The left talks often about so-called white privilege. Being “white” is a privilege, in that it is a privilege to be a biological, spiritual, and moral heir of the best civilization the world has known, from the Old Testament and Homer via Rome and Constantinople, via the leftward turn of the Renaissance and the heresy...
Who’s afraid of being labeled homophobic? A great many people, that’s who, importuned incessantly by the liberal media and other keepers of the woke flame of proper public behavior. That behavior trends ever more left-wing, collectivist, and anti-Western—following Barack Obama’s “arc of the moral universe.” The Supreme Court’s recent decision to enshrine anti-discrimination protections for...
“Can we all just get along?” That was the plea of Rodney King after a Simi Valley jury failed to convict any of the four cops who beat him into submission after a 100-mile-an-hour chase on an LA freeway. King’s plea came after the 1992 LA riots, the worst since the New York City draft...
T-Mobile and ABC, owned by Disney Company, will stop advertising on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show in view of his scandalous comments on the Black Lives Matter movement. Or so I’ve just learned. On Saturday, the news host referred to the protests as “Black Lives Matter riot.” Carlson also asked why he was “required to...
On Gen. George Washington’s orders, the Declaration of Independence, signed in Philadelphia, was read aloud to his army. On hearing it, the troops marched to Bowling Green, decapitated and pulled down the statue of George III, and sent the remnants to be melted down into musket balls. It was a revolutionary act, a symbolic statement....
It is impossible to present a coherent and forthright analysis of the causes, character, and likely consequences of the misnamed “protests” in the U.S. mainstream media. The same restraint on free speech and thought applies to most of Western Europe, and notably to the Federal Republic in which denazification has led to de-Germanization. It is...
Allow me to express my displeasure bordering on nausea over the predictably gutless way in which Conservative Inc. and its most prominent representatives have responded to the riots in American cities. Although our authorized conservatives have indicated that vandalism, mayhem, and killing should not be tolerated on our streets, and although they generally accept President...
Newly painted in huge yellow letters on 16th Street, just north of the White House, is the slogan: “Defund the Police.” That new message sits beside the “Black Lives Matter” slogan, also in huge letters, painted there at the direction of D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser. She renamed that section of 16th Street “Black Lives Matter...
In his statement to The Atlantic magazine, former Defense Secretary General James Mattis says of the events of the last 10 days that have shaken the nation as it has not been shaken since 1968: “We must not be distracted by a small number of lawbreakers.” Is “a small number of lawbreakers” an apt description of wilding...
On June second, Dr. Trifkovic gave an interview to Serbia’s most popular morning news program, Pink TV’s Novo jutro (The New Morning) on the ongoing disorder in American cities. We bring you a slightly abbreviated transcript of his remarks in English. The first question concerned the causes and background of these extraordinary events. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTniTDXM4kE [Transcript starts...
Saturday the mob descended on my hometown of Cleveland. With the police operating under rules that rendered them largely impotent, the vandals had their way, and business after business was sacked. The charming downtown that had impressed so many visitors to the city during the Republican convention, NBA Finals, and World Series just four years before was devastated, perhaps permanently...
On the fifth night of rioting, looting and arson in Minneapolis, the criminal elements were driven from the streets. By whom? By the same cops who had been the constant objects of media derision and mob hatred. Without the thin blue line, far larger sectors of dozens of America’s cities would be in ruins, burned...
As I began to contemplate the theater of the absurd that we Americans have been living through in recent days, I found the most useful place to begin was an essay by Sam Francis published in Chronicles 26 years ago, “Anarcho-Tyranny USA.” In this long, thoughtful piece, Francis contrasts the eagerness to criminalize what had...
In his half-century in national politics, Joe Biden has committed more than his fair share of gaffes. Wednesday, he confused Pearl Harbor Day, Dec. 7, 1941, with D-Day, June 6, 1944. The more serious recent gaffe, a beaut, came at the close of a recent contentious interview with black activist Charlamagne tha God. A miffed...
Recent polls show that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo enjoys a popularity rating among New Yorkers that is somewhere in the stratosphere. His ratings remained high, around 80 percent, even after we learned about his “fateful mistake” leading to the deaths of more than 4,500 elderly COVID patients. Fox News polls also indicate that Biden would trounce Trump...
Is the U.S. up for a second Cold War—this time with China? What makes the question newly relevant is that Xi Jinping’s China suddenly appears eager for a showdown with the United States for long-term supremacy in the Asia-Pacific and the world. With the U.S. consumed by the coronavirus pandemic that has killed 100,000 Americans and...
