Southerners need to be informed about the founding of a new organisation, the Bradford Institute (www.thebradfordinstitute.org). It is designed to promote the values of Southern life and Agrarianism and is especially aimed a the young people (18 to 35) who are searching for their lost heritage. This initiative will be important in keeping alive our beleaguered South in these most threatening times.


The first meeting will be held at St. Cristopher’s Camp on Seabrook Island, South Carolina, weekend of November 13—15. Details may be found on the website.


The program will feature lectures by Carey Roberts, William Wilson, Jon Harris, Jack Trotter, and Alan Harrelson, with brief remarks by Donald Livingston and Clyde Wilson. The lectures will be very relevant to current times , not just of scholarly interest. There will be especially a connection to Southern Christianity. There will be music from Clinton Hicks.


The Institute is gathering great attention and hope. The weekend meeting is sold out, but day tickets for the most important parts of the program are still available. Young people are for re-energising our beloved Dixie, and this effort could be our last stand. Join in.

My memories of earlier times prompted by my 85th birthday seem to have gathered some interest, so I will add a few more.


In the 1950s we were greatly concerned about polio. Everybody knew someone who had been struck. We were familiar with the horror of “iron lungs.”


Nobody understood at first what caused it. Some thought it was carried by flies. I spent long periods on my grandmother’s porch exterminating flies. There sometimes is, rarely, progress in our downhill world. The vaccine came along and polio has almost disappeared, although I knew people who continued to suffer from the effects.


Also, during the 1950s we were obsessed by the Cold War. In school we were taught, stupidly, to get under our desks if there was a bomb attack. We expected that an attack was coming any time. At the same time we were relentlessly propagandized about what a great thing the United Nations is.


Some of my earliest memories revolve around World War II. With my grandmother I listened to the news every day. At about four years old, I picked up a small iron pipe as a rifle and went out to kill Japs or Germans.


All the uncles on both sides were overseas or at sea, as was my father. I remember clearly that I was alone with my grandmother when the telegram came that my Uncle Paul, the third of her five children, had been killed in Europe. I was too young to really understand but you don’t forget things like that.


Later wars did not attract so much attention, and now with a volunteer force, nobody cares at all.


I was in high school when I first learned there was such a thing as an automatic transmission. Every boy worth his salt learned on a stick shift. That’s what the clutch was for.


One summer I worked, incompetently, as a boy in a cotton mill, which was the biggest industry in our town. We turned out vast quantities of denim—worn by farmers and working men. We never dreamed that blue jeans would become a worldwide fashion item.


I mentioned previously that as an undergraduate, friends and I raucously watched “Lone Ranger” on our little TV before supper. We also fervently watched Jesse Helms editorials on the Tobacco Network from Raleigh. That probably explains a lot.


Of course, in those days, he was a Democrat like all good people. The Democrats had not yet driven us out or the Republicans, our blood enemies, cynically taken over the South, for which they never have and never will do anything. My State of Sam Ervin now sometimes votes Blue.


In my early days there were only a handful of Catholics and Jews in town. There was a big competition between Baptists and Methodists for market share. Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Lutherans kept to themselves. Now there are mosques and Buddhist places.


The only immigrant I knew was a lad who was a refugee from Latvian Communism. Everybody else, black and white, had American ancestors, including the numerous carpetbaggers.


In my day, North Carolina history was a required subject for the 8th grade. That must have long since disappeared or else changed to a source of shame rather than pride.


Now, my grandfather’s house is inhabited by people from Sierra Leone and my father’s house by Vietnamese. There are foreigners anywhere you go. Hospitals are staffed by Asians and even Jamaicans. Black “leaders” control the government and schools. There is no community and the basic values and continuity of civilisation are missing. Young white people are stateless refugees in their own country.
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Nobody expects Presidents to keep their campaign promises. Since Nixon every single Republican Chief Executive has acted the opposite of what he promised. Democrats at least try and sometimes succeed in serving promises to their anti-American supporters as far as they can.


