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.

It is many years since I have watched any regular U.S. TV. Having discovered streaming, I am able to watch European television, superior in every way to the trivial and trashy emanations of the Hollywood cesspool. The Europeans are by no means perfect, but their characters and plots portray real people and real situations that can appeal to mature minds.


I have remarked before on how Europeans present American Southern characters. There is a good Norwegian series “The State of Happiness” (“Lykkeland”) about the discovery and exploitation of the North Sea oil fields in the 1970s. Two Oklahoma oil men characters in Norway have perfect Southern accents, something Hollywood is incompetent to do. Looking them up, you discover that the two actors with perfect accents are Brits. Note that the Europeans are not ashamed to present genuine accents of people usually denigrated.


Europeans have some sensitivity to real speech. The average American Yankee wants above all else to conform to what is considered (falsely) intelligent and respectable. Historic regional accents to them betray social and educational inferiority.


While I am on the subject of TV, I have to remark on the strange role that Africans have assumed in that medium. Even the Europeans are committed to affirmative action. In any police show, whether British, French, or Scandinavian, an admirable black character will appear invariably in the first five minutes, whether it is really appropriate to the situation or not. And, alas, in many cases, in the first ten minutes we will see an admirable sodomite character portrayed as a normal and unremarkable member of society.


Fairly recently I have seen Africans portray Egyptian, Phoenician, and Persian monarchs, Roman soldiers, a Viking queen, one of the Three Musketeers, a president of Finland, brilliant police inspectors and computer geniuses, and commanding an American warship in battle in World War II. This is surely a falsification of our human past.


Let us give all good credit to the accomplishments of African Americans, but in the long run this kind of false history, I think, will do more harm than good.


And in television advertisements, 90% of the time, American families are now portrayed as black or mixed race, with an occasional bow to Asians and Mexicans. A normal white family is seldom seen enjoying the vast cornucopia of American products. It seems to me that this is designed to in the long run degenerate into disgusted saturation.


​Here is another aspect of our sad culture as portrayed in advertising. About three-quarters on the screen are for drugs, in most cases drugs that no one has ever heard of and has no need of and no doctor has ever prescribed.  This is because the crooks in the pharmaceutical industry have so much money that they can afford lavish advertising in a campaign to keep on the good side of the public and the media owners.

Trump and Elon Musk have lost a hundred thousand supporters by their strange endorsement of the HB1 program to bring in Indians to take American jobs. I thought the new administration was going to deal with destructive immigration. That was Trump’s strong suit.


Liberals always favour mass immigration, but they do so from pseudo-charitable reasons—supposedly to welcome unfortunates seeking American democracy and opportunity. But Musk-Trump advocating Indian importations is crass---entirely motivated by anticipated profits.


It is true that quite a few very intelligent Indians have entered our society in recent years. No surprise that they are intelligent and achievement-oriented. After all, they are a small fraction of the top one percent of a population of many millions.


I have always thought that inviting in talented immigrants was duplicitous in terms of charity. Why don’t these people stay and help their own struggling countries? Is it charitable to bribe them away from their own needy societies? What kind of citizens do they make for a country to which they have come for profit and comfort? Not to mention that Indians, with few exceptions, are aliens to real America.


​The Yankees so far have been able to move away and personally avoid all the damages that they have wrought by their misguided “civil rights” policies. But the Indians are affluent and can easily move into wealthy and upper middle class Yankee neighbourhoods and jobs.

If a President Trump really hopes to engage in the gigantic battle to break the Deep State, to curb the dominant power of leftist bureaucrats and judges, his greatest obstacle will be the Republican party. This should have been obvious all along, but the euphoria of an election victory and first-time hope has caused his enthusiasts to overlook this plainly evident fact.


The Republicans have been willing collaborators of the Deep State’s creation and maintenance for the last half century. “Mainstream” Republicans are not inclined to any revolutionary action against the status quo. They have never been a genuine party of opposition to the leftward distortion of American government and society. They are heavily infused with the Midwestern desire for respectability and conformity. They have no ideas except those created by advertising men. Their only firm principle is “moderation.”


Remember how quickly they abandoned the defense of traditional marriage. Remember how they preferred the Bushes, Dole, Romney and such for presidential candidates. When Trump defeated a half dozen of their groomed celebrities in the 2016 primaries they were shocked. When he took office many of them engaged in sabotage of their own President, so anxious were they not to disturb the Deep State.
The Party may be populist at the grassroots, but in Congress it is what it always has been. Even while Trump was riding to victory, the Republican House chose as Speaker a museum-quality specimen of weak Establishment empty suit. In total regard of his incoming President, he fostered Biden’s destructive initiatives. The Speaker will be essential to any Trump legislative victories. Republicans have slight majorities in the House and Senate for the first time in a long time. It only takes some of them to join the Democrats to kill any Trump legislation. And that defection has been normal practice for decades.


