July 21, 2023

Getting Biden Wrong

Okay, I get it! From listening to Republican TV and reading Republican publications, I have learned that Joe Biden is a sleazy, mendacious, and demented chief executive. He has weaponized the entire Justice Department and the IRS against his real and...

June 24, 2023

Living in a Media World

Our country is now divided into two numerically equivalent ideological blocs. Not surprisingly, those in the leftist bloc have been generally impervious to what conservatives and Republicans have exposed as scandals in their camp. And there have been...

May 29, 2023

How the Democrats are Destroying Large Cities

Kevin Williamson has published a commentary in the NY Post dealing with the “blue wave” that’s moving through metropolitan areas. In cities like Denver, Omaha, Dallas, and Salt Lake City, the Republican Party has ceased to be e...

August 12, 2022

More Statue Nonsense from Florida

A shameful aspect of woke intolerance has been the degrading of historical figures who fail to meet current standards of politically correctness. This vindictive fervor has spread from removing the statues of Confederate commanders and statesmen to r...

November 26, 2021

The Real Lesson of the Rittenhouse Trial

In a critical assessment of the Rittenhouse trial, Conrad Black denies that the outcome of the case vindicated the American justice system Because of the confluence of a competent and determined judge, courageous and diligent jurors, ludicrously...

June 21, 2021

Are We Stuck with Biden?

It was widely believed, and not without evidence, that the media, Big Tech, and other Democrat party actors were pushing Biden into the White House with the hope that he could be replaced if certain developments occurred -- that is, if his faili...

November 24, 2020

The Virtues of Being Graceless

Rich Lowry at the Trump-unfriendly National Review titled a syndicated column on November 20  “Ugly Exit.” Lowry, who has made a habit of dumping on The Donald, complains that Trump’s unwillingness to graciously concede to Joe...

March 15, 2020

Since When Is Joe Biden a 'Moderate'?

In an exultant commentary on Joe Biden’s victory on Super Tuesday, New York Post-syndicated columnist Salena Zito tells us: “The Dems’ silent majority, which doesn’t tweet, is finally crying out for moderation from the party....

January 28, 2020

Triangulation: Erdogan's Secret Weapon

A former colleague of mine from Turkey, Oya Dursun-Özkanca, has just published an informative monograph on "Turkey-West Relations."  The author examines Turkish foreign policy since the ascendancy of Recep Tayyip Erdogan as Turkis...

October 26, 2019

Is Buchanan Right about Democracy?

Although I generally agree with Pat Buchanan in his observations about the world, lately I’ve been a bit confused about his comments on “democracy.” Whether Buchanan is telling us, as in April, that democracy is in a “dea...

July 14, 2019

Human Rights and Foreign Policy

To all appearances, the neocon church militant has occupied the Trump administration in the form of a new human rights panel under Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo. As head of the “Commission on Unalienable Human Rights,” Pompeo promi...

June 23, 2019

How Not to Argue Against Abortion Rights

On June 8, the West Coast Straussian Ken Masugi made a strong plea against legalized abortion in an ideologically friendly website American Greatness. Masugi quoted Justice Clarence Thomas’s arguments against abortion rights, which feature an e...

April 25, 2019

Mayor Pete's Advantage

Pete Buttigieg may pose problems that GOP operatives are not prepared to handle. Out of a field of more than twenty Democratic presidential candidates, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana stands out as an openly, proudly married gay. He flaunts his life...

April 5, 2019

What goes around...

In a column that had me scratching my head in wonder, New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser insists, as her title indicates, that "Uncle Joe is a Victim of Bonkers Feminism."  According to Peyser, Biden stands conde...

January 15, 2019

Striking at a King

In a disastrous interview with the New York Times last week, Iowa congressman Steve King put his foot in his mouth (and not for the first time) by asking this imprudent question: "White nationalists, white supremacists, Western civiliz...

December 19, 2018

Burying the Weekly Standard

Although I didn’t care for the Weekly Standard for reasons other than those given by President Trump, I admit that I disliked this now-defunct fortnightly as intensely as he did. When a Canadian friend discovered it was about to close, he asked...

December 14, 2018

A Successful Disruption

In a devastating critique of Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump’s alleged Russian collusion, Peter Van Buren explains: “We last looked at what Mueller had publicly -- and what he didn’t have -- some 10 months a...

November 17, 2018

Conservatism and Change

Bill Kristol recently tweeted an admission that he and other neoconservatives underestimated the accuracy of the view that “demography is destiny.” Kristol was forced to accept this notion and its implications after examining the voting d...

November 7, 2018

The Cult City Triumphant

Daniel J. Flynn has produced a truly remarkable work detailing San Francisco’s descent into multicultural madness in the 1970s. In Cult City. Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and 10 Days that Shook San francisco, the prolonged orgy that characterized Sa...

