Category Archives: Politics

Scorching The Earth

From X poster Christian Heiens: I can confirm that the list he has posted here is accurate. At this point, I shouldn’t think it a good idea to “go long” on peaceful coexistence.

One Screen, Two Movies

The editor of my local paper has just published an opinion piece saying that the shooting of Renee Good — whom he describes as “calmly trying to drive away” — “tells us that we have landed in a new and terrifying landscape, governed by people whose enemy is the truth and who are ready to […]

Kino In Caracas

Well! It was a big night on the world stage: the U.S., in an impressive blitzkrieg, has deposed the mephitic Maduro narcocracy in Venezuela. (So much for Nothing Ever Happens™!) As I’ve been saying for a year now about the Trump administration’s foreign policy, I see the invisible hand of Michael Anton at work here, […]

Oakeshott Redux

SIxteen years ago, Bill Vallicella offered a post on the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s classic essay On Being Conservative, and I commented briefly on his post in two items of my own, here and here. (The link in my old posts was to Bill’s old Typepad site, which is no more, and the links to […]

The Plan

The Trump administration has just released (on December 4th) an overview of its national-security strategy. It marks a welcome return to a realistic and pragmatic approach that hews more closely to that of Washington, Monroe, and John Quincy Adams (as outlined so brilliantly in the late Angelo Codevilla’s outstanding book America’s Rise and Fall Among […]

Cards On The Table

Here’s Wajahat Ali, an influential man of the Left (who, among other things, writes for the New York Times), informing white Americans that they should abandon any hope they may have had of preserving their worthless culture and homeland: Well, there you have it! I have to admit that the honesty, at least, is refreshing; […]

Caveat Bellator!

The Democrats have released an ad encouraging members of the military to defy what they call “illegal orders”. Presumably this is aimed at disrupting President Trump’s recent use of the armed services to address a bouquet of emergencies confronting the nation — including crime, invasion, and the smuggling of lethal drugs. The people who made […]

Too Cool For School

I love living way out here in the Outer Cape, but the official religion is awfully hard to take sometimes. Here’s an example, from my local paper, the Provincetown Independent: A Creature of Habit Resisting the ‘new normal’ in a universe that does not care Premises: an indifferent universe devoid of all meaning or purpose; […]

The Long And The Short Of It

In a comment to yesterday’s post, our reader Jason cited an article by Claire Berlinski, in which she points out one of the cardinal weaknesses of our form of government — to wit, that the constant demand of election cycles make officials focus almost exclusively on the short-term problem of holding their offices. [The problem] […]

When The Baby Gets Hold Of The Hammer

In a comment to our previous post, Vito Caiati linked to an outstanding article by Heather Mac Donald on the consequences awaiting New York City as Zohran Mamdani prepares to take office. Her essay begins: William F. Buckley Jr. once quipped that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston […]

Alea Iacta Est

Well, it’s done — New York has elected its first Muslim, socialist, dawa-jihadi mayor, and a new era begins: one that will likely make the nocuous administrations of David Dinkins and Bill De Blasio look like the Gilded Age. Some are blaming Curtis Sliwa for this, but not me; it’s simply indefensible to say that […]

Collision Course

An interesting game is afoot. On November 1st, if news reports are to be believed, various categories of Federal welfare, such as SNAP benefits, are due to be suspended as a result of the government shutdown. What will happen next? If the past is any guide, we should expect a rapid breakdown of order wherever […]

Flag-Burning

Today people are bickering online (because what is there to modern life other than bickering online?) about President Trump’s intention to try to make burning the American flag illegal. Leaving aside the practical reality that implementing this policy would almost certainly require a Constitutional amendment, here’s my opinion, for what it’s worth (which is, effectively, […]

The Pendulum As Wrecking-Ball

From an article in today’s New York Times: The Democratic Party is hemorrhaging voters long before they even go to the polls. Of the 30 states that track voter registration by political party, Democrats lost ground to Republicans in every single one between the 2020 and 2024 elections — and often by a lot. That […]

Enough Already

Some news outlets are reporting that President Trump is considering inviting Volodomyr Zelenskyy to his upcoming summit-meeting in Alaska with Vladimir Putin. Mr. Trump would do well to remember the advice for conductors attributed to Richard Strauss: “Never look at the trombones. It only encourages them.”

Pass The Popcorn

Get ready for the next steel-cage match in American politics: President Trump’s plan to conduct a new census, one that doesn’t count the tens of millions who are here illegally. The census numbers are used to allocate representation in the House, so counting only legal residents will almost certainly reduce the number of seats held […]

Nothing To See Here!

Well, we have now been assured by the DOJ that Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself, that he had no “client list”, and that there is no evidence that he ever blackmailed anybody. As Sen. John Kennedy once said in a hearing: “Three things that don’t hang themselves: Christmas lights, drywall, and Epstein.” What’s really special […]

De Morientibus Nil Nisi Bonum?

