These days some people are talking up “Christian nationalism.” It is not clear to me what Christ and nationalism have to do with each other. The New Testament, unlike the Old, strikes me as a message of liberation from nationalism.


It’s true that America began as a Christian society and remained so until fairly recent times. However, our Founders did not found a “nation.” They founded a republican Union. And the materials that make a Christian society no longer exist except among a minority. ‘Christian nationalism” is merely an ideology. And like most ideologies is a theory about something that doesn’t exist.

American Christians should be patriots who love their land and people, not nationalists who love their government, especially a government that is a force against both Christianity and patriotism. And American Christians should recognise that our Lord created different varieties of humans, all in His image, who needed to keep to their own given boundaries.


The last thing American Christians need is more nationalism. “Christian nationalism” is just a weak and sad revival of the old Yankee Puritanism which has done so much damage to our society, It is a blasphemous claim that America is the righteous chosen nation---a belief, as General Lee said, that makes a bad government--- aggressive at home and abroad.

The other evening I somehow persuaded myself to watch the annual Country Music Awards for the first time in years. I shut down in less than an hour, having given up any hope of ever hearing any “country music.” The show was a gaudy Hollywood spectacle driven at a frantic New York pace. There was not a thing about that was “country” or had any relationship to what was once known as country music. One of the more authentic recent country songs is rightly titled “Murder on Music Row.”



Of course, the term “country music” was a sales gimmick to avoid having to call it Southern music even as it swept the world with its talent and humanity. If you really want to know about this aspect of our Southern culture take a look at Joseph Stromberg’s recent book from Shotwell Publishing, Southern Story and Song.

It has long been my habit now and then to point out new conservative Southern writers. So I am happy to call attention to Auron MacIntyre’s recent book The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies (Regnery, 2024).

​This work is an insightful chapter and verse account of how the old constitutional republic of the United States has now become a regime under the near-total control of globalist capitalists and bureaucrats entirely antagonistic to the will and interests of the American people. What we are living under ain’t no “government of the people.”


One of several virtues of the work is, as one reader puts it: “The Total State is a detailed analysis of modern political power that is still accessible to the average guy.”


A basic point of the writer is the damage that has been done by the institutionalising of a false concept of “individual rights.” The right of the individual to do as he pleases without reference to others makes him into a lonely member of a cultureless society. He has lost the identity formed by family, group, and religion. The inevitable fate of a society of such individuals is collectivism, the loss of genuine individual will. MacIntyre writes that in such a society, human beings “become a concept rather than an essence.”


The author stresses that the recovery of self-government by the American people will not be easy. He kills off the shallow reformists’ hope that a change of officeholders or restoration of the Constitution is all that is needed. As any Southerner knows, the Constitution ceased to mean anything long ago, except for trivial matters.

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Another reader rightly comments: "Bold, lucid, and chilling. The Total State takes a flamethrower to every comforting belief conservatives hold about how our political order really works.”

​Our globalist rulers have managed to use their unelected courts to prevent the people from voting for independent candidates in France and Rumania. Trump and the American people deserve credit for defeating their plan here.


Trump’s rule is not a Southern administration, even though the unanimous South made Trump’s victory possible. We can hope it will do some good and will not be anti-Southern, although it contains strong elements of Yankee nationalism.


Many people are leaving the decadent blue States and fleeing to the South. Whether this will be positive for the South remains to be seen.


Trump’s style is leaving many of his supporters in some confusion and doubt. He needs a good television news channel. It would be news reporting of a new, or rather old type. Now the media never report what Trump says or does. Along with unflattering pictures they only report the criticism of what he says or does.


Suppose some channel simply reported the news of the administration’s position. Then the critics, when they are creditable.


Such a channel could be on two or three hours in the evening, and be nothing but a report on the world. Two hours of factual reporting would be enough to support revolution. The channel should avoid advertising and entertainment and avoid all the current media people who are hopelessly stupid or biased. If serious and well done it only needs two hours. It should be free on the air. A subscription network would only attract the already committed. It needs to reach the ordinary suppertime and evening viewer.


Imagine a news organization that had real investigative reporting. Imagine investigation and presentation of facts about all the leftist celebrities: Fauci and other bad bureaucrats, Biden officials and their evil and corrupt acts, ridiculous Congresspersons, dishonest reporters, lying generals, phony philanthropists.


Trump’s people have brought up the corruption of the federal bureaucracy tellingly but they have not at all exposed fully the evil, only seen a drop in the bucket.


The reasons for such acts would be vastly convincing to any honest common-sense observer. The reason for Trumps puzzling moves over tariffs and the Ukraine need to be made clear to his sympathisers.


​Whether this is possible I don’t know, but I give this good plan for free.

Donald Trump is not the kind of character who appeals readily to Southerners.  However, he is a recognisable un-Woke American type who deserves credit for some virtues.


His is certainly not a Southern administration although a solid South made possible his big victory in the popular vote and the Electoral College.


