As one might surmise, one doesn’t get rich by serving the HL Mencken Club. Unlike other organizations, which have claimed the “conservative” label, belonging to our club is not a ladder to social acceptability or a means of increasing one’s income or deferred annuity allowance. Investing time and energy in an organization like ours is not a wise career move but … [Read More]

In the latest issue of Quadrant, Peter Kocan complains about my “sourness” in depicting the paleoconservative persuasion in my autobiography, Encounters. Peter is shocked that someone who is described as “America’s leading paleoconservative intellectual” would be “sawing off the branch on which [he] sits,” by treating his movement as a collection of has-beens. Peter compares my “weird” behavior to that of … [Read More]

The announcement that Barack Obama had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace took many people by surprise. Note that Obama was given this award on February 1, 2009, eleven days after he had acceded to the office of president. At the time he had done nothing significant to promote world peace, and one would be stumped to find anything noteworthy … [Read More]

A wealth of ideas rushed through my mind the other day as I was watching the production of Nineteen Eighty Four starring Richard Burton and John Hurt, which was released, by no coincidence, in 1984. Like Orwell’s novel, the film emphasizes the use of factual distortions to strengthen political domination, in this case that of Big Brother. In order to keep … [Read More]

John Derbyshire and Sam Tanenhaus are both middle-aged males living within a radius of thirty miles of Times Square. They also have recently written books on the straying of the American conservative movement; and New York Magazine has recommended both of their works to its readers. Each man has had considerable contact with the movement being discussed, Derbyshire as a provocative … [Read More]

Browsing through Norman Podhoretz’s latest book, Why Are Jews Liberals? (read non-neocon leftists), I was struck by a series of misleading facts starting around page 224. According to Pod’s authorized version of THE TRUTH, certified by the neoconservative hangers-on who blurbed his book, Jews defected in large numbers from the GOP in the 1992 presidential election specifically because Pat Buchanan was … [Read More]

Having just seen the film Julie and Julia, based on a book by Julie Powell and a screen play by Nora Ephron, I’ve certain unanswered questions about some of the historical details that went into the plot. Of the two main characters, the more interesting by far is the longtime interpreter of French cuisine for Americans, Julia Child. A sympathetic maternal … [Read More]

Recently while talking to a “moderate” conservative and faithful NR reader, I was struck by this person’s profoundly negative view of the past, including the recent past. When I mentioned research by Thomas Sowell in the late 1970s proving that American blacks had made greater economic strides in the 1930s and 1940s than in the 1960s or 1970s, my acquaintance responded … [Read More]

Like the wife of David Frum, who blurted out the fact that her spouse had written the “axis of evil” speech for Dubya, I feel impelled to give voice to family pride. My younger son Jonathan, who has clerked for a while for Sonia Sotomayor, produced several of the speeches that this judge has delivered since going to DC, including the … [Read More]

Kirsten Powers, the photogenic FOX News regular and New York Post syndicated columnist (who says neocon favorites can’t have it all?) has been fuming lately about the evil chauvinists who have been going after Sarah Palin. Like several other FOX regulars, Kirsten wants a “summit on sexism” to deal with attacks on the sometime Alaska governor. Powers explains: “I’m no fan … [Read More]