On the morning of September 11, 2001, I thought that the Muslims had made a big blunder. At first I believed that they had scored an auto-goal: This was the sort of thing that would shake up the Western world, wake it up to the fact that the Islamic demographic deluge—a process that had been...

  1:00 PM CDT, Tuesday, September 11, 2001 In the aftermath of the greatest loss of American life in a single attack since Pearl Harbor—and probably ever—our first thoughts must be for the victims of an attack that was neither cowardly nor senseless (as it is already being called), but a well-coordinated demonstration of American...

In Cairo in 1943, when the tide had turned in the war on Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, who had embraced Joseph Stalin as an ally and acceded to his every demand, had a premonition. Conversing with Harold Macmillan, Churchill blurted: “Cromwell was a great man, wasn’t he?” “Yes, sir, a very great man,” Macmillan replied....

  Idling: A Public and Entirely Self-Serving Diary   1 September 4,2011. A few words by way of justification for wasting time, mine as much as yours, on talking about nothing. I have always been by inclination an idle man, the sort who is too lazy to balance his checkbook or do his taxes until the...

  September 2 is the 38th anniversary of the death of J.R.R. Tolkien (1973).  The man who inspired so many to see the real, enchanted world and not the sterile, imagined one of modernity was himself inspired by deeply Christian Anglo-Saxon poetry. The very idea of “Middle Earth” came from a (likely) ninth-century poem called Christ or The...

  Alas, Tea Partiers, you may as well fold your tents and quietly leave the field. Salon (a website that apparently caters to members and would-be members of the national elite) has given your movement the coup de grace. They have uncovered the cruel truth that your movement is a “Southern” movement. No more need be said. The...

Please join my friend Paul Youngblood and me at 3:00 (CDT) on WNTA 1330.  LAst week the station changed the schedule on us, but we're back to normal now.  We are probably going to talk about the new report on Thomas Jeffferson's alleged affair with Sally Hemmings--who says we don't ...

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 ...

  Address given on Monday, August 29, at the international conference Central Europe, the EU and the new Russia at the Czech Parliament in Prague. More than two decades after the end of the Cold War, NATO is an obsolete and harmful anachronism. It has morphed into a vehicle for the attainment of misguided American...

  Mike Dorning of Bloomberg has an interesting article on “The Slow Disappearance of the American Working Man.” The statistics set forth in the article are dire. Only 63.5% of American men have jobs, very near the low recorded in 2009, itself the lowest level of male participation in the labor force since these statistics...

  “La plupart de jeunes gens croient etre naturels, lorsqu’ils ne sont que mal polis et grossiers.” La Rochefoucauld’s caustic observation on the false simplicity of young people who mistake crudeness for nature tells us that the cult of the primitive antedates both Rousseau and the Romantic writers who wrought so much mischief.   Society...

  The most interesting Ron Paul Story these days is the Ron Paul Story.  What?  It’s like this.  I well understand why so many disgruntled and disgusted Republicans are turning in despair to a man who probably cannot get the nomination, much less win in a general election.  Paul’s supporters have come, however dimly, to...

  In the new millennium, the Americans acting badly are spoiled children who have never learned what it would mean to grow up.  100 years ago, this type was already  developing, and Booth Tarkington describes some of these characters in his fiction—the Penrod stories, Little Orvie, and, most effectively, the character of Georgie Minafer in...

Regardless of whether Muammar Qaddafy is killed, brought before the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague, or exiled, his regime has collapsed beyond recovery. After a five-month air war against his forces NATO has succeeded in decisively tipping the balance on the ground in favor of the rebels. This does not mean that the...

  The string of attacks on civilian and military targets in southern Israel by gunmen suspected to have crossed from Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula was a complex, carefully coordinated operation.  Israeli sources say that its intelligence services, army and police were taken by surprise by the scale and slick organization of the multiple assaults staged near Eilat. More serious than...

It used to be that plutocrats felt they were part of the society in which they lived, or at least felt the need to act as if they were part of that society. Thus, when they decided to give away some of their enormous fortunes, their gifts generally reflected ...

  “You’ve damaged your own race,” said Mayor Michael Nutter to the black youths of Philadelphia whose flash mobs have been beating and robbing shoppers in the fashionable district of downtown. “Take those God-darn hoodies down,” the mayor went on in his blistering lecture. “Pull your pants up and buy a belt, ’cause no one...