Republicans are not an opposition party. They are not even really a political party at all. They are an election machine - an organisation concerned with putting reliable mediocrities in office. Their election campaigns have nothing to do with ideas or principles. They take  - their stands on advertising slogans without any real content, made up after careful research by PR men.


The Republican Party operates by gathering voters offended by Democratic leftism while at the same time avoiding any “extremism” that might affect their “respectability.” That means never vigourously opposing anything. The only agenda that party has ever had, since Lincoln, is to protect Big Capital. When Big Capital was industry they supported tariffs at the expense of everybody else. Now that Big Capital is chiefly involved in financial manipulation they declaim for a “free trade” that does not exist.


When has a Republican party in Congress ever opposed a leftist initiative against Heritage Americans? They make moderate noises then after a few years adopt the leftist positions. It has happened over and over again. And we are told over and over again that we must support the Republicans as the “conservative” force. When have Republican majorities or even strong minorities in Congress ever fought to conserve anything?



Presidents never keep their campaign promises, but Trump has proved to be the most blatant liar ever and not even a plausible one. His war on Iran is not only criminal and stupid, it has shredded the last remnants of the Constitution which now has no meaning except in minor procedural matters. And forces are at work even in those matters - efforts to destroy the Electoral College.


Anyone who tells us we must restore the Constitution is either a fool or a fraud. You cannot revive a corpse.


Trump has crushed those who supported him and rewarded his enemies, who are still his enemies except when he obeys them. It is hard to think of any other such egregious betrayal in U.S. history. His lying and bullying has abandoned good faith and honest dealing and made diplomacy impossible in the future.


The only positive thing in all of this is that we have learned never to trust a New York gangster again, no matter how good he speaks.


Have you noted that the Republicans in Congress are almost unanimous in their support of Israeli war crimes. They are doing what they have always been doing. Nobody has told them to do different and they are too party-controlled and cowardly to respond to a changed situation. The only large number of No votes come from Democrats. Of course, their opposition to Zionist doings is in defense of foreigners, not America.


​It has been said that two things are certain in life—death and taxes. But it is starting to look like we are also going to have Lindsay Graham forever. I weep for South Carolina when I remember our last conservative Senator, Fritz Hollings, a Southern Democrat.

​Author's note: This article, published in Chonicles in 2012, is even truer today.​

Americans are a practical people. They don't want to hear your theory; they want to know what "works." This aversion to systematic thinking, "American pragmatism," has been celebrated as a virtue in a world cursed by ideology. And, by golly, this approach has "worked," and worked well, in some aspects of our national life.


​Another, less flattering, way to put it may be that Americans are a people of the Moment. The past is a void never thought of, and the future merely a dreamy land of wishful thinking for escapist leisure. The Now is omnipotent. That you may build a house or plant trees that will be enjoyed by your distant descendants and have real ancestors worthy of honorable memory are ideas long vanished from the American consciousness. An absence of systematic thinking might be a sign of immaturity.


The Founding Fathers of the United States recognized that a free society rested upon the ability to call rulers to account for their acts. But the vast federal apparatus now has a life of its own, essentially untouchable, irresponsible, and incapable of any change based upon long-term thinking rather than momentary pressure. Bankers create financial havoc and are "bailed out," because nobody in the vast panoply of federal power can think of any alternative to maintaining the status quo. The entire public consciousness turns automatically and exclusively to government subsidy as the remedy for financial crisis—the spending mostly booty to the malefactors who had caused the crisis, with the cost, as usual, shifted to future generations, who are not here now and so do not count.


George W. Bush lies in order to spend Americans' blood and treasure on a foolish, unjust, unnecessary, and illegal war, and there are no consequences. That was yesterday. After all, he was "our President" and a "nice, Christian man." And we all know that, since Americans invariably feel benevolent in what they do, it must be right and good. For the founders such an act would be the very definition of tyranny and treason. Today it remains not only unpunished but unrecognized.


