November 27, 2017

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

ISIS Terrorists, Multiculturalism and the Collapse of Christianity

Friends,

Surfing through several news channels this morning I came across something that surprised me. Given just how utterly crazy and mad Europe has become it really shouldn’t have, I suppose, but it did. Being interviewed were two figures in British politics concerning the advisability of letting ISIS terrorists who are British citizens back into the country—as if nothing had happened while they were over in the Middle East or Africa blowing up little children and mothers, and cutting off the heads of anyone deemed unworthy (or who might resist their brand of Islam).

By government count some 850 Brits have gone to fight for ISIS; 425 of these have returned or are in the process of returning to England and wish to be “re-integrated” into English society.

I did not catch the name of the British citizen, a Muslim, who was defending the reentry program. The on-camera opponent of reentry of these ISIS members with British citizenship was Jonathan Arnott, a member of the UK Independence Party (and Member of the European Parliament). I found it fascinating that no member of the dominant Conservative Party or from the Labour Party or from the Liberal Democrats could be found to offer opposition.

The argument for admitting those British ISIS fighters back into Merrie Olde England basically goes: “what they did in a foreign country, overseas, does not in itself violate British law. So these mostly young men, with a few young women mixed in, should be admitted back into our society.” Arnott, the UKIP constitutional spokesman, was, rightfully, indignant. What about traditional international law, he responded. What about the laws of basic human decency and morality? Does not Britain have the right to impede or restrict entry by those who have demonstrated a willingness to kill, murder and rape, even in another country? Shouldn’t we be more concerned about the victims of Islamic terrorism, especially here in the UK, rather than letting back in those who have committed such acts, even if overseas?

That this issue is even debatable today says quite a bit about Albion’s Isle and the state of both British and European society.

Just the other day, November 24, an item regarding the Church of Sweden [Lutheran] came to my attention. The Swedish state church has decided in its wisdom to make God “gender neutral”—or rather, “gender fluid,” which is a more accurate description. That is, He will no longer be referred to as “He” and “Lord” (which are considered sexist terms). The governing body of the Swedish church has approved a new Church Handbook (or Discipline) which sets out how services, baptisms, weddings and funerals should be conducted, in language, liturgy, theology and music which are “inclusive” and “not offensive to women and minorities,” including to Muslims. And now all clergy and faithful are instructed that gender-neutral terms must be used. Suggested invocations include: “God, Holy Trinity, Father and Mother, Son – Sister and Brother, and Spirit – Lifeguard and Giver of Inspiration, lead us to your depths of wealth, wisdom and knowledge.”  (http://theduran.com/church-of-sweden-decides-to-make-god-gender-fluid/)

Additionally, the Church of Sweden has also approved the substitution of the word “shortcoming” to replace the term “sin.” Whew! That’s a relief! In one verbal sleight-of-the-hand all our sins have been wiped clean and all we have left are “shortcomings.” And most of those have to do with our failure to be “more inclusive” and “embracing of diversity,” and our opposition to potential Islamic terrorists from Syria or Libya.

Ain’t this new brand of Christianity just nifty?

Of course, it was the Church of Sweden that welcomed Muslim immigrants, many of them bringing their Islamist views with them, to worship in their churches. And this phenomenon has occurred all over Europe, with the blessing of various high ranking prelates, including the present material occupant of the Chair of St. Peter, “il papa Bergoglio,” who has, in the feverish recesses of his corrupted Modernist brain, in addition to his disastrous instructions on sexual questions, dreamt up a “natural right” for immigrants to go and settle anywhere, anyplace, despite the rather consistent Catholic theology on the subject. It seems that for Catholics and most other Christians these days the only sins—oops, I mean “shortcomings”— you can be guilty of, are to oppose Open Borders and actually believe traditional teachings on morality.

In some ways this rampant and amoral incubus that claims the mantle of Christianity in our age—this “Christianity in drag”—has not gone without opposition. Even in my church, with our belief in obedience and our security in the validity and consistency of teachings that go back to the earliest apostolic times, the actions of “papa Bergoglio” have resulted both in shock and in strong opposition, even from those who have been hitherto staunch defenders of the official Catholic Church as it has apparently “evolved” pastorally and in praxis since that disaster termed the Second Vatican Council.

Last year—September 19, 2016—four cardinals, including American Cardinal Raymond Burke, protested the direction of the Church, most especially the “teachings” coming from the Vatican, on sexual morality. Cardinal Burke, along with Cardinal Walter Brandmüller and recently deceased Cardinals Joachim Meisner and Carlo Caffarra, signed a series of very serious complaints or dubia to “il papa Bergoglio.” They made the initiative public on November 14, 2016, when it became clear the Francis had dismissed their objections and would not respond. These queries—“dubia” or “doubts”--asked that apparent extreme discrepancies and deviations from traditional teaching (most notably in Francis’ Apostolic Letter on marriage and the family, Amoris Laetitia) be clarified and rectified according to the doctrines of the Church.