Trump enthusiasts, like most Americans, are very short-sighted and ignorant of history. The entire history of the last half century is marked by Republican participation in the Deep State and evil deceitfulness to their conservative voters. Nixon and Reagan were elected by large majorities as reformers. Instead the consolidated state only grew bigger and more intrusive. These presidents and a majority of Republicans in Congress supported civil rights laws, ever-increasing immigration, and some of the worst Supreme Court appointments in history.


Republicans are now balking at two of the most seriously reformist of Trump’s nominees—Kennedy and Gabbard. “Mainstream” Republican leaders recognize that these are genuine threats to business as usual, and they have no interest in harming the Establishment that provides them prestige and pelf. They have been this way for a long time.


A young man I know - talented, articulate, and determined - recently entered a Republican primary against a House incumbent. Our young man raised the immigration issue. His establishment opponent could only answer that we needed to bring in talented people. This is pure boilerplate from Republican headquarters, and it is obvious that this dunce never had even thought about a real issue. See a typical Republican congressperson.


The Republicanisation of the South has been a grievous defeat for conservatism. In the second half of the 20th century, Southern Democrats were the firmest and most skillful conservative force in America. Now the South is sending to Congress mostly Republican empty suits with no interest except in themselves and crony capitalism.
The Republican legislature in my beloved South Carolina is one of the most big-spending and corrupt of all state lawmaking bodies.


And now we have the great spokesman against immigration endorsing bringing in more Indian technicians to replace American workers. Liberals love immigration through assumed benevolence to the suffering. It is not benevolent to hire away their most talented people from struggling countries. And what kind of citizens do such people make who left their own needy countries for profit and comfort? In this case Trump and Musk motives are crass---profit-oriented. What an insult to the American people and their wish to become great again---that we need talented immigrants for important jobs. What a lie.


Trump’s recent grandiose pronouncements about acquiring new territory seem absurdly counter to our wish for domestic reform. Let us hope that this bad idea is only a publicity ploy.


We can have some hope that Trump might have learned something from his previous term and knows more about picking the right people and wielding the big stick. He will have to defy the federal courts that will throw out nets to hamper him and make ruthless use of executive power against the bureaucracy while opposed by a large part of his own party.


​Let’s have a modest hope that in this interesting and changing time, Trump may be able to avoid war with Russia and other international calamities, although his role as peacemaker is compromised by his zealous Zionism. And maybe he will be able to eliminate some of the spending and bureaucracy that now burden the American people. Whether it is too late for real recovery of that imagined Good America remains to be seen.

​Archibald Rutledge, a major South Carolina and national writer in the first half of the 20th century, seems to have dropped nearly out of sight. His books are mostly available, when obtainable at all, in over-priced used remnants. Yet Rutledge was in his time a celebrated and best selling author of hunting and nature accounts, memoirs, and a poet of lasting stature. He is the outstanding recent writer of the South Carolina Low Country.


Renewing an interest in Rutledge recently, I turned to the supposedly definitive South Carolina Encyclopedia. The clueless writer of the entry on Rutledge (1883-1973) does not bother to mention more than a few of the titles of his 50 books (some bestsellers), nor his many honorary degrees, nor the still lively international interest of hunting readers. This “historian” is very short on facts but strong in opinions. We are now to dismiss Rutledge as no more than a misleading nostalgist for the Old South and a white supremacist.


One is surprised to see such an important part of South Carolina culture dismissed so ignorantly, but actually such is so commonplace that we should not be surprised. That is one of the consequences of being a conquered people.


South Carolina still recognises its brilliant son by making his hereditary plantation at McClellanville into a State Park. And the University Press in 1992 did publish a collection Hunting & Home in the Southern Heartland: The Best of Archibald Rutledge. The editor Jim Casada knows the subject well and provides an excellent criticism and biography.


There is still plenty of room for publishing other collections of Rutledge’s work and republishing some of his books. His little inspirational book, Life’s Extras, was immensely popular at the time. If you want to get started, besides the hunting stories, I would suggest My Colonel and His Lady, Tom and I on the Old Plantation, Home by the River, and the nearly unobtainable collected Poems of Archibald Rutledge.


