At its annual “Ministers Week” lectures last year, the theological school of Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas provided a revealing window into the contemporary debate within mainline church circles over homosexuality. Taking a pro-homosexuality approach was Victor Furnish, a professor at SMU’s Perkins School of Theology. Defending the traditional Christian stance was Richard Hays...
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Death in the Afternoon
In the 16th century, Spain was the wonder of Europe, with her vast empire in Latin America and the Philippines and her wealthy possessions in the southern Netherlands and Italy. She came close to defeating and ruling England and Holland and, for a time, annexed Portugal with her colonial empire in Africa, Asia, and Brazil. ...
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The Destruction of Lebanon
Much of the Western commentary on the violence in Lebanon has not been about the events themselves but about the commentators’ feelings about the warring parties. Israel’s staunch friends and apologists would not admit that the IDF has done anything wrong, or that it could do anything wrong, even if the whole of southern Lebanon...
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On Frugal Conservatism
I was glad to see Chronicles dedicate its November 2005 issue (“Reviving the American Dream”) to the Southern Agrarians. Thomas Fleming correctly pointed out that the Agrarians were not simply idle romantics. Their vision was political, defending organic communities against the ravages of communism and capitalism. Unfortunately, most of the Agrarians later abandoned this vision...
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The Decline and Fall of the Midwest
Even more than Vachel Lindsay, who liked to say that the Mason-Dixon line ran straight through his heart, Booth Tarkington embodied the regional conflict that defined the Midwest. Born in Indianapolis only five years after the end of the war between the regions, Newton Booth Tarkington was descended on his father’s side from Southern Democrats...
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Looking Backwards
Gil Santana had it all: He was the model conservative for the new millennium. Gil was born and reared in Southern California, naturally, and his given name evoked the rich diversity of the state that had once symbolized the American dream: Kim Kwame Kaplan Santana, each part representing one fourth of his Korean, African, Jewish,...
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SPLC
So the Southern Poverty Law Center finally lost one. And a big one at that. The FBI has dropped the SPLC from its list of “partners” on the agency’s hate crimes page, The Daily Caller revealed last week. The agency dropped SPLC, an FBI spokesman told TheDC, because,“the Civil Rights program only provides links to...
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Stray Nuts & Bolts
Using the backdrop of a small Southern town slowly awakening to the cultural and social rumblings of the mid and late 20th century, Jayne Anne Phillips is attempting in this novel to weave the lives, dreams, and remembrances of the Hampson clan of Bellington, West Virginia, into a mythic mosaic of the sort found in...
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Finally, A Black “Hater”
The Southern Poverty Law Center, or the $PLC, as they call it at VDare.com, has finally found a black murder suspect they dislike. Indeed, such was their distaste, the “hate-watchers” published his mugshot on their website. Normally, SPLC covers only white “haters” collared by the long arm of the law. They include crackpot supremacists, separatists...
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Kosovo Gets Interesting
The problem of Kosovo, an already complex equation with many unknowns, is getting more vexing by the day. On February 2, U.N. special envoy Martti Ahtisaari unveiled his much-anticipated plan for the final status of the southern Serbian province, which has been under NATO-U.N. occupation since Bill Clinton’s war against the Serbs in 1999. While...
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Miller and Lennon
Sixty-six years ago, a small plane took off from southern England for Paris. It never made it. On board was a 40 year old Army Air Force major, who before the war had been the most popular musician in America. His music is still listened to and enjoyed today, even though popular music has...
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Knights of the Invisible Empire
Back in the days when Southern merchants had to take the Ku Klux Klan seriously, the knights of the Invisible Empire liked to play a neat little trick on a store owner who had strayed too far from the path of racial rectitude the secret society demanded of him. Several Klansmen in plain clothes would...
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A Liberal Policy
In regard to the recent controversy over illegal immigration, allow me to offer a few liberal proposals. The problem could be easily and immediately solved by putting all illegal aliens to work constructing a wall across the entire southern border. (They make up 25 percent of the construction industry, anyway.) And, at below minimum wages,...
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The New Gold Rush—The American Border
What U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents really think about what's happening at our southern border.
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What is History? Part 35
You can do anything you like in London as long as you don’t do it in the street and don’t frighten the horses. —Mrs. Patrick Campbell There is nothing so stupid as a gallant British officer. —Wellington I am one Southerner who is not obsessed with the Civil War. I am too busy planning for...
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Bundy: Not Quite A Terrorist
The Southern Poverty Law Center has weighed in again on Cliven Bundy, the rancher in Nevada at odds with the federal government over grazing rights, fees and endangered turtles on federal land. Having restrained itself from calling Bundy a “terrorist lawbreaker,” as the Daily Kos did, SPLC may be reconsidering. Apparently upset that Daily Kos...
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An Action Program
What is a populist? This much used (and abused) term has gone through several American incarnations. First, it was the name of a 19th-century political party whose program was as vague as its success was short-lived: The party combined an untenable admixture of Southern agrarianism and social-democratic panaceas leavened with a healthy hatred of Eastern...
