Joseph Sobran: The National Review Years. (Vienna, Virginia: FGF Books, 2012.) Recently I received the galleys for the anthologized essays and book reviews by the late, great Joe Sobran (1946-2010). The anthology pieces come out of the period when Joe was working at National Review, a relation that started in 1972 and allegedly ended because... Read More

Jonah Goldberg in his new collection of meditations, The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas and Andrew Ferguson in his latest Weekly Standard opinion piece “The New Phrenology” complain how the other side gets nasty when depicting its well-meaning opponents. This bothers our “conservative” apologists, since they yearn for all... Read More

The recent pillorying of John Derbyshire and Bob Weissberg after being accused of making tactless remarks about race recalled a question that’s been bothering me for decades. Why should we think that race is the only untouchable subject or the only issue that, to use George Will’s misleading phrase, we as a society agreed to... Read More

The refurbishing of the Statue of Liberty, which has been hoisting its torch above New York Harbor since October 1886, has evoked a torrent of lavishly tendentious praise in the national press. Perhaps the smuggest commentary is a New York Post op-ed piece by Terry Golway, director of the Kean University Center for History, Politics,... Read More

A recent syndicated column by Michelle Malkin indicates what happens to interesting conservative commentators when they sign on as GOP flacks: They become predictable Republican mouthpieces and attack dogs against the Dems. For years I read Michelle with delight as she railed against weak-kneed politicians in both parties. She was murder on Republicans as well... Read More

During the last five years I’ve written provocative fortnightly columns for the Lancaster newspapers, and I periodically receive letters from an outraged older woman (or so my wife has guessed from her handwriting and historical references) who considers me to be a moral leper. From this person’s communications, I’ve learned that I’m “one of those... Read More

FOX News has been running a series on the conservative movement and recently released a DVD showing what purports to be the definitive picture of the movement’s progress. I have a close friend who regrets he couldn’t watch every minute of this treasured series and is ordering the DVD to keep the authorized view of... Read More

After I recently savaged Rich Lowry’s syndicated review of Deirdre McCloskey’s book Bourgeois Dignity, Professor McCloskey indicated that I have no right to discuss her work until I’ve read it from cover to cover. I explained to her that I’ve nothing against her work, only Lowry’s embarrassing commentary on it. For all I know, her... Read More

This morning (on September 15) while dressing, I was watching The Today SHow and noticed three figures being interviewed, all of whom were supposedly “Young Conservatives.” The three looked as if they were on loan from a nursing home, and all wore matching black suits. The most animated of the stooges, Republican congressional whip Eric... Read More

I've somehow missed out on the Glenn Beck phenomenon. My entire exposure to the guy has been from his occasional appearances on the O'Reilly show, which I watch from long habit. Beck's persona there is goofy. He giggles, hams, pulls faces, and banters with O'Reilly. It's entertaining, which of course is what it's intended to... Read More

A major problem for those on our side of the fence is the unwillingness of the liberal and neocon media to admit us into the public discussion. This has meant that independent authors and thinkers, who have stood ever so minutely to the right of the mainstream media and its permissible discourse, have been kept... Read More

On purely aesthetic grounds, I’d be on Rush’s side. Although a fat blowhard, he looks minimally less ugly than the Frumbag. Moreover, unlike the person who just attacked him as a “racist,” Rush, to my knowledge, has never insulted me personally. Of all those targeted in Frum’s attack on the “unpatriotic Right,” it was I... Read More

Last week, while CPAC was winding down its annual conference, one of its stellar speakers, Jonathan Krohn, was honored with an interview on FOX news. This much-touted interviewee, who is now being compared to Joe the Plumber, is only 14 years old, and he bears a striking resemblance to my 13 year-old grandson Joshua. For... Read More

A serious difference of views has now surfaced in 'movement conservative' circles, and I wish that some authoritative voice of the global democratic church would furnish me with the proper theological formulation. According to yesterday's New York Post, 'Barack Obama and the country itself stands on the shoulder of giants,' and the greatest of these... Read More

Mat Roberts may be overly cynical when he accuses NRO's star intellectual Victor Davis Hanson of being dishonest in his recent description of what he and his pals are doing at work: There is no party-line take on unfolding events. The mishmash of libertarians, social conservatives, blue-dog Democrats, independents, paleoconservatives, neocons, traditionalists, atheists, and doctrinaire... Read More

A few days ago my colleague Richard Spencer discussed one of the silliest columns I've ever seen, a piece of utter gibberish that is offered up by the New York Times' 'resident conservative' David Brooks. The piece in question was so stupid that it seemed to be a spoof. Even PC readers of the Times... Read More

As Tom Piatak discusses over at Chronicles, David Frum hastened to the defense of his fellow-neocon Anne Applebaum, the historian of the Soviet gulags and the current wife of the current Polish foreign minister. It seems that NR dared to rebuke this lady for her enthusiastic backing of Obama. Frum complained about “how the house... Read More

In view of the numerous responses to my announcement of the death of paleoconservatism and my discussion of the transition from a paleo to a pospaleo opposition to the neoconservative-liberal media, there may be need for these further clarifications. One, the postpaleos’ indifference to the post-World War II conservative movement is a decided advantage that... Read More

In a recent blog Helen Rittelmeyer cites a new publishing celebrity for the New York Post and a Doubleday expert on the American Right, Ross Douthat, whose gripe is that American conservatives had actively supported segregation. Douthat is certainly not the only authorized intellectual who has been saying this. One of Helen’s respondents, who has... Read More