School uniforms are back in the news. The school board of the nation’s largest school system, that of New York City, voted unanimously this March to recommend uniforms for elementary school students. President Clinton endorsed the notion, though Norman Siegel, executive director of the New York City Civil Liberties Union, predictably threatened to sue if...

“The poor you always have with you” is a law that the best efforts of all the king’s social workers have failed to revoke. The most ambitious welfare scheme to date may be the Comprehensive Child Development Program (CCDP), a research project involving some 4,000 households across the country. After nearly a decade and 300...

Blacks are moving back to the South by the thousands. This is not supposed to happen, not if you trust the mythology of the mainstream media. How can this be? Affluent black families leaving Chicago to go back home to Mississippi, back to the land of church burnings and redneck sheriffs? But according to a...

“Remember Jonesboro” is the latest rallying cry of the “If it can happen here, it can happen anywhere” crowd. In one sense, of course, they’re obviously correct: no town is immune to the evil influences that convince an 11-year-old and a 13-year-old to shoot and kill their fellow students. But the Jonesboro groupies are disingenuous:...

Bill Clinton’s triumphant return from Africa is a bad omen for the next two years. Temporarily liberated from the shackles of Paula Jones’s allegations, the President will now be free to rim the country exactly as the First Lady sees fit. During the President’s tour of Africa, we got a glimpse of what lies in...

Timothy McVeigh may have been sent off for life, but the Oklahoma City bombing case is far from over. It looks like the federal government knew all along that Oklahoma City, if not the Alfred P. Murrah building itself, would be the target of a terrorist attack, and somehow (or for some reason) failed to...

The Rockford School desegregation case continues, but if the actions of the federal magistrate’s supporters are any indication, the tide is turning in favor of the citizens of Rockford. Stunned by recent electoral and courtroom setbacks, the leader of the local N,A4CP, a Rockford alderman, the mayor, and the superintendent of schools (all black) resorted...

Albanian separatists have been attacking policemen in the Serbian province of Kosovo for years, though only recently has the conflict escalated to the point where Slobodan Milosevic felt compelled to respond with a show of force. Not surprisingly, Milosevic’s action was met by the familiar media barrage against the cruelty of “the Serbs” and bellicose...

Hillary Clinton has given new impetus to the paranoid style in American politics with her astounding claim that her peckerwood husband’s latest sexual-political scandal was the work of “a vast right-wing conspiracy” constituting “part of an effort, very frankly, to undo the results of two elections.” When President Nixon, at the height of the Watergate...

The French are among the least noticed and celebrated of the contributors to what has become the United States. But at one time New France covered a good part of North America. The two most interesting provinces on the continent, Quebec and Louisiana, are remnants of that empire. Huguenot refugees contributed talents to the British...

Karla Faye Tucker’s execution in February for a grisly double homicide turned into a circus, complete with roaring helicopters with searchlights, live broadcasts via satellite, throngs of death penalty supporters and protesters, and scores of reporters (including disapproving “enlightened” Europeans). Why such a frenzy? As detailed endlessly in the month before her death by such...

Clayton R. Gaylord, chairman of The Ingersoll Foundation and the first chairman of The Rockford Institute, died on January 3. He had a remarkable career as industrialist, civic leader, and philanthropist. In 1958, he became president of The Ingersoll Milling Machine Company, the firm that has been owned and led by his family since his...

Caribbean immigrants in New York City are feeling the effects of several new immigration reform laws. Although New York’s immigration problems are acute—as the rage seen in the Abner Louima torture scandal attests—reform had to come from the federal level, since Mayor Giuliani continues to welcome massive immigration as a boon to the local economy....

America’s political and business elite, ostensibly dedicated to compassion and prosperity, showed their true colors this winter. First came a series of investigative articles by the Associated Press in December documenting the employment of child labor in the United States. “Kids at work: Is this childhood?” screamed the headlines, and “Toughest child labor laws are...

NRA “Extremism”—down but not out. A year ago the National Rifle Association’s internal politics, by tradition kept out of the public spotlight, erupted into the mainstream press. According to NRA management and Beltway spin doctors, a group of extremists on the NRA Board of Directors was trying to fire NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre...

The New York Post‘s editorial page has been one of the few bright spots in the City of Dreadful Night. Generally a steamy tabloid in its news coverage, the Post has nevertheless offered thoughtful and informed editorials and Commentary of a mainstream conservative orientation under its editorial page editor, neoconservative Eric Breindel, and his deputy,...

President Bill Clinton’s announcement, made during his brief Christmas visit to Bosnia, that U.S. troops were going to stay in that blighted Balkan province well beyond the initially announced “deadline” of June 1998, surprised only the naive. The only surprising aspect of the announcement was Clinton’s refusal to set any new deadlines: the troops were...