But the four cardinals were not alone. On July 16 of last year sixty-two prominent Catholic theologians worldwide, in their document, “Correctio Filialis de Haeresibus Propagatis” [Fraternal Correction on Propagated Heresy], accused Francis of actions and words “favoring heresy.” As they state it: “We wish…to show how several passages of Amoris laetitia, in conjunction with acts, words, and omissions of Your Holiness, serve to propagate seven heretical propositions.” (https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2017/09/CORRECTION.html)   And on June 29 another forty-five orthodox Catholic theologians remitted an extensive and critical theological petition to the College of Cardinals, charging Francis, again, with “favoring” the same errors.  (www.dici.org)

Let it be said that none of the signatories to these appeals and documents is suggesting that the Papal Throne is empty (sede vacante), but they are indeed making the case, through powerful  and consistent arguments based in settled Catholic teaching and doctrine, that “things” have gone very far astray since the close of Vatican Council II in 1965. Almost all of these petitioners are and have been supporters of post-Conciliar popes, in positions of authority and executors in many ways of the Council—but who now find that the ultimate fruits of the conciliarism they have championed are a poisonous fruit indeed. (On this subject there is no finer and more detailed study than Professor Roberto de Mattei’s encyclopedic volume, The Second Vatican Council: An Unwritten Story.  His work picks up where Fr. Ralph Wiltgen’s post-conciliar “tell-all” book, The Rhine Flows into the Tiber, of how the progressivist episcopacies in Germany and France basically subverted the Council and pushed through ambiguous declarations, left off. Those documents—“time bombs”— while not necessarily formally denying doctrine, opened the door for the “heresy-in-practice” that has devastated the once stalwart force that stood in the way of the success of the Progressivist Revolution.)

The eventual denouement or exact resolution of this critical controversy in the Catholic Church is yet to be foreseen, although traditional Catholics take heart in Our Lord’s promise that, in the end, the forces of Hell itself will not prevail.  

This subversion of Rome has parallels and analogies in other Christian confessions, where the bacillus of Progessivist Revolution has taken hold. In some cases, as in British Anglicanism and the American Episcopal Church, the battle is virtually over and the decaying ecclesiastical shell is now possessed lock-stock-and-barrel by the very enemies of the faith. Likewise, Methodism, mainstream Presbyterians and Lutherans, and most other major denominations, including increasingly Southern Baptists (as I detailed in MY CORNER, back on October 3 of this year), have already succumbed in large part. The most resistant and steadfast opposition to the Progressivist Revolution comes, ironically, from the newly-vibrant and vigorously traditional Russian Orthodox Church which, after some seventy years of brutal oppression and purification behind the Iron Curtain, has emerged from the dark days of Soviet persecution, stronger and more holy and more resolute in its defense of traditional Christianity than any of its counterparts in Western Europe and America.

Perhaps that testing taught Russian Christians something that we in the West long ago forgot? About strength in the faith—“fortes in Fide”—and about the importance of the Virtue of Hope and the continual renewal of our Faith?

And in Britain now, in that once-indomitably staunch society where the “sun never set on the Empire,” the collapse of the Faith and its near complete perversion and conversion into just one more cheerleader for the vicious and poisonous infection of “multiculturalist” Progressivism has led to the pusillanimous establishment dithering over whether to admit back in avowed Islamic terrorists….

With notable exceptions such as organizations like the Society of St. Pius X, the true Christian spirit of Lepanto and the Crusades has all but disappeared; the apostolic injunction to go forth and convert—that same spirit that gave the world a St. Ignatius Loyola and St. Francis Xavier—has been discarded (most particularly by Berdoglio and by most major Protestant denominations) in favor of sharing our churches with devil worshippers.

At the base of all political questions there is a religious issue, declared Cardinal Newman more than 160 years ago. In so many ways our politics are determined by our religious outlook, our view of life, our view of man’s destiny and our understanding of our own creaturehood.  One-hundred years ago brilliant Marxist theorists such as Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukacs understood the critical importance of religion as the basis for Western society and culture. Subverting it and utilizing it against the very culture that it helped create was a key strategy they enunciated…if they could only see how successful their strategy has been!

And my question: Is this not the ultimate tactic, the last best poisonous arrow, then, in the quiver of the Antichrist and his minions in their quest to finally win the eternal war between Good and evil?

November 26, 2017

MY CORNER  by Boyd Cathey

Immigration and Voting, Islamic Terror, and the Marxist Effort to Transform America

Friends,

Several bits of news came together this morning, and, so, we return to the topic of immigration. First, there is the report of a government border agent brutally murdered along the border with Mexico. The particulars are not yet known, but the fact is that he was killed in a most horrendous manner that may well indicate Mexican gang or drug cartel involvement. You will hear very little about the circumstances or responsibility on CNN or MSNBC.

A few days ago, on Monday, November 20, the United States Federal District Court of Northern California struck down the president’s Executive Order withholding federal funds from sanctuary cities (http://www.jurist.org/paperchase/2017/11/federal-judge-strikes-down-executive-order-to-withhold-funding-from-sanctuary-cities.php). And back in late October an Obama-appointed judge in Hawaii struck down, for the third time, President Trump’s latest travel ban for specifically-named countries. (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/10/17/federal-judge-hawaii-strikes-down-trumps-third-travel-ban/773074001/ ) That is, he struck down a ban aimed at countries where rampant Islamic terror and instability demonstrate the incapacity of those countries to control their domestic affairs and prevent potential terrorists from traveling to the United States.   

Add to this the attempt by Democrats and Open Border advocates to sabotage the appointed Presidential Advisory Commission of Electoral Integrity (PACEI). The commission’s requests that states turn over election data have been met by refusals from states dominated by the political Left (e.g., California, Illinois). And Open Borders activist Ari Berman, has ominously warned on National Public Radio (where else?!) that the commission’s work to eliminate illegal voting, “could have a chilling effect on voting rights.” (https://www.npr.org/2017/05/17/528769195/trumps-election-integrity-commission-could-have-a-chilling-effect-on-voting-righ)

Got that? Eliminating illegal voters from the rolls could have a “chilling effect.” Or, in other words, halting illegal voting might inhibit the Left from using hundreds of thousands—potentially millions—of illegal immigrants, dead people and outright fraud a la Chicago under the late Mayor Daley, to win elections and further the cultural Marxist effort to transform the American political and cultural landscape by whatever means, legal or not.