What else but the Momentary We can explain why the majority has not been in the least bothered for years by presidential campaigns devoid of historical context, ideas, issues, principles, or any other rational content? The people have acquiesced without a murmur in the media's presentation of politics as a sports competition between the champion and the challenger - one leading the Red Team and the other the Blue Team. Never a glimmer of a notion that it has not always been this way or that it does not necessarily have to be so. I wonder what substantial percentage of the population actually think that the Democratic and Republican parties and their noisy conventions are authorized by the Constitution?


Actually, much of the framework we are accustomed to in our electoral process was neither mandated nor anticipated by the founders of the United States. Most of it is the product of later innovations, evilly motivated devices of party machines. These innovations could be easily altered, mostly by acts of the state legislatures, if there were a will to do it.


The We is not only Momentary but Imperial. It wants what it wants, and it wants it now. During an election campaign, pay attention to the words of the empty suits reporting for the media. You will see that they are incapable of reporting simple facts. They always convey how they feel about the facts. And how we are supposed to feel about them. Watch the interviews of the ordinary citizens. They feel that the government must solve their problems. No thought whatsoever enters into it - not of the welfare of the commonwealth, or the unintended consequences of actions, or even that the government is itself the cause of the problem to be solved (e.g., medical costs, corporate plunder, unemployment, inflation). Citizens who want to travel or enter a public building are subjected to slavish humiliation, because otherwise somebody's feelings might be hurt - that somebody having no claim on consideration. A regime of feelings cannot be a regime of law, because laws are fixed things. It must become a regime of edicts from rulers. The founders did not think that centralized tyranny and mass democracy were opposites. They recognized them as boon companions.


The imperial power of the Momentary We is demonstrated in many ways besides the lack of political and historical memory - for instance, in the widespread attitude toward capital punishment. Servants of the Imperial and Momentary We are only able to focus on how they feel about the suffering of the poor criminal who is still with us. The victim is long gone and therefore forgotten. Likewise, the woman troubled by pregnancy is right here, while the unborn child is unseen and therefore absent from the account. The illegal immigrant and his plight are before us and get our sympathy. A people of the Now cannot think about what perils the masses of immigrants might pose for the future, since the people of the Now are unconscious of any posterity. This does not reflect real charity or respect for others. The referent is always how we feel, and We will gang up mercilessly on the unfortunate who is also unfashionable. 


Of course, both justice and prudence are virtually impossible with such a mentality. Why else do people accept the edicts of judges who suddenly discover "rights" (e.g., homosexual "marriage") never before thought of in a thousand years of legal history? Congresspersons do more for the government bureaucrats around them in D.C. - because they are closer - than for us folks out here in Flyover Country. They no longer represent their constituents except in petty individual matters. Representative government does not exist because it requires the representation of something corporate, organic, and real.


For mankind, a sense of shame has always been the source of good behavior and social health. People might do wrong, but they knew they were doing wrong. The founders could not imagine a self-governing community that was not a morally governed community. What would they make of aspirants for office marching in a "gay pride" parade? Look closely at our politicians. Like increasing numbers of their constituents, they have no shame. Their words do not convey what they think but what they think it is to their advantage to say. They hardly know the difference.


The Imperial and Momentary We is immortalized in the most celebrated American document. Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address is strangely abstract. We are told that there was a great battle here, but the blood, sweat, tears, fear, rage, and dying of all those Yankee farm boys and millhands and immigrant cannon fodder never receives even a hint. The real emphasis is on the benefit to the living. In Lincoln's world, as Joseph Stromberg has written, men do not die for their freedom but for an abstraction of freedom (and also, as Mencken pointed out, to deny freedom to other men).


In this period of political contests and this era of instantaneous media it is easy to get caught up in the hoopla and lose track of reality. So here are a few things to keep in mind. What comes out of the mouths of politicians is not political discourse and certainly not democratic deliberation and decisionmaking. It is marketing. It has nothing to do with the realm of true and false, good and evil, or even workable and unworkable. It has to do with the realm of power-that is, the satisfaction of vanity, greed, and lust. The salesmen in most cases are people with less than normal honesty and good will. Politics is not the realm of doing good, and any good it may claim is accidental. Grow up.