Billwatch became the prime-time soap of early 1998, eclipsing even the Pope’s visit to Cuba. Why should we care this time? Anyone with a mental age of 12 already knows that the President is an uncontrollable sexual predator. If a single straw could break the camel’s back of our patience, why not the bale after...

Regarding Saddam Hussein, “What in the world is wrong with him?” someone asked me the other day. “Doesn’t he realize the bad impression he is making with all his twists and turns? One day he lets the weapons inspectors in and gives them unlimited access, the next day he comes up with some lame excuse...

The Congressional Medal of Honor (CMH) is our nation’s highest award for valor under fire. The criteria are stiff: a deed of such exceptional bravery that failure to do it would draw no criticism; two eye-witnesses; and, above all, the risk of life. In our nation’s history, we have awarded only 3,427 such medals. Of...

Clyde A. Sluhan’s death on November 6 deprived The Rockford Institute of one of its most devoted and effective patrons. One of the original directors of the Institute, Clyde had served a term as Board Chairman, and at the age of 85 was still an active member of the Institute’s Executive Committee. Born in Cleveland,...

The Rebel Flag and Ole Miss go hand-in-hand—or rather, they did, until recently. The University of Mississippi’s football team is named the Rebels, and students and alumni have had a long tradition of waving the Confederate Battle Flag at home football games. But the tides of time and political correctness have washed up on Ole...

The Bipartisan “nationalist” coalition which has been emerging in response to the cosmopolitan policies of the Clinton administration scored several notable victories in the week before Congress adjourned for 1997. The House defeated an attempt to extend NAFTA to the countries of the Caribbean and Central America. This measure was clearly linked to the corporate...

The assault on tobacco continues. The recent phenomenon of federal and state governments levying reparations on the tobacco industry for health care costs is unprecedented, and it presents much food for thought. It is likely that the companies, already diversified, will not suffer much, or at least a good deal less than they would if...

President Clinton’s fall tour of South America raised an important question: What has happened to the adversarial role of White House television journalists? ABC’s John Donvan reported that the President’s photo-op tour of Caracas left Venezuela glowing. He said the President was greeted warmly and that his speech was an overwhelming success. There was a...

Larry Naman had had enough of arrogant and unresponsive politicians, and so he shot one. This past summer, the (media-described) drifter took aim and shot at the head of Maricopa County Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox—a run-of-the-mill politician in Phoenix, known primarily for how loud and how often she can shout “police brutality.” But thanks to...

The United Nations has generated more debate on Capitol Hill in recent months than at any time since its birth 52 years ago. Several factors account for this recent strain in relations, including the end of the Cold War and increased scrutiny by a Republican-controlled Congress. However, the excesses and missteps of the United Nations...

Ruby Ridge and Waco are two nightmares now slowly fading from the public mind, but not because some law enforcement officials have learned anything. In Roby, Illinois, a 51-year-old widow named Shirley Ann Allen was ordered by a local judge to submit to a psychological profile after her relatives expressed concern about her behavior. When...

Little Rock, Arkansas, is still a potent symbol 40 years after the forcible integration of Central High School. That’s why President Clinton chose Central High as the site of a speech in late September, one of many that he intends to deliver on race relations over the coming year. Paralyzed by the numerous scandals that...

Sling Blade, the recent hit film that rightly won Billy Bob Thornton an Academy Award, is now out on video. As viewers of the film know, it is a marvelous tragedy of classical simplicity. But what has not been mentioned is that it is also a tale told in the tradition of Southern literature. As...

A southern tradition ended on August 19, when Beth Anne Hogan, a 17-year-old ponytailed blonde from Junction City, Oregon, signed the Virginia Military Institute’s matriculation book. With help from Janet Reno’s Justice Department and the U.S. Supreme Court, Miss Hogan and some 30 other young women have done to VMI what the corpulent Shannon Faulkner...

The Ruby Ridge saga continues. Five years to the day after 14-year-old Samuel Weaver and United States Marshal William Degan were killed in the initial confrontation at Randy Weaver’s residence, prosecutors in Boundary County, Idaho, indicted Weaver’s friend Kevin Harris on charges of first-degree murder. Weaver’s supporters were rightly outraged, with some claiming that the...

Diana is dead. The sudden and gruesome death of a woman in her prime, especially the mother of adolescent children, is a sad event. With Princess Diana, it has the makings of a real tragedy. She was pushed into a public marriage with an unloving and eccentric man 14 years her senior. To make matters...