Among Republicans we behold the nauseating specter of far too many GOP solons in Washington who with a wink-and-a-nod give succor to those who would keep our national borders a leaky sieve that enables not only millions of illegals to cross, but also implicitly reinforce ongoing radical change in the nation not just economically, but culturally. Of course, their actual concern is essentially to keep their international corporate supporters happy and a steady supply of cheap immigrant workers coming into the United States. Whatever feigned distress they express at the illegality and long range political and cultural results involved is more than overshadowed by their absolute fealty to their financial cash cows.

In addition to Senators John McCain, Lindsay Graham, and Marco Rubio, among the newer and more notable additions to this gang of “culture traitors” is North Carolina’s junior United States Senator Thom Tillis. Tillis is pushing what he calls a “compromise”  “bipartisan” immigration bill that would give “Dreamers” a path to citizenship and essentially open the borders of the United States to millions of additional immigrants by chain migration (of course, he denies that, but the import of his proposed legislation in the United State Senate would permit exactly that). (https://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/10/senate-dreamers-immigration-tillis-243628)

Tillis has a long career of supporting essentially open borders that began when he was Speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives, and he was known to immigration patriots in the Tar Heel State as the “Speaker of the Chamber of Commerce” and a shill for big corporate agri-business interests who stoutly opposed restricting immigration, lest their supply of cheap unregulated labor be diminished. About his proposal, Tillis is quoted by POLITICO that “when you sit down and you talk with left-of-center, reasonable Democrats … then we have people that are having a difficult time opposing it [my bill].” (Italics added)

The cited POLITICO article comments:

“Tillis has emerged as a classic pro-business Republican when it comes to immigration: He believes more workers from abroad help the economy and that there are jobs Americans simply won’t do. He is open to a pathway to citizenship for the broader population of 11 million undocumented immigrants [….]

“Tillis has made himself the ninth member of the Gang of Eight,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, referring to senators who negotiated a comprehensive immigration bill in 2013. “He is trying to make himself a player, but it’s really just putting a Republican gloss on a Democratic policy.”

Running for president, Donald Trump made halting illegal immigration and constructing a “big, beautiful border wall,” centerpieces of his campaign. Since his inauguration he has encountered one road-block after another, and not just from the usual suspects on the far Left—the Chuck Schumers and Nancy Pelosis in Congress and the Mainstream Media—but from Republican legislators like Thom Tillis, who even went so far as to hold up President Trump’s nomination of Lee Francis Cissna to head the US Citizenship and Immigration Services administration until he could get a speeded-up review of additional H-2B visas.

This, then, is the face of the opposition to this country gaining real and substantial control of its borders…indeed, of its very future as a nation. Not just the hard left--It is Republican senators like Thom Tillis, Lindsey Graham, Jeff Flake, John McCain, Orrin Hatch, and James Lankford (Oklahoma) who epitomize the swamp “creatures from the black lagoon” who, through their actions and collaboration and subservience to the Deep State, enable the growth and dominance of the malevolent Progressivist incubus and the eventual and certain demise of the old Republic.

They must be turned out of office, soundly rejected and defeated, for the sake of our republic and for the future of our children.

November 25, 2017 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

Russiagate: The Frenzied Ideological Assault, Based on Nothing, that Refuses to Go Away

Friends,

Once again the “Russians Did It!” canard as an instrument to “get” President Trump is front and center in the Mainstream Media, and as usual, they are salivating at the prospect that, at last, somehow, someplace, there is a “smoking gun.” Now it’s General Michael Flynn, last week it was Paul Manafort, and before that it was George Papadopoulos…. And each time this Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) among the media and their political epigones erupts, there is a frenzy of baseless speculation, unfounded hopes, and assertions based on what is essentially “fake news” reporting.

Alas, it makes literally no difference that the stated legal parameters for naming the present special counsel and his charge were to investigate, uniquely, potential “Russian collusion and/or meddling” in the 2016 election; yet nothing—absolutely nothing—has been found or even remotely detected, linking the president to any possible Russian interference. But that has not stopped Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his battery of attorneys (almost all staunch Hillary Clinton-supporting Democrats), who have broadened their “investigation” to include any infraction, real or imagined, that anyone associated with Donald Trump going back decades, may have committed, including questionable business dealings or faulty income tax reporting—none of which have to do with the specific mandate.

Thus, the latest breathless “revelations” that just possibly General Flynn may be ready to “make a deal” (Over what? His taxes, his involvement as a lobbyist for Turkey?) with Special Counsel Mueller  are met with over-the-top exuberant speculation and unbridled delight—just maybe, just maybe, this is it!  

While Democratic loyalists, diehard NeverTrumpers and Mainstream Media zealots continue pushing this effort, I think a majority of Americans are, by now, completely alienated by and disinterested in and tired of this narrative. This theme is like the Energizer Bunny: it just keep running and running and running. It’s like when we were in Middle or High School, and there was a classmate who just never stopped talking, even if he (or she) had exhausted anything useful or interesting in the first thirty seconds of a five minute spiel.

