2023 Reflections . . .
& My Mid-Sized Office Assistant

3,826 words

. . . I can hardly wish any man better than he would seriously consider what he does with his time; how and to what ends he employs it; and what returns he makes to God, his neighbor, and himself for it. Will he never have a ledger for this? This is the greatest wisdom and work of life. — William Penn

Use time wisely

I became especially conscious of how fast time flies this year. What is therefore the right thing to do with the time one has? I pondered this a great deal and came up with a few ideas:

1. Study the great spiritual and religious leaders of the past. I’ve found the most effective white advocates and ethnonationalists tended to be spiritual men first. As a result of this insight, I took a second look at the New Testament letters, as well as the works of the Quakers George Fox and William Penn. I also read the works of Saint John Chrysostom, among others.
2. Spend time with family, especially with older parents or uncles and aunts. Mentoring young members of your family is especially valuable. Don’t get wrapped up in the falsehood that kids won’t listen to you. Advancing one’s culture through children is as valuable a thing as personal spiritual development.
3. Activities that make money or advance one’s career. Careful attention needs to be paid to saving and investing money. After several years of investing, this was the year when I finally felt like I finally made some genuine gains, despite the fact that the economy is an inflation-addled wreck. Even after I felt like I had gotten the hang of it, I nevertheless sought advice from a very experienced investor and figured out ways to improve. The “gains” went toward much-needed home repairs.
4. If one is in a slow period at work, take a hard look at what is going on and seek to streamline the operations. Move machines or tools to a place where they are easily accessed, pour gravel on a muddy path to make walking easier, or make the database deliver the needed answer with the push of a button. No worker should bend or stoop to perform a routine task.
5. Physical exercise of any type, as well as any activity that refreshes you.

The spiritual fight & the New Testament letters

Ben Klassen, a white advocate, went looking for recruits for his cause in prisons. This was a terrible mistake. Finding oneself in prison is the cumulative result of bad decisions, and such people rarely undergo some turnaround toward professionalism and such.

In the New Testament letters, one can see the ways in which those who wished to spread an idea carried out their ministry in practical terms. In Paul’s First Letter to Timothy, he writes:

Here is a trustworthy saying: Whoever aspires to be an overseer desires a noble task. Now the overseer is to be above reproach, faithful to his wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. He must manage his own family well and see that his children obey him, and he must do so in a manner worthy of full respect. (If anyone does not know how to manage his own family, how can he take care of God’s church?) He must not be a recent convert, or he may become conceited and fall under the same judgment as the devil. He must also have a good reputation with outsiders, so that he will not fall into disgrace and into the devil’s trap. (1 Timothy 3: 1-7, NIV)

In other words, if you want to change the world, you need to be on the up-and-up. It’s hip to be square. Do things by the book, and there won’t be any trouble. Cut corners and then you’ll see real problems. Since the early Christians were indeed successful in spreading their ideas, his writings are worth a look.

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I was inspired to delve into Quaker theology when I was doing research for my essays on the Kennedy assassination, Whittaker Chambers, and the New Apostolic Movement, a Protestant movement in America that comes very close to being an ethnonationalist religion. The New Apostolic Movement’s roots stretch back to Charles Fox Parham, who was of Pennsylvania stock and was deeply influenced by Quakerism and Methodism.

The Journal of George Fox is pretty dull. It mostly describes his career as a preacher. His most insightful commentary comes when he berates his jailer for politely calling himself “[Fox’s] servant.” Obviously, the jailer wasn’t Fox’s servant, but Fox felt that honesty is of paramount importance.

William Penn is the better writer, and his ideas are on a higher level than Fox’s, and can be timelessly applied to the human condition. Penn took a moral, political, or ethical issue and expressed it in its essential form. His book Some Fruits of Solitude is definitely a worthwhile read. Two ideas in it stood out for me:

1. “We are apt to call things by wrong names. We will have prosperity to be happiness and adversity to be misery; thought that is the school of wisdom, and oftentimes the way to eternal happiness.”
2. “Certainly, service upon inclination is like to go farther than obedience upon compulsion.”

Saint John Chrysostom encouraged humility. He wrote:

For nothing is so acceptable to God as to number one’s self with the last. This is a first principle of all practical wisdom. For he that is humbled, and bruised in heart, will not be vainglorious, will not be wrathful, will not envy his neighbor, will not harbor any other passion.