My father, Harry S. Cathey, was a World War II veteran. He left behind letters to my mother written from France and Germany in 1944 and 1945. Some of the words and designations are obviously in a code they had between them—he could not identify locations in the combat zone. What comes through above all...
On March 24, President Donald Trump said he wanted the country and the economy “opened up and just raring to go by Easter.” Easter came and went. And Trump was mocked for being aspirational and unrealistic. Yet, with Ascension Thursday at hand, 40 days after Easter, the president seems to have been ahead of his time....
Four weeks ago I posted an article examining some likely geopolitical implications of the COVID-19 epidemic. The first among those concerned attempts by major oil producers to halt the collapse of prices by agreeing to the largest production cut in history. I noted that it was uncertain whether the agreement would be enough to push...
“We have met the moment and we have prevailed,” said President Donald Trump Monday, as he supported the opening of the U.S. economy before the shutdown plunges us into a deep and lasting depression. Tuesday, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s leading expert on infectious diseases, made clear to a Senate committee his contradictory views....
Lately, my progressive acquaintances and the mainstream media seem unable to complete a thought without mentioning the importance of “public health.” These days, if Governor Ralph Northam of Virginia decides to take away people’s guns, he’s only doing so to improve the public health. If he then wishes to extend abortion rights to women who...
Free speech, open inquiry, and serious academic discussion are now being construed as the fruits of racism, white supremacy, sexism, or homophobia in my state of North Carolina. Differing points of view, once the hallmark of our college education system, are now routinely suppressed, and increasingly by professors and pusillanimous administrators at our universities. A...
Under fire for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump, his campaign and his party are moving to lay blame for the 80,000 U.S. dead at the feet of the Communist Party of China and, by extension, its longtime General Secretary, President Xi Jinping. “There is a significant amount of evidence” that the...
Over the weekend, Never Trumper Erick Erickson put up a profanity-laced series of tweets in which he berated pro-Trump conservatives for criticizing the lockdown that has shuttered many businesses, closed down most churches, stopped most medical procedures and examinations, and isolated most Americans from friends and family for two months or so. According to Erickson,...
The most destructive war in history ended in Europe shortly after 9 p.m. on May 8, 1945, when Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel signed the final German Instrument of Surrender. Over the past seven and a half decades millions of words have been written about World War II, but some of its aspects remain contentious to...
After Pearl Harbor, FDR declared that his role of “Dr. New Deal” had been superseded, replaced by his new role, “Dr. Win the War.” Tuesday, President Donald Trump signaled that, in the war on the coronavirus pandemic, he, too, is executing a strategic pivot. Where the medical crisis had been the central front, pulling the...
As of April 30, the coronavirus pandemic has killed 61,500 Americans in two months and induced the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. And if history is our guide, the economic crisis, which has produced 30 million unemployed Americans in six weeks, may prove more enduring, ruinous, and historic than the still-rising and tragic death...
The fate of Karen Whitsett, a black Democratic representative to the Michigan House of Representatives, who was censured by her fellow black Democrats from Detroit, for developing good relations with President Trump, speaks volumes. It tells us, if any further proof were required, how deeply American blacks hate the Republican Party and any black person...
Is America, in lockdown, with 26 million unemployed and entering a new depression, up for a confrontation and Cold War with China? For that appears to be where the GOP wishes to lead us. According to Politico, a 57-page memo from Mitch McConnell’s senatorial committee instructs GOP candidates to blame the coronavirus pandemic on China,...
“War is the health of the state,” wrote the progressive Randolph Bourne during the First World War, after which he succumbed to the Spanish flu. America’s war on the coronavirus pandemic promises to be no exception to the axiom. However long this war requires, the gargantuan state will almost surely emerge triumphant. Currently, the major expenditures...
After the Great Pandemic has passed and we emerge from Great Depression II, what will be America’s mission in the world? What will be America’s cause? We have been at such a turning point before. After World War II, Americans wanted to come home. But we put aside our nation-building to face the challenge of...
Political magazines have long relied on donors to ensure their continued existence. This is true of Chronicles, but it’s also been true of mainstream organs of conservatism such as the National Review. William F. Buckley, Jr., would often pen letters to donors which asserted that the magazine was “dead broke.” In one such letter from...
While researching a book on antifascism, it became clear to me that the contemporary left has strange ideas about what earlier leftists believed. This is especially true in the ascription of a certain timelessness to intersectional politics, which today’s antifascists are all about. In How Fascism Works by Yale Philosophy Professor Jason Stanley, and in...