It is nice to see steps being taken against the bloated and destructive nature of the U.S. government - something truly revolutionary that we never expected to see happen. How good to see the DEI fraud attacked and 10,000 bureaucrats leaving the Department of Health and Human Services. It will be a long-term benefit to society and the economy, though the government will probably still have to pay their lavish pensions. And the destructive and unconstitutional Department of Education brought into question.


The same process needs to be applied to the military brass, who are all devious bureaucrats and not soldiers at all.


All that is really just a drop in the bucket.  There are still many tens of thousands of federal drones to be eliminated. Where will they find work? It will be nice to see them as WalMart employees and waiters.


I have to say that my opinion of Trump rose greatly with his inaugural and state of the Union speeches.  They were actually statesmanlike, something not seen from a President in a long, long time.  He told the big picture like it is, while surrounded by all the empty-suit and corrupt officials who were responsible for the evils he was describing.


Trump’s biggest obstacle remains the Republican Party.  The grassroots is populist but the mainstream Republicans, like Speaker Johnson, want to get back to their comfortable power and pelf.  They have never been a real opposition party but have aided and abetted creation of the evil regime that Trump and his followers have attacked.


Some of Trump’s moves seem bombastic and a bit ridiculous.  Why acquire Greenland when we already have all the military bases there that we need?  Acquire Canada which has 10 states, making our country, already too big, even bigger?  We ought to be getting rid of useless territory - like Puerto Rico. Reclaiming the Panama Canal might make sense. 


I am hopeful that all the noise being made about Ukraine and Russia is just jockeying and things will come right.


Trump’s rabidly excessive Zionism is a deep moral failure that is inexcusable.  The only explanation may be that no American President can survive without obedience to Israeli interests. Then there are the stupid Evangelicals and their deceitful and opportunistic leaders.


In the 1980s some of us begin to project a Southern nationalism.  We thought that the U.S. was hopeless, that only independence could save the South, and that devolution was the wave of the future.  We were mostly right, but history has moved on and it is hard to see for sure where we stand now.  And sadly, some of those who dishonestly present themselves as Southern spokesmen are fascists, which there is nothing more un-Southern.


Trumpians have made some noise about restoring the historic monuments and symbols that were trashed in recent years. During World War II a lot of army bases were named for Confederate generals to encourage Southern support for the war---Bragg, Benning, Hood, Polk, etc.


It seems that the old names have been restored to Forts Bragg and Benning.  But the names now represent not Confederates but other people with the same names.  This is a bit of a dirty trick.


I am withholding judgment and approval until I see the noble Reconciliation Monument restored to Arlington.

America will never come right until it gets right with Lincoln. He was not a saint who saved the Union and freed the slaves. He was a pathologically ambitious man who stumbled into the bloodiest war in American history, freed the slaves in the most destructive possible way, and cost the lives of many Northerners by his bad military decisions. He did not save the Union but turned America into an empire with an unappealable central authority, with crony capitalism installed as its predominant feature of government.


Now I don’t mind if you like Lincoln and are happy with what he did and regard his deviousness as great statesman. But let’s cut out the sainthood bit which distorts our understanding of our national history with false righteousness.


Britain and France have had civil wars and revolutions. People still have sympathy with one side or another, but they don’t claim that they are basking in righteousness from the cause they favour. Only in the U.S. do we have the appeal to sainthood for one side. History is more complicated than that.


Kevin Orlin Johnson has done good work in bringing Lincoln into realistic focus. His book The Lincolns in the White House: Slanders, Scandals, and Lincoln’s Slave Trading Revealed provided us with all sorts of information that we did not know, some of it rather seamy. Lincoln did indeed sell slaves inherited from his wife’s family.

I am so old I can remember an everyday world that is as alien to my grandsons as Men from Mars:


Spittoons were commonplace in public buildings.


Everybody knew someone who had polio.


Everybody knew World War I veterans.


Everybody knew a family that had a member killed in World War II.


Tobacco barns.


Cotton fields.


Mules.


Party-line telephones.


The first television, with one local station on two-hours in the evening.


Buses that ran on tracks with overhead electric wires.


Lots of unpaved roads, even within city limits.


Ice delivered to the door for old-fashioned “ice boxes.”


Lots of people worked in the cotton mills.


Denim was not a fashion statement but proletarian garb for working people.


Segregated schools where both races got a sounder basic education than they do
today.


Sock hops.


Drag racing.


I had never seen or heard of pizza.


ONE exotic foreigner in my high school class---a Latvian who had escaped from Communism.


Washed clothes run through a ringer and hung outside to dry.


Soft drinks 5 cents; hotdogs 10 cents; bus fare 15 cents; a gallon of gas 30 cents.


Courthouses and city halls belonged to the people who could go in and out without being searched by armed guards.

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We know that Hollywood foams at the mouth at everything and anything Southern. So it’s nice to notice this new DVD, “Hazzard Nation,” a documentary made by Ben "Cooter" Jones for the 40th anniversary of “The Dukes of Hazzard.”


A Los Angeles TV critic predicted when the new series first came on the screen that the audience would not last past the first commercial. That shows you how much Yankee “intellectuals” know about Americans. The show ran for 150 episodes and for years had a weekly audience of 45 million viewers. Its theme song reached the top 10.


