawing on his own struggles and experiences, Dostoevsky used Raskolnikov...
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Los Diablos Tejanos
A Texas Ranger, it was famously claimed, “can ride like a Mexican, trail like an Indian, shoot like a Tennessean, and fight like a very devil.” These days, such a bland presumption of ethnic attributes would merit a visit from the Sensitivity Police, and even respect for martial skills verges on political incorrectness, since progressive...
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The Bubble Economy
“Why,” Sheila Ramus asked, “if there are so many pro-lifers here, does Rockford have an abortion clinic?” Sheila, my wife and I, and our pastor, Fr. Brian Bovee, were waiting to check in at Rockford’s annual Pro-Life Banquet. An hour before the dinner was scheduled to begin, the Holy Family Room (yes, that is its...
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Deserving Has Nothing To Do With It
The Swamp is indignant, pretending to be outraged that Donald Trump wanted Ukrainian President Zelensky to continue an investigation of the dubious Ukrainian-related activities of Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. The whole kabuki theater production is ridiculous, of course, as we know that the Democrats sought Ukrainian help in digging up dirt on Trump...
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Importing Jihad—October 2005
PERSPECTIVE Christians Against Terrorismby Thomas Fleming Counterterrorism is hell. VIEWS Promoting Militant Islam Abroadby Ronald L. HatchettU.S. policy blunders. Learning From Canada’s Mistakesby James BissettTerror along the border. Welcoming Muhammadby Scott P. RichertAbandoning that which is our own. NEWS Rivers of Bloodby Richard CummingsImmigration and terror in a time of chaos. The Dishonest Pursuit of...
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The League of Frightened Gentlemen: U.S. Occupation and Iraqi “Sovereignty”
Before the surprise early transfer of power to a “sovereign” Iraqi government on June 28, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told the House Armed Services Committee that the interim government was “prepared to step up to its responsibilities.” He emphasized that the White House plan would shift the burden of rebuilding Iraq and fighting...
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Playing the Trump Card
In August, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) published a report documenting a startling increase in immigration over the past year. The study indicated that America’s immigrant population had grown by 1.7 million and that 44 percent of the new immigrants were from Mexico, with illegal immigration increasing during a “protracted period of legal immigration...
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The “Suffering Love” of Patriots
The Russian writer Valentin Rasputin, himself no lackey of the Soviet regime, once attacked Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn for having crossed the line where “war against communism became war against . . . Russia.” In Rasputin’s eyes, the prophetic exile had stained Russia’s reputation—not merely that of the communist regime—in his relentless assaults on Soviet power. The...
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Against the Invaders
Roy Beck’s brief against immigration abounds in useful but also familiar statistics: e.g., since the Immigration Act of 1965, 30 million immigrants, mostly from Third World countries, have entered the United States; at least half of our births in the last 30 years are traceable to these immigrants; without them, the current population of the...
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Required Reading
Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982 by Philip Larkin; Farrar Strauss Giroux, New York. Philip Larkin is a rare thing among literary journalists—his own man. When he edited the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse, he filled it with his own eccentric choices, many of them rhymed and often by uncelebrated poets. His own verse, as...
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September 11: What Has Changed?—September 2011
beyond the revolution Deforming Education by Thomas Fleming views U No What I Meen: Technology and Illiteracy by R. Clay Reynolds Tarzan’s Way by Andrei Navrozov news September 11: Ten Years After by John C. Seiler, Jr. reviews The Monism of Perfection by Chilton Williamson, Jr. The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life by Kenneth ...
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A Case of Russophobia
John McCain does not like the Russians. Nearly 17 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, with Soviet-style communism safely tossed into the dustbin of history, Senator McCain loves to scare us with the Russkie boogeyman. Take, for example, this excerpt from his “An Enduring Peace Built on Freedom,” published in the November/December 2007...
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Surfin’ Safari
It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to; You would cry, too, if it happened to you. —Lesley Gore, 1963 Mike Love’s churlish behavior at the third Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremonies should not have come as a surprise to anyone. His outlash against everyone from Paul McCartney to Diana...
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The Silent Invasion
“It is surely arguable that during the third century of American existence the main problem of this nation will be—it already is—that of immigration and migration, mostly from the so-called Third World.” —John Lukacs Last year the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) apprehended 1.8 million illegal aliens along our southern border—less than half the number...
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Economic Patriotism
In an essay first published in Chronicles in 2006 and collected in the Chronicles Press volume Life, Literature, and Lincoln, the late Tom Landess relates a story about Arizona Sen. John McCain. While stumping in South Carolina for the Republican presidential nomination, the Mad Bomber encountered a textile-mill worker who was not a fan of...
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The Truth About Afghanistan
If anyone hasn’t heard about it by now, “our” government has been lying about the lack of progress being made in the seemingly eternal war being fought in Afghanistan. In the 18 years of the longest war in U.S. history, more than $1 trillion has gone down the drain, along with thousands of lives, in...
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The Bush Clan at the “Oligarchs’ Ball”
Vladimir Putin reacted swiftly to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s criticism of Russian democracy following the Russian president’s reelection on March 14. The exchange indicated increasing tensions in U.S.-Russian relations, tensions that may have as much to do with the Bush clan’s business interests as they do with the geopolitical interests of the two...