Ethnic groups were reportedly highly successful in registering new voters in the months before the 1992 national election. In California, the Secretary of State’s office was deluged with requests for registration forms and, in at least two cases, countless thousands of those forms were sent to businesses like Domino’s Pizza and the 99 Cent Store,...

The Carter, er, Clinton, honeymoon is over, so far as Fm concerned. Even before his inauguration, Bill Clinton had exhausted our patience with his reckless comments on throwing the doors open to AIDS-carrying Haitians and admitting sodomites into the military. The sociopaths of the American press were in ecstasy, now that they had the chance...

Husbands and wives is a slight but charming film, and, had it not been for the inability of the press to distinguish between life and art, it would have opened in the usual eight theaters to reviews that were mildlv favorable if not quite ecstatic. Husbands and Wives is not a Shadows and Fog disaster,...

Race-norming’s likeliest successor is something called “banding.” If you see references to a “diversity-based sliding band,” do not expect to encounter something as agreeable as a Dixieland ensemble. No, the term is only a euphemism for the latest subterfuge to scuttle rank-order selection of top scorers on tests for hiring and promotion. It’s better, you...

The breakfast table is the latest battleground in the war against the family. School-based breakfast programs have been tried at the local level for years, and the idea goes back at least as far as the Black Panthers in the 1960’s. The big push now is for a national program. Last year, a federally subsidized...

Homosexual rights are more and more taken for granted as a given of American life. In October, for example, CNN raised the question of whether homosexual activists were correct in condemning Hollywood’s refusal to advance their agenda. Whether filmmakers ought to advance a homosexual agenda is, apparently, not worth discussing. In the world of magazines,...

The Supreme Court missed the mark last year in unanimously shooting down a St. Paul, Minnesota, statute imposing criminal liability on those engaged in “hate speech.” The problem with the Court’s decision in R.A.V. v. St. Paul is that it dwelled on legal niceties rather than recognizing the time-tested, historically proven method for dealing with...

The Supreme Court’s recent Casey decision on abortion is a memorable example of sociological balderdash. The joint decision began, “Liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt,” to which Justice Scalia fired back in his dissent, “Liberty finds no refuge in this jurisprudence of confusion.” Scalia’s observation becomes painfully clear when one reads the...

What do you get if you cross six Catholic bishops with five “Christian feminists”? The answer: economic ignorance and cultural lunacy. In what has to qualify as the meeting from Purgatory, the bishops and the feminists met for eight and a half years. As a committee of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB), they...

The Southern Classics Series is a new venture of J.S. Sanders and Company. John Stoll Sanders and his series editor M.E. Bradford are systematically resurrecting worthy titles that have disappeared from the pages of Books In Print. In so doing, they are making a valuable statement about the Southern tradition in American literature. I purposely...

Watergate was once again the site of intrigue and stealth, only this time the GOP head of state couldn’t wait to tell the world about what it all had produced: something called the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The White House was in a panicked rush to complete the free trade accord, linking the...

Canada’s social engineers got themselves into a box by creating what the Bilingualism and Biculturalism Commission called in 1967 “an equal partnership between the two founding races.” Descendants of all other immigrants, who until then had thought of themselves as Canadians, were suddenly excluded from the new definition. To placate them, the engineers declared the...

Speaking English has become rarer than I thought. When I recently put my 1985 Plymouth Horizon up for sale in the classifieds of the Washington Post and the Washington Times, I wondered how many people would respond to my ad. Little did I know how many calls I’d actually get. Problem was, I couldn’t understand...

Conquerors and intellectuals have dreamt of one big European government for centuries. The goal, as with all such millenarian fantasies, was to transform people’s national allegiances (viewed as reactionary and divisive) into larger loyalties to “Europe” (viewed as progressive and cosmopolitan). But they face the barrier even today that there are no “Europeans,” but only...

Regarding Europe, I’ve got a nagging twofold question I’d love to have answered: Why has no one remarked on the incredible, glaring double standard in Establishment treatment of ex-Nazi and Communist regimes? And what in blazes is the justification for that double standard? We start with a stipulation, presumably made both by myself and by...

Our “Letters From Prison“ (Correspondence, May 1992) elicited a number of requests for an update. The letter ended with “Frank,” a 26-year-old black man imprisoned in Illinois, in solitary confinement at a medium-security prison. He had been placed in isolation for his own protection, because the gang he had once belonged to, the Black Gangster...

A war fever is breaking out among the leaders of the free world. Congressional Democrats are egging on President Bush to do something about the situation in Bosnia, and their concerns are echoed by Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, and the conservative leadership of Mr. Bush’s own party. As we head into the last...