It follows that it is pointless to accept as sincere or valid anything that politicians say. Their statements are meaningless, or worse, deceptions. What you see in the pictures on television is not reality but a show. The "reporters" who choose and interpret the pictures for you are not objective or especially insightful observers. The are unelected actors in the pursuit of power and are not possessed of any special knowledge. In fact, most are self-absorbed pseudointellectuals, people of the Imperial Now with no understanding of history, economics, diplomacy, or any other human affairs. Their minds are incapable even of noticing the things that are really significant.


Furthermore, both of the candidates presented for president by the two controlling parties are creatures of the Now, and they do not differ on any essential point. Both are surrounded by men who give only lip service to constitutional and democratic government and believe that there are no limits to the power of a president, who is permitted to do anything at any moment when he can pretend to be doing good. The Moment after the inauguration will be the same old Now.

I recently turned 85. I really did not expect to last this long. When I turned 70, I wrote a contemplative essay that attracted some attention. For 85, I mostly have only an old man’s boring reflections on how much has changed.


I was a teenager before I saw a television and a college student before I saw a pizza. The first television was on only two hours a day and there was only one station in town.


I can remember when bib overalls were the usual clothes of working men. And when mules and wagons could regularly be seen. And when a lot of city streets were not paved.


I can remember party-line telephones, and kerosene pumps, and a lot of tobacco-curing barns.


When I graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1963, it was still customary to give every graduate a Bible (King James).


When I was 10 or so, I could ride the bus (10 cents) downtown and spend the day reading comic books, watching movie serials (25 cents), and eating hot dogs with Nehi orange. Nobody dreamed that a child alone would be molested.


My maternal grandmother had 9 children and my paternal grandmother 5. Most couples I have known in recent years had 1 or 2 children and quite a few have none at all.


I can remember when my hometown boasted of our skyscraper-- 17 stories tall.


I can remember when BB gun fights between boys were commonplace.


Boys carried pocket knives to school and nobody thought anything of it.


No male carried an umbrella. To do so would have required a response to ridicule. The first time I saw it was in college and then only with fraternity boys.


When I first arrived at UNC, dormitories were 3 students to a room and there was one large bathroom for the entire floor. Having a phone never occurred to us. We did have a small TV where we could humourously watch “Lone Ranger” reruns before getting a full supper meal at the cafeteria for 35 cents.


I can remember when UNC-Greensboro was the Women’s College of NC. Of course, it was a weekend destination for UNC-Chapel Hill boys. Women students had to sign out and in and had to be back by 11 p.m. Nobody could imagine coed living quarters.


I saw the last college “panty raid”-- 1963. You probably don’t know what that is, but it was quite common in a certain period. Many students were veterans and did not welcome civilian discipline.


I remember many students cheering when the JFK assassination came on the radio. I also remember Walter Kronkite, “the most trusted man in America,” immediately announcing that Kennedy had been shot by “right wing extremists” in Dallas.


​When I gave up college teaching in 2006, undergraduate students could not do one-fourth of the work that they routinely did when I began in 1971. Of course, university presidents, a particularly bad bunch of con artists, were bragging that we were becoming ever more “excellent.”