As a former resident of Winchmore Hill I am well familiar the surrounding areas of north London—Wood Green, Ponders End, Enfield…—affected by three successive nights of rioting and looting which has now spread to other parts of the capital. Burglaries, car thefts and vandalism started being ...

The decision by Standard & Poor's to strip the United States of its AAA credit rating, for the first time, has triggered a barrage of catcalls against the umpire from the press box and Obamaites. S&P, we are reminded, was giving A ratings to banks like Lehman Brothers, whose books ...

  He blew it. Two days before the United States was officially set to default on its debts on August 2, President Barack Obama had the Republicans where he wanted them. All he had to do was announce that he’d trudged the last half mile towards a deal, but that there is no pleasing fanatics...

  Awhile back the folks out in Seattle got in a dudgeon when they learned that their county, King, was named after William R.D. King, who was elected Vice-President in 1852. They wanted the world to know that the county was ever after to be considered as named for The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King,...

  The Republican Party is a stool that stands on three legs: social conservatives, economic conservatives and foreign policy conservatives. Yet since Ronald Reagan departed and George W. Bush arrived, that coalition has been under a growing strain that may yet pull it apart and redefine what conservatism means in 21st century America. Is a...

  A little perspective on the debt-ceiling fracas might not be amiss. And so… Whoever said it first spoke a mouthful: Rome wasn’t built in a day. To which I would add: congressmen didn’t build it either. Members of Congress bicker, bellow and throw nails under each other’s pickup tires seemingly trying to block meaningful...

Paul Youngblood and I will be on the air at 3-5 CDT today, chatting amiably about Syria and government-funded contraception–and anything else that comes up.  Please call in and save me from Rockford’s  rabid welfare dependents  who call up screaming insults. [Subscribe online to Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. Comments To post a comment,...

  Bernard Mandeville was a Dutch physician (b. 1670 in Rotterdam), who moved to England, apparently to learn the language.  In 1704 he published a poem of doggerel couplets, The Grumbling Hive, which he included in his 1714 book, The Fable of the Bees, Or, Private Vices, Public Benefits.  It is one of those rare books whose title...

  I have always been amazed at the sub-intellectual process by which liberals all know at almost the same time and in the same form what they are supposed to think.  It is amazing.  Of course, it has nothing to do with ideas or learning—it has to do entirely with attitude, fashion, and presenting oneself as...

  I am grateful to Dr. Trikovic for his reply to my response to his article defaming Archduke Otto since he thereby proves my case entirely. Not one of the challenges to his sources is he able to gainsay or rebut. The most he can do is claim some sort of generalised misinterpretation of his position. There is but...

  Much ill-informed and superficial nonsense has been published in recent weeks on the Habsburgs in general and on their role in the Balkans in particular. This is a pity because that role is genuinely interesting, often filled with drama and heroism, and in its final stages marked by hubris, folly, and tragedy. Well worth a...

  On August 1 The Daily Mail published an op-ed by Melanie Philips (“Hatred, smears and the liberals hell-bent on bullying millions of us into silence”) which warns that the baleful effects of Anders Breivik’s recent attacks in Norway have not been limited to the carnage of the day. The atrocity has produced a reaction on the...

  I am going to use the word “liberal” in a very broad sense to refer to the modern movement in ethics and politics that begins in the Renaissance, develops in the Enlightenment,  and culminates in the classical liberalism of the 19th century.   Socialism–and the other isms that have plagued European man for the past...

  Mr. James Bogle denies [“It is ludicrous”] that Otto von Habsburg was an enthusiastic supporter of the jihadist side in the Bosnian war. Since Habsburg’s support of the Muslim side in the Bosnian war is uncontentious, the claim is “ludicrous” only if Bogle denies that Alija Izetbegovic was a jihadist. On that subject the record is...

  I have started work on a piece analyzing the rights and wrongs of the classical liberal tradition.  To do it properly, I am going to review a number of major works in that tradition, specifically, Mandeville, Condorcet, Smith, Godwin, JS Mill, Fitzjames Stephen, and Hayek.  I do not intend to spend a great deal...

  In these scandal-sodden weeks, it’s been tough to write passionately about the fight here over deficit reduction. I look up from some wearisome bulletin on the latest maneuvers of the Gang of Six, and here’s Tristane Banon’s mother admitting to consensual, albeit “clearly brutal,” sex with Dominique Strauss-Kahn amid the filing cabinets in an...

