How much do you remember about 9/11? Almost certainly—unless you are quite young—you know the basics: Islamic terrorists hijacked planes and flew them into targets in New York City and Washington, D.C. But do you remember how many American victims were murdered that day? In Mitchell Zuckoff’s book published last year, Fall and Rise: The...

If Donald Trump loses the election, history will attribute his defeat to a pandemic that killed 200,000 Americans during his reelection campaign, and a historic depression deliberately induced to put the economy in a coma as the nation suffered through that pandemic. But despite the worst hand dealt a sitting president since Herbert Hoover in...

For the majority of Egypt’s Christians, the Sisi government is far from ideal, but preferable to any likely alternative. The Copts (“Copt” being derived from the Greek Αἰγύπτιος, “Egyptian”) still suffer from various forms of discrimination, but at least Christians are not formally reduced to the status of dhimmis, second-class citizens under Sharia, which was...

I’m back in Egypt six months after my brief foray into Sinai in February and a year and a half since my last grand tour of this remarkable country. This is a good time to visit. There are no crowds at the sights. Red Sea resorts are half-empty and ridiculously cheap. It is still rather...

When U.S. cities erupted after the death of George Floyd, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser was in the vanguard of the protests, renaming a section of downtown Black Lives Matter Plaza, and painting the name in letters on the street so huge they could be seen from space. Thursday, however, Bowser awoke to those same BLM...

In response to the recent riots and protests, America’s biggest companies have committed hundreds of millions of dollars to so-called racial justice organizations such as Black Lives Matter (BLM) and denounced political speech on the right as hate. The conservative establishment has greeted this rise in corporate “wokeness” with a mixture of surprise, fury, and a sense of betrayal.  In reality, it’s...

In northeast Syria last week, a U.S. military vehicle collided with a Russian armored vehicle, injuring four American soldiers. Both the Americans and Russians blame each other for failing to follow established rules of the road. Had an American been killed, we could have had a crisis on our hands. Query: With the ISIS caliphate...

Is Joe Biden forfeiting the law-and-order issue to Donald Trump? So it would seem. “Republicans Use Law and Order As Rallying Cry” was the top headline on The New York Times‘ front-page story on Vice President Mike Pence’s acceptance speech at Fort McHenry Wednesday night. The Wall Street Journal Page One headline echoed the Times:...

Democratic Party presidential candidate Joe Biden has vowed to end President Trump’s “Muslim travel ban” on his first day in office and to fight “Islamicphobia”. The supposed “Muslim travel ban,” which was signed by Trump in January 2017, blocked most immigrants and travelers from Iran, Libya, Somalia, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen. Of the five majority-Muslim...

As Donald Trump is about to be nominated for a second term, how his presidency has already altered the orientation of his party is on display. Under Trump, the GOP ceased to be a party of small government whose yardstick of success was how close it came to a balanced budget. Trump signed on, this...

As a cradle Catholic and recipient of Notre Dame’s Laetare Medal, Joe Biden is outspoken in declaring that the principles and beliefs of his Catholic faith guide his public life. “Joe is a man of faith,” was a recurring theme at the Democratic convention that nominated him to become our second Catholic president. Biden has...

Speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union” recently, House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn likened President Donald Trump to Benito Mussolini. The South Carolina lawmaker opined that Trump “plans to install himself in some kind of emergency way to continue to hold on to office.” “The American people had better wake up,” Clyburn declared. “I know a...

Characteristic of Conservatism Inc. for several decades now has been the practice of having politically correct spokespersons expressing its talking points. Fox News is full of black guests who are encouraged to say what the white hosts are terrified of stating lest they be accused of racism or sexism. Candace Owens, a very attractive black...

If the definition of racism is deliberate discrimination based on race, color, or national origin, Yale University appears to be a textbook case of “systemic racism.” And, so, the Department of Justice contends. Last week, Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband charged that “Yale discriminates based on race… in its undergraduate admissions process, and that race...

Accused of being a serial harasser in 2019, Joe Biden did what comes naturally. He apologized for perceived past misbehavior, and, to appease his accusers, pledged to choose a woman for a Biden ticket. Reacting to the racial rage that erupted after the death of George Floyd under the knee of a white Minneapolis cop,...

Since the death of George Floyd beneath the knee of a cop in Minneapolis on Memorial Day, the nation has been instructed by its cultural elites that this is the daily reality that a racist America has too long ignored. Our nation, it was shouted in our faces, is a place where white cops harass,...

President Trump has taken significant criticism for his recent comments on low-income government housing from a speech in Texas late last month: You know the suburbs, people fight all of their lives to get into the suburbs and have a beautiful home… There will be no more low-income housing forced into the suburbs.… It’s been going...

