As we ponder the impact of school closures, economic dislocation, panicky shoppers clearing the shelves of toilet paper, and the general disruption of our lives as a result of the coronavirus scare, there are a couple deeper points to consider about how this situation came about. First, the warning signs of what globalism meant for...

[Trump’s Coronavirus Briefing, Jan. 30, 2020] Not until well into the Democratic debate Tuesday night did the COVID-19 coronavirus come up, and it was Mike Bloomberg, not a CBS moderator, who raised it: “The president fired the pandemic specialist in this country two years ago,” the former New York mayor said. “There’s nobody here to figure...

Sen. Bernie Sanders may be on the cusp of both capturing the Democratic nomination and transforming his party as dramatically as President Donald Trump captured and remade the Republican Party. After his sweep of the Nevada caucuses, following popular vote victories in Iowa and New Hampshire, Sanders has the enthusiasm and the momentum, as the...

Wednesday night in Las Vegas, Mayor Mike Bloomberg learned what it is like to be thrown up against a wall and frisked. At the opening of the Democratic debate, his first, Mayor Mike was greeted by his nearest neighbor on stage, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, with this warm welcome: “We’re running against … a billionaire who...

[This article first appeared in the January 1992 issue of Chronicles.] The Case Against the Boy Scouts The Boy Scouts of America have recently been accused of sins against Democracy, in the form of discrimination against atheists, homosexuals, and women. Four recent lawsuits have challenged the organizational prerogatives of the Scouts. The families of nine-year-old...

Philippines President Duterte Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte has just given us notice he will be terminating the Visiting Forces Agreement that governs U.S. military personnel in the islands. His notification starts the clock running on a six-month deadline. If no new agreement is negotiated, the VFA is dissolved. What triggered the decision? Duterte was offended...

Last week I wrote about the first stage in my proposed plan to end racial preferences in the U.S. university system by using the ready availability of genetic testing services, such as 23andMe and others, to broaden the definitions of multicultural identity to the point where these distinctions become meaningless. I’ve named it “The Warren...

From the day he entered the race, Joe Biden was the great hope of the Democratic establishment to spare them from the horrifying prospect of a 2020 race between The Donald and Bernie Sanders. Today, that same establishment wants Joe out of the race. Why has Biden suddenly become an albatross? His feeble debate performances...

He’s 5’5″, or I’ll eat my hat. President Donald Trump recently mocked Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg as “a 5’4” mass of dead energy.” Immediately, the mainstream press and tech companies were out playing defense for the diminutive billionaire founder of Bloomberg LP and former mayor of New York City. A National Public Radio host...

[Read part one of this essay, “The Plan,” posted on Wednesday, Feb. 12.] Part Two: The Disagreeable Agreement.  Establishing the Palestinians’ significant culpability for the lack of progress nevertheless does not mean that the Israelis should be encouraged to create territorial faits accomplis which cannot be tenable in the long run. Let us look once...

Part One: The Plan The conflict in the Holy Land is older than any mainstream media pundit of note. Most of them have spewed ill-informed drivel on President Donald Trump’s plan for Israeli-Palestinian peace because they are ignorant of geography or history. They talk of “Jerusalem,” but don’t know the difference between the Jerusalem Municipality...

In a way, Donald Trump might be called The Great Uniter. Bear with me. No Republican president in the lifetime of this writer, not even Ronald Reagan, united the party as did Trump in the week of his acquittal in the Senate and State of the Union address. According to the Gallup Poll, 94% of...

Racial preferences in higher education continue to linger despite numerous efforts to kill them off. Yes, voters can ban them, research can show their pernicious impact on intended beneficiaries, and judges can narrow their scope. However, they still persist and nothing on the horizon suggests that the end is near. Let me suggest a radically...

By the end of February, the race for the Democratic nomination may have come down to a choice of one of three white men. Two are well into their 70s, and either would be the oldest president ever inaugurated. The third is a 38-year-old gay in a same-sex marriage who would be our youngest president...

[This article first appeared in the February 2017 issue of Chronicles.] Are addictions real?  We talk as if they are.  Many women say they are addicted to chocolate.  Actor David Duchovny has been diagnosed with having a sex addiction.  In the early 90’s, when crack was all the rage, one Christian pop singer encouraged young...

It has been a bad few days for the establishment, really bad. In a 51-49 vote, the Senate refused to call witnesses in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump and agreed to end the trial Wednesday, with a near-certain majority vote to acquit the president of all charges. As weekend polls show socialist Bernie Sanders...

