Tag

Neoconservatism

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The Real Meaning of the 4th of July

A headline in a news story caught my attention the other day. It reads: “Louisiana now requires the 10 Commandments to be displayed in classrooms. It’s not the only terrifying state law.”  The column appears in The Independent, July 1, 2024, and is by one Gustaf Kilander. Notice that the author uses the word “terrifying” to characterize the public display…
Boyd Cathey
July 5, 2024
Blog

The Neoconservative Disorder

The recent controversy over the Israeli incursion into the Gaza strip has also revealed some deep fissures within the Conservative Movement. For despite the massive support for the Israeli invasion from both establishment Democrats and Republicans, there have been cautionary voices raised on the Right, in particular, by significant journalists such as Tucker Carlson (via his popular podcast) and Candace…
Boyd Cathey
May 17, 2024
Blog

“National Unity” is a Mirage

Now, after what may have been a racially-motivated mass shooting in Buffalo (May 14) by a deranged young man, new insistent calls go out for the government to fight “white nationalism” and “right wing domestic terrorism.” Attorney General Merrick Garland has already signaled more than once that this is the nation’s major challenge—not the illegal drugs epidemic, not the rampant…
Boyd Cathey
May 17, 2022
Blog

Martin Luther King Day and the Destruction of the American Republic

As is my custom, each year for the Federal holiday celebrating Martin Luther King (whose birth date in January 15), I send out a cautionary essay I first began researching back in 2018. What I was attempting to do was urgently remind readers, specifically so-called “conservatives,” that King and his holiday are emblematic of the ongoing radical transformation of the…
Boyd Cathey
January 17, 2022
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Against the Cruise Ship Historians

The court historian is as old as history itself. Early states were based on the monopolization of information—accounting tablets at first, for taxation, but then “official” histories so that rulers could legitimize their ongoing theft of other people’s resources. Someone had to write these “histories” of the righteous, divinely sanctioned persistence of the ruling house, and thus the court historian…
Jason Morgan
September 10, 2021
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Independence Day and the Preservation of History

July 4, “Independence Day,” has become for most Americans little more than another holiday, a day off from work, and a time to barbecue with family and friends. Yet, the Declaration of Independence and the day we set aside to commemorate it should make us reflect on the sacrifices of the men who signed it and what they intended. Representatives from…
Boyd Cathey
July 5, 2021
Blog

When Did We Have a Civil War, Virginia?

God’s guidance and blessing began in Virginia. But Civil War is where we are today.  For those who have had the usual blather from a contemporary public-school education, a little background. Well, actually, more than a little if your public school (and universities) are as useless as they are as this is written. Point to make: Critical Race Theory is…
Paul H. Yarbrough
June 22, 2021
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Bad History Masquerading as an Appeal to Peace and Piety: A Response to Allen Guelzo’s “Why We Must Forget the Lost Cause”

It is a testimony to the prevalence of anti-Southern sentiment that The Gospel Coalition (TGC), one of the most prominent evangelical parachurch entities, has provided a platform for such sentiments by publishing an article entitled “Why We Must Forget the Lost Cause.” Written by the prominent Princeton University Professor Allen Guelzo, this piece was published in the “Bible and Theology”…
Tom Hervey
May 24, 2021
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The Professor and the Proposition

As the “Exceptional Nation” totters and pratfalls further toward perdition, some on what is commonly, if not entirely accurately, known as the “Right” are calling for the various factions to unite beneath a single banner – a band of brothers, as it were – to battle shoulder-to-shoulder against the Bolshevik plague-beast. Several such tocsins have resounded from the San Bernardino…
Enoch Cade
May 17, 2021
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The Disappearance of Southern Conservatism

Abraham Lincoln has become, for most mainline conservatives, an icon, and, along with Martin Luther King, Jr., no opportunity is lost—it seems—on Fox News or in the establishment “conservative press,” to stress just how much conservatively-minded Americans owe to these two canonized martyrs. Any demurer, any dissent or disagreement, brings forth condemnations of the complainant as a “racist” or “reactionary,”…
Boyd Cathey
May 3, 2021
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The Termite Infestation of American History

As part of its campaign to pander to the important and urgent needs of African-Americans with extremely divisive yet ultimately performative identity politics, the Biden-Harris administration has announced that it will resume Barack Obama’s decision in 2015 to remove Andrew Jackson from the twenty-dollar bill and replace him with Harriet Tubman. Jonathan Waldman’s celebratory and condescending column in The Washington…
James Rutledge Roesch
March 12, 2021
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The Future of Fox News and the Future of America

It happened on Saturday morning, November 14, 2020, at around 8:15 EST. I had switched over to briefly catch some national news on the Fox News Channel. All of a sudden I heard—and saw—Pete Hegseth stop in the middle of the sentence he was reading from his teleprompter: “…there weren’t any substantiated cases of voter fraud in the swing states….”…
Boyd Cathey
November 18, 2020
Blog

Marxists, Conservatives, and Neocons

Reading an article in the latest Hillsdale College newsletter Imprimis I was shocked by the outrageous comparison of Lebron James and Colin Kaepernick with Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson as people fighting to “divide the nation.” The article was adapted from the speech, “American Sports Are Letting Down America,” in an online Hillsdale lesson by prominent black sports columnist,…
Carole Hornsby Haynes
September 17, 2020
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Brain Dead Neocons

A recent article in Hillsdale College’s newsletter “Imprimis” compared Lebron James and Colin Kaepernick to Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in wanting to “divide the country.”  On a lessor point, it was in a figurative reference to the battle of Gettysburg, which Jackson wasn’t even present at, of course, being dead by then. The article was taken from an online…
Wes Franklin
September 4, 2020
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American Girondins