The Genocide Joe regime

The Genocide Joe Biden regime is a most curious phenomenon. I simply cannot understand how an obviously senile president is not being criticized more harshly in the mainstream media. Biden’s presidency has experienced as many disasters as the Carter administration, but Biden isn’t facing the same furor of discontent.

I can only speculate that the person calling the shots in the White House is Barack Obama, and the mainstream media knows and supports this. Because he is in the shadows, the full measure of anti-white genocide is easier to carry out. The political fallout from the anti-white border crisis, the military disasters in Ukraine and Afghanistan, and spreading anarcho-tyranny are falling upon the empty shell that is Joe Biden, but not the true ruler.

The Biden regime has also crossed the threshold that leads to civil war. His administration has criminalized legitimate political differences. The many criminal charges filed against Donald Trump are an obvious case of this. Furthermore, those who thought Biden was fraudulently elected and held a sit-in protest at the US Capitol have been put in prison for years. Not only was Ashli Babbitt murdered by the regime’s police, but the semi-competent praetorian guard that is the FBI murdered an elderly man named Craig Robertson while serving a search warrant for his anti-Biden comments — even though – law enforcement did nothing when similar comments were made by Leftists about Trump. America is sailing in dangerous waters.

Wilmot Robertson wrote that “Israel is the sputtering fuse of World War III.” This is related to the fact that President Biden is not just senile, he’s evil. Genocide Joe supports Israel’s ongoing genocidal bombing of Gaza. Biden is unwaveringly supporting an ally that has deliberately bombed hospitals, churches, and fleeing civilians. Incredibly, Biden allowed his “intelligence community” to lie about who had bombed a hospital in Gaza. But the worst aspect of this war thus far is that the US Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, continually emphasizes his Jewishness, thus demonstrating his dual loyalty — if he is even loyal to America at all.

Biden’s mostly Jewish staff and his unquestioning support for Israel is probably why there is less furor around his blundering than Carter’s. Biden has also most likely built up a large patronage network in his long career in the US Senate. There are probably people in key roles who owe everything to Biden and recognize that when he is gone, they will be forced into retirement. Biden likewise supports American involvement in foreign affairs, and thus foreign entities who rely on American funding and weaponry to kill their tribal enemies are highly motivated to fund Biden and his supporters. The mainstream media, for its part, is controlled by those who are completely hostile to old–stock Americans, and they recognize that this group is beginning to organize to pursue its own interests — and they are responding with disciplined narrative control.

Trends beneath the surface?

Throughout this year there have been trends beneath the surface that could suddenly change everything. In my professional and social circles, for example, apart from the fashion-conscious young women, almost every person I meet is either a Trump supporter, hostile to the Black Lives Matter/antifa riots, or quietly sympathetic to some form of white advocacy. In my day job, a man who passed away was replaced by a younger man who is every bit as well-read as his predecessor. He is also Right-leaning and unsympathetic to America’s neoconservative, Soros-funded aggression abroad.

There has been considerable improvement in the professionalism of white advocates across the board. Today’s white advocates are young, mature, dedicated, and making persuasive arguments about the Great Replacement. The National Justice Party (NJP), for example, carefully put its message out while avoiding the brawls and antics of previous organizations such as the Traditionalist Workers’ Party. As I understand it, there are some ongoing internal issues in the NJP and they are undergoing a reorganization of some sort, but from the outside looking in, they are a very sharp-looking bunch who have a chance to make big gains should there be a few changes in the external political environment. White advocates should not be discouraged by their problems. Keep your hand on the plow.

The Homeland Institute is off to an excellent start. I was extremely pleased to see that Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson pointed out the fact that Jews are actively trying to genocide American whites.

The work of dedicated white advocates and the changes I see among ordinary people must be putting pressure on the System. There is no telling if or when this pressure will affect the political culture of the United States, but in the early 1990s there was noticeable resentment across the Rust Belt as a result of America’s military deployments and support for industrial rivals such as South Korea and Germany. This ultimately manifested in political change in 2015 and 2016. When I was in high school in the early 1990s, older men, often veterans, were especially vocal about such problems even while they “supported the troops” during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Trump’s stunning victory in 2016 must have been fueled by this change in thinking. Additionally, calls for a more isolationist foreign policy emerged during the 2024 budget talks, when funding for Ukraine was separated from the Pentagon’s usual budget. This would have been unthinkable during the American interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s, although I don’t recall any ordinary person, including those in the military, genuinely supporting the Balkan interventions at the time.