Among the works that first brought Henry Kissinger to academic acclaim was A World Restored, his 1950s book about how the greatest diplomats of Europe met at the Congress of Vienna to restore order to a continent shattered by the Napoleonic Wars. The balance-of-power peace these men achieved lasted—with the significant exception of the...
The same day the number of U.S. dead from the coronavirus disease hit the 15,000 mark, we also crossed the 15 million mark on the number of Americans we threw out of work to slow its spread and “bend the curve.” For each American lost to the pandemic, 1,000 Americans have lost their jobs because...
Easter may not bring America the victory in the war against the coronavirus pandemic that President Donald Trump anticipated. But in this Holy Week, we may be reaching our Saratoga moment, our turning point. While New York state reported a record number of deaths from the virus on Tuesday, over 1,800, new hospitalizations were down....
For declaring in March that the U.S. economy might be reopened by Easter, President Donald Trump was roundly mocked. Yet, it appears his political instincts were correct. He was more in tune with his country than were his critics. By early Easter week, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the governors of six states in the New...
In the third week of April, the nation remained absorbed by the epidemic and its immediate effects, to the exclusion of most other concerns at home or abroad. This does not mean that the struggle for power and resources in the great, wide Hobbesian world has been suspended. It continues, just as the Hundred Years’...
Pope Francis recently said he believes the coronavirus epidemic is “nature’s response” to humanity’s failure to address human-induced climate change. Asked by British journalist and papal biographer Austen Ivereigh if the current crisis provided an opportunity for an “ecological conversion,” the pontiff repeated his previously stated belief that humanity had provoked nature by not responding adequately...
“Fortress Europe is an illusion.” So declares the Financial Times in the closing line of its Saturday editorial: “Europe Cannot Ignore Syrian Migrant Crisis.” The FT undertakes to instruct the Old Continent on what its duty is and what its future holds: “The EU will face flows of migrants and asylum seekers across the Mediterranean...
A week ago, the candidacy of Joe Biden was at death’s door. On a taping of “The McLaughlin Group,” this writer suggested it might be time to “call the rectory” and have the monsignor come render last rites. Today, Biden’s candidacy is not only alive. He is first in votes, victories, and delegates, and is...
For more than 60 years, I’ve been interested in both the historical past and in how historical interpretations are created. I’ve also written a great deal on both subjects, but particularly on how public and scholarly opinions about past events and personalities change, and why they change. I believe there are two routes through which...
President Donald Trump’s first official visit to India produced all the right optics for him and his host, Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Tens of thousands of flag-waving Indians lined the streets, and well over 100,000 came to the cricket stadium in Ahmedabad to hear Trump speak. Clips from the Namaste Trump extravaganza—shots of a charismatic...
“This is the question that is going to dominate the election: How did you perform in the great crisis?” So says GOP Congressman Tom Cole of Oklahoma in today’s New York Times. GOP National Committeeman Henry Barbour of Mississippi calls the crisis “a defining moment… The more (Trump) reassures Americans, gives them the facts and...
To fight the coronavirus at home, France is removing all military forces from Iraq. When NATO scaled back its war games in Europe because of the pandemic, Russia reciprocated. Moscow announced it would cancel its war games along NATO’s border. Nations seem to be recognizing and responding to the grim new geostrategic reality...
“We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself,” tweeted the president on Sunday night, adding that, after the current 15-day shutdown, “we will make a decision as to which way we want to go.” President Trump is said to be privately expressing a deepening concern at the damage the coronavirus shutdown is...
“It’s a war,” says President Donald Trump of his efforts to contain the coronavirus pandemic, and likening his role to that of “wartime president.” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo welcomed the president’s claim to his commander in chief role in the crisis and his resolve: “The president and I agreed yesterday… we’re fighting the same...
A friend in Germany just wrote about how political correctness has persisted in his country despite the Corona Pandemic. Although Chancellor Angel Merkel spent years responding to critics of her generous welcoming policy toward Muslim migrants by insisting that borders are fluid, she has now sealed those very borders. Apparently German borders are no longer...
Over the past two or three decades it has been fashionable for international relations theorists, politicians, and mainstream media pundits to claim that the Westphalian nation state was moribund, obsolete, and rapidly diminishing in importance. They claimed that various transnational and regional mechanisms and institutions—the European Union being a prime example—were irreversibly taking over its...
Serious epidemics can have far-reaching social, cultural, and geopolitical consequences. The plague which devastated Athens in 430 BC—in the second year of the Peloponnesian War, when an Athenian victory still seemed within reach—claimed a quarter of the population, some 75,000 people including Pericles. His successors were weak and incompetent, and Athens suffered a precipitous decline...