Two hundred and thirty-one years have passed since a bunch of rabble-rousing troublemakers declared the independence of 13 American colonies from their mother country.  Much has changed in that time, and it’s all too easy for us to regard Independence Day as just another expression of neocon nationalism run wild.  And. as far as national “celebrations” are concerned, it probably is. … [Read More]

Justin Raimondo writes so fast that he can be forgiven for misreading what I wrote.  He refers to “excluding” adherents to Islam, while I wrote “denying entrance to adherents of Islam.”  Obviously, I’m not talking about deporting citizens who are Muslim, Black Muslim or otherwise, but changing our immigration policy so that we’re not accepting more Muslims. Would that make a … [Read More]

My friend Justin Raimondo is right: The hysteria being generated in certain quarters around the botched bombings in London is entirely manufactured, designed to support a failed and immoral war.  Like the JFK airport plotters, and the Fort Dix Six, and a score of other victims of Sudden Jihad Syndrome), the bombers were incompetent and almost certainly not connected to Al … [Read More]

A little more than eight months ago, on September 12, 2006, Pope Benedict XVI delivered his now-infamous Regensburg Address.  The reaction in the Muslim world was swift and severe, including protests, violence, and the murder of a nun—all over the Holy Father’s citation of a late-14th-century Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Paleologus.  In a dialogue on Christianity and Islam, the emperor had … [Read More]

Life is full of coincidences so fortuitous that it is hard to believe that they are simply random.  Yesterday, as Taki’s Top Drawer published the final installment of my “Thoughts on the Antichrist” (click here for Part I and Part II), one of the chief “conservative” American Catholics that I had in mind while writing the articles (but whom I did … [Read More]

In late 1990, in the run-up to the Gulf War, I was a graduate student in political theory at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.  The coming war occupied much of our talk outside the classroom, and I can recall only one graduate student—a Sicilo-American Republican from Philadelphia who had gone through ROTC and was studying at the law … [Read More]

If the Antichrist will be a pacifist, as Giacomo Cardinal Biffi (following Vladimir Solovyov) argued in his recent Lenten meditation for the papal household, is the former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum, positioning himself as the Second Coming? Santorum made his name as a social conservative, championing traditional positions on abortion, homosexuality, and marriage, and not a few viewed him … [Read More]

[T]he Antichrist presents himself as a pacifist, ecologist and ecumenist.  He convokes an ecumenical council and seeks the consensus of all the Christian confessions, conceding something to each one. The crowds follow him, except for tiny groups of Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants.  Chased by the Antichrist, they tell him, “You have given us everything except for the one thing that interests … [Read More]

Keith Ellison doesn’t like tobacco smoke.  One day last week, a member of his staff smelled “a very strong odor” coming from a nearby office in their building.  In typical liberal fashion, he didn’t track down the vile offender and ask him if he might, out of deference to Mr. Ellison, extinguish his cigar.  Instead, he called the cops. It turns … [Read More]

For men to choose to kill the innocent as a means to their ends is always murder, and murder is one of the worst of human actions.  So the prohibition on deliberately killing prisoners of war or the civilian population is not like the Queensbury Rules: its force does not depend on its promulgation as part of positive law, written down, … [Read More]