Christian Zionism remains a problem in America. I encourage everyone to spread the word about the film Marching to Zion, which directly refutes their theology. I have no idea if Christian Zionism is collapsing as a viable religious and political movement, but without a doubt it is not the force that it was in the 1960s and ‘70s. Many of Christian Zionism’s leaders have passed away, which is one factor. Pat Robertson died this summer. He had had a TV show called The 700 Club which parroted the Jewish settler movement’s line in Israel. Robertson’s interpretation of the Bible held that events in the Middle East were part of a divine plan that would end with the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

The fact that the Second Coming hasn’t happened is also a factor in the movement’s decline. In late 1990 I attended a church where many of the congregation thought the end was just around the corner, given that an “anti-Christ” (Saddam Hussein) was at work in “Babylon” (Iraq). President George W. Bush even claimed that “Gog and Magog” were at work in Iraq in 2003 — and yet Jesus didn’t return. Domestically, Jewish liberals opposed the “Religious Right’s” domestic social agenda throughout Bush’s career, while Israeli actions damaged America by leading to such things as the Iraq War and support for open borders. This contradiction was noticed by many Christians. It is only a matter of when, not if, American Protestant Christianity will shift its interpretation of events. Israeli actions against Christians in Jerusalem and their deliberate targeting of Christians in Gaza demonstrates that Zionism cannot possibly be the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy. I’ve personally decided to work to refute Christian Zionism as much as I can.

At the end of 2020, I wrote an article in which I mentioned the fact that Azerbaijan was going to cause trouble. In 2023, they indeed did so. Now that the war in Afghanistan is over, it is certainly time to cut ties with that Islamic nation.

The Confederate monuments

I must admit I find the videos of people desecrating Jewish sacred objects, such as when the Polish politician Grzegorz Braun recently used a fire extinguisher on a menorah in the Polish Parliament, a guilty pleasure. Such events are the end result of the logic behind the destruction of many Confederate monuments after the Summer of Floyd. The purpose of Confederate monuments was to symbolize national reconciliation and tolerance. They were also equivalent to tombstones: One could honor the dead and the past with such a monument and then move on. In 2020, the organized Jewish community and other establishment parties declared that the monuments could be destroyed out of righteous anger. The destruction of such monuments, encouraged by sneering liberal Jews, is a symbolic attack on old-stock white Americans. Such attacks are also a precursor to genocide.

Depressing books

I read a couple of depressing books this year. The first was Civil War in the North Carolina Quaker Belt: The Confederate Campaign Against Peace Agitators, Deserters and Draft Dodgers. This book shows how a moderate faction of Quakers that had deep roots in North Carolina voted for a Governor who would make peace during the Civil War. But once their candidate was in office, he betrayed his base and sent the Home Guard against them.

Another depressing book was Strategy for Defeat: Vietnam in Retrospect, which shows that the Vietnam War was lost even before the first shot was fired. Nothing has changed, of course; American military policy continues on its merry way, staggering from one crisis to another and not winning anywhere.

Counter-Currents 

I won’t make a list of the great articles I read on this site this year out of fear that I might offend someone if I don’t include his article. I also rarely post in the comments. It takes time to do that, and I prioritize my time on writing my next article. I will point out, however, that Kenneth Vinther’s series on dysfunctional democracy across Western Civilization is outstanding.

Difficult people

Dealing with difficult people is part of life. I had an insight into it this year, when I was researching the coonskin cap fad for my article on The Alamo (1960). I came across a photo of older teen boys gathered at the Alamo in San Antonio, all of whom were wearing coonskin caps and buckskin fringe jackets. Frankly, I felt those boys were too old to wear such costumes, despite the fact that they were affirming their heritage. They were prioritizing the trivial over the important. It occurred to me that there was undoubtedly a young man there who had been insulted by another (with a squad of toadies and flatterers on his side) for not wearing as skinny of a coonskin cap as he had.

I’ve experienced this pettiness several times in my career, especially in the military, where one fellow can easily be replaced by another and the only way to get ahead is to become a purer example of the standard than anyone else. In one instance, I gave the correct answer to a question that was posed during a meeting of 300 soldiers; a fellow in my platoon became an implacably hostile personal enemy after that. Another fellow was jealous of a minor military success I had; he later became deliberately uncooperative at a combined arms live-fire exercise, which resulted in an explosion at the wrong place and time and could have become a mass-casualty event.

