NEW OXFORD NOTEBOOK… By Pieter Vree | November 2025 | New Oxford Review | Subscribe: print and / or digital Pieter Vree is Editor of the NOR. “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion…but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.” ― Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash… Read More Assassination Nation
America… “not in any sense Christian” “….she licensed every form of lust with laws to cleanse the stain of scandal she has spread.” — Dante, The Inferno, canto V, 57. Every four years, truths in America can change from one thing to another, even as the center – left’s quest to be the global hegemon… Read More America and Seductive False ‘Liberty’.
By Solange Hertz. The world is showing all the signs normally associated with old age. If it appears to be going mad, there is every reason to believe its madness is the senile dementia of the superannuated rather than the crazed exuberance of youth. Compared with the children of adamic times and the patriarchal progeny… Read More Life Among the [Moral] Ruins
The events of 1968 had a strong bearing on his shift to a more conservative outlook. Excerpted from “POPE BENEDICT XVI: A Biography of Joseph Ratzinger.” (c) 2000 by John L. Allen, Jr.The Continuum. Joseph Ratzinger arrived at Tübingen [University] in 1966, still enthusiastic about the promise of Vatican II and ready to take his… Read More How the ’60s Changed Ratzinger
Edward Pentin | National Catholic Register | February 26, 2025 | John Rist says the secularization and moral fragmentation in England stems from the cataclysmic 16th-century event and the ensuing rise of nontheistic rights theories. … He also discusses how the collapse of traditional Christianity, especially Catholicism, has left a void, leading to a de… Read More Prominent English Scholar Says His Country’s Decline Began With the Reformation
by John Daniel Davidson. G. K. Chesterton said, “Some say it is impossible to return to the past; but the truth is that there is now nothing before us but the choice between two paths which both return to the past. We can return to some sort of Catholic fellowship, or we can return to… Read More Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come
Many hope Donald Trump has brought new hope and that he can avoid both anarchy and tyranny. When John Adams wrote, “A republic is a government of laws, not arbitrary rule” he very likely could not even conceive of the constantly evolving laws we know too well today, laws that evolve substantially, essentially, from one… Read More In the West today, there has been no stable law.
Former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s lengthy and emotional response to Sir 2016 John Chilcot’s inquiry into the Iraq War, a war opposed by Pope John Paul II and millions of people across the world: “The intelligence assessments made at the time of going to war turned out to be wrong, the aftermath turned out to… Read More Iraq. The Geat Internationalist Tragedy in Context And Retrospect.
“Pope Leo XIII to the Archbishops and Bishops of the United States, and dated Jan. 6, 1895. “For the Church amongst you, unopposed by the Constitution and government of your nation, fettered by no hostile legislation(1), protected against violence by the common laws and the impartiality of the tribunals, is free to live and act… Read More Leo XIII on American Church – State Accomodation
President Donald J. Trump. Executive Order.January 20, 2025. “By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and section 301 of title 3, United States Code, it is hereby ordered as follows: Section 1. Purpose.The First Amendment to the United States Constitution, an amendment… Read More Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship
— from Part II of the Catholics & American Life Symposium. New Oxford Review. January-Febuary 2025. On Christmas Day 1886, 18-year-old Paul Claudel — raised Catholic but delinquent in his faith — was listening to vespers in Notre-Dame de Paris. It was an event that “dominates my entire life,” he later recounted. “My heart was touched, and… Read More Karl Keating: Catholics & American Life
From the December 2024 New Oxford Review symposium Catholics and Political Life. 1. It is hard for me to understand how a nation can be an experiment. Such a notion presupposes that the United States is not actually a nation but an idea, something that underlies our many attempts, from Woodrow Wilson to George W. Bush,… Read More Thomas Storck on the American Experiment
Heck, we don’t to want turn away important allies in seeking to restore at least some “old” values anywhere, and it’s got to be better than what Kamala Harris was selling, but some of this is seeming a bit exploitative and schlocky. SH. “Viewers tuning into Fox News on Thursday afternoon were treated to an… Read More Selling America? Donald Trump Hawking Bibles, Sneakers and cologne.