Bounty hunters with a license to kill are glorified on television every week. The reality is uglier and more terrifying than most of us imagine. In Phoenix, a group of heavily armed bounty hunters, wearing ski-masks and body armor, sledgehammered their way through the front door of a private residence, tied up a mother, and...

Al Gore, in a recent address to the National Council of La Raza, the militant Hispanic organization, credited Latinos for creating “a new economy in America” and said “not enough Latinos are participating [in its benefits]. We have a lot of work to do, and we will not rest until everyone in the community shares...

François Furet’s death on July 11 in Toulouse at age 70 ended the career of a truly iconoclastic historian. Despite Furet’s association with the political left, as a youthful communist and middle-aged social democrat, his scholarship went against the grain of the French and American academic establishments. In Penser la Révolution and in other revisionist...

Madeleine Albright’s rendition this summer of Madonna impersonating Evita Peron (“Don’t cry for me, Argentinaaaa . . . “) was neither intrinsically interesting nor aesthetically pleasing. The venue was an aircraft—paid by you and me—en route from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Singapore; and according to an eyewitness, the only thing missing was a red orchid...

Pol Pot, who presided over the murder of more than a million of his fellow Cambodians, has been condemned to life imprisonment after a jungle show trial by the Khmer Rouge—or what is left of it. Many of Pol Pot’s accusers were, in happier days, his accomplices, and the trial had about as much credibility...

The China lobby was in full swing this summer, and once again the “If We Can Sell Every Chinaman Just One” crowd carried the day. By a wider than expected margin, the House of Representatives defeated a resolution revoking China’s Most Favored Nation status, letting both the Senate and the President off the hook. As...

An ecumenical jihad was the subject of a conference, “Not of This World,” held at Rose Hill College in Aiken, South Carolina, last May. Here Eastern Orthodox Christians hosted Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants in an effort to discover common ground and build on it. In a surprising demarche, Boston College professor of philosophy Peter...

Eugene Narrett has lost his job as a professor of English at Framingham State College in Massachusetts. An outspoken conservative who never misses a chance to bash feminism and liberalism in his columns for the Middlesex County News and in periodic essays for this and other magazines, Narrett thinks that his politics had much to...

Peyton Place is the name of the North Dakota bar where First Lieutenant Kelly Flinn went to relax, and the name sums up her case very well. It has been a soap opera all through. And as often happens in the soaps, the worst characters prove to be the most popular. Thanks to her healthy...

Donaid Warren’s untimely death in May has deprived the American and European populist right of a truly penetrating analyst. From his pioneering study of “Middle American radicals,” a term he coined in 1976, to his dense biography of Father Charles Coughlin published last year. Professor Warren examined in depth the populist bridge between modern democracy...

NATO has three new members: Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. The event has taken place at a time when Europe is as stable and unthreatened as it has ever been in history. The Russians—regardless of political persuasion—are profoundly disturbed at the shift eastwards of the limit of NATO’s Article 5 guarantee, which postulates that...

The Lega Nord has not been cowed by its mediocre showing in the spring elections. Virtually alone among Italian political leaders, Umberto Bossi has condemned both the “humanitarian” mission of the Italian army in Albania and the continued refusal of the government to keep out the so-called refugees, most of whom have spent the past...

Father’s Day has always seemed to me a silly kind of holiday. It’s a time to give Dad something he doesn’t need, like another splashy necktie, or, what’s worse, something he does need—like an electric staple gun that takes away his last excuse for not rescreening the porch. Until recently, at least, fathers did not...

The Republican Party has spent the last four years gloating and giggling over the Clinton scandals—draft evasion, Whitewater, Travelgate, Vince Foster, the Rose law firm, Waco, Ron Brown, Henry Cisneros, Hillary, the illegal naturalization of aliens, the Lincoln Bedroom, legally and ethically dubious campaign contributions both foreign and domestic, and (gasp, wheeze), any number of...

The Rockford schools case continues, but for the first time since the “People Who Care” lawsuit was filed in 1989, there are signs of hope. As chronicled by Tom Fleming in these pages in February (“Here Come the Judge”), the Rockford public schools have been under federal control for the past three years, the result...

Jackie, Tiger, and Ellen—not as catchy as Martin, Bartin, and Fish, or Abraham, Martin, and John, but good enough to mesmerize the press this spring. In one respect, the mainstream media were right: Jackie Robinson was a courageous man; Tiger Woods is an extraordinary golfer; and Ellen DeGenerate—well, two out of three ain’t bad. But...

Partial birth abortion—a procedure which its practitioners call D&E, dilatation and extraction—is once again the subject of congressional legislation that would ban the grisly act. President Clinton would appear to be in a bind with this bill, because he can hardly veto it a second time without appearing to be totally committed to feticide, or...