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Walt Garlington

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Green Men and Green Churches

A modern prophet from England, Paul Kingsnorth, has made the comment in a number of his essays that he appreciates how the ancient churches in England look as if they grew out of the soil itself rather than were constructed by human hands.  If one looks into Southern life, he will find that our churches share a strong resemblance to…
Walt Garlington
March 24, 2025
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We Are All Saint Oncho Now

Since the end of the War, with the Yankees in the ascendancy, the dominant ideas in the union have been mainly change, innovation, progress, and their near-of-kin.  Sultan Donald the Magnificent re-confirmed this in his Inaugural Address in January: ‘And, right now, our nation is more ambitious than any other. There’s no nation like our nation. Americans are explorers, builders,…
Walt Garlington
February 19, 2025
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Reinvigorating State Power in the US Senate

Donald Trump’s victory in the election for the federal presidency has provoked bold claims of a sweeping political realignment in the States: ‘The recent political landscape has been shaken to its core, revealing a seismic shift that has emerged as a result of the latest elections. The transformative power of the MAGA movement has taken center stage, with an unprecedented…
Walt Garlington
November 18, 2024
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The Sovietization of Federal Elections

Traditional community life is nearly non-existent in the modern United States, the natural effect of the venomous ideologies that have been imbibed in copious quantities over the decades by both Left and Right, progressives and conservatives.  Voting days are one of the few remaining vestiges of those earlier times, one of the few communal gatherings left to us – when…
Walt Garlington
October 28, 2024
Blog

An Outrage Double Standard?

Donald Trump’s MAGA base (which includes many of the Southern people) is galvanized like never before after the attempt on Mr. Trump’s life.  Two things in particular have annealed them to the former president as it regards this traumatic incident:  the tough guy image of a man who ‘took a bullet for America’ and the vitriol of his opponents. But…
Walt Garlington
July 17, 2024
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The Unbroken Line of New England Radicalism

Prof. David Hackett Fischer gives an overview of the chief characteristics of New England’s ancestors, who hailed from the coastal southeastern counties of England, mainly East Anglia and Essex, in his praiseworthy book, Albion’s Seed.  Among them were an inclination toward industrial pursuits, urban living, equality, and rebelliousness against established authorities in religion and politics (Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways…
Walt Garlington
June 21, 2024
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Yankee Cain and Southern Seth

Southerners have often been mocked for their agrarian simplicity by Yankee-minded folks.  We know the insults well by now:  hicks, hillbillies, rednecks, and so on.  But Dixie should not be ashamed of this.  We ought rather to delight and exult in it. Richard Weaver gives us good ground for doing so in his contrast of the Northern/Yankee and Southern types:…
Walt Garlington
April 11, 2024
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Gregg Jarrett Loathes the Christian South

The United States are often presented as ‘one nation’, but that is far from the reality.  One of the most exemplary of the Vanderbilt Agrarians, Donald Davidson, even spoke of a cultural ‘cold Civil War’ that began between the North and the South after WWI drew to a close (Southern Writers in the Modern World, U of Georgia Press, Athens,…
Walt Garlington
August 7, 2023
Blog

A Southern Response to the Nashville School Shooting

‘One day Saint Polycarp saw the ruler sitting in his chair and watching as the blood of Christians flowed like water.’—From the life of Martyr Polycarp of Alexandria (+4th century) The murder of six innocent Christians at the Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, by a deranged young woman in the grips of the demonic ideology of transgenderism seems to have…
Walt Garlington
April 14, 2023
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A New 4th of July Resolution

The solution offered by Mr Vivek Ramaswamy to the destructive ideology of the Woke Social Justice Warriors could not be stranger: The antidote isn’t to fight wokeness directly. It can’t be, because that’s a losing battle. The true solution is to gradually rebuild a vision for shared American identity that is so deep and so powerful that it dilutes wokeism…
Walt Garlington
July 2, 2021
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The Deep Identity of the South

Editor's Note: The Abbeville Institute does not endorse or support the views of Alexander Dugin on race, religion, or government, and Mr. Garlington offers his philosophical positions on identity in the broad concept of the term. The Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin lists three kinds of identity in his book Eurasian Mission – diffused, extreme, and deep.  The diffused identity is…
Walt Garlington
June 30, 2020
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French Conservatives and the Southern Tradition

Part of the blood that flows through the veins of the Southern ethnos is French blood, both of the high-born that settled in places like New Orleans and the plainer folk like the Cajuns of Acadiana and the Huguenots of South Carolina.  This being so, and it also being the case that all true sons and daughters of the South…
Walt Garlington
May 26, 2020
Blog