Niall Ferguson, Victor Davis Hanson, and Andrew Roberts are senior fellows at the Hoover Institution and among the most prestigious and popular historians in the world. This is the first time they have appeared together in a public forum. Among the topics they cover in this wide-ranging discussion: the recent controversy regarding Winston Churchill’s role… Read More What the 1619 Project and Tucker Carlson Have in Common: Pseudo-history
Again and again British politicians, commentators and celebrities intone that ‘The War on Drugs has failed’. They then say that this is an argument for abandoning all attempts to reduce drug use through the criminal law. Peter Hitchens shows that in Britain there has been no serious ‘war on drugs’ since 1971, when a Tory… Read More Peter Hitchens: The War We Never Fought
Pro-choice means what, exactly? A new Charlotte Lozier report finds that more than 95% of U.S. abortions are elective, while less than 5% are due to health risks, rape, or incest, shedding light on the reality of abortion procedures across the country. Analysis Carole Novielli “The media has been spewing out stories right and left… Read More Latest US abortion figures show 95% are procured for ‘elective’ reasons
Young supposedly privileged women are being taught in school to retool their own desires. They are told they need to be instructed by “experts” on how to be socialized, whereas most often young men learn to socialize themselves, on route to innovating and building the world. Retooled privileged Women seem to aspire to and do best… Read More The Corporatization of Women
Bad and evil ideas have been far more virulent in history than silver, gold, or geopolitical schemes. Our modern errors arose out of the weeds of bad Christian soil, fueled by concupiscence and backed by diverse and mighty powers. King Henry VIII’s ecclesial revolution in England, born in lust and ending in the vast dissolution of the… Read More Philosophers of the New Light
Opinion. By Karel van Wolferen.* In a famous exchange between a high official at the court of George W. Bush and journalist Ron Susskind, the official – later acknowledged to have been Karl Rove – takes the journalist to task for working in “the reality-based community.” He defined that as believing “that solutions emerge from your judicious… Read More Through The American Looking Glass. “We Create Our Own Reality,” He Said
A Note on ‘Conspiracy‘ in general and in regard to Wokeness and the War on the Past. No one should be afraid of the term ‘conspiracy’. Even two men planning to rob a liquor store are indulging in a conspiracy. The term ‘conspiracy’ has been a commonplace term in our legal systems for a very… Read More Note on the Word ‘Conspiracy’
Mark Groubert, a Jewish Trump supporter [who was wrong here speculating on likely Harris V.P., pick] says Kamala Harris must be taken seriously. Consider: She has the money, is said to be extremely calculating, very ambitious, she knows how to play all the way to the end game in political chess, and is used to… Read More Why Harris May Have the Last Laugh
“For the average person, all problems date to World War II; for the more informed, to World War I; for the genuine historian, to the French Revolution.” —Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
Loneliness in the West. “Once we bowled in leagues, usually after work — but no longer. This seemingly small phenomenon symbolizes a significant social change that Robert Putnam has identified in this brilliant volume, Bowling Alone, which The Economist hailed as “a prodigious achievement.” Drawing on vast new data that reveal Americans’ changing behavior, Putnam shows how we have… Read More Bowling Alone
“Sexual expression, whether visual or written,” he speciously says, “can be a legitimate form of artistic expression,” proving he’s no better or more conservative than the rest of them, despite how giddy with pride he makes many conservatives feel, especially those who wrap their egoism in blockbuster podcasts touting American Patriotism and righteousness. Even Catholic… Read More Elon Musk’s X Deploys American “Liberty” for More Sex
Is “our” American Enlightenment philosophy an example of sheer political cynicism, or is it brute historical fact where there is no God but power, imperial Roman-like power, redux? Appearance, reality, unreality. We see one thing when reality is so often another. A lot of Enlightenment philosophy is like that. Consider a few of modern day… Read More America As Spectacle: Beyond Good and Evil.
“Whittaker Chambers is best known today as the veteran Soviet spy who became, in William F. Buckley Jr.’s words, “the most important American defector from Communism” when he testified against members of his underground Communist cell in the 1930s. Yet Chambers did more than reject Communism: He revealed a key problem with modern liberalism. In… Read More Mark Groubert On the Whittaker Chamber – Alger Hiss Case
Elderly pro-life activist sentenced to over two years in prison under FACE Act (CNA) Joan Andrews Bell, a 76-year-old Catholic and pro-life activist, has been sentenced to over two years in prison for her involvement in a “rescue” at a Washington, D.C., abortion clinic. In addition to Bell, three other activists — Jean Marshall, 74,… Read More Elderly pro-life activist sentenced under ‘Freedom’ of Access Act
“Binyamin Appelbaum In a speech with multiple fire-breathing moments, I was struck by Biden’s level tone as he declared that those who fought to overturn Roe v. Wade were going to learn about “the power of women.”—NYT. “Women?” + Donald Trump on real persons abortion + America is racing toward Canada’s euthanasia free-for-all – as seven… Read More What it boils down to
No fear of God. + Bill Joy: Why the Future Doesn’t Need us. + Aldous Huxley on Emerging Scientific Dictatorship . Note: Back in the 1980s a nun told me she believed homosexuals were God’s gift to humankind in an age of overpopulation.
