After New Year’s Day, millions of schoolchildren from kindergarten to university will troop back into their education factories. There, the work of turning their heads to mush shall resume at the hands of their… ah, educators. This might seem a bit strident on my part; however, the truth is that events across the country (since … Read more
For many of us, 2020 has been a difficult year. (Yes, I am aware of the understatement!) Covid-19, along with its ensuing restrictions and economic and personal upheaval, the rioting, election madness, and all the rest of the public horror has for many of us been combined with personal losses, especially the deaths of family … Read more
Perhaps because of the severity of the Covid restrictions currently in place, the public in Austria has had more pressing worries than the follow-up investigation into the Islamic terrorist murder spree on November 2. The All Souls’ Day massacre that claimed the lives of three people in Vienna’s downtown district as well as the twenty-year-old … Read more
In our post-democratic era, there are all sorts of questions of identity being bandied around the post-Christian West, not least in our own United States. The dominant view for over two centuries saw this nation as primarily an instrument of freedom, firstly for itself, and then for all the world. For those of a conservative … Read more
When I was a boy in Hollywood, in the palmy days of the mid-sixties, my father (in addition to his grocery-and-rent-paying engineering job) wrote screenplays. None of these were ever sold, alas. But while I watched Batman and the Green Hornet, and stood bemused at the antics of the hippies, Dad’s fertile imagination ground out … Read more
If the past month has been chaotic in America, it has seen some bloody scenes here in Europe. On the morning of October 29, a 21-year old Tunisian national entered the Basilica of Notre Dame in Nice, France began knifing the three people he found there. He virtually severed the head of an elderly lady, … Read more
As all the world knows, the election of 2020 was destined to be messy, as the two nations inhabiting the territory of these United States geared up for battle: after four years of nonstop media abuse, in which the major news generators had long since abandoned any pretense to impartiality, both sides were spoiling for … Read more
The recent arrest of Father Travis John Clark of Saints Peter and Paul Church in Pearl River, Louisiana, opened up a rather lurid story. Apparently, the cleric in question had hired two self-described dominatrices to engage in sex with him. On the altar. On camera. One of the… ah, ladies in question had posted on … Read more
Today is the feast of the Blessed Emperor, Charles I of Austria-Hungary. The release of my new biography of the saintly monarch last month have for obvious reasons brought him to my mind in recent days. Added to this is the impending dedication of the 16th shrine in his honor in these United States, at … Read more
Few candid observers today will deny that the asylum of modern life is truly run by the inmates. This home truth was brought home to me yet again by two very different news stories—one of international interest, the other purely local (and that from a town I have only been to a few times). The … Read more
One of the disturbing things about the Cult of Wokeness is how many venerated institutions—educational, cultural, religious, and so on—have succumbed to it, as per our earlier published “Woke List.” One such that did not make that admittedly non-exhaustive numbering was the National Association of Independent Schools, the umbrella group for many of the most … Read more
Amidst the witches’ sabbath that the news has become, a rather pleasant centennial has come and gone—that of the birth of Ray Bradbury. The late Mr. Bradbury is author of such novels as The Martian Chronicles and Something Wicked This Way Comes, numerous short stories, plays, and film and television scripts. It was my pleasure … Read more
As America’s major cities continue to be besieged both by rioters and inane local governments, and as increasing numbers of individuals are being attacked for dissenting from the elites’ party line regarding race and gender via “cancelling” and “doxxing,” we deem it to be in the public interest to identify those organizations in government, education … Read more
In a year filled with craziness across the United States and the formerly Christian world, two things in particular—apparently unrelated—have hit me especially hard: the burning of Mission San Gabriel in the eponymous town in Southern California, and the retrogression in status of Constantinople’s Hagia Sophia from museum to mosque. Of course, there were other … Read more
In the orgy of self-indulgent masochism that so many leaders of our cultural and educational institutions are enjoying while America’s cities burn, a few truly stand out as remarkable. Certainly, CNN’s gleeful reportage that “NASA drops racially charged nicknames of celestial bodies” was unique—and almost as silly as Aunt Jemima’s and Uncle Ben’s summary dismissal … Read more
TRIGGER WARNING: Ultra-sensitive readers may feel microagressed by some or all of the views expressed in this article. Please go immediately to your nearest safe space to regain your composure via the use of stuffed animal, play dough, chocolate milk, and videos of puppies, kittens, and bunnies. Attacks on statues and monuments around the developed … Read more
“The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that … Read more
We are living in a strange time, to be sure—a strange amalgam of the last short years of the antebellum South and Weimar Germany. If we were selling it to a studio as a film idea, we would have to say it’s the first half-hour or so of Gone with the Wind meets Cabaret. Amid … Read more
When the attacks—legal and otherwise—on Confederate monuments and heritage began to ramp up, I warned in various venues that it would not stop there. And, of course, such disparate characters as Kate Smith and Columbus followed in that train. But ever since the eruption of riots across the nation and the rest of the Western … Read more
The apogee of collaborationist Catholicism, alongside its more radical co-religionists, was undoubtedly the day of my birth: November 8, 1960. It was the day John F. Kennedy was elected president. He had already paid the price of admission to the Oval Office with a speech before the Houston Ministerial Association the previous September 12, in … Read more