It was a revealing moment. Former GOP consultant turned Never Trumper Rick Wilson began ridiculing Trump supporters on CNN as “credulous Boomer rube[s]” who believe “Donald Trump is the smart one and y’all elitists are dumb.” Muslim activist and New York Times contributor Wajahat Ali joined in, mimicking the rubes’ supposed disdain for “You elitists,...

Can a septuagenarian socialist who just survived a heart attack and would be 80 years old in his first year in office be elected president of the United States? It’s hard to believe but not impossible. As of today, Bernie Sanders looks like one of the better, if not best, bets for the nomination. Polls...

A wake-up call sounds in the Reeducation Camp #3017, on a bitterly cold North Dakotan morning. It is January 2023. Inmate Harold Denison, age 48, designated IPR (incarcerated pending reeducation) on the orders of President Sanders’ Homeland Security Secretary Kyle Jurek (“on the well-founded suspicion of being a Chronicles subscriber”), is feverish and yearns for...

On January 27 Dr. Trifkovic presented a paper on the geostrategic significance of the Russo-Chinese partnership at the Dado Center for Interdisciplinary Military Studies of the Israel Defense Forces in Glilot, north of Tel Aviv. We bring you his remarks in a slightly abbreviated form.   Almost exactly 116 years ago, in January 1904, Sir Halford Mackinder gave a...

In 1868, President Andrew Johnson was impeached for violating the Tenure of Office Act that had been enacted by Congress over his veto in 1867. Defying the law, Johnson fired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, without getting Senate approval, as the act required him to do. In his 1956 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, John F. Kennedy...

In his latest interview with Serbia’s most-watched private TV channel, Dr. Trifkovic looks at the renewal of tensions in Libya. [Translated from Serbian, abbreviated]   Q: Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has confirmed that he is sending his country’s soldiers to Libya to support the Government of National Accord in its fight against the forces...

Is it possible President Donald Trump may have perfectly played the Iran conflict? He’s been criticized for different and various reasons by people on the left and on the right. There’s been a real concern that the president could get us into a war with Iran. It’s early but it seems like Trump has effectively...

In his latest interview for Serbia’s top-rated Happy TV channel, Dr. Trifkovic dwells on the geostrategic and political dynamics behind the current crisis in the Middle East. The first question was whether we are at the threshold of a major war.   [Interview transcript below, translated from Serbian and abbreviated.]   ST:      The odds of...

Fifteen years after the U.S. invaded Iraq to turn Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship into a beacon of democracy, Iraq’s Parliament, amid shouts of “Death to America!” voted to expel all U.S. troops from the country. Though nonbinding, the expulsion vote came after mobs trashed the U.S. embassy in an assault that recalled Tehran 1979. What provoked...

A successful strategy, in diplomacy and war alike, rests on the judicious balancing of ends and means in pursuit of defined objectives. This invariably entails altering the behavior of the adversary in a manner which will make the attainment of those objectives more likely. It is unclear whether and in what way the killing of...

[above: Office of War Information research workers, 1943] The Afghanistan Papers, published by The Washington Post on Dec. 9, have demonstrated that successive U.S. administrations have deliberately and systematically disinformed the nation about the nature of the conflict, its course, and prospects. This should be no surprise to those who have studied the modern history of foreign affairs...

Otto von Bismarck famously declared the Balkans weren’t worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier. He knew that fractious, feuding part of Europe would soak up as much blood as the Germans cared to spill. Because Bismarck’s successors forgot his wisdom, the Balkans ended up claiming the bones of millions, in what was naively...

“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future,” Yogi Berra reminded us. But on “The McLaughlin Group,” the TV talk show on which this writer has appeared for four decades, predictions are as mandated as was taking Latin in Jesuit high schools in the 1950s. Looking to 2020, this writer predicted that Donald Trump’s...

On December 12 the U.S. Senate passed a resolution formally recognizing the mass killings of Armenians in Turkey during the Great War and in its aftermath as genocide, a move Ankara has long opposed. The resolution states that “it is the policy of the United States to commemorate the Armenian Genocide through official recognition and...

“Surprised by joy” was Wordsworth’s line, taken up by C.S. Lewis for his spiritual autobiography. It’s a fair reflection of the public mood since the glorious moment when the exit poll revealed all. The Goyaesque monsters conjured up by the Corbynista threat have retreated, mopping and mowing, into the darkened wings of history. They were...

