Christmas is a time of wonder, when the best and the worst of our sputtering culture is on display.  For every magnificent four-part rendition of Stille Nacht, we seem destined to endure umpteen episodes of godless grinches screaming about tolerance and diversity in order to keep authentic Christmas symbols out of the public square during...

Whichever candidate wins the presidency on November 8 (this issue went to press on November 2), the American political establishment—the Democratic and Republican parties combined as America Consolidated—will have decisively lost the presidential elections.  That is the meaning of the director of the FBI’s public decision to reconsider the agency’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email...

On September 22, a giant of Catholic journalism died—and genuine Catholic journalism might well have died with him. Paul Likoudis was a crack reporter for The Wanderer, America’s oldest national Catholic newspaper—founded in 1867, published in German until 1954, and banned by Hitler in the 1930’s. Likoudis joined the paper in 1986 and immediately began...

British marriage is on the rocks.  No, this is not a press release from James Dobson.  Rather, it is the consensus of the entire media establishment of the U.K.  What is harming the most fundamental institution in the history of humanity—the very basis of civil society? Is it divorce, infidelity, loss of faith, pornography, drugs,...

Phyllis Schlafly, in the spring of 1973, squared off in debate at Illinois State University against archfeminist Betty Friedan.  The subject was the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, at the time just a few states short of ratification.  Those were the years when feminists went out of their way to look bad: frumpy clothes;...

People whose families did not arrive in America yesterday or the day before yesterday are likely to discover, some time or another, among their parents’ and grandparents’ effects small, faded campaign buttons advocating Coolidge for President, or FDR, and later larger and more elaborate buttons promoting Eisenhower-Nixon, or Stevenson-Kefauver, Kennedy-Johnson, Goldwater-Miller, Reagan-Bush, and perhaps Clinton-Gore. ...

Donald Trump’s surprise visit to Mexico on August 31 has been analyzed every which way, except for one—the one that may, in the long run, prove most important.  While every journalist and political pundit felt compelled to speculate on what Trump hoped to gain from the visit, and whether it would help or hurt him,...

Liberals say they believe in democracy, meaning government that represents and listens to the people whose instrument it is supposed to be.  Yet democratic governments today clearly do not listen to the people, if “listening” means trying to understand what they have to say. The most obvious current example of Western politicians’ willful deafness to,...

A vast, under-populated Western country.  A densely populated neighboring one and member of the quasi-Third World immediately south of the border.  Human labor in demand in the north, an overabundance of it in the south.  A lazy, somewhat dissipated and decadent, aging northern population facing an energetic, youthful, and entrepreneurial one southward across a riverine...

Starting January 1, every abortion clinic in Illinois will be required to refer those who come seeking its services to one of the many nonprofit pregnancy-care centers in the state, established to help pregnant women understand that there are alternatives to abortion, and to provide those alternatives.  Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner signed the bill into...

The Southern Baptist Convention finally had its Appomattox, surrendering the flag of its ancestors at its annual meeting of messengers (representative delegates) held in mid-June in St. Louis.  Reportedly, an overwhelming majority of messengers voted in favor of Resolution 7, in which they determined to “call our brothers and sisters in Christ to discontinue the...

The tenor—and temper—of the debate leading up to the British referendum on the United Kingdom’s continued membership in the European Union on June 23 hardly suggested the rhetorical and emotional violence of the response by the proponents of Remain to their substantial defeat by a margin of 52 to 48—a figure some of them pounced...

In every presidential election since 1992, complaints about subpar Republican candidates (George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney: The names speak for themselves) have been met with a common refrain: This is the most important election in our lifetime, because of the Supreme Court!  Hold your nose and vote for...

For four decades now, pro-life voters have been wedded to the national Republican Party by the vows of politicians whose actions, upon election, have proved that they had no intention ever of fulfilling them.  Every two or four or six years, they would swear to defend the lives of the unborn, and then, after taking...

A frequent English correspondent from Stratford-upon-Avon who contributes regularly to this magazine wrote recently to express the frustration mockers of Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Wall have been causing him.  Hadrian’s Wall, he pointed out, begun in a.d. 122 by the Roman Emperor Hadrian to keep the Picts and other barbarians from invading England from the...

One of the ways in which Bill Clinton presented himself as a “New Democrat” was his insistence that he wanted abortion to be “safe, legal, and rare.”  Twenty-four years after Clinton’s election to the presidency, the national Democratic Party has given up any attempt to claim that they believe abortion is anything other than a...

Well, shootfire: That didn’t work. U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) is against requiring women to register for Selective Service in our Brave New Military.  Accordingly, he proposed an amendment to the 2017 defense-spending bill that accomplishes the opposite of what he believes. The idea, Hunter claimed, was that he didn’t want the executive branch to...

To the extent that a man may be judged by his enemies, Donald Trump is a very good man, indeed.  And the more extended and successful his campaign becomes, the more it proves that everything he has ever said about the conjoined political and media establishments in America is spot on, beginning with his charge...

