March 30, 2020

Dr. Fauci and Dr. Greenspan

Four and a half minutes into an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN Sunday morning, in the middle of a mini-lecture on the perils of modeling, Dr. Anthony Fauci tossed off an estimate of the death toll in the U.S. from Covid-19:  100,000 to 200,00...

March 21, 2020

Reducing Covid-19 Fever

In the end, this flu season will be of greater interest to social psychologists and social and political historians than to virologists and epidemiologists.  Among an innumerate and paranoid population obsessed with its health, and which believe...

February 25, 2020

A Trumpian Proposal to Conquer Cancer

On March 12, 1938, Germany invaded Austria.  Recognizing that war with the Third Reich was now probable and anticipating bombing raids on London, Admiral Hugh Sinclair, head of the Government Code and Cipher School (GCCS), set out to find proper...

March 5, 2019

Does the Metropolitan Opera Hate Whites?

The Met Live in H.D. performance last Saturday was Donizetti's La Fille du Regiment.  The comic opera, which premiered in 1840, tells the story of a Tyrolean peasant, Tonio, who's in love with Marie, an orphan adopted by a regi...

January 8, 2019

The Original Social Justice Warrior: Father Charles Coughlin

The most notorious American anti-Semite of the 1930s was Father Charles Coughlin, the charismatic pastor of Shrine of the Little Flower in suburban Detroit.  In 1934, Father Coughlin founded the National Union for Social Justice, which publ...

October 25, 2015

Bibi and the Holocaust

In a speech to the 37th Zionist Congress last week in Jerusalem, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in an aside, mentioned Haj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem from 1922 until 1948.  The subject of Bibi’s talk was ten lies about ...

October 5, 2015

As usual, Israeli victims are not the story for the New York Times

“I yelled ‘please help me,’ and they just spat at me,” Adele Banita told reporters. An Arab terrorist had run out of a shop in Jerusalem’s Old City Saturday and stabbed to death her husband, Aaron, and a man who had l...

September 28, 2015

The Rectification of Names: Confucius Takes on Political Correctness

Kong Qiu, known in the West as Confucius (from Kong Fuzi, “Master Kong”), is the first individual whose birthday we know:  September 28, 551.  Happy birthday to Qiu. One of the Master’s core doctrines was “the rec...

September 7, 2015

How You Can Help Stop the Iran Nuclear Deal Tomorrow

If you have a Democrat Senator or live in the district of a Representative who supports the President, consider yourself lucky.  You still have a chance to influence the debate on the deal. An overwhelming response from constituents may persu...

September 5, 2015

Deja vu All Over Again: What Happened When We Did A Nuclear Deal Two Decades Ago with Another Rogue State

Claudia Rosett in Forbes offers an instructive comparison between the “Agreed Framework” with North Korea in 1994 and this summer’s “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action” with Iran. With Congress due to vote by Sept. ...

August 16, 2015

America and the Holocaust: The Past as Prologue

There are two kinds of evil-doers:  those who kill, rape, beat, and brutalize others, and those who let this happen. The story of American and British indifference to the fate of Jews during the Second World War still makes for disturbing rea...

June 19, 2015

The Real 'Root Cause' of the Conflict in the Middle East

Defeat in war is often accompanied by the wholesale transfer of populations via expulsion and resettlement. Brutal and inhumane, but with one notable exception, the agony usually ends in one generation. The First World War famously shattered four ...

June 9, 2015

Multiculturalist Intolerance: Why Can't a Woman be More Like a Man?

Several years ago, an occasional contributor to American Thinker, John Kenneth Press, shared with readers a letter he had just received from a good friend, whom he called Sandra.  This was a “Dear John” letter, but with a difference....

June 5, 2015

The Myth of the Long March Through the Universities

Actually, it didn’t take very long.  In many places, it was all over by 1972.  And it was more of a stampede than a march.  This year marks the 40th anniversary of Malcolm Bradbury’s classic novel The History Man.  ...

April 13, 2015

Some additions for the Urban Dictionary

Earlier this year, State Department spokesperson Marie Harf became a verb.  “Harfing,” according to the Urban Dictionary, means “To say or assert something so patently stupid and preposterous as to generate widespread mockery....

April 9, 2015

That was then, this is now: a tale of two senators

Once upon a time, before he was a senator, X worked for a law firm that helped a shady developer score $43 million in government funding.  When X left the firm and became a legislator, he helped the developer get another $14 million in taxpayer ...

April 7, 2015

Who's Your Daddy? Another Look at Joel Gilbert's <em>Dreams from My Real Father</em>

Barack Obama’s campaigns for national office have always centered on who he was, not what he’d done. But who was he? Professional journalists didn’t want to know, and didn’t want voters to know. In Ray Bradbury’...