Who should Americans blame for the iconoclasm on display during the "protests" in virtually every American city this past weekend? Not the Left. They are the easy targets, and not without culpability. The washed up hippies teaching in American classrooms at every level have certainly been a major component of the cultural Marxism that now saturates American society. But they…
Brion McClanahan
June 3, 2020
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The Egalitarian Myth and Secession

Increasingly, I try to avoid news-binging, watching assiduously all the compiled, feculent bilge that passes for news reporting these days, those authorized “stories” fed to us like tasteless, industrial-strength pablum to non-rational infants, or more, to non compos mentis inmates of the giant asylum which is what our country is quickly becoming. Viewing just a few minutes of Fox’s coverage…
Boyd Cathey
June 2, 2020
Blog

Victor Davis Hanson and “Southern Racism”

The political structure in the United States is often portrayed by the media and its guests via a histrionic history of federalism. However, it seems, no historian or commentator can speak without referencing Southern (and only Southern) racism. And history is always linked, era to era, as Conservative vs Liberal vs Southern. It is often linked as Republican versus Democrats…
Paul H. Yarbrough
May 4, 2020
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Never Trumpers Like Joe Biden and Hate the South

Thoughtful Southerners of a conservative and traditional bent have known since the 1980s that the old Conservative Movement which began back in the 1950s with the publication of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, and then with the inauguration of William F. Buckley’s National Review, has no room for them, no room for their writers (unless those authors pass a rigorous…
Boyd Cathey
April 2, 2020
Blog

How the Neocons are Helping Destroy Western Civilization

Every now and then an acquaintance who reads what I write will ask me: “Boyd, why are you so critical of writers and commentators—Neoconservatives—like Victor Davis Hanson, Ben Shapiro, Brian Kilmeade, and those who appear on Fox News? Why do you seem so condemnatory of articles and essays that show up in, say, National Review or The Wall Street Journal?…
Boyd Cathey
October 4, 2019
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Texas is Going to be Bluer Than Bluebonnets

Texas will turn blue before it’s over with its local Neocons in charge. Former sports announcer and Bankrupt, now Lt. Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick has decided that his historical acumen can bring Texas forward into the true modern way of thinking.  That is, the South is and always had been a bunch of ignorant savages. But no more. If…
Paul H. Yarbrough
February 1, 2019
Blog

Southern Conservatives

The South is and always been conservative. But with the constant hammer of political correctness and political falsehood (redundant?) pounded on it, it has waffled among many who brand it as evil. Punchy from the blows, it has sought to defend itself in the wrong places: In presentism and with Republicans. Republican and Air Force veteran Mike Hill, the first…
Paul H. Yarbrough
January 18, 2019
Blog

Trump Agonistes

The presidential election of 2016 gave promise to be a watershed in American politics. Donald Trump appeared, a non-politician and rich enough to support his own campaign without selling himself to the usual special interests. He collected all the right enemies. He deflated a whole platoon of Republican celebrities down to their actual pigmy size. He vanquished them by something…
Clyde Wilson
January 16, 2019
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Was Lincoln a “Conservative?”

The latest in Lincoln polemics comes courtesy of Rich Lowry, editor of National Review.  In the latest issue of the latter, Lowry both promotes his new work and takes aim at those of our 16th president’s detractors that are to Lowry’s political right—the “Lincoln haters.” The “Lincoln haters,” Lowry insists, are limited “mostly, but not entirely,” to a libertarian “fringe”…
Jack Kerwick
November 2, 2018
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Fake News and Fake History

The “Fake News” appellation has been applied to just about every outlet that presents itself as something on the order of a news outlet, manned (yes--the word) by what are christened as journalists. The ill-use of the “J-Word” provides enough tidings for an essay a yard and a half long, but that is another write for another day (Charly Reese…
Paul H. Yarbrough
August 31, 2018
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A Battle for Western Civilization and the South

On Monday night, August 20, 2018, approximately 200 to 250 raucous demonstrators gathered in a mob on the campus of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and proceeded to tear down the century-old statue, “Silent Sam,” a monument memorializing the over 250 university students who fought and died during the War Between the States. University police, whose primary goal is…
Boyd Cathey
August 23, 2018
Review Posts

Foundering Inventions

A review of Original Intent and the Framers of the Constitution by Harry Jafffa, (Regnery, 1994). When Professor Harry Jaffa, in his new book Original Intent and the Framers of the Constitution: A Disputed Question, refers to Abraham Lincoln as the “greatest interpreter of the Founding Fathers,” one must wonder whose Founding Fathers he has in mind. From the outset…
William J. Watkins
December 19, 2017
Blog

Calhoun the Marxist?

Neo-conservatives can’t seem to make up their mind about the Confederacy. They all agree that the Confederacy represented everything evil about early America (which places them squarely in league with their intellectual brothers on the Left) but why they hate it presents the real conundrum. It borders on schizophrenia. Neo-conservative historian Victor Davis Hanson, for example, often rails against the…
Brion McClanahan
August 10, 2017
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A Review of Paul Gottfried’s War and Democracy

War and Democracy by Paul Gottfried, Arktos, 2012. War and Democracy is a collection of 25 of paleoconservative thinker Paul Gottfried’s essays, originally published in The American Conservative, Taki’s Magazine, Modern Age, lewrockwell.com, and similar outlets. Almost all of them come from the last 15 years. Many of them are book reviews in which Gottfried gives rein to his own…
Jason Sorens
April 21, 2014