[This review first appeared in the November 1994 issue of Chronicles.] “Wisdom is neither inheritance nor legacy.” —Thomas Fuller In his keynote speech to a meeting of the John Randolph Club, Murray N. Rothbard exhorted his colleagues to take up the task he sees as central to the success of their movement: nothing less than...

From the December 1997 issue of Chronicles.   The man who loves other countries as much as his own stands on a level with the man who loves other women as much as he loves his own wife.” —Theodore Roosevelt Hailed by the New York Times for showing that Colonel Robert McCormick, the legendary publisher of...

I took the diagnosis of non-small cell lung cancer (Stage 4) quite well, I thought.  Except for occasional bouts of hysterical self-pity and thankfully rare gestures of melodrama. Oh, I’d resisted it, denied it, although I knew all along that I had it.  I ignored the warnings of my hapless local doctors, and when I...

As we gathered in the gazebo, sitting on the hard white benches with the paint peeling off in strips, nursing Marlboros—the girls wielding cigarette-holders, like scepters—we decided then and there who and what was the main obstacle to our goal.  Sheryl called it the “Marshmallow Conspiracy,” and of course we didn’t need a translation, although...

To say I was a difficult child is something of an understatement: I was a wild child.  In retrospect, I can only feel sorry for my poor parents, who had no idea what to do with me.  I was simply unmanageable.  Unwilling to sit still in class, or to obey the simplest instructions, I did...

From September 2000 issue of Chronicles. “The mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation.” —William McKinley In his classic study of “isolationism,” Not to the Swift, Justus Doenecke takes note of a phenomenon called “Asia Firstism”—the view of conservative politicians and publicists of the postwar era who opposed meddling in Europe but...

The country is currently suffering through a series of moral panics—or, more precisely, the coastal elites are, while the rest of us go about the business of ordinary living. There was the tearing down of the statues, an “antiracist” campaign to eradicate all traces of any historical figure who could be linked, even tenuously, to...

America’s descent into banana republicanism continues apace, and on two fronts.  To begin with, we learn that President Trump’s much-disdained assertion that Trump Tower was being wiretapped during the election campaign turns out to be absolutely true.  On September 19, CNN reported that Paul Manafort, who lived in Trump Tower and was Trump’s campaign manager...

Sheriff Joe Arpaio, hated by the open-borders crowd but loved by those who want to uphold America’s immigration laws, has always been surrounded by controversies—they whirl around him like dust storms in the Arizona desert.  Now an even bigger storm is brewing around him, in the wake of the Trump administration’s pardon. And what, you...

From the August 1997 issue of Chronicles. “It is a sort of a disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything,” confessed George Soros to a British newspaper, “but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” Recalling youthful fantasies of omnipotence in his 1987...

From the November 2015 issue of Chronicles. Politics is all about hatred.  Never mind who you’re voting for: It’s who you’re voting against that really counts.  And that’s why any disagreement I may have with Donald Trump’s actual policies is completely irrelevant.  Because what really matters is that all the people I really hate—the media,...

They call it Cascadia—a land of plunging waterfalls and snowcapped mountains, a mythical kingdom of towering trees and raging rivers. Here in Seattle, capital of this Arcadia, the sleekly modernistic Space Needle rises up against the backdrop of Mount Rainier, which dominates the horizon—a distinctly Cascadian juxtaposition of mountain and cityscape, forest and skyscraper, greenery...

While it looks like the much-touted Libertarian Moment has passed—if it was ever here to begin with—we can say with some degree of certainty that the Paleoconservative Moment has arrived.  And we can pinpoint the date of its arrival with impressive specificity: The day of the South Carolina Republican presidential debate, when Donald Trump dropped...

The year was 1964.  I was 13 years old.  Sitting in the family room of my parents’ home in Yorktown Heights, New York, with the TV on, I picked up the envelope that had arrived in the mail that day.  I had sent away for information to all sorts of political parties and organizations in...

With Donald Trump continuing to rise in the polls, the neoconservatives are in a lather.  Bill Kristol, who initially declared he was “anti-anti-Trump”—in the same sense that his departed father declared he was “anti-anti-McCarthy” (Joe, that is, not Eugene)—recently tweeted, “Crowd-sourcing: Name of the new party we’ll have to start if Trump wins the GOP...

The publication of a special “Stop Trump” issue of National Review was heralded in a blaze of publicity. Editor Rich Lowry appeared on Fox News and was interviewed by Trump nemesis Megyn Kelly, where he proceeded to denounce The Donald as a threat to the intellectual integrity of the conservative movement. A “symposium” of anti-Trump...

“Quarantine the aggressors!”  That line out of Franklin Roosevelt’s famous speech signaling the beginning of his open road to war with the Axis powers was much criticized by anti-interventionists, who correctly saw that the President was trying to undermine the great principle of neutrality which had, thus far, kept us out of the European war. ...