But at least those classmates usually had no ulterior (or ideological) motive and weren’t seeking to undermine or get another classmate expelled! The “Russians Did It!” canard has an ideological and sharply partisan goal. And its unbridled and feverish convulsions betray an observable form of hysteria and actual madness.

I have labeled this hysterical concentration that seems to totally dominate and control the lives of pundits on CNN, on MSNBC, and at The New York Time and Washington Post, a form of lunacy that characterizes the fanatical revolutionary. And I wrote that the program of these revolutionaries turns liberty on its head, inverts rationality, and enslaves its supporters in unrequited passions and desire, unbound and unreasoned, cocooned in a counter or pseudo-reality. It is to paraphrase the great English essayist and poet G. K. Chesterton, the definition of real lunacy. 

In his fine volume, The Poet and the Lunatics (1929), Chesterton’s character Gale asks the question: “What exactly is liberty?” He responds, in part:

“First and foremost, surely, it is the power of a thing to be itself. In some ways the yellow bird was free in the cage…We are limited by our brains and bodies; and if we break out, we cease to be ourselves, and, perhaps, to be anything.

“The lunatic is he who loses his way and cannot return. Now, almost before my eyes, this man had made a great stride from liberty to lunacy. The man who opened the bird-cage loved freedom; possibly too much... But the man who broke the bowl merely because he thought it a prison for the fish, when it was their only possible house of life—that man was already outside the world of reason, raging with a desire to be outside of everything.” [Italics added]

Our modern revolutionaries, whether in Congress demanding the president’s impeachment, or using the Office of Special Counsel as a limitless “star chamber” medium of assault, or broadcasting nightly ideological sputum they call news, are, to use Chesterton’s parable, certifiably insane: men “already outside the world of reason,” whose unrestrained rage to destroy is only matched by their profound inability to create anything of real and lasting value.

The United States—a large segment of it—seems possessed by this dark demon, infected beyond repair and beyond hope by a revolutionary contagion that fits Chesterton’s definition of lunacy. For the past half century—indeed, for much longer—this virulent revolutionary bacillus has roamed almost freely, poisoning all that it comes in contact with. It respects no traditional rules of morality or standards of conduct; it seeks only to bring down, to pervert, and to destroy the culture in which it exists as a hostile and now largely dominant force. It is the forward panzer of a cultural Marxist blitzkrieg that ranges across every facet of human endeavor and which corrupts and perverts our churches, our schools, our entertainment and sports industry, our politics, and our very means of communicating with each other. It is what the Church Fathers 1,500 years ago would have termed “the triumph of the partisans of evil,” and about which they sternly warned us: “Be sober, be watchful! For your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, goes about seeking someone to devour. Resist him, steadfast in the faith, knowing that the same suffering befalls your brethren all over the world.” (I Peter 5:8-9, verses used in Compline, the ancient Evening Prayers of the Divine Office of the Church.)

Increasingly, the mad raging roar of our Social Justice Warrriors resembles the portrait in St. Peter’s Epistle.

November 24, 2017

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

What Thanksgiving Really Means for Our Country in 2017

Friends,

In the euphoria that accompanied the election of Donald J. Trump last November 8, many of us felt that a tremendous curse had been, at least partially, lifted from this nation. We—we deplorables—had been in some way granted a miraculous respite, some breathing room, one more opportunity to roll back at least some of the more noxious effects of the Deep State, which had seemed before that date to be irreversible. The election of Hillary Clinton had been confidently predicted by the entirety of the media, by nearly all “informed” pundits (including such Bush-era luminaries as Karl Rove), by almost every poll; even the day of the election we beheld the specter of various “serious,” furrow-browed political experts speculating in measured tones on what the impending and overwhelming defeat of candidate Trump would mean to the Republican Party and how quickly the GOP establishment would regain its former control.

We know what happened.

But ominously, since President Trump’s inauguration this past January 20, we have witnessed not only the refusal of the establishment Deep State to recognize the results of the election, but a frantic, frenzied and all-out multifaceted attempt to essentially nullify those results and unseat him, using most prominently the “Russians Did It!” canard. In addition to hysterical and unhinged opposition to President Trump and his agenda from the Leftist political establishment—from the totality of the Democratic Party, from the educational elites, from Hollywood, and from the media, the president has also been met with similar, if more sinister and cunning and usually less public, opposition and obstruction from the leadership of much of the Republican Party, most especially centered in the US Senate and amongst the elites of the so-called “(neo) conservative movement.”

The recent  “explosive” and not-so-veiled attacks by former President George W. Bush and Senators Jeff Flake and Bob Corker, the undying enmity and continual sabotage by Senator John McCain, the various underhanded attempts by Senator Mitch McConnell to thwart the election of a true “drain the swamps” traditional conservative in Alabama, plus the incessant daily attacks by such pseudo-“conservative” journals as The Weekly Standard (e.g., Steve Hayes) and National Review (which despite their nominal “support” have never been reconciled to a Trump presidency…at least not one in which they did not dictate policy), fully illustrate this mind set. And what is ironic—and of significant value to observant conservative grass roots voters—is that the election of Donald Trump literally forced these supposed “conservatives” out of the closet, revealing for all to see that their first allegiance is bound up with their subservience to the very same Deep State managerial establishment that manipulates the Left.  It is there where their bread is buttered, where the goodies and sinecures come from…and despite their dishonest protests that they represent us and defend us against the “ravages of the far Left,” they are essentially collaborationists and enablers. Or, as the old saw goes, “With friends like these, who needs enemies?”

