Free Republic

Daughter of the Enlightenment By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL Last spring, Ayaan Hirsi Ali took her ''Dutch mother'' -- the woman who taught her the language and cared for her after she arrived in the Netherlands as a refugee in 1992 -- to lunch at the Dudok brasserie, near the Parliament in The Hague. As always, Hirsi Ali's armed security detail was there. They have been her companions since she started receiving death threats in September 2002. Hirsi Ali, who was born in Somalia and has been a member of the Dutch Parliament since January 2003, had endorsed the view that Islam...

According to British defense officials. Latest intelligence update from the U.K.'s Ministry of Defense (MOD) noted that Colonel General Alexander Lapin had reportedly been fired from his role as commander of Russia's Central Military District in late October. Major General Alexander Linkov was reportedly appointed acting commander on Thursday, the ministry said in the update on Sunday. It said that Lapin had been "widely criticized for poor performance on the battlefield" by Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov and Putin ally Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the notorious Wagner Group, a mercenary outfit fighting on Russia's side in Ukraine. Both blamed Lapin...

Of the two communities that confronted each other 400 years ago in New England, it may now be the Indians who most resemble today's Americans.The following essay is part of The Federalist’s 1620 Project, a symposium exploring the connections and contributions of the early Pilgrim and Puritan settlers in New England to the uniquely American synthesis of faith, family, freedom, and self-government.Possibly someone will surprise us at the last minute. Possibly the coronavirus is to blame. But with 2020 nearly over, it looks like the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrims’s arrival at Plymouth, Massachusetts, is going to pass uncommemorated.There have...

Almost the entire population of Italy, it seems, spent the last week of June watching a boat arrive from across the Mediterranean. It was the Sea-Watch 3, a Netherlands-registered ship funded by progressive philanthropists and captained by Carola Rackete, a 31-year-old German climate-change activist. Rackete radioed that she was carrying 42 African refugees rescued at sea who were in desperate health. Italian interior minister Matteo Salvini holds that such ships rendezvous with traffickers just off the Libyan coast, and are really less interested in rescuing sailors than in transporting illegal immigrants to Europe en masse. “Taxis,” he has called them....

This is the most conservative of all the Democratic presidential candidates, note well. So, as the man says, let’s be clear: if you think it might be a bad idea for biological males to compete against your daughter in the high school women’s sports league, or that biological males do not belong in your daughter’s or wife’s locker room, or even if you dissent from gender ideology at all, as the left-wing feminist J.K. Rowling did publicly late last year — then you are on the same side as Bull Connor and the Ku Klux Klan, and will deserve the...

Christopher Caldwell’s new book, The Age of Entitlement, offers a striking revision of recent American history that has the advantage of being readily summarized. The polarization of political opinion and the dissolution of the American fabric, he argues, has its roots in the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which represented a sharp break with the past. “The changes of the 1960s, with civil rights at their core,” he explains, “were not just a major new element in the Constitution. They were a rival constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible.” The common narrative surrounding civil rights,...

Christopher Caldwell is not a household name. But for the relatively small set of people who care deeply about political writing, he is a towering figure. His prose — full of wit and irony, enlivened by an eye for paradox and the telling detail, informed by a polyglot and polymathic erudition — is second to none in the world of conservative journalism and exceeds nine-tenths of what is published in the press at large. In a review of Caldwell’s previous book, 2008’s immigration-skeptic Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, the Marxist historian Perry Anderson, himself one of the most learned...

In fact, we’ll blame anything rather than confront the truth about what’s happening Christopher Caldwell’s new book is called Reflections on the Revolution in Europe. And, if you don’t quite get the Burkean allusion, his subtitle spells out his real concerns: “Immigration, Islam and the West.” Given my own obsessions in recent years, you’d expect me to be favourably disposed to it. And I am, my enthusiasm only slightly tempered by the instant conventional wisdom that, if you’re only going to buy one Islamophobic Euro-doom-mongering diatribe this summer, Caldwell’s is the sober and respectable one, in striking contrast to certain...

Christopher Caldwell’s “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West” is a hot book presented under a cool, scholarly title. To observe that Mr. Caldwell’s rhetoric is “hot” is not to say that it is aggrieved or unruly. On the contrary, Mr. Caldwell, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and a columnist for The Financial Times, compiles his arguments patiently, twig by twig, and mostly with lucidity and intellectual grace and even wit. But they are arguments one is not used to hearing put so baldly, at least from the West’s leading political journalists. Primary among...

In his “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe,” Christopher Caldwell, a meticulous journalist who writes for The New York Times Magazine and other publications, gives this subject its most sustained and thoughtful treatment to date. The question of Islam in Europe has occasioned calls of alarm about “Eurabia,” as well as works of evasion and apology by those who insist Islam is making its peace with European norms. [...] ... A fault line opened in European society [regarding Muslim immigration]. On one side were those keen to keep their world whole and theirs; on the other was elite opinion, insisting...

Something explosive is about to hit the British political arena, a book with ideas so shocking it will change the debate on the most important issue in European politics. For years, the European political class have told their peoples that mass immigration was beneficial, inevitable and historically precedented. It enriched our lives, it boosted our economy, it made us better people morally and it was a continuation of our countries’ histories of immigration, and anyone who disagrees is a racist bigot. The ruling class kitted the emperor out in his fancy new clothes and if people could not see them...