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The Supreme Court, Globalization, and the Teaching of Religion
Public figures talk about globalization as if it were the Rapture. We are told that, unlike Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus, we live in an era of international trade; so these days, we must worry more about what the world thinks and does. As Justice Sandra Day O’Connor told the Southern Center for International Studies,...
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The Lunacy Spreads
The hatewatch business has grown in recent years from a large but solo operation known as the Southern Poverty Law Center into a major industry that includes an array of outlets that also retail gratuitous contumely, scurrilous innuendo and naked lies. Say something the left doesn’t like, and any number of disreputable websites will declare...
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Texas and Heterosexual Marriage
Barely eight years ago, 76 percent of Texas voters affirmed by constitutional amendment their commitment to heterosexual marriage as the proper relational norm. But, hey, so what, when a federal judge informs Texans that “[S]tate-imposed inequality can find no refuge in the United States Constitution”? Accordingly, Texas joins the melancholy parade of Southern states—Virginia, Kentucky,...
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Yes, America Is Being Invaded
Though most of the migrants crossing the U.S. southern border are in search of economic opportunity, some are used as tools by our enemies. The invasion is deliberate.
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Slouching Toward Empire
The tragic fate of the Cherokee tribe is well documented. What is less widely known, and probably less researched, is the fairly rapid destruction of the Creeks—a nation whose territory included most of what is today Alabama and southern Georgia—and the role played by Andrew Jackson in their demise. In a style more readable than...
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Putin’s Friends in Ukraine
The most important borders for Americans to worry about are our own. But the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 has certainly shifted media attention from the crisis on our southern border to the borders of Ukraine. Although we do not know with certainty, it appears likely that pro-Russian rebels were the ones who shot...
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Trying to Find “Hate”
A problem with having to find “hate” wherever you look, and then blog about it in breathless, apocalyptic prose, is publishing a major gaffe. Thus did the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch blog offer this gem on Aug. 20 about conservative activist Larry Klayman, the founder of Judicial Watch: Right Wing Watch: Larry Klayman wants...
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Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?
A pathologist who recently moved from Vermont to North Carolina has written an article in the American Journal of Forensic Sciences about the old Southern custom of lying in the road. The good doctor was apparently unacquainted with this practice, and he was upset to discover that every couple of weeks, on the average, one...
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Media Matters: Another Inquisitor In Fighting ‘Hate’
The granddaddy of the “anti-hate” movement is, of course, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has made hundreds of millions of dollars and ruined the lives of conservatives by using innuendo, guilt by association and outright lies to smear anyone it doesn’t like. And that’s just about anyone to right of, say, Che Guevara. One...
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Europe, A Nation of Old Men Up for Grabs
I have just completed a three-week tour of Europe starting from a home base in Switzerland to southern Germany, thence to the south of France, and finally to northern Italy. Each of these places is unique. Each is delightful in its own way, rich in culture and history, a pleasure to be in. The food...
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“Tech Totalitarians” vs. the Right
The “tech totalitarians” of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Google have been joined by financial services corporations like Paypal in not only “de-platforming” and censoring alternative voices on the Right but “de-financing” them by blocking access to their services. Paypal is teaming up with the leftist, anti-Christian Southern Poverty Law Center to determine who to ban...
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Death Wish of the West—May 2011
beyond the revolution The Unentitled by Thomas Fleming views Suicide by (Legal) Immigration by Roger D. McGrath The Death Wish of the West by Claude Polin news DOMA’s Fifth Column by William J. Watkins, Jr. reviews A Southern Foison by Ray Olson Chronicles of the South edited by Clyde N. Wilson Vol. 1: Garden of the Beaux Arts Vol. 2: In Justice to so Fine a ...
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Texas Is Correct to Defend Its Sovereignty from the Border Invasion
The mass invasion now transpiring at the U.S. southern border is illegal, immoral, and unsustainable. Texas is within its rights to resist it.
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State’s Wrongs
Chilton Williamson, Jr.’s column “Pragmatic Destruction” (What’s Wrong With the World, December 2011) attacks American democracy with a vengeance. He seems to be bothered by the fact that Southern blacks were “freed” (his quotation marks) by civil-rights laws through the negation of “states’ rights” (my quotation marks). I don’t see how restricting a certain class...
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Genes & Jingo
Popular journalists have begun writing off the sociobiology revolution. “Can Sociobiology Be Saved? and quote the learned opinions of Stephen J. Gould and Ashley Montagu (would they lie?). They indulge in vaguely worded smears: Konrad Lorenz was a nazi, E. O. Wilson is a Southerner, and sociobiology is a code word for racism among members...
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High Times: The Late 60’s in New York
As 1969 rolled around and the decade was ending, I was six years old and living in a temperate Southern city a thousand miles from New York. Conflict came from wanting to stretch my feet into my brother’s half of the backest-back of our fake wood-sided turquoise station wagon; Vietnam had no meaning for me....
