If Donald Trump told Michael Cohen to pay hush money to Stormy Daniels about a one-night stand a decade ago, that, says Jerome Nadler, incoming chair of House Judiciary, would be an “impeachable offense.” This tells you what social media, cable TV and the great herd of talking heads will be consumed with for the...
On a recent sunny afternoon—a wonderful rarity in Holland’s late fall—I visited Huis Doorn, the country manor 15 miles east of Utrecht where Kaiser Wilhelm II Hohenzollern spent just over two decades in exile before dying there in early June 1941. His lead coffin, draped in the Imperial flag, lies in the middle of a...
On most Sundays and holy days, I happily attend what Pope Benedict XVI termed the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite and what is often called the Novus Ordo Mass. Last Saturday, though, I attended what Benedict XVI termed the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite and what is often called the Latin Mass. The occasion...
“Boris” is the only British politician universally known by his first name. He was Foreign Secretary, until he jumped ship from Theresa May’s Ship of Fools and is now on the Tory backbenches. Since May’s political life is passing peacefully to its close he is much talked of as a likely successor. What are his...
On August 19, 1991, the people of the Soviet Union awoke to music from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake playing on national television. Swan Lake would play continuously that day as the “hard line” State Emergency Committee staged its coup against the first and last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, who had been arrested at his Crimea vacation...
George H.W. Bush was America’s closer. Called in to pitch the final innings of the Cold War, Bush 41 presided masterfully over the fall of the Berlin Wall, the unification of Germany, the liberation of 100 million Eastern Europeans and the dissolution of the Soviet Union into 15 independent nations. History’s assignment complete, Bush 41...
From the November 2011 issue of Chronicles. Thornton Wilder met Sigmund Freud in the fall of 1935. Freud had read Wilder’s new novel, Heaven’s My Destination. “‘No seeker after God,’” writes Wilder’s biographer (quoting Freud of himself), “he threw it across the room.” At a later meeting Freud apologized. He objected to Wilder’s “making religion...
The reaction of top U.S. Senators from both parties to the briefing by CIA director Gina Haspel on the killing of Jamal Khashoggi has been unprecedented. A close ally of President Trump, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), announced that he had “high confidence” Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was complicit in the murder, describing the Saudi...
In Katowice, Poland, all the signers of the 2015 Paris climate accord are gathered to assess how the world’s nations are meeting their goals to cut carbon emissions. Certainly, the communications strategy in the run-up was impressive. In October came that apocalyptic U.N. report warning that the world is warming faster than we thought and...
From the August 1992 issue of Chronicles. Late in life, Harry Sinclair Lewis of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, figured something out: he would soon be forgotten. In a mock self-obituary, Lewis foresaw that he would leave “no literary descendants. . . . Whether this is a basic criticism of [Lewis’s] pretensions to power and originality, or...
How do you celebrate Christmas in Sodom? I know—it’s not a cheery thought. And by posing the question, I run the risk of anachronism. There were over four centuries between the time when Abraham pleaded on behalf of his favorite nephew’s adopted hometown and Moses’ accounting of it in Genesis. And of course, Christmas was...
“You are all a lost generation,” Gertrude Stein is said to have told Ernest Hemingway when he and his first wife were living in Paris after the Great War. Since then, the generation that was born in the 1890’s and reached maturity to fight in the terrible conflict that came close to exterminating both it...
A Mad Love: An Introduction to Opera, by Vivien Schweit-zer (New York: Basic Books; 288 pp., $27.00). I need to be fair to this book, because the author, a concert pianist and writer who worked for a decade as a classical-music critic for the New York Times, certainly knows her stuff so far as opera...
Seeking relief from the midterm madness, I’ve been rereading H.L. Mencken’s political reportage and commentary, selections from which have been published in most Mencken anthologies. Up to Franklin Roosevelt’s bid for a second presidential term, American politics was still enjoyable—bitter though many campaigns in the 19th century were, especially as the War Between the States...
Hobbled as I am by residual injury—I wear an ankle brace and limp a bit—and wheeling a large cornet/flugelhorn case, I was grateful when a man much younger than I held open a door for me as I entered the lobby for Elkhart’s Lerner Theatre. I was there plenty early to play a concert set,...
First Man Produced by Wyck Godfrey, Marty Bowen, Isaac Klausner, and Damien Chazelle Directed by Damien Chazelle Screenplay by Josh Singer from the biography by James R. Hansen Distributed by Universal Pictures Black 47 Produced by Fastnet Films and the Irish Film Board Directed by Lance Daly Screenplay by P. J. Dillon Distributed by IFC...
