Les Larmes de Crocodile
France’s anti-Christian ruling class lament the fire that damaged a valuable symbol of their government’s subjugation of Christianity
Thomas Fleming
Thomas Fleming is president of the Fleming Foundation. He is the author of six books, including The Morality of Everyday Life and The Politics of Human Nature, as well as many articles and columns for newspapers, magazines,and learned journals. He holds a Ph.D. in Classics from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a B.A. in Greek from the College of Charleston. He served as editor of Chronicles: a Magazine of American Culture from 1984 to 2015 and president of The Rockford Institute from 1997-2014. In a previous life he taught classics at several colleges and served as a school headmaster in South Carolina
The Middlebury College Inquisition
Conservatives are upset that Middlebury College has cancelled a conservative speaker, allegedly out of concern for safety. The safety angle shows how utterly degradingly stupid college officials have become. Of course, any rational person despises Middlebury for this and a thousand other crimes. But, let us take a breath and reflect.
Poems: Ecclesiastical Sonnets of Wordsworth
While Wordsworth was something of a radical in his early years, he settled down into a comfortable but apparently sincere Anglican faith. His Ecclesiastical Sonnets are not, it goes without saying, among his best read works, but they are carefully, even elegantly written.
Born Out of Due Time, Part One: The Think Tank Murders, Chapter 22 (Inconclusion)
He sustained among other things that unforeseen catastrophes are never the consequence or the effect, if you prefer, of a single motive, of a cause singular, but they are rather like a whirlpool, a cyclonic point of depression in the consciousness of the world, toward which a whole multitude of converging causes have contributed. Carlo Emilio Gadda, Quer Pasticciaccio brutto de Via Merulana Dyson was waiting for him in the car outside, listening to his Pioneer car stereo system. I’m a drunken hearted man, my life seems so misery I’m a drunken hearted man, my life seems so misery...
Heresies in the Mirror: The Genesis of Globalism
If family ties and local patriotism mean little, then the Stoic should regard all men as his fellow-citizens. He should be a cosmopolites—a citizen of the world. Like most of the harsher teachings of the Stoics, cosmopolitanism is easier to mouth than to practice. So austere a Stoic as Cato the younger was able to hand off his wife to a friend, but he could not cease to be a Roman patriot who preferred death to living under a dictator who, among other sins, cultivated the friendship of foreigners.
Roger Scruton: Purged
I see Prof. Sir Roger Scruton has been sacked by the Conservative government for saying George Soros is bad, Islamophobia is an imaginary problem, the sky is blue, water freezes at O centigrade, and a host of other offense notions. I never met Scruton, though I used to have some dealings with the Salisbury Review. I read some of his essays and his book on Sexual Desire, which had some good things in it but comes out of a philosophical tradition that has done far more harm than good. In this sense he is a real conservative, clinging to rationalism...
Heresies in the Mirror: Globalism and Nationalism, Part II: One World, One Government, One Ruling Class
Christians ought to be deeply suspicious of both nationalism and globalism, which developed in the course of the 18th century and which were both advocated by the bloody-handed leaders of the French Revolution who killed each other over whether the Revolution represented the revival of the French nation or the dawning of the brotherhood of man. In the end, the nationalists won, and while Napoleon pretended to be liberating the captive nations of the Holy Roman Empire, he was really only replacing Austria with France, Hapsburgs with Bonapartes. Stalin and Trotsky played out the same homicidal farce in their struggle...
Heresies in the Mirror: Globalism and Nationalism: Prologue
Globalism is one of many nightmares spawned by the French Revolution, which also generated equally pernicious counter-movements. If some Jacobins opposed war, others embraced it; if considerations of race and ethnicity were condemned by some as retrograde, they were also celebrated by others as as the ultimate reality, and, if the ultimate Jacobin dream is of a universal paradise without distinctions, the lesser alternative has been embraced by a long line of hard-headed pragmatists like Napoleon and Lincoln, Stalin and Hitler.
Podcast: The Right to be Rude
Thomas Fleming explains the purpose of “From Under the Rubble” and applies it to the twin errors of political correctness and the so-called right to self-expression in school.
Pete Buttigieg–Man of Faith
Here’s a pretty-how-de-do! Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend and leading candidate for the Democratic nomination, wonders if someone like Donald Trump–so wealthy, so unashamed of his wealth–could possibly be Christian. He has also attacked Mike Pence for his concentration on sexual issues. Like many people who read the headlines, I wondered what religion could inform the mind of a man who attacks one politician for being rich and another for being moralistic, when he pretends to have married another man. (I forget which he pretends to be the wife and which the husband.) He can’t be a...