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You Had One Job
Our southern border is being overwhelmed by waves of “migrants” and interior immigration enforcement has collapsed, as the president continues to threaten closing the border. Trump has made plenty of threats before, threats about halting the “caravans,” making Mexico pay for a border wall, forcing “migrants” to wait in Mexico, and refusing to sign any...
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Cannibal Statistics
In debate, it is always possible to be right for the wrong reason. For instance, in supporting the proposition that cannibalism is immoral, I might argue that, historically, cannibalism encouraged the killing of human beings who might otherwise have been kidnapped by Arabs or rival African tribesmen and sold into slavery in the southern United...
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An Academic Remnant
As a rule I don’t use this letter for academic shoptalk. Most of you aren’t college professors, and few things are more tedious than another profession’s gossip. Besides, there’s no regional angle to this stuff, except that the trendy foolishness currently plaguing American campuses may afflict Southern schools (Duke University aside) marginally less than those...
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Coulter Guilty Of Thoughtcrime
So the Southern Poverty Law Center has divined that Ann Coulter is a “white nationalist.” SPLC drew this conclusion because Coulter says some things with which other “white nationalists” agree, and SPLC dutifully assembled such “racist” quotes and placed them side-by-side. Examples (the italics are SPLC’s): One may assume the new majority will not be...
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An Unpeaceable Kingdom
It was one of those Saturday nights that spills over into Sunday morning. Invited into the home of a main-line Protestant couple in split-level northern New Jersey, the 40ish group was made up of Jews and Roman Catholics from the neighborhood and of visiting Southern Baptists from Texas. After enjoying much conversation and suffering the...
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Along for the Ride
I thoroughly enjoyed Roger D. McGrath’s account of the Southern California Norton Owners Club journey along Old Route 66 (Correspondence, September). He mentions that his home is near the Rock Store, which immediately brought up memories of my old stomping grounds. I grew up in the west end of the San Fernando Valley, in Woodland...
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Trump’s Unsteady Performance
President Donald Trump has declared a national emergency to fund the wall along the nation’s southern border. Speaking in the Rose Garden, Trump said there was an emergency at the border which could only be fixed by building a wall. House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer had said before Trump’s address...
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Success and Failure in Higher Education
Nelson County, Marion County, and Washington County are collectively referred to by their inhabitants as the Kentucky Holy Land, and I don’t think the expression is meant to be entirely whimsical. Settled in the late 18th century by English Catholics from Maryland, the rolling green country is to this day marked by cattle farms, distilleries,...
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Requiescat In Pace Domini
In any age, Samuel Francis would have been a remarkable man for the penetration of his mind, his unflinching pursuit of truth—regardless of current cant or personal consequences—and the gravity of his style. In our age, he is peerless, and his death represents an irreplaceable loss. Sam and I were friends and allies for over...
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Kosovo: A Threat to Israel’s Survival
There are many self-styled friends of Israel in the United States who have been enthusiastically supportive of Kosovo’s independence for years. People like Sen. Joe Lieberman, Rep. Elliot Engel, Morton Abramowitz, William Kristol, Douglas Feith and ...
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A New Path to Peace
Israel’s recent siege of Lebanon, which has imposed a crippling humanitarian, economic, and psychological setback on her northern neighbor, may return Syria to the center stage of Middle Eastern politics. Considering Syria’s enduring influence over Lebanon and the Palestinians and her close ties to Iran, ignoring Syria no longer serves America’s (or Israel’s) interests. Even...
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Gifted Amateurs
Since they first appeared in the late 19th century, professional academic historians in the United States have been pretty much Establishment men (though, in other days, they did observe some canons of evidence and reasoned argument, and an occasional maverick appeared to remind that historical understanding should be an evolving debate and not a party...
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Virtue-Signaling Ourselves to Death
Republicans seem perfectly content to repeatedly proclaim the mass exodus of black voters from the Democratic Party’s “plantation,” only to be proven wrong time and time again.
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Journalists and Other Anthropoids
It is over 60 years since the Scopes Trial attracted journalists like Henry Mencken and Joseph Wood Krutch to Dayton, Tennessee, and yet the teaching of evolution is once again as controversial as—it was in 1925. Most of the debate is carried out between militant fundamentalists and equally militant materialists. While most of the fundamentalists...
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By Their Incompetence, Biden and Harris Strike a Blow Against the Deep State
More Americans than ever understand that the uproar over the upcoming election is less a contest between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, and more a campaign to remain in power by what some call the deep state.
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Memo to Trump: Declare an Emergency
In the long run, history will validate Donald Trump’s stand on a border wall to defend the sovereignty and security of the United States. Why? Because mass migration from the global South, not climate change, is the real existential crisis of the West. The American people know this, and even the elites sense it. Think...
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Hamas is Israel’s Golem
Hamas is a golem, a monstrous creature from Jewish folklore created from mud and made animate, which escaped his master and turned against him.