Colin Flaherty, July 1993. Photograph by author.
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I found some intriguing perspectives in the recent batch of obituaries for Colin Flaherty, who died on January 12. They almost all recall him as best known for his internet videos and bestselling books on under-reported black crime (White Girl Bleed a Lot, Don’t Make the Black Kids Angry, et al.).
Maybe that’s a valid point today. However, having known him for 30 years, I thought of this post-2012 phase as just a minor coda to his career, sort of like Laurence Olivier doing Polaroid commercials in the 1970s. If you had to explain to clueless people who Sir Laurence Olivier was, you’d mention the commercials, and the folks would think, “Oh, he’s this guy who sells cameras.” (more…)
1,302 words
Sabrina Strings
Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia
New York: New York University Press, 2019
This was a yummy, provocative idea for a book that didn’t quite work out. Its proposition is that fat-shaming and racism and white supreemism are all part of the same deal. Their history is intertwined. Hundreds of years ago, Europeans looked at the strange, repellent physiognomies and fleshy bodies of the African Negro, the Bushman, and the Hottentot, and were both fascinated and repelled. (more…)
The rarely-photographed H. Keith Thompson, Jr. in 1954
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My theory on Feds is that they’re like mushrooms: Feed ’em shit and keep ’em in the dark.
–Mark Wahlberg’s character in Martin Scorsese’s The Departed)
The gracious and courtly Harald Keith Thompson — he told me to call him H. K., as we had too many Keiths around — would never put it that crudely. But when it came to disseminating (mis)information, H. K. and Marky-Mark were very much on the same page.
The wonder is that some investigators would gladly repeat his stories as gospel truth even when they knew Thompson liked to tease and deceive. (more…)
1,512 slov
English original here
„Onen hlad feláhů po míru, po ochraně proti každému narušení každodenní rutiny, proti každé formě osudu jako by naznačoval ochranné mimikry před chodem dějin, lidský hmyz, který vystaven nebezpečí hraje mrtvého, ‚happyend‘ prázdné existence, nuda, jež dala vzniknout jazzu a černošským tanečkům v pohřebním průvodu za velkou Kulturu.“… (more…)
1,966 slov
English original here
Margot Metrolandová
Samuel Francis
Leviathan and Its Enemies: Mass Organization and Managerial Power in Twentieth-Century America
Arlington: Washington Summit Publishers (more…)
1,766 words
Wendy K. Z. Anderson
Rebirthing a Nation: White Women, Identity Politics, and the Internet
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021
This is a book that the author conceived back in 2005 on a cute but shaky premise. A young academic in “Communications Studies,” Wendy K. Z. Anderson proposed that there was a cadre of tech-savvy White Nationalist women out there, and they were using their insidious HTML skills to ensnare and influence other women. (more…)
2,318 words
Michael Brendan Dougherty
My Father Left Me Ireland: An American Son’s Search for Home
New York: Sentinel Books, 2019
When this was first published a couple of years ago, reviewers had two distinct takes about the book. One was that it was a wistful, sometimes bittersweet memoir about growing up without a father, because the father was off in Ireland, having never married Dougherty’s American mother; and also, the author had some romantic notions about Ireland, and wasn’t that special. (more…)
2,219 words
Czech version here
Samuel Francis
Leviathan and Its Enemies: Mass Organization and Managerial Power in Twentieth-Century America
Arlington: Washington Summit Publishers
Leviathan and Its Enemies has the subtitle Mass Organization and Managerial Power in Twentieth-Century America, which seems curious, given that it was first published in 2016. (more…)
July 1976 cover of Instauration
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Wilmot Robertson has been a perennial favorite in these pages, and it’s time to provide a list of relevant links and articles published over the years.
The ever-intriguing fact about Robertson is that he thrived for decades as an original, often contrarian, thinker on the racialist Right; yet he remained a man of mystery, known to few. And that was no accident. (more…)
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Here we have a continuation of the narrative presented in past installments, describing Brasillach’s auto-tour through wartime Spain in July 1938, accompanied by his brother-in-law Maurice Bardèche and their friend Pierre Cousteau. As before, I have translated it directly from Brasillach’s memoir Notre avant-guerre (1938-41). (more…)
Phil Eiger Newmann, Flannery O’Connor, 2021.
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Like her near-contemporary Gore Vidal (both were born in 1925), the fiction writer Mary Flannery O’Connor had her first brush with fame via a Pathé movie newsreel. She had a pet chicken whom she’d taught to walk backward. Gore’s fame came a few years later when he piloted an airplane, age ten. (more…)
1,566 words
Kevin D. Williamson
Big White Ghetto: Dead Broke, Stone-Cold Stupid, and High on Rage in the Dank Woolly Wilds of the “Real America”
Washington, DC: Regnery, 2020
I suppose the author and publisher meant the title Big White Ghetto (etc.) to be eye-catching and amusing, (more…)