April 6, 2015

Obama is no Neville Chamberlain

Let’s retire Neville Chamberlain’s umbrella.  It’s become a pretty threadbare symbol over the years. In negotiating with Hitler in Munich in September 1938, as historians in the ’70s and ’80s pointed out, the Bri...

March 31, 2015

Republicans see Obama as a more imminent threat than Putin

Reuters reported early Monday that in a Reuters/Ipsos online poll, over a third of Republicans (34%) think the American president poses an imminent threat to this country, whereas only a quarter believe this of the Russian president.  Why, ju...

March 27, 2015

Self-Hating Jews, Self-Hating Americans, Self-Hating Whites

In 1970 Lolo Soetero, Barack Obama’s Indonesian stepfather, was hired by Union Oil to work in the company’s government relations division.  He was asked occasionally to go to dinner parties with visiting Union Oil executives and Amer...

March 14, 2015

Giuliani Speaks Truth to Power

Rudy is on a roll. For the second time in less than a month, he’s made a statement, however breathtakingly obvious, that no other politician in America has dared so far to say:  African-Americans commit “enormous amounts of crime...

March 13, 2015

Obama's 9/11 conspiracy theory

Conspiracy theories about 9/11 still flit across the blogosphere like fruit bats after dusk.  For the truthers, it was an inside job.  The CIA detonated explosives planted in the buildings earlier in the year, with a little help from Dick C...

March 6, 2015

Obama's Hand Sign Reconsidered

In an American Thinker article published on February 18th that received over 180,000 views and 1,188 comments, F. W. Burleigh analyzed an AP photo taken last August at the United States-African Leaders Summit Conference in Washington, D.C. showing Pr...

February 23, 2015

Obama's finger

The hand sign that the president appeared to be flashing at the African Leaders’ Conference in August, described by F. W. Burleigh on these pages last week, is not merely a Muslim gang sign.  It has a long and venerable history. As Burl...

February 19, 2015

Barack Hussein Obama. What's in a Name?

During the 2008 campaign, Democrats were indignant when a talk show host referred to the Senator from Illinois by his full name.  In the parlance of the left, this was “demagoging” their candidate.  We should celebrate diversity...

January 20, 2015

Was Iran behind the murder of Argentinian prosecutor Alberto Nisman?

Two terrorism experts see the fingerprints of Iran in the alleged suicide early yesterday of Alberto Nisman, the Argentinian prosecutor who was to testify before the National Congress the same afternoon on the 1994 bombing of the Jewish Community Cen...

January 12, 2015

Jewish victims at kosher market nameless, faceless in the MSM

Late in the morning on Saturday (EST), January 10, the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions juives de France (CRIF) disclosed the identities of the four individuals killed in the kosher market takeover the day before.  They were all men...

December 29, 2014

Non-Notable Deaths for 2014

This is the time of year people check the “notable deaths” of the last twelve months -- as determined by the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, or the L.A. Times. The entertainment, sports, and fashion industries are more heavily rep...

December 21, 2014

A Murder in Miami

On a sunny Saturday morning last August, Rabbi Joseph Raksin was shot and killed by two young African American men as he walked to a synagogue in an unincorporated neighborhood in North Miami Beach.  Raksin was a Lubavitcher, a member of Chabad,...

December 14, 2014

Mozart and Multiculturalism

In Mozart’s tragically short lifetime, Die Entführing aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio) was his most popular opera.*  It premiered in Vienna on July 16, 1782, and a week later Mozart wrote his father, “I must say ...

December 5, 2014

The Story behind the Story in Israel

Former AP reporter and editor Matti Freedman has published another excellent piece on the story behind the story: the way in which journalists frame and report events in the Middle East. As usual, Orwell got there first. Here is his description ...

December 3, 2014

Safari Park Rules

Commenting on the murder of Zemir Begic on November 30 by hammer-wielding “youths” in St. Louis, the Conservative Treehouse has adumbrated the Safari Park Rules: if you find yourself “in the wrong place at the wrong time,” sta...

December 1, 2014

Gruber, the Grey Lady, and Gullibility

It was on Veteran’s Day that non-health-care-policy wonks first heard of Jonathan Gruber.  Embarrassing revelations from the architect of the ACA had originally surfaced last July, but it was Gruber’s remarks about the stupidity of t...

November 27, 2014

Thank a White Male

Do you like internal combustion engines?  Thank a few white men.  (Jean Lenoir, Nikolaus Otto, Karl Benz, Rudolf Diesel, Gottlieb Daimler, Emil Jellinek, Henry Ford among others.) Are you a fan of flush toilets and indoor plumbing? ...