The life of man is a dubious experiment. . . . Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux.  - Carl Jung


According to our experience and our human history, I know that everything essential and great could be born only from the fact that man had a homeland and was rooted in a tradition.  - Heidegger


Praise the Lord and pass the barbeque.  - Maurice Bessinger


We have no need, sirs, to be ashamed of our dead; let us see to it that they be not ashamed of us.  - Robert L. Dabney, 1868


The slave trade was routine in Africa before the Europeans arrived... The inculcation of guilt in Europeans has facilitated the masked invasion of their territories and the “great replacement” of their populations, something that has no precedent in the past.  - Dominique Venner


Without censorship in the West, fashionable trends of thought are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and the latter have little chance of finding their way.  - Solzhenitsyn


Donald Trump has proved to be a Great Betrayer—one of the worst in history. We foolishly forgot our inherited wisdom that nothing good can come out of New York.  - Clyde Wilson


We have sung of the soldiers and sailors, but who shall hymn the politicians. - Herman Melville


​“It always makes me proud of my country to see all those fine young men in the U.S. Army.”  - Crooked Yankee banker in the classic film “Stagecoach.”
Hitler did not know that Russia had a winter.  - Churchill

The words of his mouth were smoother than butter, but war was in his heart; his words were softer than oil, yet they were drawn swords. - Psalm 56:21



O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see ourselves as others see us!  - Burns



Those who have the most virtues in their mouths have the least in their bosoms.  - Oliver Goldsmith



Where will the Word be found, Where will the Word resound?
Not here, There is not enough silence.  - Shelley



I did not opposed to Obama as President because he is African. Just being from Illinois is enough for me. Besides, I am still not reconciled to John Quincy Adams. - Clyde Wilson



But capitalist society, which naturally does not know the meaning of honour, cannot know the meaning of disgrace. - G.K. Chesterton



Always make the audience suffer as much as possible. – Alfred Hitchcock


Everything has a moral if only you can find it. - Lewis Carroll



Previous to the War between the States, political education was maintained by public discussions of great principles, by great men. Since the War, political education has been neglected; and the people who once knew that they were sovereigns... now act upon the idea that they are subjects, without the liberty of doing anything , except to pay taxes, and obey the orders of those in office. - Tom Watson of Georgia, 1917.



You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. - Lenin


Looking for Utopia you have to wade through rivers of blood and find out it’s not there. - Peter Hitchens



The North strove to remember the war during the remainder of the 19th century as one of valorous collective unity, rather than an unpopular struggle that held considerable dissent and resentment... Abraham Lincoln was despised by a sizable portion of the Northern populace. - Paul Taylor, ‘Tis Not Our War: Avoiding Military Service in the Civil War North (2024)

Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. - Matthew 7:15


My view has always been that a state’s political system reflects the characteristics of its leaders. - Xenophon


Me seemes the world has runne quite out of squaare
​From the first point of his appointed sourse,
And being once amisse, grows daily wourse and wourse.
- Edmund Spenser, The Fairie Queen


Nothing can more hurt a state than that cunning men pass for wise. - Francis Bacon


It is better to be ruled by a wise Turk than a foolish Christian.  - Martin Luther


Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire


Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute. - Charles Cotesworth Pinckney


Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure, when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? - Thomas Jefferson


Alas! It is delusion all;
The future cheats us from afar,
Nor can we be what we recall,
Nor dare we think on what we are.
- Byron


Political words are the most indefinite, on account of the constant struggle of power to enlarge itself by tortured construction of terms.  - John Taylor of Caroline


The Confederates have gone out of this war with the proud, secret, deathless, dangerous consciousness that they are THE BETTER MEN.  - Edward Pollard, The Lost Cause, 1866


Our sole object was the establishment of our independence and the attainment of an honourable peace. - R.E. Lee, 1866


. . . the government is in its essence the executive committee of great wealth.  - Frank Owsley, Southern Agrarian, 1936


Shine on, O perishing republic.  - Robinson Jeffers


To see what is in front of one’s nose, needs a constant struggle.  - Orwell


The spiritual life of a nation is more important than its territory, and more important, even, than its level of economic prosperity.  - Solzhenitsyn


American culture is an infinite regression to moronic vulgarity.  - Thomas Fleming


I find absolutely no ground for optimism, and I have every reason for hope. - Wilfred Sheed


Police protection is an oxymoron.  - Bernard Theursam


Have we no shame? No.  - Fred Reed


The foremost duty of a citizen, especially in dangerous times, is to think. - Charley Reece


It cannot be repeated too often that the purpose of Politically Correct censorship is to punish people who tell the truth. Rulers don’t care about falsehoods. - Clyde Wilson


History teaches us that the capacity for things to get worse is limitless. - Chalmers Johnson


You can’t go home again.  - Thomas Wolfe

Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan running for President promised to cut federal spending and reduce federal interference in society. I personally heard Reagan at the South Carolina capitol promise to send people to scrutinise and eliminate federal waste and to appoint conservatives to office.


