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George W. Bush is back in the news to promote his horrible picture book, Out of Many, One. The picture book, as its title evokes, urges readers to see America as a vast, multicultural landscape where everyone can belong. Most of his public statements in support of the book have touted mass immigration and the superiority of immigrants. He’s backed amnesty and denounced the Republican Party for its “nativism” and “isolationism.” (more…)
Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth watch horse races in 1968
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The death of His Royal Highness Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh kicked up some forgotten echoes of an older form of dissent from the orthodoxy. While the identitarian side of the Dissident Right had reserved reactions, the more conspiratorial-minded saw fit to break out in outright celebration of the old man’s death. It reminded me of the conspiracy theories that were in vogue before the rise of the identitarian Right. The number of people repeating these things showed that these ideas are still very much in vogue today and that identitarian concerns have yet to supplant them as the dominant concern. (more…)
London Mayor Sadiq Khan
1,231 words
Genetically speaking, I am almost 100% a child of the British Isles, with my strongest links to recent ancestry being London, Dublin, and County Cork. Even that stubborn and pesky 4.3% “Spanish and Portuguese” quotient of my genetic makeup may simply be “Black Irish” DNA resulting from when the Spanish Armada dropped a few loads in the Emerald Isle half a millennium ago. (more…)
3,771 words
The events of January 6 have been called an insurrection, a riot, an assault on democracy — the epitome of white supremacy, revolution, anarchy, elements of a coup d’etat.
One word they haven’t been called is rabble, which is almost a term of honor, and honorable terms aren’t what the state or its servitors want passed on. Honor, you say? Rabble? (more…)
Meghan Markle and Wallis Simpson
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Meghan Markle is not the first conniving, social climbing, American divorcee to imperil the British Monarchy. Before her, there was Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor. And, as problematic as she was, Wallis had a hell of a lot more going for her. Born Bessie Wallis Warfield in Baltimore in 1896, Wallis was not pretty (one biographer has even speculated that she was a hermaphrodite). (more…)
2,542 words
Anthony Burgess
1985
London: Hutchinson, 1978
Anthony Burgess of A Clockwork Orange fame celebrated thirty years of Nineteen Eighty-Four with his 1985. It is in two parts: a discussion of Orwell and freedom, and a novella updating Winston Smith’s struggle. (more…)
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London calling to the faraway towns
Now war is declared and battle come down
–The Clash (1979)
Forty years ago this month, the punk poet Joe Strummer penned his apocalyptic lyrics, heralding a step-change in the ongoing culture war that has dogged Britain for decades and reduced our nation’s capital city to a multiracial melting pot akin to the Tower of Babel. (more…)
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Part 1 of 3 (Part 2 here)
(The title comes from De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, a work written by the monk Gildas the Wise in the sixth century AD.)
While bumptious Boris leads a Tory bounce in the polls, Little Englander Brexiteers seem to have finally had their way, and the civic nationalists wear their molded-plastic Union Jack hats and wave their paper-thin flags with pride. (more…)
5,702 words
The problem with talking about tradition as applied to our present world, at least within the context of a people or a country with a long history, is determining what, exactly, tradition is, and which tradition to draw upon. (more…)