A little over a year ago I got a note from a reader who told me she was leaving her present job for a better one. She was climbing the ladder of success and… heading home. That’s right, her new job was one which the corporate world might frown upon, with responsibilities including changing diapers,...

“Mandalorian” star Gina Carano made headlines this week when she was fired from Disney. Her crime? Authoring a social media post comparing the censorship of conservatives to Nazi persecution. Disney’s decision set off a salvo of justified attacks on the company. But while the self-righteous anger is gratifying to fans both of Carano’s acting and...

It has been a dreadful three months for the Grand Old Party.           On Nov. 3, President Donald Trump seemed to have lost the White House by narrowly losing three crucial blue states he had won in 2016—Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—and Georgia and Arizona as well. Trump immediately mounted an acrimonious two-month...

Two weeks to “slow the spread” proved to be a lie as state government stay-at-home orders stretched on and on, being taken away and reintroduced at the whims of governors rather than by acts of the various legislatures. Even when we were permitted out of our homes, they imposed rules on who we could visit,...

Accounts from individuals, many unknown to Americans, who gave their treasures and lives to defy totalitarianism fill Rod Dreher’s latest book, Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents. Their stories should inspire all of us in the age of fear and fraud we now inhabit. But there’s one problem—a huge problem—with Dreher’s take on...

Because of offensive tweets posted by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., before she won office, House Democrats joined by 11 Republicans voted to strip her of her committee assignments. If this is the new standard, can we apply this to the Rev. Al Sharpton, aka a Democratic “kingmaker,” whose support was solicited by every major...

We live in an era of unprecedently widespread lying. Yet lying itself, is an art—albeit an unadmirable one—in decline in a decadent age. Our leaders have set a spectacularly bad example. Former President Trump lied continually and shamelessly, as do his noisiest enemies and his successor. But they are bad liars—clumsy, unconvincing, and incredibly short-sighted,...

Liberals rarely defend the property rights of corporations, so it is quite amusing that scores of them are arguing that social media companies have the right to deplatform rogue actors. Unfortunately, by making free speech the crux of the argument conservatives have ceded the debate to liberals.  Instead, we should be asking ourselves if companies can arbitrarily...

Every once in a while, I speak by phone with the editors of some of the publications I write for. In my most recent conversations with two of them, they conveyed the same basic message. They reminded me they want articles with a positive vision of the future. Realistic, but without the doom and gloom...

In 1989, Japanese businessman Minoru Isutani purchased Pebble Beach’s famous golf course for $850 million, and Mitsubishi Estate Company paid $846 million for 51 percent of New York’s Rockefeller Center. The United States cowered from the kamikaze attack of Japanese capital on American business. American students swamped Japanese language programs, as the Land of the Rising...

To Parliament, in the London of George III, the Boston Massacre of 1770, and the Tea Party of 1773 were not seen in the same light as they were by the Sons of Liberty in the Massachusetts colony. To Parliament, this was mob violence, and the shooting and killing at Lexington and Concord were acts...

I couldn’t believe my eyes. TIME published an article entitled: “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.” Having been constantly told by the media in recent months that conspiracy theories and underground movements are bad, one would not be blamed for turning tail and running as far away as possible from...

Leonid Ilych Brezhnev presided over the irreversible decline of the USSR during his 18 years in power, initially as Secretary-General of the Soviet Communist Party and later also as chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. He was two years younger than Joseph Biden is today when he died in 1982, but – just...

1959: I was eight years old. Had someone told me I would one day own and operate a bed-and-breakfast, homeschool my kids, and possess a laptop that allowed me to write instant letters to far-away friends or read newspapers from England, such predictions would have boggled my mind. “Homeschool,” “laptop,” and so on were words...

When it was learned in 2016 that Russia may have hacked the emails of John Podesta and the DNC, and passed the fruits on to WikiLeaks to aid candidate Donald Trump, mighty was the outrage of the American establishment. If Russia’s security services filched those emails, and a troll farm in Saint Petersburg sent tweets and...

Last Sunday, Chris Wallace solemnly called attention to what he regards as a growing embarrassment in Congress: A Georgia representative, Marjorie Taylor Greene, whom Democrats have now stripped of all assignments in their august body because she refuses to keep her mouth shut. Congresswoman Greene thinks the presidential election on Nov. 3 was full of...

“The science is settled” is a phrase often used to shut down debate. But perhaps the phrase would be more accurate if it was recast as “the theology is settled,” especially in relation to climate change, in which environmentalists pursue an aggressive response to remedying the apocalyptic consequences facing the earth. The rationale behind using...