I’m sure you’re all familiar with the Latin expression “de mortuis nil nisi bonum”, which exhorts us not to speak ill of the dead. Given the news we’ve just had about Joe Biden (carefully timed, of course, to pre-empt both the forthcoming book by the astonishingly hypocritical Jake Tapper and the damning release of the […]

Weekend Warriors

This weekend, the Trump administration produced: an American hostage released by Hamas; a provisional trade agreement with China that sent the Dow soaring over 1,000 points today; renewed negotiations between Russian and Ukraine; a cease-fire agreement between India and Pakistan; and an executive order that promises to reduce prescription-drug prices. Today, Mr. Trump fielded questions […]

Madness In Maine

Here’s a story to keep an eye on: Those of you who follow current events (and I can hardly blame you if you don’t) will know that President Trump has been leaning on state governments to stop allowing men to compete in women’s sports. The state of Maine has been particularly recalcitrant: the governor, Janet […]

Science!

An editorial in my local paper laments, as an “assault on truth”, the cancellation of federal funding for research into “disinformation”. We read: The National Science Foundation last week canceled hundreds of grants to researchers studying the spread of disinformation online. This was the explanation: “NSF will not support research with the goal of combating […]

About-Face! And About Time, Too

C.S. Lewis once wrote: “We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to […]

VDare Needs Your Help

The patriotic immigration-reform foundation VDare has for years now fallen under a withering “lawfare” attack by New York State’s maleficent Attorney General, Letitia James — who has never accused VDare of any crime, but despises the organization merely for its allegiances and opinions. Seeking to destroy VDare and its principals, Peter and Lydia Brimelow, and […]

Hang On To Your Hats

This week should be a wild one, folks. It’s hard to find the perfect metaphor for what’s happening in the nation and the world right now, but it’s somewhere between radical battlefield surgery and an exorcism (probably much closer to the latter, and perhaps even literally so). The old world order is not going to […]

They Fail To Comprehend Their Peril

I’ve written here often about civil war; I even went so far as to publish an article about it at American Greatness a few years ago. We flatter ourselves, here in the West, that in our “progress” toward Utopia we’ve moved past such atavisms of barbarity, but the truth is that human nature never changes, […]

A Whole New World

After watching President Trump’s lively and combative speech last night, I continue to be amazed (and delighted) at the sudden and complete reversal of the power balance in American politics; it is the greatest example I have seen in my lifetime of what the political theorist Vilfredo Pareto called the “circulation of elites“. On second […]

Behind The Curtain

Looking at the rapidly changing posture America is taking on the world stage, it occurs to me that all of this new strategic diplomacy would be consistent with the idea that the Claremont Institute’s Michael Anton, who is the State Department’s Director of Policy Planning in the new administration, has command of Trump’s ear and […]

The Poisoned Tree

Of all the exhilarating reforms taking place under the new administration, perhaps the best of all is the rooting-out of rot and waste and corruption by the new Department Of Government Efficiency, headed up by Elon Musk. It has already struck a mighty blow by shutting down the tumorous bureaucratic excrescence known as the United […]

The MOG-roe Doctrine

With his swift intimidation of both Canada and Mexico in these last hours and days by raising a credible threat of tariffs, President Trump just gave us a dazzling display of sensible, power-backed American statesmanship. This hemisphere is our natural sphere of influence, and we should not be afraid to influence it. What we are […]

American Juche

From a recent thread on X, here’s Nick Land (@Xenocosmography) on tariffs: The Tariffs ledger, positive and negative, is far more complicated than established opinion (or nationalist enthusiasm) is allowing for. For the US specifically, the highest priority positive factor is this: Losing core strategic industrial capacity through international division of labor is a geopolitically […]

The Boot Is Lifted!

We’re in Hong Kong now, thirteen hours ahead of Eastern time, so I was only able to check in on events a little after the fact — but wow, what a day for America. Pardons for J6 political prisoners! Sealing the border! Withdrawals from the Paris boondoggle, and from the WHO! Federal hiring freeze! An […]

Putting The “CA” In “Catastrophe”

I haven’t had much time for writing in these last few days, but, like the rest of you I’m sure, my attention has been riveted to the conflagrations that have utterly destroyed parts of Los Angeles, and are still, in many places, raging uncontrolled. I won’t make a detailed repetition here of the accusations being […]

A House Divided

The social-media site formerly known as Twitter was aflame, over the past couple of days, with a squabble among various factions of the new Right about the importation, by H-1B visas, of tech workers from other countries. One one side were Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who argue that in order for the U.S. to […]

The Days Just Ahead

Former General Mike Flynn — who knows a thing or two about what the entrenched Washington oligarchy is capable of, and willing to do — has posted a threat-assessment of the risks we face between now and Inauguration Day. Read it here.