Rutledge was a direct descendant of John Rutledge and of other historic South Carolina figures, and inherited a plantation. But he was by no means affluent in his start in life. He attended a small college in New York State. For more than thirty years he served as chairman of the English department at Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania, only occasionally able to visit his home place. Only after retirement was he able to restore Hampton into a vital place.


The encyclopedia writer is completely wrong to dismiss Rutledge’s treatment of the black people among whom he lived. He was paternalistic yes - what else was possible at the time? We ought to give him credit for an affectionate attitude, especially when we remember the negative attitudes toward black people that were widespread in the South - and, yes, in the North and West as well. Anyone who is interested in knowing African American life will find much of value in the writing of one who knew them well and who expected their improvement.

Nobody has ever written more and more meaningfully about the South Carolina Low Country, of which Rutledge is the eternal bard.

Vladimir Putin has shown great patience and restraint in not reacting to the U.S. government’s criminal attack on his country. He is hoping that a change in government in the U.S. will avoid catastrophe. For this the world and America should be grateful. Unlike any American leader, Putin is a genuine statesman.


If Trump manages to settle the Ukrainian debacle, that will justify his election. Will he be able to clean up the diseased police agencies of the government? Will he be able to reduce the federal bureaucracy that contains, largely unknown to the citizens, many thousands of parasites with six and seven figure salaries, who are either useless or destructive? Will he be able to get rid of the Woke generals and admirals, bureaucrats and not soldiers, who have degraded the U.S. military and replace them with good men?


Perhaps most important, will he be able to eliminate inflation and restore a real working economy to the American people in place of the paper regime that now dominates? The Deplorables are waiting for help.


Although Trump has made vague comments of support for Southern symbols, his is not a Southern administration. I can’t think of any Southerner in an important position with him. They are all Yankees of the common-sense Unwoke kind, not bad people but not like us. It remains to be seen if Making America Great Again will be of any benefit to the South.


Besides Yankees, the American political scene now includes a considerable segment of Indians, something that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. Somalia Harris is half-Indian, JD Vance’s wife is Indian, and an Indian is the nominee to head the FBI. The U.S. has received a fraction of the top 1% of the huge Indian population. Should we worry about the patriotism of those who left their own needy country for a bigger paycheck here?


Trump faces major obstacles to accomplishing any of his announced goals. The primary obstacle is the Republican party. With small majorities in Congress, a few Republicans can join the Democrats to kill any good legislation. In fact, this has been regularly happening for years, especially in regard to immigration.


The Republican party is now Trump’s at the grassroots, but the Washington element remains what it has always been. The ordinary Republican congressman is an empty suit without any ideas or principles. He only wants to hold on to his power and pelf by clinging onto the establishment, and he is deathly afraid of the press, which can damage his cherished respectability and moderation.


One would like to see criminal prosecution for some of the worst high-placed criminals in the Biden regime, but mainstream Republicans are always afraid to do what the Democrats regularly do to them.


One would also like to see a lot of pardons for wrongly persecuted and imprisoned populists like the Charlottesville and Jan. 6 “insurgents.” However, a lot of the persecution has been done at the state and local levels, where the foreign billionaire criminal Soros has considerable control of the personnel and Presidential pardons do not apply.


And the federal judiciary remains a majority Obama-Biden cohort. Any federal judge can almost instantaneously block any constructive action that Trump undertakes. He will have to have the courage of Andrew Jackson to ignore the orders of bad judges and that will be a serious Constitutional issue.


​For my money, I am holding out on my humble support of Trump until I see the Reconciliation Monument back in its rightful place.

Sometimes something good happens when you aren’t expecting it. I have discovered, quite by accident, a 1959-1961 television show, “The Rebel,” which I have been streaming with pleasure for several weeks. The show is a wonderful contrast to the ignorant, vile, and dishonest portrayals of Confederates that have appeared in the “entertainment” media in recent decades.


“The Rebel” reminds us that hate-Dixie was not always the prevailing case in American popular culture. In better times all the major Hollywood stars played admirable Confederates in the movies: John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, Gary Cooper, Martin Sheen, Allan Ladd, Charlton Heston, William Holden, Victor Mature, Henry Fonda, Tyrone Power, Clint Eastwood, and many more I could mention. And I am not even counting the Southern-born like Randolph Scott, Joseph Cotten, or Audie Murphy.