So that battle rages on both the national and state level. And thus we behold the spectacle of approximately forty Republican US senators announcing that before any allegation or accusation is verified or proven, that Alabama senatorial candidate Judge Roy Moore “must step aside,” “that the women must be believed.” It’s what I’ve called the “Mitt Romney Rule,” and if fully applied it would mean that any time, any place when a woman makes an (unproven) charge against a traditional (non-Establishment) conservative, the woman must be immediately believed, no matter that no evidence has been adduced. In effect it states: “If you are a traditional conservative and are accused, you are automatically guilty, no proof or corroboration required.”

Can you imagine this scenario if Luther Strange had won the GOP senatorial campaign, and such accusations of similar supposed happenings forty years ago had all of a sudden surfaced five weeks before the general election? Mitch McConnell and John McCain and Mitt Romney would have undoubtedly run lickety-split to his defense, demanding that unimpeachable proof be provided before any judgment could be made.

The Inside-the-Washington-Beltway Republicans and Potomac River punditry appear smugly confident that their posturing and solemnly condescending pronouncements about Alabama—and about those, you know, “rednecky” Alabama voters—are infallible and will be heeded by those fly-over country folks. Apparently, those politicians and “informed opinion makers” (and their polls) continue to believe the rest of us to be rubes who must continue to absorb dictation dribbled out in pontificated doses by their outlets and spokesmen.

I don’t think so. My belief is that what has occurred since the election of Donald Trump has in large part removed the scales from the eyes of many of us. As never before, we see revealed in the faces and praxis of those elites all the fetid ugliness and prostituted and naked corruption that they have attempted to obscure for decades. That does not mean we shall “kick the bums out” right away, not at all. Indeed, one year after the election of President Trump they continue to control most of the means of communication and the “conservative media” (with a few notable and salutary exceptions), and they still dominate much of the national Republican Party. The impending departure of Senators Flake and Corker from the Senate and the possible election on December 12 of Roy Moore may just be a harbinger of a much more generalized and ruthless intraparty “civil war.” And that, if it occurs, would be a good thing, something long overdue.

Last night, as I have done for a number of past Thanksgivings, I shared the celebration with the extended family of a dear friend. He lives about five miles from me just over the county line in Johnston County. I would say he is representative of all the good solid citizens who have, over the years, made America a success and an admirable place in which to live and raise a family. Like millions of other North Carolinians he is active in his church, he has been a wonderful father and now grandfather, he is a loving and considerate husband, and he has worked hard and successfully for his entire life. He is conscious of the many graces that have been granted to him.

Folks like my friend once were a large majority of America’s citizens. And like most of those folks, he supported and voted for Donald Trump.  And so did the entirety of his family.

One of the customary practices for that family on Thanksgiving is for everyone to offer individual thanks for something specific that has meant a lot to them during the past year. As the “thankful” paper strips were being read out, I noticed that many of them, most of them, after expressing their thanks for “God, country, family, and our military,” also mentioned: “for the election of Donald Trump.”  And in talking to a number of the folks, it was clear that they understood far better than the Beltway pundits and GOP elites in Washington what had happened since this past November—and indeed what should and must happen if this nation is to be made “great again.”

None of them seemed to underestimate the difficulties, and, certainly, none of them possesses the kind of wealth or the type of bully pulpit that normally are required to make their voices and influence immediately heard. But there was a firm conviction that reflected a faith that reminded me of what America, in its best days, had meant and symbolized. I have not seen that kind of determination since the heady days of the first Reagan administration, and even then, the times and environment were quite different and the “national crisis,” less severe.

I only wish that their numbers were much greater.

So, my hope and prayer is that the glimmer of light, that door cracked open last November, that nearly miraculous reprieve granted to us and to this country, may offer for us a path, if difficult and painful, in the direction of recovery and restoration. I do not underestimate the extreme hazards and the immensity of the forces arrayed against us—we have no divine promise that the American “experiment” will survive. The odds are heavily one-sided. But armed with our faith, and our assurance and Hope, and the knowledge that our fight is right, we go forth to do our duty.

For if not, we recede into the unlamented memory hole of a “once great people of a once great civilization.” That is not the kind of future my friend and his family—and millions of other fellow citizens—wish for their grandchildren

November 23, 2017

MY CORNER  by Boyd Cathey

THANKSGIVING DAY: My Wishes for a Joyous and Happy Thanksgiving to Each and Every One of You and Your Families

Friends,

Today is Thanksgiving, and I take the opportunity to wish each and every one of you a truly joyous holiday. I am sure that most of us will be with family and friends, and that good fellowship and great food will highlight our day.

Catching a bit of a local PBS broadcast last night, I noticed that the state of Virginia reminds us that despite the traditional claim of Massachusetts about the Pilgrims having celebrated the “First Thanksgiving,” the settlers at Jamestown, Virginia, actually gathered in thanksgiving several years before the Plymouth colonists.  I also recall that a son of President John Tyler, Lyons Gardiner Tyler (1853-1935), who also served as President of William & Mary College (in the days when it truly was a Southern center for education) wrote an essay about that.  (The Abbeville Institute just re-published it, but I have lost the link.)

The thrust of the program was that from the beginning of what became the American nation, we have given thanks to Almighty God for His bounty, for our lives and our families, for our homes, and for the multiple blessings bestowed upon us. When our ancestors came to these shores they brought with them their traditions, their customs, their language and literature, and their religious faith. They crossed the Atlantic mostly to find better land for cultivation and for more opportunities for them and their families. And they came largely in entire communities of people with the same background, same race, and same national and religious heritage.

