Tag: American South

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In modern American society, fictional works have become beacons of moral guidance. One such fictional moral beacon is the Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein musical, South Pacific, which was released on Broadway in 1949 and turned into a movie of the same name in 1959. Rodgers was Jewish, Hammerstein partially so and raised a Unitarian. (more…)

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Liberals often derogatorily accuse anybody who does not faithfully accept every dogmatic piece of history and the “official story” as a revisionist. Some of these accusations have come my way over the years, which in turn got me thinking about all of the instances of legal and historical revisionism by the Left. Examples of this are legion, enough to fill at least an entire book or two spanning the length of recorded history. (more…)

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At the height of the battle over integration in the American South, a young musician from Louisiana’s Cajun country picked up a microphone and shocked listeners with bold and inflammatory musical appeals to maintain the separation of the races. (more…)

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John Kennedy Toole
A Confederacy of Dunces
Foreword by Walker Percy
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980

A Confederacy of Dunces is one of the greatest comic novels ever written. It takes its name from a line of Swift’s which serves as its epigraph: “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that all the dunces are in confederacy against him.” (more…)

President Nixon with several top strategists including Kevin Phillips.

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Implementation of the “Southern Strategy” by Republicans to win over disaffected white voters (particularly in the South) is the most underappreciated historical event in American history. This was when the parties “switched”, defining our current political status quo. Essentially, the Southern Strategy emerged when Republican strategists realized that focusing on the resistance of white voters to desegregation and racial entitlements for non-whites could secure them the South and thus a route to electoral victory in presidential contests. (more…)

Sub-Saharan misrule during Reconstruction.

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Part 1 of 3 (Part 2 here)

On the evening of April 14, 1865, the actor and Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth leaped onto the stage at Ford’s Theater and shouted “Sic semper tyrannis!”, followed by “The South is avenged!” Booth had just fatally shot President Lincoln. He was acting as part of a larger conspiracy to decapitate the Lincoln administration and was the only conspirator to successfully carry out any part of the overall plan — a plot that had been initiated by Booth, not the Confederate government. (more…)

The Confederate Memorial Day ceremony held in Arlington National Cemetery in 2014. (Photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons)

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You should do your duty in all things.
You can never do more, you should never wish to do less.
— Robert E. Lee

Several Southern states observe state holidays at this time of year to remember the men who died fighting for the Confederacy during the War Between the States. (more…)

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Padraig Martin, ed.
The Honorable Cause: A Free South –12 Southern Essays
Self-published, 2023

In concluding his great work The Southern Tradition at Bay, which was published five years after the author’s death in 1968, Richard Weaver leaves us with some truly haunting words: “The South which entered the twentieth century had largely ceased to be a fighting South.”

Although this statement was false in a literal sense, since throughout the twentieth century the American South had provided the United States military some of its best fighting men, it was true in that these men had largely ceased fighting as Southerners. (more…)

Ilya Yefimovitch Repin, The Zaporozhye Cossacks Write a Mocking Letter to the Turkish Sultan, 1880-81

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Part 2 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here)

As I hope I’ve shown in the first part of this series, embarrassment and/or humor are operative with virtually all people under all circumstances. The heart of clown world in the present is no exception; indeed, these elements played a big part in bringing our mad, mad world about, as I can attest from personal experience, having been in high school during the early years of the Global War on Terror and the ironically-named USA PATRIOT Act that gave it teeth. (more…)

Nehemiah Adams

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One of the most neurotic things about white people is the desperation so many of them have to be perceived as moral. Most will virtue-signal in a variety of cheap and easy ways. Those who take it seriously will often descend into activism. But there is one way to virtue signal — indeed, it is the best way — that will sanctify one’s morality for all to see: care more for outgroup members than for ingroup members.

After all, what motivation could there be — other than pure angelic virtue — for doing something so utterly self-defeating? (more…)

Richard M. Weaver

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America wasn’t always a liberal country. The founders drew more upon classical republicanism than liberalism. In the nineteenth century, the populist movement was decidedly anti-liberal. But the founders and the populists were never consistently anti-liberal, because consistency is the province of intellectuals, not statesmen.

America never had a genuinely anti-liberal intellectual movement until the Southern Agrarians of the 1920s and 1930s. (The North American New Right is America’s second anti-liberal intellectual movement.) (more…)

You can buy Jim Goad’s The Redneck Manifesto here.

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Jim Goad’s The Redneck Manifesto is a groundbreaking, irreverent polemic against the stigmatization of the white working class in American culture. It was published by Simon and Schuster in 1997. In pugnacious and often hilarious prose, Goad shreds the racial and political taboos of the era and slaughtered many a sacred cow. The Redneck Manifesto brought a critical eye to then-radical terms like “white supremacy,” racial justice, and “anti-fascism” which had yet to reach widespread exposure outside of Left-wing universities, but would terrorize the American political landscape in subsequent decades. (more…)

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After nearly 20 years of exile in New York City, I recently returned home to the South. I went to New York for a job and arrived full of hope, delighted at the prospect of a new life in “the greatest city in the world.” My preconceptions about the city were almost all positive, and, as I later discovered, heavily romanticized. (more…)