The GameStop saga shows some “equity” movements are more equal than others. Stakeholder theory, the corporate version of social justice, attempts to install this hopelessly amorphous concept of “equity” in the business world. Equity, unlike equality, demands different treatment of individuals and different distribution of resources based on need, identity, and historical injustices. But now...

Had I told Democratic friends around the turn of the 21st century that in 2021 their party would insist that a biological man identifying as a woman should be treated as a woman in sports competitions, they would have laughed me under the table. Yet here’s Joe Biden, their man in the White House, claiming that...

The Berlin Tagesspiegel recently went after a young Protestant theologian whom naïve readers might have mistaken for a polite, unassuming scholar. This figure was outed by an academic colleague who discovered that he wrote for “new Right” publications, a term that in the German context should be understood quite broadly. One of the venues of this putative extremist...

The insufferable Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) was in the news again, having discoursed at length on social media about her experience during the bizarre events in the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The video showcases what she does best: talk lugubriously about herself and all the things that are causing her pain and suffering. Here’s some of...

I can’t claim to be much of a poetry buff, but upon seeing a footnote reference to a poem called “The Gods of the Copybook Headings,” I was too intrigued to ignore it. Upon hunting down a copy, I found 10 stanzas of verse written by Rudyard Kipling in 1919. The “copybook headings” featured in...

Sparked by the Black Lives Matter movement, cities across the United States went up in flames last year, beset with looters, agitators, and killers. As leaves, and ashes, fell softly last autumn, homicide rates began to soar nationwide as $1 billion-plus in claims registered on the insurance industry’s books, making these riots the most destructive in American history.  Even so,...

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Each morning’s internet headlines bring a new version of crazy. This morning was no different. In her article “PETA: Using Animal Names as Verbal Insults Is Supremacist Language,” Catherine Smith reports that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is decrying the use of insults and anti-animal slurs...

Everything old is new again. The corruptocracy of the Obama administration is back with a vengeance in the White House. Once more, the “S” in “DHS” stands not for security—but for sleaze. Our nation is back for sale to the highest foreign bidders and their “America last” cronies. Last Thursday, the Senate Homeland Security Committee...

“Never allow a good crisis (to) go to waste. It’s an opportunity to do the things you once thought were impossible.” Thus did chief of staff Rahm Emanuel advise Barack Obama on the financial crisis he inherited in 2009.            Following the Capitol riot by a mob of pro-Donald Trump protesters,...

Gun rights activist Dana Loesch recently complained that she had been denied the right to respond to her critics on Twitter, according to a story reported in the New York Post. Unlike her adversaries, who are free to swing away at her, Loesch is not allowed to use Twitter’s fact-checking platform to correct their misstatements. Loesch...

A comic from NPR caught my eye the other day. Promising to tell parents “how to raise informed, active citizens,” the scrawled images and text stressed the importance of civics and made several recommendations on how parents can work instruction of this topic into everyday life. The suggestions range from using fun and games, to...

It’s after 4 o’clock on a Monday afternoon, and I just walked to my mailbox and received a check from the federal government for $600. And I am furious. Here are a few reasons why. First, I am self-employed. I work eight to nine hours every day, seven days a week, writing articles for outfits...

The Baseball Writers’ Association of America (BBWAA) continues to block Curt Schilling’s entry to the Hall of Fame, not because of his performance on the field, but because of his politics. What should have been a straight-forward decision finalized years ago was tarnished by sports journalists’ horror at Schilling’s bold proclamation of conservative views. Apparently...

As soon as the Senate received the lone article of impeachment accusing President Donald Trump of “incitement of insurrection” in the Jan. 6 mob assault on the Capitol, Rand Paul rose to object. The Senate, he said, has no right to try a private citizen, which Trump now is. Thus, what we are about to...

The Crusader Strategy: Defending the Holy Land, by Steve Tibble (Yale University Press; 376 pp., $35.00). If one gets his Crusades history from Karen Armstrong or the History Channel, one is likely to think that nasty and brutish Franks went off half-cocked to the Holy Land to rape, pillage, and enslave peaceful Muslims. This is an ignorant...

“There is more than one way to burn a book,” Ray Bradbury once said. “And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.” Bradbury wrote the novel Fahrenheit 451 about a world that systematically burned books. In late December, I resolved to try and read more books than those I review for Western North...

The unifying strand in conservatism as a movement and the GOP as a political operation is a superficial desire to limit and eschew power. This position is sloganized in exhortations against “big government,” against “socialism,” against the noxious fumes of power. But movement conservatives, like their political counterparts, are quite all right with both the...