October 28, 2018

'Informed Voters' Are Not the Solution

This week I was co-hosting a YouTube interview courtesy of the San Francisco Review of Books. My cohost for this weekly program, Joseph Cotto, and I had brought on as our guest the Libertarian candidate in the New Jersey senatorial race Murray Sabrin...

September 30, 2018

Birthright Citizenship and Natural Rights

Michael Anton, who was a speechwriter for George W. Bush's administration and later a pro-Trump blogger for the Journal of American Greatness, has acquired additional fame as a critic of granting citizenship to the offspring of illegal alien...

August 10, 2018

What Conservative Canon?

In 2012, I came across a scholarly article in a journal on rhetoric on "The Conservative Canon and Its Uses."  The author, Michael J. Lee, undertook to explain why the American conservative movement had put together a ...

August 1, 2018

Trump and Carl Schmitt: An Unlikely Association

Every now and then, I come across a prominently posted commentary that combines virtue-signaling with the appearance of weighty scholarship.  A perfect illustration is "Trumpism and the Philosophy of World Order," a polemic p...

June 27, 2018

Conservatism, Inc. Indulges Its Own

Watching a recent discussion on Fox News between Chris Stirewalt and Guy Benson concerning George Will's exhortation to Republican voters to support Democratic candidates in the upcoming congressional election, I thought of th...

June 12, 2018

A Conservatism of Principle

Anyone comparing the post-World War II conservative movement to its current media successor may note something in the older movement that has vanished from its successor. Despite its often rigid anti-Communist focus, the group that William F. Bu...

June 9, 2018

Orwell the Leftist

David Ramsay Steele, a libertarian activist, an author, and the editorial director of Open Court Publishing Company, has produced a truly extraordinary work on the English novelist and political critic George Orwell.  It's not...

June 2, 2018

By What Right Do You Judge?

Recently, I overheard Laura Ingraham bewailing how the American left is now suppressing the public discussion of sensitive issues.  Laura's case in point is Kevin Williamson, a commentator whom Jeff Goldberg at the Atlant...

May 5, 2018

The Pleasures of Bullying

Feigned outrage against Marshall DeRosa, a professor of political science at Florida Atlantic in Boca Raton, has now taken predictable forms.  Nietzsche observed that a successful war can be used to justify any cause.  At Florida ...

April 3, 2018

Exonerating Mussolini?

In an interview with the British Spectator last summer, Steve Bannon said was "fascinated by Mussolini," whom he clearly admires for some of his accomplishments.  But is this more than an isolated view?  T...

March 23, 2018

A Harmless Persuasion: Conservatives and Traditionalism

Several decades ago, Samuel T. Francis coined the phrase "harmless persuasion" to describe would-be conservatives who desist from saying anything that might evoke anger on the left.  Francis was referring to neoconservatives, who ...

March 6, 2018

Corporate America and the Left

A distinguished social economist of my acquaintance, Carl Horowitz, produced a penetrating essay, which is available in the latest issue of Social Contract, on "The Alliance of Corporate Capitalism with Political Radicalism."...

March 1, 2018

Trump and Old-Time Democrats

Last Saturday afternoon, I listened to a gathering of Wall Street Journal editors and writers on Fox News discussing the congressional deadlock on immigration.  Paul Gigot, Jason Riley, and Karl Rove were all disturbed that the pr...

February 16, 2018

Bill Kristol Is Not Yet Out

I've just been reading on Breitbart a tirade against Bill Kristol, which features a comparison between this supposedly falling neocon star and the author's friend Tony, who landed in jail after stabbing his ex-wife's lover. ...

February 8, 2018

Getting the Culprits Right

I’ve just been looking at an interview by clinical psychologist and University of Toronto Professor Jordan Peterson dealing with postmodernism and the triumph of Marxism in Canada. In view of Peterson’s brave struggle against Political Co...

January 30, 2018

Inventing the Political Center

I’ve just been reading in the New York Post about the need for “centrist” politics in our polarized society. Post columnists, John Podhoretz and Seth Lipsky have both deplored an eroding center in American political life. Podhoretz ...

January 23, 2018

Conservatism and Chronological Isolation

Like other political movements, American conservatism offers predictable explanations as to where bad ideas arise.  During the Cold War, the explanation for this problem that one would have found with some regularity in conservative publica...

January 17, 2018

Does Conservative Populism Exist?

Having just read Matt Purple's comments on The American Conservative as to why "Bannonism will live on," I thought I'd weigh in as a critical observer of what now passes for the "conservative movement."...

January 12, 2018

The Frankfurt School and Cultural Marxism

Franklin Einspruch, A commentator in The Federalist, describes me as a “circumspect conservative” scholar who has written responsibly about Cultural Marxism.  I’m also deemed to be a conservative who agrees with other...

