History

Salmon Chase: Whodat?

Featured image In the last of the five stories that make up his third volume of stories about fictional alter ego Henry Bech, John Updike recounts the incredulous response to Bech’s receipt of the 1999 Nobel Prize for Literature. In Updike’s telling, the New York Daily News runs a story with the headline “BECH? WHODAT???” That doesn’t quite apply to former Supreme Court Chief Justice Salmon Chase, but we should know him »

When Patty Met Jimmy and Billy

Featured image Yesterday marked 50 years since the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst from her Berkeley apartment. Hearst came to embrace the SLA’s revolutionary cause, adapted the nom de guerre Tania, and helped the SLA rob banks. On September 18, 1975, the FBI finally tracked down Tania. Hearst drew 35 years but in 1979 President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence. In 2001. On January 20, 2001, President Bill »

Uncancel Woodrow Wilson? How About Hell No

Featured image “Uncancel Woodrow Wilson” is the case David Frum attempts in the new issue of The Atlantic. Frum thinks well of Wilsonian internationalism, and thinks Wilson’s progressive reformism was . . . pretty good too. Where to begin? Frum is a skilled polemicist and writer, but his case for Wilson is unconvincing. Frum affects a both-sidesism, trying to scold lefties who hate Wilson for his open and vicious racism, and trying »

Justice Jackson cross-examines Hermann Goering

Featured image John Hinderaker and I wrote this article for Bench & Bar of Minnesota, the monthly publication of the Minnesota State Bar Association. It was published in the October 2002 issue. I provided background on it here yesterday. Working on this article was a labor of love. I hoped it would be both interesting and useful. I did my best to get the facts straight and provide examples within the space »

Cross-examining Hermann Goering

Featured image Former United States Attorney and federal district judge Herbert Stern retired from the bench and returned to private practice in 1987. While on the bench he wrote the memoir Judgment In Berlin (1984), which was turned into a 1988 movie directed by Leo Penn. The movie starred Martin Sheen and Sean Penn. Morton Mintz reviewed the book for the Washington Post here and Professor Maynard Pirsig for the William Mitchell »

Joshua Fit the Battle

Featured image Joshua Muravchik, Scott notes, was a student of Jan Karski, author of Story of a Secret State: My Report To the World. In 1987, Muravchik was a speaker at the Second Thoughts Conference put on by David Horowitz and Peter Collier, with speakers included Ron Radosh, Jeffrey Herf,  Stanley Crouch, P.J. O’Rourke and others. In his foreword to Bill of Writes, Collier wrote, the participants: differed on many issues, but »

Long day’s journey into “Shoah”

Featured image Yesterday TCM played Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour documentary Shoah in observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day. I saw it when it was released in 1985 and took the opportunity to watch it again yesterday. It’s a powerful film. Over a period of 12 years Lanzmann compiled the testimony of Holocaust victim/survivors, perpetrators, bystanders, and a few who don’t fit those categories. All in all, Lanzman filmed some 230 hours of footage and »

Treason of the intellectuals, American edition

Featured image Reading the eminent historian Niall Ferguson’s great Free Press column “The treason of the intellectuals” last month, I was struck by this passage: It might be thought extraordinary that the most prestigious universities in the world should have been infected so rapidly with a politics imbued with antisemitism. Yet exactly the same thing has happened before. A hundred years ago, in the 1920s, by far the best universities in the »

Which Party Did You Say Is Radical?

Featured image Democrats and their toadies in the news media never tire of asserting that the Republican Party has been “radicalized,” and is a “threat to democracyTM.” I suppose the following kind of platform language would strike liberals as radical and reactionary: We believe that a party platform is a covenant with the people to be faithfully kept by the party when entrusted with power, and that the people are entitled to »

If you love military history

Featured image This past Saturday I met Aaron MacLean, host of the School of War podcast. Aaron is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Before that, he worked on Capitol Hill as senior foreign policy advisor and legislative director to Senator Tom Cotton and served on active duty as a U.S. Marine for seven years, deploying to Afghanistan as an infantry officer in 2009–2010. Following his time in »

A word from Ritchie Torres

Featured image Rep. Ritchie Torres is a Democrat whose district sits in the Bronx. He is an outspoken supporter of Israel and the Jewish people. This past Friday he gave the sermon at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue Shabbat service commemorating the life and legacy of MLK. Rep. Torres has posted the video below on his YouTube channel. The video seems to have gone viral among supporters of Israel on X. In his remarks »

Barry and Biden Barely Cared About King

Featured image On January 15, 2016, when he proclaimed the national holiday for Martin Luther King, President Obama said: With profound faith in our Nation’s promise, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., led a non-violent movement that urged our country’s leaders to expand the reach of freedom and provide equal opportunity for all. Together, with countless unsung heroes equally committed to the idea that America is a constant work in progress, »

The prophetic voice

Featured image When Martin Luther King, Jr., brought his nonviolent campaign against segregation to Bull Connor’s Birmingham, he laid siege to the bastion of Jim Crow. In Birmingham between 1957 and 1962, black homes and churches had been subjected to a series of horrific bombings intended to terrorize the community. In April 1963 King answered the call to bring his campaign to Birmingham. When King landed in jail on Good Friday for »

Capitol Bomber Back Stories

Featured image [Herewith a sequel to the previous item about leftist violence in the U.S. Capitol that Democrats always seem to forget.] Often unaware of the date, time, and his own location, it was only natural that Joe Biden should forget 11/7, the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Capitol by the May 19th Communist Organization. As William Rosenau showed in Tonight We Bombed the U.S. Capitol, this was the “the first and »

Biden Ducks Capitol Bombshells and Bullets

Featured image Back in 2021, Joe Biden referred to the events of January 6 as “the worst attack on our Democracy since the Civil War.” The Delaware Democrat ignored Pearl Harbor, 9/11, and the attack on the U.S. Capitol on November 7, 1983. The “Armed Resistance Unit” planted a bomb in the Capitol, the Senate document “Bomb Explodes in Capitol” explains, “in retaliation for recent U.S. military involvement in Grenada and Lebanon.” »

The Shambhalic Henry Wallace

Featured image Henry Wallace! I have long thought that Roosevelt’s replacement of Wallace with Truman on the Democratic ticket in 1944 provided irrefutable proof that God looks out for the United States. Wallace was a fool who would have altered the course of history very much for the worse if he had succeeded Roosevelt to the presidency in 1945 instead of Truman. Among other evidence of Wallace’s foolishness, one thinks of Wallace’s »

Mitrokhin Phone Home

Featured image “Ex-CIA analyst says intel agencies to be politically active again in 2024 election: ‘Significant problem,’” proclaimed the January 2 Fox News headline. The former CIA analyst is Georgetown professor John Gentry, who cites “ideology driven analytic errors” such as diversity, equity and inclusion policies. According to Gentry, Bill Clinton launched the DEI policy, formally established by an Obama executive order in 2011. Gentry flags former CIA boss John Brennan and »