As of Dec. 26, Kim Jong Un’s “Christmas gift” to President Donald Trump had not arrived. Most foreign policy analysts predict it will be a missile test more impressive than any Pyongyang has yet carried off. What is Kim’s game? What does Kim want? He cannot want war with the United States, as this could...

Prague is one of the grand capitals of Europe. It is painfully beautiful in these misty mornings, with the Castle catching the first sun rays while a hundred spires below remain dormant. With just over a million residents, it is a city big enough to offer an embarrassment of cultural, visual and gastronomic riches while...

“We’re gonna impeach the (expletive deleted).” Thus did the member from Michigan, Rashida Tlaib, declare last January to be the goal of the 2019 House Democratic Caucus. Wednesday night, Speaker Nancy Pelosi delivered the goods. The House impeached President Donald Trump on a straight party-line vote. Not one Republican signed on to the most partisan...

The Fuseli nightmare is over. Day breaks to a dawn chorus, an ovation for Boris Johnson’s epochal achievement, while Jeremy Corbyn, who would be admirably cast as Scrooge, has no vision of Christmas future and will be dismissed from all further conduct of the Opposition’s affairs. The LibDem leader has been voted into private life....

[above: statue of Horace]  “Quid pro quo” was the accusatory Latin phrase most often used to describe President Donald Trump’s July 25 phone call asking for a “favor” from the president of Ukraine. New Year’s prediction: The Roman poet Horace’s Latin depiction: “Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus“—”The mountains went into labor, and brought forth a...

[This review first appeared in the October 1990 issue of Chronicles.] Walter Scott, in 1820, wrote that Fielding is “father of the English Novel.” Yet James Russell Lowell, in 1881, remarked to an English audience that “We really know almost as little of Fielding’s life as of Shakespeare’s.” Lives of Fielding, or important essays about...

“Jaw-jaw is better than war-war,” is attributed, wrongly, say some historians, to Winston Churchill. Still, the words lately came to mind. While last week ended with a hopeful U.S.-Iranian prisoner exchange that was hailed by President Donald Trump—”Thank you to Iran for a very fair negotiation. See, we can make a deal together”—a few days...

[above: David Frum] This week brought the unsurprising news that our war in Afghanistan has long been supported by optimistic claims that were false and known to be false.  It is, of course, too late to save the thousands of Americans who have died in Afghanistan or to recover the hundreds of billions—some say trillions—of...

[above: Fishmongers’ Hall across London Bridge] Let “Dover Beach,” Matthew Arnold’s finest poem, be the epigraph for today. Many migrants come on shore there in tiny and dangerous boats, often escorted in by border patrols. They will mostly be allowed to stay in England. Many are not intercepted and fade without trace into the mainland....

The “Our diversity is our strength!” Party is starting to look rather monochromatic in its upper echelons these days. The four leading candidates for its presidential nomination—Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Pete Buttigieg—are all white. The six candidates who have qualified for the Dec. 19 debate—the front four, plus Amy Klobuchar and Tom...

The Anglican Church of Canada clutches its throat at the prospect of—Lord have mercy—shutting down its ministries and works 20 years from now. You know—putting up the “Closed” sign, the public demand for said ministries dwindling more with every passing year. So sharply have Anglican membership rolls declined since 2000 that, according to an internal...

At first glance, it would appear that five months of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong had produced a stunning triumph. By September, the proposal of city leader Carrie Lam that ignited the protests—to allow criminal suspects to be extradited to China for trial—had been withdrawn. And though the protesters’ demands escalated along with their tactics,...

The British election campaign has been conducted with all the duplicity that characterizes the higher echelons of the State. The Establishment aim is to install Boris as leader of the Conservative Party with a Commons majority but with a much reduced capacity to achieve Brexit. A true Brexit is anathema to them. Hence the fatal...

The fall of Prince Andrew, Duke of York, is index to the strength of the monarchy. He has now been ordered by the Queen to step back from public life “for the foreseeable future.” His continued friendship with the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein was the immediate cause, and it was followed by the Duke’s ill-judged...

Roger Stone was recently convicted in federal court on seven felony charges, stemming from the since-closed Russian collusion investigation. Stone’s main crime was lying to Congress about who he had, or had not, spoken to about Russia. By the time Stone’s trial began in Washington, nobody was talking about WikiLeaks anymore. Nobody cared. Yet prosecutors...