January 6, 2018

Conservatives Ignore the Obvious

For a long time, it's been obvious that GOP politicians and media personalities bend backwards to avoid raising what are supposed to be settled social issues, lest they turn off certain voting blocs.  Whether it's the Supreme Court ...

December 21, 2017

An Empty 'Conservative' Victory

Having now read the comments of every #NeverTrumper and RINO on the planet about how lucky we were that Roy Moore was not elected to the Senate and that instead Alabamans wisely chose the “moderate” Democrat Doug Jones, I am hereby regist...

November 25, 2017

Misreading Putin

Last Saturday, President Trump stated that he thought Russian president Putin “meant what he said” when he denied interfering in the American presidential election. Whereupon Senator John McCain shot back that he was shocked that our chie...

November 16, 2017

Jonah's Off Target Again

In his latest anti-Trump tear, National Review editor Jonah Goldberg warns that “the GOP can’t afford to chase away its own.” The GOP’s own, for Goldberg, means “middle-class suburbanites,” whom he depicts as the b...

October 25, 2017

Are We Really Talking about Nationalism?

In a speech delivered last week in New York City, former president George W. Bush fiercely attacked American nationalists as narrow-minded nativists. Among the memorable phrases in his oration were these: “We’ve seen nationalism dis...

September 3, 2017

Ryszard Legutko and the Failings of Democracy

I consider Ryszard Legutko, former professor at the Jagellonian Institute in Krakow and an adviser to the very conservative president of Poland, to be the greatest living critic of liberal democracy. Please note that I myself produced a trilogy on th...

June 3, 2017

Why #NeverTrumps Persist on the Conventional Right

Dennis Prager recently posted a column trying to explain why many of his political allies have remained in the “#NeverTrump” camp. This seems to be Prager’s latest effort to reason with friends whom he won’t “cease admir...

May 1, 2017

How the Right can Learn from the Neocons

Several friends on the independent Right have been sending me notes stating their frustration with the Trump administration for playing them for fools. These fellow-members of the independent Right (yes, I’ll admit to my own leanings) complain ...

April 20, 2017

Words That May Never Be Heeded

Fred Reed, a talented commentator and former Marine who now lives in Mexico, recently posted a gutsy piece about all the achievements that white people should be proud of. Fred admits that whites, like other races, have committed their share of outra...

April 8, 2017

Was American Intervention in WW I Justified?

Burton Yale Pines’s work America’s Greatest Blunder: The Fateful Decision to Enter World War One is hardly a new book. (It came out in 2012.) Nor was it published by a leading commercial press, despite the author’s long, distinguish...

April 3, 2017

Did the Middlebury Riot Betray an Excess of Virtue?

A commentary posted on The American Interest website (March 29, 2017) about the “protest and subsequent riot” at Middlebury College occasioned by the appearance of Charles Murray, the respected critic of liberal racial and welfare state p...

March 8, 2017

The Democrats and the Left Are Pursuing a Clever Strategy

Like other opponents of the Left, I am annoyed by the obstructionist tactics engaged in by Senate Democrats and the often hysterical reaction of the media to just about anything done by President Trump. I’m also appalled by the way Democratic a...

March 4, 2017

Do Classical Conservative Worldviews Make Sense Any Longer?

My young(er) friend Jack Kerwick, who is a well-known website columnist, is also a contentious professor of philosophy, and in his latest published anthology of essays, Misguided Guardians (Las Vegas: Stairway Press, 2016), Kerwick tackles political ...

February 9, 2017

The Death of Marxism Revisited

About ten years ago I published a book, The Strange Death of Marxism, which argued strenuously that the present Left is not Marxist, but post-Marxist. Unlike traditional Marxists and European democratic socialists, the type of Left that has gained gr...

December 26, 2016

Dressed to Kill in New York

My wife subscribes to a magazine, the very sight of which turns my stomach. She believes that it’s beneficial to have this reading matter around so we can know how the “non-deplorables” think. But as a retired college professor, I k...

December 24, 2016

Gotcha Conservatism

On December 19 the Townhall website posted a commentary by Republican activist Arthur Shaper entitled “The California Democratic Party and the Ghost of the Confederate Past.” Shaper’s piece makes a feeble effort at an historical arg...

August 11, 2016

The Vote Horse Has Bolted

Recently while rereading John Stuart Mill’s Considerations on Representative Government, a tract published in 1861 by a self-described political “Radical,” an early feminist, and an advocate of “economic democracy,” it d...

August 7, 2016

What is 'Honorable'?

Retired Harvard professor of political theory Harvey Mansfield recently published a commentary in Wall Street Journal (July 30) characterizing Trump as “no gentleman” but as a “demagogue who loves to be loved” and as a “...