Nixon and Reagan lied. All they did was to pretend to support the issues that George Wallace had brought to national attention.

Understanding the short-sighted nature of the Republican party in Congress and the Supreme Court, I never expected anything else and suffered little disappointment.

With Trump it was different. Here was a man not a politician who seemed to speak out to the forgotten and powerless people. He was not afraid to stand on matters that the Democrats were too fanatical and the Republicans too cowardly to even mention. His character issues seemed unimportant given his eloquent courage.

His first term was underwhelming but we knew that confronting the federal beast and the Republican leadership was a hard battle.

He apparently did something on the immigration issue, but not nearly enough, and he seems to have backed away from that. Cut spending? Remember the “Big Beautiful Bill”? Reduce federal interference? Prosecuting “antisemitic” freedom of speech at universities?

What we all most hoped for was relief from a series of illegal, counterproductive, damaging wars.

Then we had the silliness about Greenland. We already had Greenland in our defense establishment. Why antagonise a peaceful and friendly European country? And then sheer colonialist force being applied to Venezuela. Was there not some quieter way to handle that?

The unprovoked and criminal attack on Iran destroyed Trump for good. It was not only bad it was stupid---a total miscalculation of the defense capacity of the large and historic Persian Empire, based on the false claims made by another government. He has deceitfully announced negotiations when he had nothing to discuss except complete surrender. He has contradicted himself continuously in his statements. He has very possibly left an unsolvable situation in which Israel will resort to nuclear war we have not seen since 1945. Will he be willing and able to prevent that?

The attack has damaged the world economy with possibly catastrophic results. Trump has so damaged American prestige that new power alignments are likely to emerge. He has guaranteed that he will go down in history as an awful President furthering the decline of his country.

Worst of all, he may have guaranteed that the increasingly authoritarian Democratic party will resume control. Without Trump the Republican leaders will run for cover and spout pablum as they always do.


No, I was wrong.  Even worse, Trump has  discarded  giving any help to the  chance for a real America to come home and work for spiritual renewal.  

We traditionally expect impartial neutrality from jurors deciding guilt or innocence. Historians should not be handing out verdicts of good and evil, although that is often what they do. Rather, they should properly be trying to help us understand past times. The past is like a foreign country. We can’t live there but it is interesting to visit.


You can study the personal writings of representatives of nearly every European country who were in America during the great bloodletting of 1861-1865. Nearly all of them described the war as an exercise in the Northern imperial conquest of the South. Nobody believed that freeing the slaves was motivated by benevolence.


Good European historians have approached that war with seemly neutrality. They have broader views of history than most Americans. Most importantly, they do not see a great moral crusade. They are free from the stance of Yankee self-righteousness.


A good example is the outstanding Italian historian Raimondo Luraghi. Three of his books are available in English: The Rise and Fall of the Plantation South, A History of the Confederate Navy, and Five Lectures on the American Civil War. These are very much worth the attention of any student of Southern or War between the States history. Luraghi has new and illuminating perspectives.


There are two books of the prolific and deeply insightful Frenchman Dominique Venner. Venner was a wide-ranging historian, and perhaps relevantly a veteran soldier. His work deserves translation.


First, Le Blanc Soleil des Vaincus, described as a study of the War of Secession, 1607-1865, the dates being a signal of superior insight. Second, Gettysburg. This work concerns more than the battle. It is a full history of the Confederacy.


Both of these books have Confederate battle flags on the covers of the quality paperback editions.

Know any good French translator?
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