A substitute teacher in a public school in what is, by today’s standards, still a relatively socially conservative part of the country uses “an anatomical word during a teaching lesson.”  She is fired, and the story goes viral. Just another battle in the never-ending culture war, right?  Yes—but not in the way you might think....

The Panama Papers appeared in April, promising to be the biggest bombshell dropped on the international community since Nagasaki.  Combing through the 11.5 million documents that were (what follows is a euphemism for stolen) leaked by a purported whistleblower to the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung, an international team of journalists has connected a lot of...

Almost since the passage of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, critics of American immigration policy have been suspicious of the political advantage the Democratic Party was taking of this crucial piece of legislation.  Though Congress’s motive in passing the bill was, in political terms, more symbolic than partisan and tactical, the replacement of...

Brussels has been cackling like a hen that has just laid an Easter egg, but the cackling will stop when the egg cracks and a turkey buzzard sticks its red rubbery head through. In accordance with the agreement that was reached between the European Union and the Turkish government last winter, Greece and the E.U....

“Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.”  This line from Section 2 of the 14th Amendment must have seemed fairly straightforward to its authors.  In light of the first section’s elevation of blacks to full citizenship...

David Daleiden, the “mastermind” behind the Planned Parenthood sting videos of the Summer of Gay Marriage and Caitlyn Jenner, and fellow activist Sandra Merritt face a grand-jury indictment in Harris County, Texas, as of this writing.  Both are charged with violating Texas law pertaining to “perjury and other falsification,” for having used phony drivers’ licenses...

In January, two astronomers announced that, following the recent demotion of Pluto as the ninth planet, they may have discovered a replacement for it in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune’s orbit.  If they are right, according to their calculations the “new” planet’s orbit would take it as close as 20 billion miles to the sun...

From the beginning of Donald Trump’s candidacy for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, I have consistently said that I do not expect him to win the nomination, or, if he does capture it, to win the election.  My reasoning has had nothing to do with whether Trump actually believes in the positions he has adopted...

Six coin tosses.  Six separate wins.  And thus was Hillary Clinton crowned the Democratic winner of the Iowa Caucuses. Not surprisingly, people immediately cried foul, citing the “impossible odds” of winning all six coin tosses in six different precincts at six different times—a feat that is statistically surprising only to those who don’t understand statistics. ...

The New Year is in full swing, and with it new laws and regulations carefully designed to enrich the lives of Americans who are insane. Because the essence of our approach to life together in our degenerate age is that, for every problem humanoids may encounter, there is a potential law that could solve it,...

American politicians and media people have been making much of what they perceive as a profound distinction between “radicalization” and “self-radicalization.”  While they consider both to be Bad Things, the perception seems to be that, as a rule, “radicalization” is the badder of the two, as it implies that foreign jihadists are able to exert...

President Obama’s latest executive order, announced as we send this issue to press, is hardly surprising.  Having failed to convince Congress three years ago to pass new gun-control laws requiring background checks on all gun purchases, the President had used every mass shooting since—including the jihadist attack in San Bernardino—to rail against the current state...

The nation held its breath in mid-December when GOP candidate Donald Trump dared to suggest that, in the wake of an ISIS/ISIL/IS/Caliphate/Daesh-related terrorist attack on U.S. soil, all Muslim immigration should be halted, until “Congress can figure out what the hell is going on.” When the press finally exhaled, it started screaming and hollering, pausing...

National Review celebrated its 60th anniversary last November.  Its founder, William F. Buckley, Jr., would have been days away from turning 90.  He is all over the anniversary issue, in a somewhat exploitive way—many photographs and reminders of his celebrity status, including an image of the brand of peanut butter he endorsed.  Indeed, just as...

Immediately following the jihadist bombings in Paris, President François Hollande announced that he was declaring a three-month national state of emergency, closing the French borders, and treating the attacks as “an act of war.”  Two nights later French planes began attacking ISIS in Syria, and two days after that Hollande and Vladimir Putin agreed to...

Unlike Osama bin Laden, who chose to launch his attack on the United States on September 11, 2001, as a symbolic reversal of the Ottoman defeat at the Battle of Vienna on that date in 1683, Syed Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, prosecuted their jihad in San Bernardino because that is where they lived...

David A. Hartman passed from this life on November 24, at the age of 79.  Though it has been some time since his writing appeared in these pages, Mr. Hartman’s influence will be felt as long as Chronicles remains in print.  As his close friend, collaborator, and fellow board member Tom Pauken rightly noted in...

The media and the hand-wringing politicians who are dancing on the grave of the career of Columbia, South Carolina, School Resource Officer Ben Fields are pulling a fast one.  They claim that, because “black lives matter,” the young woman who refused to relinquish her smartphone and leave math class at Spring Valley High School should...

The New York Times and Pat Buchanan warn that the United States is being drawn into the Syrian civil war, now a regional conflict.  President Obama is allowing himself to be pressed by Hillary Clinton, Gen. David Petraeus, John McCain, and other hawks who wish the United States to impose a no-fly zone and a...