“The Rebel” ran for 2 seasons with 76 half-hour episodes. The main character is an ex-Confederate roaming the wide West. He is still in Confederate clothes, which are probably among the few clothes that he has, and thus is recognizable by friend or foe wherever he goes. He is satisfied that the war is over but has no apologies for his proud service in the Confederate army.


He is a good man. He always helps out people in trouble and only kills Yankees and Indians when it is unavoidable. He keeps a diary of the stories he experiences in his wide travels. Perhaps he will be a writer someday.


The plots are mostly quite good. The historical settings of the rough West and its people are mostly authentic, which cannot be said about most War Between the States or “Westerns” shows even from earlier days. Jefferson and Varina Davis even appear in an episode. Johnny Cash does the theme song: “The Rebel, Johnny Yuma.”


“The Rebel” is Nick Adams, the screen name of a Ukrainian-American from the Pennsylvania coal fields. He does not have the accent but many of the characters do. He plays very well and convincingly, a good man—modest and independent but just and charitable, as well a good fighter with fist, Colt, and sawed off scatter-gun. The fine actor, born Nicolas Adamshock, died at 36 under unclear circumstances.

The election of Somalia Harris as President will enable us to move forward in erasing America’s racist and slave-holding past. A lot has been done recently in eliminating signs and symbols of the evil white-supremist regime, but much more is needed.


The Washington monument is named after a slaveholder. And it is white—a symbol of white supremacy. The monument needs to be painted in rainbow colors to represent the new tolerant America. After all, all our embassies abroad already fly the rainbow flag.


Of course, the capital is named for a white supremacist slaveholder. It is time to move on. The capital should be renamed. Tubman City? John Brown City? Obama would be a good name to signify America’s diverse origins and outreach to the nonwhite world.


What might we do about the monument to the slaveholding white supremacist Jefferson? Perhaps it ought to simply be demolished and certainly closed to view until it is put in a context that will explain 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. A new one is needed. I suggest the great Civil Rights song “We Shall Overcome.”


​Great progress has been made in recent years in destroying memorials to racists and traitors, as well as changing the names of forts and ships. As you can see by these remarks there is much more to be done. We will soon have the opportunity to move forward in erasing the evil American past. We can expect the new President to get serious about reparations for slavery.

Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? Psalms 2:1


Trump is making major gains in support from Hispanic voters. Recent polls indicate that recent immigrants are in favour of limits on new immigration. Something similar is happening in Australia where recent immigrants are among the strongest supporters of immigration limits. What do they know that our rulers don’t?


If you think the Dark State is going to allow a free and fair Presidential election, I have some nice land in Florida I would like to interest you in. Our only hope is in their general delusionary view of the world and their incompetence. What sensible person would put Kamala near the nuclear phone?


Many Americans seem to believe that we are a great democratic, peace loving, benevolent country. It takes an above average attention and perception to understand that “America” is a decaying empire.


Tocqueville in the 1800s and Solzhenitsyn in the 1900s pointed out that Americans (meaning the Yankee breed) were conformists and strong believers in their own virtue and superiority. We are now living through the inevitable collapse of the Yankee Empire established at Appomattox.


Unusual experience. On the TV ads the other evening I actually saw an all-white family.


For several decades, testosterone levels, IQ, and Christian faith have been declining in the U.S. Not a good sign for a country that thinks it’s Number 1.


The illegal alien “refugees” that U.S. and European governments are allowing into our countries, are mostly military age males.

​
America’s rulers care far more about the welfare of illegal aliens than they do about yours. After all, you are only one of the “deplorables” while they are noble examples of democracy at work. Southerners shouldn’t mind---we are very used to being “deplorables.”

Black ghettos are a Northern not a Southern invention.


Put in the plainest terms, the War of 1861-1865 was an invasion and conquest of the South by fellow Americans in control of the U.S. government—Republicans with no more than 40% support of the American people. It could not and did not save the Union. It turned the Union of the forefathers into something else. It was not a war to free the slaves. That was only an opportunistic move that never took into consideration whatsoever the welfare of African Americans.


Between 1860 and 1890, African Americans suffered a ten-year decline in the span of life and suffered many other declines in their welfare. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.


Satan is real. He is quite active these days in Washington, D.C.


A large proportion of the members of the U.S. Congress are intellectual and morally shallow people whose actions are entirely self-referential and self-serving. Their only interest in the people they are supposed to represent is maintaining their own popularity by federal payoffs of one kind another.


If you look carefully at all the atrocities that have been done to symbols of Confederate heritage, you will find that Southern Republicans have played a major role in the atrocities every time.