I can find no better example of this kind of communal migration than my father’s family, which arrived in a group with other Scots in Philadelphia in 1718. Eventually, they came down the Great Wagon Road to the Piedmont region of North Carolina (ca. 1745) from which some eventually found their way to nearly every Southern state, and by 1849, to California during the famous “gold rush.”  What is fascinating is to compare the list of family surnames that appear in census records for the little community of Catheys Valley, California (near Yosemite), in 1940, with family names listed in the “Scots-Irish Settlement” in old Rowan County in 1747 (as compiled by Robert W. Ramsey in his study, Carolina Cradle: The Settlement of Northwest Carolina, 1747-1762), with listings of parish records for Antrim County, Northern Ireland (1680), and then with the records of several parishes in Ayrshire and Wigtown, Scotland,  a few decades earlier. Many of the same family names that appeared in community in the early 1600s continued to show up, in community, in 1940.  That is, the very same folks who once lived and worked and prayed together in communities in Scotland 400 years ago continued, through later generations, to form a community, even far into the twentieth century.

The historian Richard Beale Davis, in his exhaustive three-volume study, Intellectual Life in the Colonial  South, 1585-1763, demonstrates conclusively that the those early settlers, especially in the Southern colonies, brought with them their precious cultural patrimony from the British Isles, as did the German colonists from German states, and in places like Louisiana, as did the settlers from France. They were not, essentially, attempting to create a completely “new utopia” out of the wilderness, but rather to continue the experience and blessings of their inherited legacies, their customs and their beliefs.  Although by no means in conflict with their European heritage, the colonies, in particular in the South, did over the years modify that rich Old World patrimony, adjusting to distance, circumstance, climate, the presence of Indians, and the mixture of additional immigrants. The result was quantifiably conservative and localist. It was on this foundation that the American republic would one day be erected.

And it was a country that was firmly anchored in the land, by place and community, and by ties of blood and family. Which is precisely why the Neoconservative and dominant “movement conservative” position that America was founded on abstract ideas of “equality” and “human rights,” and their rejection out of hand of the American Founding as one inseparable from land and family, is utter nonsense—and just one more indication of their philosophical origin over on the Progressvist Left and in the occluded and fevered mental gymnastics of abstract Rationalism, disconnected from the reality of American history.

Thanksgiving is a holiday to celebrate not just our blessings and our God-given bounty, but a day of recalling who we are and have been as a people, of remembering our past and our traditions, of honoring our ancestors and our common legacies, mostly from Europe, but admitting others to these shores who willingly adopt and share our beliefs, and integrate into our culture and society.

This is our heritage and our existence as a people; we have no other. It is precious beyond all price, and once lost, it leaves us in despair, isolated, atomized, and subject to the whims and dictates of “Big Brother” and the ravenous centralizing managerial state.

With the slight door ajar that opened this past November 8, 2016, my hope and prayer is that together we may indeed “make America great again.” But that goal can only be achieved if there be a true realization of who we are as a people, understanding the critical role of our families and the importance of our communities—and their integrity, realizing the need to recover our constitutional liberties, comprehending the necessity of our faith, and the willingness to gird up for battle against those—and they are many—who would rob us of our patrimony and pervert and eventually destroy the republic.

That is my sincere wish for this Thanksgiving. May God bless you all and grant you His Graces!

November 22, 2017

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

The “Russians Did It!” Canard is Alive—Like Frankenstein’s Monster, It Won’t Go Away

Friends,

I have written so much about the “Russians Did it!” narrative over the past ten months or so, that I am surprised that I’ve not been summoned by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Clinton-donating investigative attorneys or minions of Senator Richard Burr’s senate committee to find out if I have received any fat money transfers from some Kremlin bank for services rendered! I exaggerate, of course. But the simple fact is that, without doubt, the topic Russia and its supposed “meddling in our elections” has become an incendiary centerpiece in American domestic politics, not just an issue of our foreign relations.

Actually, I began researching current Russo-American relations and the nature of post-Soviet Russia for a number of years beginning in the late 1990s. I recall coming across University of Virginia professor Allen Lynch’s superb study, Vladimir Putin and Russian Statecraft, back in 2011. It was an eye-opening account, based on years of serious investigation, research and analysis by a specialist in Russian history. It wasn’t a leftist screed or brittle propaganda, just a straightforward and evenhanded examination of the man that so many Leftists and establishment “movement (neo) conservatives” and their organs of opinion have come to warmly hate.

Then there were works by my friend James Madison University professor Lee Congdon on George Kennan, and Professor John Garrard’s impressive study, Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent, and Professor Michael Stuermer’s Putin and the Rise of Russia, not to mention the favorable observations of the Reverend Franklin Graham and Patrick Buchanan. These were sources of impeccable integrity and solid scholarship, authors I trusted and whose observations were credible.

Why, then, was it that so many so-called “conservatives” seemed to detest that man in the Kremlin? Why the continuing—and totally false—accusation that he “continues to be a KGB agent” (per John McCain) when that charge has been totally debunked? (Lynch, p.34) Why the belief that he coddles “oligarchs” and has “enriched himself at the expense of Russia”? (Lynch, pp. 33, 35)  Why the continually trotted out trope that “he wants to restore the Soviet Union,” when, once again, that quote and such accusations are easily disproven (See First Person: An Astonishing Frank Self-Portrait by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, New York, 2000, pp. 165-190)?  Are these only leftover remnants of a worn-out ideological Cold Warrior anti-Communism that somehow has metamorphosized into genuine Russophobia—even after the final, ignominious death throes of Soviet Communism in August 1991 (in which Putin, ironically, had been a critical player)?