It was still popular when it was taken off the screen by the Hollywood moguls. “Hazzard Nation,” with selections from the comedy and interviews with the stars and other personnel shows why it was so popular and still is. Because it characters resembled decent, independent, well-meaning Americans in a clean comedy presentation along with the admirable stunts of the “General Lee.”


Having killed the series, the moguls tried to make some money with a movie sequel, following their natural inclinations by bringing in dope and obscenity. They still had no idea why the show had been popular with Americans.


Remember this was about the time when “The Beverly Hillbillies” and “Hee-Haw” were popular with national audiences. The South’s colorful and honest people had great appeal to most Americans before the pseudo-intellectuals and crooks who own the media began to distort reality even more than their normal practice.

Dear Reader of Reckonin: You may have suffered through my long series of lamentations about the American condition called “The Way We Are Now.” So ain't it nice these days to wake up, tap on the computer, and actually hear some good news for the first time in 50 years? Trump seems to be working on his promises. When was the last time you ever heard of a President doing what he said he was going to do?


Of course, I am not giving a thumb’s up until the Reconciliation monument is back where it belongs on General Lee’s stolen property, and the forts and warships get their right names back. I know it will upset Senator from Massachusetts Elizabeth Pocahontas Warren. Somebody may have to take out her fangs before she hurts herself.


The 1960s saw the creation of the irresponsible leviathan government in Washington. Happening, not coincidentally, at the same time as a sharp decline in morality. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was supposed to help the poor. Its actual purpose and accomplishment was to provide comfortable non-work, six-figure employment for legions of Yankee pseudo-intellectuals who consider themselves too important to do any real work. That is the Deep State.


One of the most important of Trump’s initiatives may be curtailing federal grant programs. Having had dealings with federal money-dispensing agencies and academic administrators I know whereof I speak. That is the base of Deep State allegiance for hundreds of thousands if not millions.


Remember that Republicans in Congress, sometimes a majority of them, voted for most of the federal expansion as well as the immigrant flood that has transformed American society. As I have said before, Trump’s real opposition will come from Republicans embedded in the Establishment. They are already blocking his most reform-minded nominees.
​

There are large number of Trump’s own voters who don’t understand the real nature of the evils he is trying to do something about. Not surprising. The media have long been a tool of the Establishment, since the people of the media are exactly like the second level people of the Deep State.


Trump needs his own television station to tell the public facts about the evils he is fighting. This should be manageable. Such a broadcast need only be two hours in the evening. It could do completely without advertising. Such an outlet must avoid hiring any “reporters” from mainstream media who are already hopelessly corrupted. It should do what Tucker Carlson and others have been doing but aimed at a larger audience.


This suggestion is simply patriotism. I do not expect any government grant for it.

Some of the wisest words I have heard in years, by the poet and essayist Caryl Johnston: “More and More I am convinced that our ultimate human fate will depend on whether or not we succeed in wresting the intellectual life from the professoriate.”

South Carolina’s black Senator Tim Scott has a much stronger conservative voting record than his Republican colleague Lispey Graham and our Republican House member Nancy Mace. He is also ahead of many Northern Republican Senators.


Am I the only one who suspects that Somalia Harris has lightened her skin colour?


Isn’t it interesting that African American advocates for slavery reparations, Obama and Harris, have no ancestral connection to U.S. slavery?


Contrary to what is usually assumed, Hispanics already in the U.S. are not in favour of illegal immigration. What do they know that our rulers don’t?


Now that Trump has won, don’t expect the Left to gracefully and peacefully accept defeat. Leftists have never acted that way---violence is always in their repertoire. Study how Communists took over Eastern European countries after World War II by killing the patriots and giving the government to their apparatchiks.


What we have escaped by Harris losing:


Effective elimination of the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendments. The 9th and 10th amendments were discarded by the Republican Party long ago.

We could have expected a great move forward in eliminating the signs and symbols of America’s evil white supremacist history. The Washington monument is named after a racist slaveholder. It is white—a symbol of white supremacy. The monument can be repainted in rainbow colours to represent the new tolerant diverse America. After all, our embassies abroad already fly the rainbow flag.


The distinguished Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Pocahontas Warren would lead the way. We could expect ingenious proposals for renaming the capital city named for a racist slaveholder. Maybe Tubman City? John Brown City? Obama would be a good name to signify America’s diverse origins and replace “Washington.”


What might be done about the monument to the slaveholding white supremacist Jefferson? Maybe it can be demolished or closed to view until it can be put into a context that explains his evil legacy.


Most Americans don’t know that the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner” was a slaveholder. It has never been a satisfactory national anthem. Perhaps the great Civil Rights song “We Shall Overcome,” symbolizing the overthrow of the evil racist American past would become our national anthem.


We could have expected a President Harris to really get serious about “reparations” for slavery.


​But, my friends, the battle is not over. It has just started. The establishment Republicans will do everything they can to prevent any Trump reforms. That is their character---shallow, self-serving, and conformist.