When Vice President Calvin Coolidge ascended to the presidency on the death of Warren Harding in 1923, a wag remarked that Silent Cal’s career had exhibited unmistakable signs of celestial intervention. Governor Coolidge vaulted to national attention during the Boston police strike of 1919, where, in a stinging letter to Sam Gompers of the AFL,...

“When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.” This was the nightmare of Ben Franklin. Yet, with passage this spring of a $4 trillion bailout of an economy facing historic losses because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and Nancy Pelosi’s House having voted out another $3...

The extravagant tributes conferred by the conservative establishment on the onetime civil rights leader and longtime Atlanta Democratic congressman John Lewis are as ineffectual as they are utterly tasteless. Lewis’s moments of fame came when he accompanied Martin Luther King, Jr., on his March on Washington in 1963, demonstrating for what became the Voting Rights Act....

The outspoken, courageous conservative criminologist and prolific writer Mike Adams has died at age 55. Tragically, he took his own life, struggling under an unbelievable burden he has borne for years now as a result of the fact that he stood up so fearlessly to the bullying of the increasingly irrational leftist orthodoxy that dominates...

There is a real possibility that, this coming week, Joe Biden will be selecting the 47th president of the United States. For the woman Biden picks—he has promised to exclude from consideration all men, black, brown, white, or Asian—has a better chance of succeeding to the presidency than any vice-presidential nominee in U.S. history, other...

A Chronicles website reader self-identified as “bigfish92672” took exception to my statement (“Back to the Mosque,” July 22) that “[i]n the awful annals of the 20th century, two instances of genocide stand out,” the Nazi mass murder of European Jews and the Ottoman mass murder of Armenians. “No Holodomor, comrade?” commented he (or she) with...

With the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse under nightly siege from violent radicals, and Portland’s police hard-pressed to protect it, President Trump sent in federal agents to secure the building. The reaction from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi: “The use of stormtroopers under the guise of law and order is a tactic that is...

Have you seen the polls lately? I’m referring to those surveys which the media tout as predictors of how Donald Trump will fare in the November election. If you look at these polls and support the President’s reelection bid, a feeling of doom and gloom has probably set in. If this is how you feel,...

How great a burden can even an unrivaled superpower carry before it buckles and breaks? We may be about to find out. Rome was the superpower of its time, ruling for centuries almost the entirety of what was then called the civilized world.  Great Britain was a superpower of its day, but she bled, bankrupted,...

Just after 1 a.m. on July 22, 2019, Tyler Wingate, a 24-year-old white male, was driving on Livernois in Detroit when Lawrence Davis, a 24-year-old black male, bumped into him. The two pulled into a gas station to resolve the minor fender bender. Both got out of their cars. Wingate took one step when Davis...

(This is part three of Prof. Trifkovic’s three-part series, “Reflections on the Tragedy of the Hagia Sophia.” Read part two here.) In a speech at Blackheath in 1876, Britain’s former Prime Minister William Gladstone told the Ottomans, “You shall retain your titular sovereignty, your empire shall not be invaded, but never again, as the years...

Is her racial diversity America’s greatest strength? So we are told. Yet, even before America becomes a majority-minority nation, 25 years from now, recent changes in the composition of the country are going to impact both parties in 2020.            According to Brookings Institution demographer William Frey, between 2010 and 2020,...

(This is part two of Prof. Trifkovic’s three-part series, “Reflections on the Tragedy of the Hagia Sophia.” Read part one here.) The Ottoman zenith was reached in the 16th century, when the Turks controlled Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, the Arabian Peninsula, held Persia at bay, and pushed into central Europe after defeating the Hungarians at Mohács. The decline...

In the Great Church where the holy gifts were revealed, the King of all, there came to them a voice from heaven, from the mouth of the angels: ‘Leave off your psalter, put away the holy gifts. Send word to the land of the Franks to come and take them: Let them come and take the...

Is the U.S., preoccupied with a pandemic and a depression that medical crisis created, prepared for a collision with China over Beijing’s claims to the rocks, reefs, and resources of the South China Sea? For that is what Mike Pompeo appeared to threaten this week. “The world will not allow Beijing to treat the South...

I’ve suspected that the America First mandate perished sometime in early 2017. The Alabama Senate GOP primary runoff between Jeff Sessions and Tommy Tuberville, where Trump endorsed the latter and mocked the former when he lost, is something like a nail in the coffin. Sessions, regardless of what Trump’s most devoted followers have to say about his...