Much of the answer, certainly for the internationalist-minded Neoconservatives, had to do with their fervent ideological commitment to a zealous and imperious American globalism and a belief in what they termed (to employ Charles Krauthammer’s phrase) “universal human rights, equality and liberal democracy.” And that template, that model, they asserted, was universally and everywhere applicable, no matter a country’s history or traditions, or legitimate capacities for American-style democracy. In his volume, The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom summed this view up succinctly: “And when we Americans speak seriously about politics, we mean that our principles of freedom and equality and the rights based on them are rational and everywhere applicable.” And any country—“those who do not accept those principles”—will be “forced…to do so,” a process Bloom calls an “educational experiment.” (See Paul Gottfried, War and Democracy, p. 110)

Since 2016, in particular since the Clinton campaign, its surrogates and the Mainstream Media decided on the convenient “Russians Did It!” strategy to both explain away an incompetent presidential campaign’s failings (See the revelatory book, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, by Amie Parnes and Jonathan Allen) and to use the same line of assault to undermine, possibly unseat President Trump, the American Left has, as if on the “Road to Damascus,” been converted lock-stock-and-barrel to an even more vigorous—and unhinged—Russophobia than that professed by the Neocons. And the sight of so many former apologists for Soviet Communism in an incestuous relationship with supposed “conservatives” on the object of their shared hatred is truly remarkable.

Of course, although sharing a common object of their loathing—a common “Russians Did It!” narrative—the Neocons and more openly Leftist voices make different uses of the meme and have different reasons for doing so: either those evil Russians were colluding with Trump to defeat Clinton, or those evil Russians were actually in league with the Clintons to get American uranium and have a major voice in American business. Either way, the “Russians Did It!” template is maintained…with the John McCains and Lindsay Grahams in the Republican leadership being joined by fearsome Marxist Democrats to insist that “America has been attacked,” and that we need to take strong and offensive action…even military measures. McCain even seems to lust after armed conflict. The times are darker, says former McCain foreign policy advisor and zealous Neocon anti-Trumper, Max Boot, “than any time since Munich in 1938!”

Perhaps we should all go out and feverishly dig backyard bomb shelters like some of our neighbors did back during the Cuban Missile Crisis or the shoot down of Francis Gary Powers’ U-2 spy plane in 1960? Better, perhaps we should all go back and re-watch that 1997 black comedy of political deception and attempted distraction, “Wag the Dog”?

What is apparent is that both the Neocon punditry and their political epigones in the GOP, and the American Left and their voices in the media and Democratic Party, are essentially a Janus-faced manifestation of an intense hostility—and fear—of a post-Communist, nationalist and increasingly conservative and religious Russia. It is a Russia that refuses to take dictation from the international  Deep State, that has expelled the minions and NGOs [non-governmental organizations] controlled by George Soros, that has rejected both the economic tutelage of  and subservience to Bruxelles, Wall Street and Washington, that has “restricted” the freedom of homosexual activists and proselytization (obviously a violation of “human rights”), that refuses same sex marriage, and that has in large part returned to its traditional religious Orthodox faith.

Against the onrushing forces of globalism and of what is dishonestly and fraudulently called “liberal democracy,” that Russia cannot—must not—be allowed to stand.

 November 20, 2017

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

DACA, Immigration and the Basic Issues at Stake

Friends,

The current debate about immigration involves not just the DACA [Deferred Arrivals for Childhood Arrivals] illegals (many of whom are assuredly NOT children), but how to treat the continuing influx of across-the-border immigrants who are in so many ways altering both the economics and the culture of our society.

There are, so it seems to me, several major points we should remember in this, what seems, endless discussion and debate:

1) Illegals will continue to come to the United States by any means they can, looking for jobs—and for our nation’s generous social welfare programs and social safety net—as long as we let them, as long as we don’t truly secure the borders of the country, and as long as political leaders conveniently turn a blind eye to what has been and is occurring.

2) Illegals, who may not pay the same taxes or live at the same standards as American citizens, in many cases undercut the ability of citizens to work and find work, taking jobs that ordinarily would be done by citizens.

3) Despite the claimed “contributions” (in sales tax revenues, purchasing, etc.) that illegals make to the American economy, their overall net economic effect (e.g., welfare, free medical care, educational benefits, etc.) has been negative, in the many billions of dollars.

4) For Democrats the influx of illegals, especially from Mexico and Central America, is seen as an advantage, a political boon that is enabling them to replace voters in the South and West who have deserted the Democratic Party due to its movement to the far Left, and in some cases—such as California, New Mexico, and a few other states—has permitted them to gain a solid lock on voting in those states: continued immigration is seen by Democratic strategists as major means of gaining eventual and full control politically over the nation.

