Thilo Sarrazin, and the Germans’ Great Mistake

Throughout the summer, former director of the German Bundesbank and a longtime adherent of the German Social Democrats, Thilo Sarrazin, remained in the crosshairs of the German political class for his controversial work dealing with the relation between high crime and Germany immigration policy. ...

Learning to Hate Our Two-Party Democracy

This morning (on September 15) while dressing, I was watching The Today SHow and noticed three figures being interviewed, all of whom were supposedly "€œYoung Conservatives."€  The three looked as if they were on loan from a nursing home, and all wore matching black suits. The most ...

The Death of the WASP

A remark by Richard Brookhiser in April in a syndicated column in the New York Post about “how we"€™re all WASPs now” made me realize that Brookhiser's statement taken in context does not prove what he thinks he's saying. A journeyman author, long associated with NR, Brookhiser, to ...

Picking Apart Washington’s Scum

As everyone and his cousin know, the neocons are my least favorite "€œWashington insiders"€ and they divide generally into two categories, the ill-mannered, touchy Jews and their groveling or adulatory Christian assistants. David Frum, the Kagan boys, Norman and John Podhoretz, and Michael ...

Christian Heresies

Matthew Roberts suggests that there are presently two understandings of Christianity on the real right. One is the view taken by youthful neopagans, critically tracing our democratic egalitarian politics and culture back to primitive Christian sources. The pursuers of this fashion are happily ...

A Call to the Alternative Right

As one might surmise, one doesn’t get rich by serving the HL Mencken Club. Unlike other organizations, which have claimed the "€œconservative"€ label, belonging to our club is not a ladder to social acceptability or a means of increasing one's income or deferred annuity allowance. ...

Beautiful Losers

In the latest issue of Quadrant, Peter Kocan complains about my "€œsourness"€ in depicting the paleoconservative persuasion in my autobiography, Encounters. Peter is shocked that someone who is described as "€œAmerica's leading paleoconservative intellectual"€ would be "€œsawing off ...

Ignoble Prizes

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 ...

The Desert of the Real

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 ...

A Tale of Two Conservatives

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 ...