“… the political fantasies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau have a great deal to answer for. For two centuries, his sentimentalizing utopian rhetoric has provided despots of all description with a means of pursuing conformity while praising freedom. It is a neat trick. Words like “freedom” and “virtue” were ever on Rousseau’s lips. But freedom for him… Read More Jean-Jacques Rosseau and the Antinomian Principle
81% of Enlightenment Americans approve. Divorce in America Gets a glow Up.Axios. Jan 27, 2024. Divorce has become a major life milestone replete with specialized parties, large support networks and a whole industry ready to capitalize on the big change — just like weddings. Why it matters: Cultural attitudes toward ending a marriage have become… Read More Divorce in America Gets a Glow Up
For Catholics our every Eucharist is Thanksgiving day (lit. from Koinē Greek: εὐχαριστία). And only a neopagan nation could conceive of a national syncretic Thanksgiving Day apart from the Eucharist. This is American simulacra. SH. By Solange Strong Hertz. Thanksgiving and more. “…[R]eligion, of course, is what the [1776-1789] Revolution is all about, for no one… Read More America’s Feast Days — To Itself
It was Aldous Huxley who, very early, saw sexual decadence combining commercial interests with political manipulation in the emerging media. And he knew what that would mean for a culture. “Aldous Huxley in his 1932 dystopian novel Brave New World depicts a culture in which pleasure is compulsory and engineered to eliminate intellectual challenge and to… Read More Aldous Huxley, Sex, and Corporate Psychological Manipulation
Or, there are many ways to resent and persecute that which is hated. Originally Titled: Modern Art. The Goldsmith Company Lecture David StarkeyGoldsmith Lecture2017 The Inquiring Mind writes “Starkey is in great form in this lecture where he excoriates conceptual art “For the inaugural Goldsmiths’ Company lecture, Dr. David Starkey spoke on the subject of… Read More How Modern Art Took a Dump on Christian Western Civilization
…the National Lawyers Guild, and the 65 Project. Last Spring famed attorney Alan Dershowitz, who has been ostracized by many or most of his present and old friends for speaking out against legal violations in what he calls the political prosecution of former President Donald Trump, warned about “what is coming,” saying repression is going… Read More Dershowitz Warns Against Stanford Law Radicals
“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” — Bhagavad Gita, Robert Oppenheimer “Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness.” — JFK, American University, 1963 “The dropping of the… Read More Oppenheimer and The End of Time.
“The visionary chemist Sidney Gottlieb was the CIA’s master magician and gentlehearted torturer – the agency’s “poisoner in chief.” As head of the MK-ULTRA mind control project, he directed brutal experiments at secret prisons on three continents. He made pills, powders, and potions that could kill or maim without a trace – including some intended… Read More How Evil Thee, Sidney? How Evil We?
Updated. Nancy Pelosi vowed to reverse the end of Roe v. Wade ‘one way or another’ By Anders Hagstrom | Fox News Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., urged her fellow Democrats to put the abortion issue front and center in their 2024 campaigns, arguing Republicans will lose big on the issue across the country. Pelosi appeared… Read More Pelosi says abortion is Democrats’ ticket to victory in 2024, accuses Republicans of ‘disrespect for women’
By Solange Hertz Any citizen doubting that the Old Religion of the alchemists is the state religion of the U.S. need only make a pilgrimage to the nation’s capital, beginning with the Prayer Room established in the Capitol by joint resolution of Congress in 1954. He will find there for his devotion a small central… Read More Our State Religion
Scripture prophesies the coming one day of a great deception heralding the imminent arrival of “the Lawless One” (2 Thess 2) just prior to Parousia(1). Prof. Daniel O’Connor writes, “As modern man turns away from his own Christian patrimony, the myths he turns toward are no longer found within the pages of Hesiod. They are,… Read More Signs and Lying Wonders. Only Man Bears His Image.
Catholic Critique 