5) Republicans and conservatives are split over the issue of immigration. While all mouth the slogan, “Make our borders secure,” a considerable portion of so-called “conservatives” and of GOP legislators continue to push for what essentially comes down to an “open borders” approach to the issue. Some, such as Senators Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, motivated by large agri-business and Chamber of Commerce support, advocate what they term “compromise,” which would essentially allow in millions of additional “workers” and allow them to stay, with an eventual “path to citizenship.” Others, including Senator Jeff Flake and some at the libertarian CATO Institute, for instance, also make the argument that immigration—and its supposed economic benefits—should be seen as part of the general advocacy for “free trade” and (open) “free markets.” In other words, for them the perceived economic advantages of cheap (illegal) labor and the nebulous idea of “freedom” trump concerns about territorial integrity or cultural homogeneity—which arguments they see as “nativist” or “xenophobic.” In this Flake (for all his vaunted and false claims that he is a “conservative”) and those like him are joined at the hip with the far Left open borders zealots.

6) The undeniable fact is that mass immigration, and specifically illegal immigration—the kind of immigration we have seen during the past half century, certainly since the disastrous immigration bill of 1986—is radically altering the fabric of our historic culture, and this, to some degree, is by design: the desire of the motivating and dominant political forces in our society to transform the country through ethnic and population replacement. New Latino immigrants are out-populating native citizens in birth rates in many cases by more than a two-to-one ratio.

I think here of numerous examples. And one that always sticks out in my mind is Siler City, North Carolina. For years as a boy my family would travel through that town, which is about half-way between Raleigh and Charlotte, as we motored west to visit my father’s relatives. Oftentimes we would stop to get gas or a bite to eat. Siler City was a typical small North Carolina town, populated by hardy, hard-working folks, some of whom once worked in nearby textile mills (most of which have now gone to Mexico or China). Made famous by “The Andy Griffith Show,” it was also the final residence of Aunt Bee actress, Frances Bavier.  Siler City counts around 8,000 inhabitants---and 50% [49.8%] of them by the last census data are Latinos. Thus, in the schools, in business, and—on the various welfare rolls—the very nature of this once-archetypal Southern town has changed. And its culture and outlook have changed, as well.

For three years I studied for my doctorate in Pamplona, Spain; later (1980-1981) I taught on the collegiate level in Argentina. I am fluent in Spanish, and I love and appreciate Hispanic culture, history, and the beauty of the language. But just as I did not wish to impose my North American—“Estadounidense”—culture, my politics, and my language on Spain or Argentina, so I would not have or desire to have that culture, language and politics imposed here. 

Every nation, every society, I believe, has a God-given right to its history, its cultural integrity, and the richness of its own past. Certainly, over the centuries our nation, like most others in the world, has received and will continue to receive immigrants—new arrivals. Sometimes those immigrants will come in waves, as for example the influx of Irish prior to the War Between the States, or the Scandinavians late in the 19^th century. The key has always been the ability to assimilate—especially given the backgrounds and ethnicity of the new arrivals—and the willingness of the newcomers to integrate into what has been called “the melting pot,” to share our historic beliefs and values, that is, to want be “Americans.”

The most recent mass influx largely from below the border has placed this template in serious jeopardy. Entire communities and neighborhoods in California, for example, are now unrecognizable, and resemble and could well be any town in Morelos or Jalisco states in Mexico, except that they retain the older infrastructures (e.g., roads and transportation, government support systems, etc.) that were built and put in place by earlier non-Latino leaders (and are now under severe duress with the new immigrants). 

But the culture has changed and is changing, and, as never before there is a marked resistance to actual assimilation from a large proportion of the newcomers.  And this resistance and unwillingness to assimilate is abetted and encouraged by many American political leaders and by those in academia and the media, who partake in various ways in the cultural Marxist narrative that posits that historic white peoples and the civilization they created are, by definition, oppressive and evil, and thus, must be brought down and destroyed. Many—certainly not all—Latino immigrants have, thus, become pawns, if not willing participants, in this effort.

Every people, every nation, has a natural right to its historic culture, its history and a usable past, to its language and richness of a national (and regional) literature. Every people, every historic country, has a right to its land and to protect its borders from unwanted incursions from “outsiders.” Unlike the insane “open borders” theology that now runs rampant through much of current Christian “teaching” on this topic, nations are like families in macrocosm. Just as the family, father-mother-and-children, has the right in natural law to reject entry of any unwanted outsider and to preserve its integrity and safety, so analogously the nation—a collection of families united in their history and traditions, beliefs, customs, language—has a natural right to prevent entry of those it deems a threat, unmalleable or incapable of integration, economically, socially, and, yes, culturally.

This is how the broader debate over immigration should be focused. It is not “racist” or “xenophobic” to believe in and to defend your own historic culture and your traditions. It is not “hateful” to believe that those citizens who have lived here and contributed historically through their labor and multiple contributions to the well-being of the country (including through taxes and participation in the public life of the community) should have—must have—first crack, the first opportunity, to fill positions and jobs when they become available. It is not a sign of “white supremacy” when our citizens insist on using our historic English language in business and commerce, and in our schools and education. And protecting our borders—really protecting them, unlike the palpable hypocrisy of a Thom Tillis—with a wall and with stepped up enforcement and sending back illegals, who by the very definition “illegal” have broken our laws, is not an example of “bigotry” or “nativism.”

It continues to be up to us—to you and me—to let our elected political leaders know what we think, and to give our support to such excellent immigration control organizations as FAIR [Foundation for American Immigration Reform], NumberUSA, American for Legal Immigration PAC [ALIPAC], NC LISTENS, and the American Immigration Control Foundation [AIC Foundation]. These organizations have produced impressive studies and reports, and lobby our politicians. But too often their voices are drowned out by the filthy lucre of international corporate business and the babbling bile of social justice warriors who, in effect, would destroy this nation as we have known it.