November 19, 2014

If CNN had reported on the Nuremberg Trials

American Soldiers Kill Nine Germans Nuremberg, October 6, 1946 Seven German civilians and two military personnel were killed by American soldiers today in a Bavarian town recently devastated by Allied bombing.  The victims were identified ...

November 16, 2014

Dr. Huxtable and Mr. Hyde

It was not a good week for Bill Cosby.  Hundreds of thousands people who didn’t know what a “meme” was and knew nothing about the comedian’s sexual exploits have been enlightened.  At last count, thirteen women ha...

August 18, 2014

Independence Day in India and Pakistan

Shortly after the movie Gandhi opened in Delhi in 1982, a cartoon appeared in a major Indian newspaper showing a car with then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (no relation) pulling away from the theater. “They say it’s based on a true story,...

August 17, 2014

Divvying Up the Caliphate: The Long-Term Causes of the War

A hundred years later, the dominoes are still falling from the First World War, and people are dying as they fall -- some, in Iraq and Syria, pretty gruesomely. In analyzing how a disaster of this magnitude could have happened, it’s the sho...

August 15, 2014

Phyllis Schlafly Turns 90 Today

Very few individuals who were not politicians or generals have had a major impact on American political history.  Phyllis Schlafly is one of the exceptions.  Twice.  In 1964, she helped launch the grass-roots conservative movement that...

August 10, 2014

Short Memories: Once Upon a Time, Killing Civilians was Kosher for the Brits

While British Prime Minister David Cameron several times called for a cease-fire in Gaza, and described a strike that hit a school as “appalling,” and his new Foreign Minister, Phillip Hammond, characterized the situation as “simply...

August 4, 2014

Winston Churchill's Brilliant Plan that Almost Prevented the First World War

On Wednesday, July 29, 1914, the British Cabinet met to discuss the European crisis.  Time was running out:  Austria-Hungary had just declared war on Serbia, and that afternoon would shell Belgrade.  In just two days, Russia and then G...

August 4, 2014

An Outbreak of Paranoia at <em>Gates of Vienna</em>

According to the website Gates of Vienna, my 3-part article series last month on Diana West’s American Betrayal and the controversy surrounding it was “commissioned” by “the arbiters of ‘accepted history’” wh...

August 3, 2014

The Lessons of World War I

One hundred years ago tomorrow, at 8:05 a.m., two Belgian border guards stationed outside Gemmenich spotted a squadron of twenty-five German cavalrymen approaching the village.  They ordered the patrol to halt.  “Belgian frontier,...

July 27, 2014

Who Started World War I?

August 4, as even non-history buffs now know, will mark the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of World War I.  Inevitably, a slew of books have appeared on the war’s origins.  Two of the most widely reviewed, going head-to-head in...

July 6, 2014

Diana and Ron: Backstory

See also: Diana and Ron: What Was Going On?                 Diana and Ron: The Second Front On the same day as he published “McCarthy on Steroids,” Ron Rados...

July 5, 2014

Diana and Ron: The Second Front

See also: Diana and Ron: What Was Going On? Diana West makes the case in her book, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character, that Communist agents in the U.S. helped block a strategy that could have ended the war early a...

July 4, 2014

Diana and Ron: What Was Going On?

“With the publication of my second book, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character, I am looking forward to a vigorous debate about my findings,” Diana West wrote when the book was released.  What followe...

April 24, 2014

'Every Man His Own Commissar': Jared Taylor and the Politics of Race

Good manners are infectious.  Jared Taylor’s civility and dapper appearance impress even those sending him death threats:  the most recent one addresses him as “Mr. Taylor.”  In an age when even upper-class Brits loos...

September 20, 2012

Frank Marshall Davis, Jr.?

In Laughter and Forgetting, novelist Milan Kudera describes a photo taken of the leaders of the Czech Communist Party on a balcony in Prague.  In the original picture, Vladimir Clementis stands next to Prime Minister Klement Gottwald.  But ...

September 9, 2012

Inside the Big Tent

Both the DNC and RNC featured divisive internal splits, over platform and rules changes, respectively.  The Democrats settled their fight with a top-down diktat.  The Republican dispute was resolved by a compromise, but one that still left ...

September 5, 2012

'Fact-checking' Michele Bachmann

Fact-checking sounds great in theory.  Wouldn't it be nice to see statements by politicians analyzed intelligently and dispassionately?  But expect the tooth-fairy to tuck the controlling shares for Brooklyn Bridge, Inc. under your pillow b...