Political Correctness continues on many of the nation’s campuses. Many Americans still regard the whole affair as a petty squabble among eggheads, unrelated to their daily lives. However, a recent skirmish in the PC wars illustrates only too well why all Americans, especially parents, have a stake in this scholastic conflict.  Professors Jay Belsky and...

As the academic year commences, students wonder which professors will make a difference, and which won’t. Here is the story of a professor who made a difference-someone who believed that education is for the courageous, that striving to surpass ourselves defines the well-lived life-and who paid the price for doing so. But the story has...

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...

Ross Perot had come and gone before a monthly magazine had time to take him seriously-another victory for long deadlines and broad views. Many of our friends and colleagues nearly sprained their ankles hopping onto the Perot bandwagon, but I could never work up any enthusiasm for someone whose stock answer to the big questions...

Although Greg Kaza has political pretenses [sic], a recent article in Chronicles (Cultural Revolutions, June 1992) suggests that he has not learned even the most elementary lessons of American politics-least of which that it is “the art of the possible.”  The problem with Kaza is that he is an ideologue. Like most ideologues, he would...

The Bush administration has rediscovered the family. A year ago, White House minions strove to torpedo the Final Report of the National Commission on Children, worried that its recommendation of tax relief for families with children might upset the hallowed “budget agreement” with Congress. Today, with one eye on the embers of Los Angeles and...

After the riots, fires, and looting in Los Angeles, both Jack Kemp, secretary for Housing and Urban Development, and Jesse Jackson blamed the federal government—not for failing to send in the military, but for not providing enough social and economic therapy. Here is Kemp’s analysis, on the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour, of why blacks and Hispanics burned...

South Africa’s March 17 referendum led the government to toughen its position against the ANC. Within a month after the results, Mr. de Klerk got the ANC at the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) to agree to the election of a transitional; government, the interim government the ANC had wanted appointed. The ANC...

Los Angeles was bopped by debris crumbling loose from twenty-five years of a Great Society gone goofy, or so believe the callers from all over America with whom I talk for three hours on weekday afternoons. These talk-show callers are angry, frightened, and baffled. They’re angry at pictures of rabble marching on Korean grocers like...

Voter cynicism and apathy are at an all-time high, and as such we can expect the unexpected come November. Those Middle American Radicals whom Sam Francis has been writing about will either revolt at the polls or sit at home, disgusted. Thus far, during the primary season, someone has been staying home, since turnout has...

Governor Jim Florio’s $2.8 billion tax increase two years ago left New Jersey taxpayers with no recourse, despite efforts over the last 16 years to make the initiative and referendum process available to frustrated citizens. The issue was revived again last year by Republican Assemblyman Robert Franks, who sponsored a bill that would allow individuals,...

Pollsters and pundits seem to think our American malaise is an economic illness that will be cured when the recession ends. I spent my State Department career deeply involved with the Shah’s regime and revolutionary Iran and I smell deja vu. In the past four years, I’ve seen stronger expressions of political discontent here than...

The lesbian roommate case in Madison, Wisconsin, that has been pending since 1989 was finally given a hearing this past fall. In a decision dated December 27, 1991, Madison Equal Opportunities Commission hearing examiner Sheilah O. Jakobson found that Anne Hacklander Ready and Maureen Rowe unlawfully discriminated against lesbian Caryl Sprague by refusing to rent...

The Jury is the greatest achievement of the Anglo-Saxon legal system. No matter how much pressure from kings and lords, or in our ease politicians and the media, “twelve good men and true” can do the right thing, so to speak. And that is exactly what they did in the case of Rodney King, although...

Michael Wu wants to become an American citizen. He is 25 years old and has lived in San Diego with his Taiwanese parents since 1980. He speaks English and Chinese, works packing newspapers for recycling, and attends school. He loves baseball and swimming and wants to join the U.S. Navy. By all accounts he is...

USA Today is the ACT-UP of the newspaper industry. Last April 8 the paper outed Arthur Ashe, forcing him to reveal the fact that a 1983 blood transfusion left him HIV positive. USA Today also recently outed former television newscaster Linda Ellerbee, bullying her into a public discussion of her double mastectomy. As Ellerbee revealed...

Rodney King Day will be the official designation of April 29th on the new American calendar, and the holiday will be marked by an annual spree of rioting and looting, all in a good cause. The jury’s verdict in the LAPD officers’ trial came as a shock to the commentators who could only repeat, over...