The Iron Law Of Oligarchy

RFK on Ukraine: Robert F. Kennedy Jr EXPOSES the TRUTH about Ukraine in 3 minutes. Make the World Safe again pic.twitter.com/T8Vpeyw2Io — Marjorie Taylor Greene Press Release (Parody) (@MTGrepp) November 20, 2024

Can The Fever Have Broken?

In the runup to the election I said how worried I was about rising conflict between the two warring American social and political factions once the winner had been determined. I thought it likely, barring massive fraud, that Trump would win, and I thought that if that happened the seething Left would stage massive chimpouts […]

Playing With Matches

By now you’ve probably heard about the sad end of P’Nut the Squirrel, who, during his brief time on Earth, lived in happy and playful companionship with a fellow named Mark Longo (who had rescued the wee rodent after its mother had been squashed by a car). As their relationship blossomed, Mr. Longo had made […]

Buckle Up

Over the past few years, prominent members of our ruling Democrat oligarchy have declared those of us not aligned with “progressivism” to be racists, sexists, white supremacists, bitter clingers to guns and religion, deplorables, irredeemables, Nazis, and Fascists. Last night, we learned, also, that our sitting President thinks of us as “garbage”. That’s at least […]

Repost, With Commentary: The Inverted Monarchy

The following is a repost of an essay I published at American Greatness in October 2020. Four years on, I think it holds up fairly well, but its closing remarks about the Constitution need, I’m afraid, some further qualifications, which I have added at the bottom of the post. Not a day goes by lately […]

On Carl Schmitt’s Friend-Enemy Distinction

In a pair of posts at Substack and his own website, Bill Vallicella revisits a conversation he and I had a couple of years ago about the shrinkage of circles of moral inclusion in periods of deep political strife. I had commented on this passage of his: …haven’t the barbarians forfeited their (normative) humanity to […]

There’s No Fixing This

Yesterday I sat at a dinner event with some members of our ruling overclass, including a wealthy and powerful septuagenarian Washington lawyer and her husband, a D.C.-area doctor and hospital administrator. (I will not name names, but we are talking about the very highest levels of swamp creatures here. If I had been carrying an […]

Wormtongue

This is what we’re up against, folks. (You can almost smell the sulfur.) Raddatz: "The incidents were limited to a handful of apartment complexes… A handful!"@JDVance: "Do you hear yourself? Only a handful of apartment complexes were taken over by Venezuelan gangs and Donald Trump is the problem and not Kamala Harris' open border?" ? […]

Snitches Get Stitches

By now you have probably heard that Eric Adams, the glabrous black ex-cop who is (for now) Mayor of New York, is under multiple indictments for various acts of political corruption involving bribery and foreign influence, the culmination of a probe that has over the past couple of months swept up a number of his […]

By Other Means

Here are the results of a recent survey conducted by Scott Rasmussen’s Napolitan News Service: Seventeen percent (17%) of voters believe America would have been better off if former President Trump had been killed in last week’s attempted assassination. That figure includes 28% of Democrats who say that America would have been better off if […]

Any Questions?

Another day, another insane violent leftist bent on partisan violence. (I refer, of course, to today’s foiled attempt to assassinate Donald Trump — the second in two months.) Say what you like about Carl Schmitt, but the man had a keen eye for the truths of human nature. I’ve posted this quote before, but it […]

Interesting Times

“There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.” – Lenin As I write, Joe Biden has yet to be seen in public following his fishy letter of abdication. Rumors are spreading that he may be dying, or even already dead. As Moldbug remarked in a post today: There is simply […]

As I Was Saying

In light of today’s events it seems timely to repost this item from January. Still almost half of 2024 to go, folks, and the caldera is rising. P.S. Having now seen footage of Mr. Trump’s female Secret Service detail dithering in panicky confusion (and seemingly unable, in their agitation, even to holster their weapons properly), […]

Sowing The Wind

In his “Finest Hour” speech of June 18th, 1940 — eighty-four years and two days ago — Winston Churchill warned of “the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.” With news now appearing of the widening spread of the deadly H5N1 virus, there’s […]

What’s So Great About Democracy?

Over at Bill Vallicella’s place, I’ve expressed in several comment-threads my increasing lack of enthusiasm for democracy — a disaffection that has increased in proportion to the fetishization of “Our Democracy!” in political discourse and propaganda. To listen to it all, you’d think that Democracy is somehow an end in itself, the founding principle of […]

Trump “Guilty” On 34 Counts

Insane. Sickening. Buckle up, folks. The earth is shaking. The rest of this year is going to be very lively indeed. Also: this is a carefully calculated provocation. They’ve done this flamboyantly, daringly, pugnaciously, right before our eyes, as if to say “well, what are you going to do about it?” Any jacquerie that results […]