September 4, 2012

Michele Bachmann and the Left

I told my apolitical daughter I'd interviewed Michele Bachman the day before and asked if she knew who Bachmann is.  My daughter thought for a second and said, "Yeah, that crazy lady." With the exception of Sarah Palin, no one has been demonized...

September 1, 2012

Citizen Cain: Herman Looks Back and Ahead

It may seem like half a lifetime ago, but from late October through much of November of last year, an African-American businessman from Atlanta was leading the pack in the race for the GOP nomination.  In one memorable debate in Las Vegas, he wa...

August 31, 2012

Mitt's Night

The four-hour show last night at the Tampa Bay Times Forum was supposed to introduce Mitt to America.  It probably succeeded.  Stepping into the Sheraton lobby to catch some AC on the long walk back to the parking lot, I heard Brett Baier c...

August 29, 2012

Opening Day Fracas in Tampa

Before the made-for-TV show officially got underway at 7:00 PM, there was a noisy fracas on the floor of the GOP Convention.   The floor, by the way, is a red carpet, and in all other ways the Tampa Bay Times Forum was transformed from a hockey ...

August 17, 2012

Newt on the Recent and Distant Past

(Editor's note: Elise Cooper and Jeff Lipkes are covering the GOP Convention for AT.  They spoke with Newt Gingrich last week.) AT asked the former speaker: why isn't Newt Gingrich being nominated in Tampa at the end of the month? According to t...

July 17, 2012

Breaking News: Zimmerman Molested a Six-Year-Old Girl (When he was Eight)

George Zimmerman's cousin came forward to denounce him to prosecutors as a serial groper.  The first incident took place when the two children were lying under a blanket while they watched TV.  Other episodes occurred at widely spaced inter...

July 15, 2012

Taking Down the Second Amendment: The Connection between Fast and Furious and the Trayvon Martin Case

Very soon after his inauguration, Barack Obama decided to move ahead with plans to use the horrific number of deaths in the Mexican drug wars as a pretext for new gun control laws. On March 26, 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder proposed a ban on "as...

July 15, 2012

'Horseplay' at Penn State?

The verdict of the Freeh investigation was not a surprise to anyone who looked at the emails from February 2001 that were leaked to CNN on July 2nd.  They revealed that after Mike McQueary met with Vice President Gary Schultz and AD Tim Curley, ...

July 8, 2012

The Truth about Fortune Magazine's 'The Truth about the Fast and Furious Scandal'

Early in the morning on June 27, Fortune Magazine published online a lengthy article called "The Truth about the Fast and Furious Scandal."  Fortune's timing was not fortuitous.  That evening, the House voted to hold Attorney General Eric H...

July 3, 2012

The Movie on Health Care That Obama Doesn't Want You to See

It's not a documentary, and it's not by a conservative.  The writer and director is a French-Canadian leftist, or former leftist.  But, among other things, the film is a horrifying and hilarious exposé of health care in Canada.  The fi...

July 2, 2012

The Smoking Gun at Penn State

When Joe Paterno was fired by the Penn State Board of Trustees on November 9, 2011, some brave souls (including one at American Thinker) argued that the board had acted precipitously.  After all, when Mike McQueary told him about the incident he...

June 29, 2012

'Botched' Reporting

The papers of record continue to whistle in the dark.  The day after Eric Holder was held in contempt of Congress, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post, still doggedly refer to Fast and Furious as a "botched" operat...

June 19, 2012

Is there such a thing as a feminist fountain?

My last year in high school I went out with an older woman.  She was a freshman at UCLA.  Judy was embarrassed to have me visit her in her dorm, so we would meet at the newest landmark on the Westwood campus, the Inverted Fountain.  It...

June 17, 2012

Grosvenor Square, Tavistock Square: Odes to Political Correctness

I was working in London last month and stayed in a flat just north of Hyde Park.  One evening, feeling a tug of homesickness and mild curiosity, I crossed the park and walked to the U.S. embassy in Grosvenor Square, a couple of blocks east of Hy...

May 1, 2012

Fingering Zimmerman: Payback for the Sanford Police?

The shooting of Trayvon Martin went viral after Tracy Martin, Travyon's father, approached civil rights lawyer Benjamin Crump, who in turn enlisted the Orlando publicist Ryan Julison. But why did Martin senior contact the lawyer?  Had he been ...

April 23, 2012

Trayvon, Dee-Dee, and D.J.

Dee-Dee's Story Dee-Dee, Trayvon Martin's girlfriend, told a very short story, but a compelling one.   It's how we first learned about the now iconic hoodie.  But above all, it's the main source for the media's narrative of the Trayvon...

