Month: February 2016

Home 2016 February
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Incidentally White

       “[T]o speak in general terms of the prototypical Southern conservative we would say first of all that he was not an alienated man.” —M.E. Bradford, “Where We Were Born and Raised” White nationalism has long existed on the borderlands of disaffected conservatism.  Among its several denominations is the movement known as identitarianism, which combines the...

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Keep Your Powder Dry

President Obama’s latest executive order, announced as we send this issue to press, is hardly surprising.  Having failed to convince Congress three years ago to pass new gun-control laws requiring background checks on all gun purchases, the President had used every mass shooting since—including the jihadist attack in San Bernardino—to rail against the current state...

Kidnapped
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Kidnapped

This book was first published in England as The Adventures of Sir Thomas Browne in the 21st Century.  Neither title describes the book very accurately.  It is really an extended meditation on Browne’s life and interests as they strike a 21st-century science writer who likes to ride a bicycle and who, like Browne, lives in...

With Friends Like These
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With Friends Like These

The elegantly titled Iron Wall is a perfect example of how a necessary book on an important topic can be rendered inadequate by the author’s all-consuming bias.  In the Preface to this immense volume, Avi Shlaim, a retired professor at Oxford and a fellow of the British Academy, describes his well-connected family as Iraqi “Arab”...

It’s the Debt, Stupid
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It’s the Debt, Stupid

A distinguished and liberal economic historian, Prof. Michael Hudson has laid bare the secret of the present American dilemma—why we suffer a declining and artificial economy and a widening chasm between the rich and the rest.  The interest-collecting rich absorb ever more of the national income.  “Instead of creating a mutually beneficial symbiosis with the...

The Agony of Nations in the West
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The Agony of Nations in the West

European history since the fall of the Roman Empire may be regarded as the slow forging, as if by a hidden hand as well as by human passions, of these particular forms of human collectivities called nations.  After several failed attempts to reconstitute the Roman Empire, Europe emerged out of the Middle Ages as a...

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Radical in Chief

American politicians and media people have been making much of what they perceive as a profound distinction between “radicalization” and “self-radicalization.”  While they consider both to be Bad Things, the perception seems to be that, as a rule, “radicalization” is the badder of the two, as it implies that foreign jihadists are able to exert...

A Christian Humanist
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A Christian Humanist

Having access to personal correspondence and other private papers is every biographer’s dream, a potential difference between a decent biography and a great biography.  In the case of Russell Kirk, the advantage was huge.  Kirk maintained a “massive—in some ways, beyond comprehension—correspondence” over the course of a prolific life in letters.  For example, Bradley Birzer,...

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Dropping the Ball on Us

The New Year is in full swing, and with it new laws and regulations carefully designed to enrich the lives of Americans who are insane. Because the essence of our approach to life together in our degenerate age is that, for every problem humanoids may encounter, there is a potential law that could solve it,...