The contrived conviction of Roger Stone showed that America has a profoundly serious problem with its legal system. The reaction to President Trump’s commutation of Stone’s sentence by mainline media, and former and current prosecutors tells us that the president himself is likely to be prosecuted after leaving office. The roots of this problem lie...

I had to double-check recently that the Civil War actually did end in 1865. I wondered whether this was still the case after hearing Republican spokesmen and Conservative Inc. celebrities demonizing Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and other 19th century Southern leaders. American history seems to grow more hateful to our establishment conservatives as the...

On July 22, 1988, after the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, the party nominee, Gov. Michael Dukakis, enjoyed a 17-point lead over Vice President George W. Bush. Five weeks later, on Labor Day, Dukakis was down eight points, the same margin by which he would lose the election. He had lost 25 points in one...

Before our Black Lives Matter moment, one had not thought of the NBC networks as shot through with “systemic racism.” Yet, what other explanation is there for this week’s draconian personnel decision of NBCUniversal chairman Cesar Conde? According to Conde, the white share of NBC’s workforce, now 74 percent and divided evenly between men and...

Now that a federal appellate court has ordered the dismissal of the case against Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, and outgoing intelligence chief Rick Grenell has released classified documents which cast the activities of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in a horrendous light, the depth of corruption within our nation’s chief domestic intelligence agency is abundantly clear....

Speaking at Mount Rushmore on Friday, and from the White House lawn on Saturday, July 4, Donald Trump recast the presidential race. He seized upon an issue that can turn his fortunes around, and the wounded howls of the media testify to the power of his message. Standing beneath the mammoth carved images of Presidents...

During the last few days, those of us who have questioned Conservatism Inc.’s willingness to stand up to the cultural left seem to have received new allies. David Marcus at The Federalist, Thomas D. Klingenstein at the Claremont Institute, and the commentator Mark Steyn on Tucker Carlson’s program have all been taking shots at the...

On the Fourth of July near the end of the 18th century, citizens of Boston paraded into the church that gave birth to the first Tea Party movement. The city’s board of selectmen, the executive arm of the town government, had announced that Congressmen John Lowell, a Harvard-educated lawyer and notable of the founding generation,...

The Seattle Commune is no more. Declared three weeks ago by radical leftists as CHAZ, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, rechristened CHOP, the Capitol Hill Occupation Protest, the six-block enclave inside Seattle ceased to exist July 1. The cops shut it down. As Marx said, history repeats itself, first as tragedy then as farce. If...

Now that statues of Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Grant, and Theodore Roosevelt have been desecrated, vandalized, toppled, and smashed, it appears Woodrow Wilson’s time has come. The cultural revolution has come to the Ivy League. Though Wilson attended Princeton as an undergraduate, taught there, and served from 1902 to 1910 as president, his name...

The great and good French novelist and thinker Jean Raspail died on June 13, three weeks short of his 95th birthday. I was deeply saddened by the news, although at his age it was to be expected. It is ironic that he succumbed to the COVID-19 virus, the product and totemic symbol of our age...

Some polls now have Joe Biden running ahead of Donald Trump by 10 points and sweeping the battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. This vindicates the strategy Biden’s advisers have adopted: Confine Joe to his basement, no press conferences. Trot him out to recite carefully scripted messages for the cameras. Then lead him back...

On October 11, 2019, President Donald J. Trump commemorated Christopher Columbus’s discovery of America with these memorable words: On October 12, 1492, after a perilous, two-month journey across the treacherous Atlantic Ocean, Christopher Columbus and his crew aboard the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria landed in what is today the Bahamas. This watershed voyage ushered...

The left’s war on America’s past crossed several new frontiers last week. Portland’s statue of George Washington, the Father of his Country and the first president of the United States, the greatest man of his age, was toppled and desecrated. While the statue stood, an American flag was draped over its head and set ablaze....

My new anthology, The Vanishing Tradition: Perspectives in Conservatism (from the Cornell and Northern Illinois University presses) does not paint a flattering picture of the present conservative movement. The general impression conveyed by the contributors to this volume is that the movement is driven by the demands of sponsors who do not have a single...

Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met for seven hours at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii with the chief architect of China’s foreign policy, Yang Jiechi. The two had much to talk about. As The Washington Post reports, the “bitterly contentious relationship” between our two countries has “reached the lowest point in almost half...

The American news media with hardly any exceptions is propagating a falsehood, a lie which is fatal to what remains of the old American republic. Practically all our political leaders, including most Republicans and establishment conservatives, have bought into it. America at its core, goes the narrative, is a racist society, drenched in historic systemic...