April 20, 2012

Soak the Famous

Adam Smith didn't mince words about monopolies.  They are "absurd and oppressive[.] ... Like the laws of Draco, these laws may be said to be written in blood."  The monopolies he had in mind were those granted by the government: the king or...

April 20, 2012

Bloodied But Unbowed

ABC News released this photo earlier today of the back of George Zimmerman's head, taken just three minutes after the shooting. The injuries are consistent with his head being slammed against a hard surface. But no mea culpas from ABC about its earli...

April 17, 2012

Zimmerman's 'Aggravated Stalking' Charge

Here's the Florida statute under which George Zimmerman has been charged with second degree murder.  It's 782.04 2n: unpremeditated murder as a result of aggravated stalking. This is defined as engaging in:  willful, malicious and repeated...

April 12, 2012

Medildos: The Media and the Zimmerman-Martin Case

My first teaching job was in the English Department at Northwestern.  The university was home to the Medill School of Journalism, which considered itself, and maybe still does, the nation's premier j-school.  It had just launched an undergr...

April 9, 2012

The Story Unravels: New Questions about Trayvon Martin's Final Hour

It was a fable for our times: Once upon a time, a nice young man set off from his dad's fiancée's home before the NBA All-Star game to buy some Skittles and Arizona Tea for his stepbrother.  Although the lad was seventeen, he looked like a cute ...

April 5, 2012

Where's the Map?

On March 13 the Orlando Sentinel published a map of the Twin Lakes community where Trayvon Martin was shot, but no one else seems to have reproduced it.  Yet it's impossible to reconstruct the incident without referring to it.  George Zimme...

April 3, 2012

Zimmerman and Ketman

The most interesting question at this point in the Trayvon Martin case may be who believes the Party line and why. As for the incident itself, after the case became the latest and noisiest cause célèbre of the left, the police released seven 911 tape...

January 28, 2012

Newt Self-Deports in Florida

Live by the sword, die by the sword.  Newt surged from the back of the pack after his performance in the early debates.  Then came his famous take-down of CNN reporter John King on the eve of the South Carolina primary, to a standing ova...

January 15, 2012

OWS: The Children's Crusade Redux

This year marks the 800th anniversary of the Children's Crusade.  The celebration began early.  There are some intriguing parallels, and contrasts, with OWS as it sputters into the new year. In the spring and summer of 1212, crowds of you...

December 25, 2011

Blue and White Christmas

What do Israel Baline, Felix Bernhardt, Samuel Cohen, Walter Kauffman, Jacob Levinson, Jonathan Marks, Michael Pashelinsky, Samuel Ram, Julius Steyn, Alan Stillman, Melvin Torma, and Bernard Weismann have in common? This minyan plus two wrote the lyr...

December 18, 2011

Back to Bachmann

Knute Romney is not going to win one for the Gipper. It's deja vu all over again: as in 2008, the two frontrunners are not conservatives.  The recent National Review editorial, despite reading as if it were written by a committee, was nonetheles...

December 17, 2011

One Cheer for Democracy

Communism in Eastern Europe collapsed and died at the end of the 1980s because the third generation of leaders lost the religion.  Ivan Twelve-Pack had been disillusioned for decades; only the intellectuals were still on board. Similarly, if t...

December 10, 2011

One-off Democracy: When the First Election is the Last

Today is the anniversary of the first election in history in which a nation's leader was selected by universal male suffrage.  On December 10, 1848, Frenchmen went to the polls for the first time in fifty-six years.  For a third time, a rev...

December 1, 2011

Saving the Cain Campaign

The Cain Train is about to derail.  There is probably only one thing Herman can do at this point to get his campaign back on track: he can talk about race.  Specifically, he can talk about two subjects that are taboo for white politicians: ...

November 24, 2011

Thanking America: When Americans Save Lives Overseas, it Doesn't Make the Textbooks

In October 1914, over 5 million Belgians faced starvation.  The German Army had invaded on August 4 and swept across the country in three weeks.  Revisionist historians would later snicker about "atrocities" invented by the British, but the...

November 13, 2011

Talking Turkey

There is an illegal occupation that has gone on for decades in the Middle East and it's not being enforced by the IDF. In August 1974, Turkey seized nearly 37% of the then-independent Cyprus.  The pretext for the invasion was the protection of T...

November 13, 2011

When Penn State went wrong

The focus on the Penn State scandal has been almost entirely on the dramatic events of 2002, when graduate assistant Mike McQueary barged in on the rape of "Victim 2."  In fact it was decisions in 1998 and 1999 that revealed the university's pri...