Neoconservative Republican Governor John Engler of Michigan inherited a $1.1 billion budget deficit from his predecessor, moderate Democrat James Blanchard, when he took office last January 1, 1991. Engler eked out a narrow 17,595-vote victory over Blanchard by promising relief from Michigan’s burdensome property tax structure, fourth highest in the United States, to Reagan Democrats...

Polly Williams, a black Democrat in Wisconsin, has been hailed by the Wall Street Journal, Reason, and other neoconservative organs for her school choice legislation. And the Wisconsin Supreme Court has approved it: underclass public school students can now get more welfare, in this case free tuition, at “nonsectarian” private schools. Neoconservative choicers hail the...

Anti-Semitism, said August Bebel, was the “socialism of fools.” Murray Rothbard has responded similarly to the reckless imputation of anti-Semitic motives by neoconservatives and their clients, saying that “Anti-anti-Semitism has become the conservatism of fools.” The non-responsiveness of journalists and intellectuals to the gentile-bashing of Alan Dershowitz suggests that the problem underlined by Professor Rothbard...

An Nea Grant has been awarded to an “artist” in Utah to erect a monument to the myth of a pre-Roe v. Wade “back-alley” abortion holocaust. Darin Biniaz, a 26 year old who has discovered that “art” is more profitable and less demanding than actual work, has received $2,000 to create a “sculpture” called “No...

President Bush’s 1993 budget called for additional reductions in defense spending totaling $50 billion over five years. Liberal members of Congress immediately sharpened their knives to make even larger cuts. Bush’s recommendations in regard to nuclear weapons were sensible. Termination of the B-2 bomber and Midgetman ICBM programs was justified, as both were far too...

Governor Clinton’s candidacy for President, plagued as it’s been by charges of marital infidelity and draft evasion, has brought to the fore once again the question of whether personal character is relevant to fitness for public office. There are those to whom it is obvious that private behavior is relevant to public office. Others contend...

The criminal, on the eve of sentencing, received as heartfelt a display of support as I’ve ever read about. More than fifty people filled the courtroom to plead for leniency. It happened in Rhode Island, but such things happen in courtrooms everywhere. This man, the supporters said, does not deserve jail. They called him an...

Vice-President’s Quayle’s speech last year regarding the overabundance of lawyers in America seems to have had little effect on the 84 students in my first-year Civil Procedure class. The Vice-President’s speech has affected only some members of the bar who are looking to protect their interests. This lack of response to the Vice-President’s speech is...

Tammy Wynette injected the only note of reality into the race for the Democratic nomination, when she lashed out at Governor Clinton’s wife for saying she was not “some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette.” Knowing nothing of country music—or of the country itself—the established press was quick to ridicule Wynette and...

Black mischief continues to bubble in the Caribbean, and the Reverend Jesse Jackson, U.S. Representative Charles Rangel (Democrat, New York), the American Bar Association, the Church World Service, and the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights have demanded that the Bush administration grant temporary political asylum to the 14,000 Haitian refugees taken off small boats by...

The Dead Sea Scrolls controversy is not—as some have argued—about Christianity fearing for its life in the face of new and dreadful facts. The claim that the Scrolls contain information that calls into question Christian verities is pure poppycock. So is the spurious charge of some British mountebanks that the Vatican tried to suppress the...

The “Church Notes” section in the February 2, 1992, issue of National Review requires attention and a word in response. In this little essay, the editor of that magazine informs us that the traditional right is under some obligation to recognize that its adversaries who call themselves conservatives but are pragmatically committed to an ever...

National Education Day was signed into law by President Bush and Congress last March 20. At first sight this new holiday looks like the President’s bid to be taken seriously as the “education President.” In fact, educators nationwide celebrated it as a tribute to their profession. But a closer look at the bill indicates that...

When network news magnates from Manhattan send their cameras to cover small towns in the Midwest, what happens? Well, when CBS News came to my hometown of Viroqua, Wisconsin, the result was a grain of truth wrapped in an inch-thick sour ball of negative hype. When it comes to the Great Fly-Over between New York...

Publishers Weekly (Publishers Weakly in my book), though it is one of the most depressing magazines in America, obviously considers itself a sprightly, thoughtful, and somewhat “irreverent” publication, gifted with the insight to see that the emperor has no clothes on and blessed with the courage to stand forward and say so. In the bold...

William F. Buckley, Jr. didn’t have a spy novel or a yachting saga in him one recent week, and the skiing season in Gstaad hadn’t started yet. So he sat himself down and tinkled out a 40,000-word tome tided “In Search of Anti-Semitism.” The article—or book, or monster—consumes the entire issue of the December 30,...