I had long been in search of a pretext for writing a column on sex, drugs, and classical music when I discovered that, by extraordinary coincidence, just such a subtitle adorned Blair Tindall’s memoir, Mozart in the Jungle (2005). The televised series of the same name seemed also to feature much sex, drugs, and classical...
At a raucous campaign rally in Houston, President Trump laid his ideological cards on the table for all to see. If the Democrats take the House and/or the Senate, he told the crowd, they’ll carry out the agenda of “corrupt, power-hungry globalists.” “You know what a globalist is? A globalist is a person that wants...
Cancer imposes innumerable indignities on its victims. In addition to possible death, the disease, its complications, and its treatment also force patients through the most inhumane gauntlet of our health-care system. When you’re not giving a blood sample, you’re likely hooked up to an IV full of toxins or being zapped with near-lethal doses of...
The writing is at long last on the wall for a world-famous migrant utopia that was founded in a tiny medieval town overlooking the Ionian Sea. It has been a con from start to finish. The little town of Riace in Calabria on the toe of Italy has been eulogized by the global left for...
I offer a moral dilemma. Are there books or fictional works so dangerous that they should not be taught in school or college, and that should as far as possible be kept from a general audience? Some observers would apply this label to political tracts like Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, but however loathsome its content,...
A station agent tried to telegraph Price, Utah—the direction the outlaws were headed—but Butch Cassidy and Elzy Lay had cut the wires. The paymaster had the train’s engine uncoupled. Men grabbed a variety of weapons and jumped aboard. The locomotive steamed down the narrow gorge of Price Canyon right past the unseen robbers, who were...
Reader: I wasn’t quoting you. I was characterizing your analysis as such. Me: You were mischaracterizing my analysis. What I have written, I have written. What you have written, I did not. Reader: Says you. Words have meaning. We live our lives, for the most part, in a world in which, on a clear spring...
Jair Bolsonaro won the presidential election in Brazil on October 28 with 55 percent of the vote. The former army captain triumphed over Fernando Haddad of the leftist Workers’ Party pledging to fight crime and corruption, to end affirmative action for “disadvantaged minorities,” and to shatter the straitjacketed discourse on race and sexuality. The leader...
A fifth columnist is a supporter or secret sympathizer of an enemy nation, and the phrase was coined by Spanish nationalist general Emilio Mola. Before World War II broke out in 1939, Europe was awash with references to “The Fifth Column at work,” and the phrase was bandied about by both appeasers and those who...
On departure for the G-20 gathering in Buenos Aires, President Donald Trump canceled his planned weekend meeting with Vladimir Putin, citing as his reason the Russian military’s seizure and holding of three Ukrainian ships and 24 sailors. But was Putin really the provocateur in Sunday’s naval clash outside Kerch Strait, the Black Sea gateway to...
Abizaid of Arabia What does President Trump’s recent nomination of retired Army General John Abizaid to become the next U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia signify? Next to nothing—and arguably quite a lot. Abizaid’s proposed appointment is both a non-event and an opportunity not to be wasted. It means next to nothing in this sense: while...
The crisis in British politics deepens. Everything changed Sunday, when the European Union, without further debate, approved the Withdrawal Agreement that is Theresa May’s work. That Agreement is now set in stone, with no further changes possible for the EU/UK. And the dynamics of politics are revolutionized. The Withdrawal Agreement has been greeted with dismay...
Mass migration “lit the flame” of the right-wing populism that is burning up the Old Continent, she said. Europe must “get a handle on it.” “Europe must send a very clear message—’we are not going to be able to continue to provide refuge and support.'” Should Europe fail to toughen up, illegal migration will never...
The 633-word statement of President Donald Trump on the Saudi royals’ role in the grisly murder of Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi is a remarkable document, not only for its ice-cold candor. The president re-raises a question that has roiled the nation since Jimmy Carter: To what degree should we allow idealistic values trump vital...
“America First! The world is a very dangerous place!” President Donald J. Trump’s opening of his statement on “Standing with Saudi Arabia” (November 20) was eccentric; the ensuing 600-odd words—indubitably his own—appeared to give Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (“MbS”) an unqualified and outrageous carte blanche, seven weeks after Jamal Khashoggi’s murder. There may be...
I often hear it said that America isn’t a real country or that there are no such people as Americans. That’s an easy enough case to make from behind a keyboard, but a harder case to make if you’ve ever been to Europe, where Americans are instantly recognizable even if they’re visiting places their families...
A “progressive” rap on “social conservatives”: All they crave is power to tell you whom to sleep with, and how, and what god (if any) to worship. This contrasts, naturally, with broad-minded types of the progressive persuasion, who don’t care what you do, morally speaking, so long as you don’t say or do anything insensitive...