  I read Dr. Srdja Trifkovic’s highly coloured article on ChroniclesMagazine.org about the recently deceased Archduke Otto of Austria with a mixture of surprise and concern.  Not a single one of his sources supported the entirely negative picture that he drew. Let’s see why. “Habsburg was an enthusiastic supporter of the Jihadist side in the Bosnian civil war,...

  “Like a fire bell in the night,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1820, “this momentous question … awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union.” Jefferson was writing of the sudden resurgence of the slavery issue in the debate on Missouri’s entry into the Union, as...

  In his 1,500-page European Declaration of Independence mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik approvingly quotes me and several other authors who have written critically about Islam, including Bat Ye’or, Robert Spencer, Andrew Bostom and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The exploitation of the connection followed promptly. “Norwegian butcher a product of Islamophobia” was last Monday’s banner headline in the Zaman, Turkey’s...

  It’s not that this wonderful land of ours has never known political fracases. A war that took place midway through the 19th century comes to mind. There was also, years later, if memory serves, an upheaval known as the New Deal, during whose course all manner of head-butting took place.   The redeeming feature...

Thanks to Tea Party fanatics, we are told, America just lost an historic opportunity to deal with her national debt. Because of Tea Party intransigence and threats against their own leader John Boehner, the speaker had to reject Obama's

[Transcript and video of Srdja Trifkovic’s RTTV interview] RT: By giving up wartime fugitives President Tadić may win the praise of EU leaders, but as Dr. Srdja Trifkovic, foreign affairs editor at Chronicles magazine told RT, this will hardly pave Serbia’s way to the EU. On Wednesday Serbian authorities ...

  Dear Friends: I am sorry to inform you that my long time friend and Rockford Institute board member Peter Stanlis has died from a combination of lymphoma and an untreatable lung disease.  Peter and his wife Joan had known for several months that the end was imminent. Gail and I managed to visit him...

  This morning’s Cleveland Plain Dealer carried a sad headline: Borders, the nation’s second largest bookstore, was liquidating, and its 10700 employees will be unemployed by the end of September. I first became familiar with Borders in law school, when there were only two of them: the first Borders in Ann Arbor, and one other store in...

Democracy: A sacred form of government invented by Abraham Lincoln in the Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address.  John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. also helped greatly in the invention of democracy. Democratic Elections: When the rulers permit the voters to keep on voting until they get it ...

Archduke Otto von Habsburg, who died on July 4 aged 98, became the heir to the imperial crown of Austria and the royal crown of Hungary when his father Charles ascended the throne of the multinational Dual Monarchy in November 1916. In the final decades of his life (1979-1999) he ...

  How much “diversity” can the West absorb before it is no longer the West and thus ceases to be a haven for people escaping their own non-Western “cultures”—which they bring with them? When and why did the critical shift occur in American mentality that caused “scholars” and journalists to stop reporting facts, events, and...

  The magnitude of Western self-deception and ignorance about the future of Egypt was exemplified by a feature article in The Washington Post last week (Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood could be unraveling, July 7). The influence and organizational abilities of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) have raised fears in the West and among Egypt’s secular and liberal groups that democracy may...

  Does television corrupt American morals or do American morals corrupt television? If there had never been any racist, sexist, homophobes, would the United States exist to give affirmative action to minorities? Does anyone in a position of authority or influence care that the American middle class, and therefore the country, is being demoralised and...

  By refusing to accept tax increases in a deal to raise the debt ceiling, Republicans are behaving like “fanatics,” writes David Brooks of The New York Times. Anti-tax Republicans “have no sense of moral decency,” he adds.   They are “willing to stain their nation’s honor” to “worship their idol.” If this “deal of the...

  In the U.S. mainstream media the developments that have followed the misnamed “Arab Spring” have been curiously under-reported. The reason seems clear: In recent weeks those developments have taken a clear turn away from Western-style democracy, pluralism, tolerance, respect for human rights, etc. (as we’ve warned,  repeatedly, that they would). The turmoil has undermined the region’s...

A few weeks ago, I hosted a local program on WNTA Radio for our new friend Paul Youngblood.  Paul has invited me to join him every Friday at 3. Call (815) 874-8255 to take part in the discussion.  I’d like to help Paul make this the liveliest talk show from Chicago to Madison. Listen Live...

The most significant aspect of President Obama’s speech on the Middle East (May 19) is the absence of a plan to revive the “Peace Process.” The passing storm over his statements regarding the 1967 borders notwithstanding, it is already evident that there will be no new initiatives in the months ...