Sputnik News carried a live interview on Jan. 25 with Srdja Trifkovic on the social and political climate in the United States in the aftermath of President Joseph Biden’s inauguration. We bring you Dr. Trifkovic’s translation of some key segments of that interview. Q:        [At 7 min. 55 sec.] How seriously should we take the warnings that America...

The political jargon and posturing one hears these days seems to suggest that we are in an era unlike any that has ever occurred before. Hope springs anew, there is light at the end of the tunnel, politicians gush, and for those of our elites who really want to impress with their knowledge of history,...

A Small Farm Future, by Chris Smaje (Chelsea Green Publishing; 320 pp., $22.50). Chris Smaje is probably the only sociologist-turned-farmer in England. This unusually ecologically-aware agriculturist hopes the sobering effects of COVID-19 will help reset society by restructuring rural areas. Food chains are fragile due to population pressure and economic and ecological challenges, and Smaje says there...

“COVID is where you die.” So said my three-year-old grandson, John Henry, when I asked him what he knew about COVID-19. Like many of my readers, I come across online articles warning of the negative effects of the virus on young people nearly every day. While only a tiny number of them have died from...

Here’s the answer to that question right off the bat: Joe didn’t go anywhere. Instead, our culture, our lawmakers, our pundits, and others made him invisible. They have erased Average Joe. And Average Josephine too, for that matter. Who today really speaks for the barber in Weaverville, North Carolina who just spent eight hours on...

“The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States… does not challenge that position.” Thus did President Nixon, in the Shanghai Communique of 1972, accept China’s territorial claim to the island of Taiwan....

Fraser Myers recently asked at Spiked how blacks and Latinos could vote for Donald Trump and in some cases enthusiastically join demonstrations for him, given the supposedly obvious fact that that Trump is a white supremacist. According to Myers, New York University professor Cristina Beltrán answered this troubling question in the Washington Post in a memorable gloss on “whiteness”:...

During the 2016 presidential campaign, candidate Donald Trump spoke and acted like every coastal globalist’s nightmare. Criticizing the European Union as America’s devious competitor, Trump called both the World Trade Organization and NAFTA “disasters.” NATO was obsolete, he said, Crimea was none of our business, and better relations were needed between Washington and Moscow. Advising Obama to stay out of Syria,...

I loved Little House on the Prairie when I was little, but as I grew older, my favorite story from this series of novels centered not on Laura Ingalls’ childhood, but on that of her husband, Almanzo. The youngest of four children growing up in 19th century New York, Almanzo and his siblings were once...

My wife and I recently watched The Vow on HBO Max. It’s a nine-part documentary about NXIVM (pronounced “NEX-ee-um”), an organization that claimed to provide personal and professional development training programs. Think Scientology in its early days, when it was an unorthodox therapy program without all the sci-fi religious mythology. Like Scientology, its true nature was much more sinister. NXIVM quickly...

With Inauguration Day behind us, ink spilled on politics is being diverted from Donald Trump and the transition of power to Joe Biden and the exercise of power. One such piece by Jeffrey D. Sachs over at CNN takes a rather disingenuous approach to this theme, calling a small government approach “reckless radicalism.” Rather than...

First the crazies tore down statues they deemed offensive. Next they vandalized churches. Then they demanded trigger warnings on classic movies like Gone with the Wind and Blazing Saddles. If these monsters ever discover libraries, books will be next. Let me suggest you hoard copies of William McNeill’s The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (1963) before...

“We have met the enemy and he is us,” said Walt Kelly’s cartoon character Pogo, half a century ago, about what we Americans were doing to our environment. Rereading President Joe Biden’s inaugural address, Pogo’s remark comes to mind.            Biden began on a lofty, hopeful and familiar note: “This is a...

Many argue that whiteness is a major problem in America. On the internet one can find scores of articles depicting the perceived racism of white Americans as the genesis of all ailments. Those who are steeped in history, however, are aware that Western society is distinctly individualistic and open to new ideas. For example, today one is far more likely to find white people...

National Review has found yet another reason to hate Trump, whom it has attacked relentlessly for over four years. It seems that among his multiple shortcomings, according to Frank Lavin, a supporter of Republican Voters Against Trump in 2020, Donald Trump was not the Gipper. In fact, he caused the Republican Party to deviate grievously from Reagan’s...

At the Jan. 6 rally in Washington D.C., those of us entering the VIP section were required to throw our tote bags in the trash. We divvied up various items, threw the rest away, and entered the grounds. When we left the rally, someone had emptied all of those cans onto the street and the...