After adding at least 37 seats and taking control of the House by running on change, congressional Democrats appear to be about to elect as their future leaders three of the oldest faces in the party. Nancy Pelosi of California and Steny Hoyer of Maryland have led the House Democrats for 16 years. For 12...
The War of the Tory Succession is now entering its terminal phase. The ultra-loyalist Amber Rudd, badly wounded a couple of months ago, has now after convalescence returned to the Front. She is back in the Cabinet after Dominic Raab became the second Brexit Secretary to pull out from that unfulfilling job. Michael Gove avoided...
For the past year or so—and especially since the badly constructed pipe bombs (none of which went off) that were sent to various Democratic Party leaders and to certain national leftist personalities, and then the hate-filled rampage by a crazed anti-Semite at a Jewish synagogue in Pittsburgh—the mainstream media, including many of the supposed conservative...
Last week, the White House revoked the press pass of CNN’s chief White House correspondent, Jim Acosta, and denied him access to the building. CNN responded by filing suit in federal court against the president. Acosta’s First and Fifth Amendment rights had been violated, said CNN. The demand: Acosta’s press pass must be returned immediately...
From the June 1991 issue of Chronicles. Lewis Namier liked to tell the story of an English schoolboy who was asked to define “imperialism” on an examination paper. “Imperialism,” the budding proconsul wrote, “is learning how to get along with one’s social inferiors.” In the Edwardian twilight of the British Empire, that answer might have...
Last Sunday, many of our political leaders, feeling pressured by the anniversary of the Armistice that began at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month exactly one hundred years ago, publicly remembered the generally forgotten dead of the Great War. That war is something any genuine statesman would always keep in...
In a rebuke bordering on national insult Sunday, Emmanuel Macron retorted to Donald Trump’s calling himself a nationalist. “Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism; nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism.” As for Trump’s policy of “America first,” Macron trashed such atavistic thinking in this new age: “By saying we put ourselves first and the...
After four years and three months of unprecedented carnage, the Great War—the most catastrophic event in all of history—ended one hundred years ago, on November 11, 1918. That war destroyed an effervescent civilization, unmatched in its fruits and vigor. A decent and on the whole well-ordered world was wrecked for ever, thrown into the abyss...
The war in Washington will not end until the presidency of Donald Trump ends. Everyone seems to sense that now. This is a fight to the finish. A postelection truce that began with Trump congratulating House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi—”I give her a great deal of credit for what she’s done and what she’s accomplished”—was...
Armstrong is a rollicking work of alternate history that doesn’t sacrifice accurate details or historical nuance for the sake of your entertainment. Have you ever wondered what might have happened if General Custer survived the Battle of the Little Bighorn? Wonder no more, for this is the premise of Armstrong. H.W. Crocker III immerses you...
One can almost hear an audible sigh of relief from the rogues’ gallery of criminal conspirators behind the phony Russiagate collusion story cooked up in the bowels of the US-UK Deep State with the aim of overturning the 2016 election. Now, after two years of the GOP’s dithering in the area of investigations and hearings...
From the October 2015 issue of Chronicles. “Every great man nowadays has his disciples,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “and it is always Judas who writes the biography.” Even conceding that Wilde was writing for effect, it is nonetheless true that biographers often betray their subjects with either a kiss or a curse, and that the kiss...
Did former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg just take a page out of the playbook of Sen. Ed Muskie from half a century ago? In his first off-year election in 1970, President Richard Nixon ran a tough attack campaign to hold the 52 House seats the GOP had added in ’66 and ’68, and to...
“The curious have observed that the progress of humane literature (like the sun) is from the East to the West. . .” —Nathaniel Ames As both a reality and an interpretive problem, the American West has retained its long-established hold on the attention of our scholars. And the same is true of Western American literature:...
Angela Merkel announced on October 29 that she would make a two-stage exit from the political scene. She is first giving up her chairmanship of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which will select a new leader at its party congress on December 7-8. She is to step down as chancellor next, but not before the...
Among the reasons Donald Trump is president is that his natural political instincts are superior to those of any other current figure. As campaign 2018 entered its final week, Trump seized upon and elevated the single issue that most energizes his populist base and most convulses our media elite. Warning of an “invasion,” he pointed...
Eight years ago, I made the case in this magazine that Pat Buchanan has been a “visionary.” That case is even clearer today, with the White House occupied by a man who got there by running on the issues Buchanan had championed for decades and who is now remaking the GOP along populist and nationalist...