This sort of thing can be categorized as “irrational competition.” This is a term in business to describe when one firm focuses on damaging another firm rather than on improving its own profitability. There isn’t a good counterstrategy to this behavior, and such a strategy has a slim chance of success. It is very risky, however, because the irrational competitor can easily implode before the other firm goes out of business. It gets easier to deal with such nonsense professionally as you get older, since maturity and experience goes a long way toward cutting problems down. The point is to not be an irrational competitor yourself. Should you meet someone at a professional event who has a powerful mind, seek to turn him into an ally, don’t try to destroy him.

The higher one goes in one’s career, the more one needs to not be “one of the guys.” At this point I don’t participate in ordinary conversations with my subordinates or co-workers. I do talk frankly with my peers, but usually behind a closed door, and usually exclusively about business. What I did on Saturday night is no longer important.

Grief & my mid-sized office assistant

This year there were many important people in my life who passed away. One was past 90, and his funeral was the sort where funeral was spelled with “fun.” He had many descendants and relatives, and I had a great time seeing everyone. Another older relative of mine who had exerted an important influence on me was nearly 90 when she passed away. I was sad, but not heartbroken. Then, a teacher at my high school who had also attended my hometown church died. She was a mentor and an anchor for many students who were trying to make their way in a confusing world. She hadn’t seemed to be very old, and her death landed in a heavier way. Shortly afterwards, a colleague from work passed before his time. I spoke at his funeral, in front of his weeping widow and family. That was an unsettling experience.

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There were other blows, as when other people I care about had extreme health setbacks. Two were stricken with cancer, while another required a series of surgeries. Also, a friend’s father passed away unexpectedly. All these affected me either professionally or personally, or both. I found that it was becoming increasingly difficult to concentrate, but I kept on going.

For the last decade and a half, I had enjoyed the company of my “office assistant” — a mutt with much shepherd ancestry. I had picked her up from the pound when she was just a puppy. She was agile, fast, smart, and should have been living on America’s western prairie, herding cattle and sheep. My little office assistant hung out with me when I worked from home, proved an outstanding playmate for the kids, and was incredibly bright.

Sometimes she’d leap over the fence and take herself for a walk. Once, she ran off while the rest of my family was out-of-state. As a result of her impulsive behavior, she was marooned outside until I returned home. When I did so, she bolted out of nowhere and nearly jumped into my arms. “They” say dogs don’t have facial expressions, but I swear I watched her face go from an anxious look to relief, and finally to happiness when she saw me arrive home. And when the telecommuting revolution really took off during the COVID-19 pandemic, she became my go-to office assistant. She was a great all-around friend, and was always nearby. She was a walking companion, and especially liked to go camping.

About a year ago, she started to have a tough time getting up and walking around, so I got her a prescription of Vetprofen. She improved — for a time. Then it got to the point where I often had to lift her up to get her walking. When she ascended the three stairs between our kitchen and the outside door, I often had to give her a push, because sometimes her legs would give out. But although her joints were creaky, her eyes continued to display her tremendous intelligence. She finally developed trouble eating, and that’s when I realized that the end was approaching. I staved off the inevitable for a week by feeding her chicken and rice, but by then her ribs were sticking out and her spine was bent and visible through her flesh. We finally made the appointment with the vet for her final journey. When the day arrived, my family came from wherever they were to meet in the parking lot. My office assistant was not alone at the end.

Grief is a strange thing. It starts as a small irritation, and then grows to become something that crushes one’s chest and turns one’s arms to lead. The night after my dog passed away, I had nonsensical dreams that were drenched in sadness. I woke up at 2:30 AM and couldn’t get back to sleep. My dog’s passing had lit a fuse of sorrow. All the deaths of those I had loved crashed upon me. My mind raced uncontrollably from worry to worry. I thought of my teacher, who had been a stable adult who had anchored the lives of many students; why hadn’t I told her how much I appreciated that? Was there some offense that I had never apologized for with one of the people who had recently died? Have I cleared away the offenses I’ve made against those who are still living? Have I used my time to the fullest extent? Why hadn’t I chipped away at the vices and trivialities in my life sooner? Had I really done my duty to Divine Providence, my people, and my family?

Then I realized something. My dog had clearly not been feeling well on the drive to the veterinarian’s office. She kept her face down, and she had to be lifted into the car. When she saw that the family gathered together to see her, however, her face lit up and the joy she had in her heart was clear. My dog was loved, and she loved us back. For all my failings, I have raised a family in which love is present — and my humble pound mutt and office assistant felt that in her soul; and that, perhaps, is what makes all the difference.