Overextending Political Loyalties

One of the two commandments the Lord Jesus Christ gave to His disciples to follow was to love our neighbor as ourselves.  However, in the modern United States of America, we no longer have neighbors.  We either have ideological allies; or we have ideological opponents, who keep us from enjoying the right to say or do this or the right…
Walt Garlington
November 8, 2019
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The GMO Threat

Genetically engineered crops have been grown in large numbers across the States since 1996.  These genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are created by taking a gene (or genes) from an unrelated species like a bacterium and splicing it (them) into a crop like corn or cotton with the intention of improving some aspect of it (to protect against herbicides, drought, etc.). …
Walt Garlington
June 12, 2019
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The Procrustean Constitution

We have seen how Mississippi, with its campus free speech bill, totally ignored its own State constitution in favor of federal 1st Amendment arguments.  Now Texas is doing likewise in response to the San Antonio City Council’s decision to reject Chick-fil-A’s request to be a vendor in the San Antonio International Airport.  The opposition to this decision rests mostly on…
Walt Garlington
May 15, 2019
Blog

The Crisis of the Electoral College

A decisive moment is coming for the peoples of the States, especially for those who consider themselves conservatives yet belong to the cult of Lincoln:  Will the Electoral College system for selecting the federal president continue on, or will it be scrapped for a purely national vote?  At the State and federal level, attempts to change it are ongoing: Calls…
Walt Garlington
April 10, 2019
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Mississippi’s Free Speech Confusion

Some lawmakers in Mississippi, obviously alarmed at the violent demonstrations and restrictive measures at college campuses intended to silence what passes for conservative viewpoints, have come up what they consider a fitting solution in their legislative kitchen, House Bill 1562, ‘Forming Open and Robust University Minds (FORUM) Act’.  But the result is far from enticing. The heart of the bill…
Walt Garlington
March 20, 2019
Blog

What’s in a (Generational) Name?

The whole 20th century was a horrible time for the friends of tradition:  the mild rule of Europe’s Christian monarchs - Habsburgs, Romanovs, and others - was replaced by the ruthless Communists and later the despotism of the European Union, amongst other totalitarian ‘isms’; Mao overthrew Confucius in China; the natural rhythms of the agrarian life in many places of…
Walt Garlington
September 28, 2018
Blog

The Southern Saga

In the book The Mystery of the Wonder-Worker of Ostrog, the main character, Mladjen, a fictional representation of the modern Serb uprooted from his traditions by the lingering effects of Communism (who is very much akin to many of those inhabiting the New South, shorn of so much of their past by the all-too-present effects of Communism’s alter-ego, Capitalism), has…
Walt Garlington
August 10, 2018
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An Appeal to Southern Graduates

This spring thousands of graduates coming out of the high schools and colleges across the South will be hearing a similar message: Go far!  Dream big!  Succeed!  Break the mold! But we hope they will not listen to it.  We hope they will do the opposite: Stay home, dream small, be content, be unknown. The duty of the young is…
Walt Garlington
May 23, 2018
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A Poetry Sampler

Editor's note: Three recent poetry submissions, the first two by Walt Garlington, the third by Stephen Borthwick. The Patriarch’s Clan The patriarch’s clan By the lake is gathered To honor again Their common father: The matriarch with Her circle of friends, Cousins, with new wives' and husbands' And newer children, The bond of kinship Strengthened in their meeting. Traditions are…
Abbeville Institute
July 17, 2017
Review Posts

Is Pluralism Enough?

Fr John Strickland, reflecting on the Renaissance of Western Europe, wrote, . . . For Burckhardt, the Renaissance (for the first time a distinct period in history) became the moment of cultural liberation, the breakthrough into the modern age of humanism, individualism, and secularism.  . . . At the heart of this breakthrough was the Renaissance’s reflection on the human…
Walt Garlington
June 21, 2016
Review Posts

A Clear-Eyed Look at the Old South

Now that a third Reconstruction is very much underway in the South, it is more needful than ever to know and understand her history and her ways of living. Thankfully, Mrs. Elizabeth Allston Pringle, a South Carolina plantation owner and rice planter (1845-1921), has left us a valuable guidebook for doing such things in her written account of her family’s…
Walt Garlington
August 11, 2015
Blog

Cell Phone Towers

Cold metal arms, skeletal, sepulchral, Reaching upwards, grasping. Devil's towers topped with devil's claws, Tearing the creation - earth and sky, Wind and water, what is seen, what is not. Scorpion tails, Stinging all with unseen venom. Counterfeit trees for a counterfeit life: Texting, surfing, talking - with the soulless. Where are the trees of living wood and leaf, That…
Walt Garlington
October 29, 2014