Friday, January 31, 2020

January 31, 2020

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

Confederate Monuments and the Totalitarian Agenda:
Silent Sam and Inconvenient History

Friends,

All across the Southland today efforts have been mounted by “woke” social justice warriors—in most cases spearheaded by violent and destructive mobs composed of radicalized Millennials—to tear down or at least remove all monuments to Confederate veterans. But removing monuments to those who fought and died in 1861-1865 is just a first step in a broad national effort, a national campaign to rid America of all symbols of an “inconvenient history” which does not further a cultural Marxist totalitarian agenda—a troublesome history that does not confirm and affirm an imposed redefinition of our history to fit the latest fanatically progressivist narrative.

Thus, in New Orleans, in Memphis, in Charlottesville, and in Chapel Hill we have witnessed frenzied and continuous assaults by noisy mobs directed at memorials to those veterans, followed by pusillanimous reactions from local authorities. Those monuments, which have stood for many years in public spaces, are reminders that the impetus to rewrite our history is not just an academic exercise, but rather a significant aspect of an immense ideological war being waged in America.

The objective is to completely recast history, to sanitize it, as it were,  or even obliterate it, so as to buttress and offer support for the now-dominant current progressivist template: if the history—if the facts—don’t support your view, well, then, just change the history, change the facts. Veracity be damned. Countervailing research, which is an obstacle in this process, is denied or explained away, or increasingly, decried as “racist” or an example of hated “white supremacy.” The vast majority of citizens in every poll favor keeping monuments in their original locations, but this has not deterred the small groups of Leftist fanatics.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) case—about the monument to the “boy soldiers,” known as “Silent Sam,” which stood on campus—has provoked tremendous debate in the Tar Heel State. Brought down in August 2018 by a violent mob composed of members of Antifa, “Smashing Racism,” and other assorted Marxists, debate over the monument’s fate has swirled heatedly since then. North Carolina has a Monuments Protection Law (G.S.100-2.1), enacted in 2015, admitting only a few exceptions for monument removal or change of location. But that law lacks a specified civil or criminal penalty for its violation and depends on the respective governing authority whether or how it will be enforced.

In 2018 the North Carolina Department of Administration, acting at the behest of Governor Roy Cooper (D), attempted to have the three impressive Confederate monuments on Capitol Square in Raleigh removed to the Bentonville Battlefield. The effort was rebuffed by the North Carolina State Historical Commission, and those monuments remain on the square.

However, the situation for monuments on county court house grounds (subject to the purview of county commissioners) and at UNC (governed by its Board of Governors) is different. In most cases, it was the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) who donated monuments to North Carolina counties, and it is they who are presently involved in appeals relating to local efforts in Chatham County and Winston-Salem to rid those jurisdictions of monuments to Confederate veterans. Those legal efforts are ongoing.

The UNC case is more complex—and more heated. After the toppling of “Silent Sam” both the North Carolina UDC and Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) vigorously demanded that it be returned to its original location at McCorkle Place on campus, a decision that fell to the university Board of Governors (BOG). The board, fearing the kind of protracted violence and demonstrations which the school had witnessed during 2018 into 2019, wished to see the monument located elsewhere, and several alternative solutions were proposed—none of which satisfied anyone.

A thorough judicial and legal review of the situation by the SCV’s legal counsel and the fact that only a minority of the twenty-four members of the BOG favored returning Silent Sam to its original location, stymied all efforts to restore the monument. Because of this impasse serious negotiations between the SCV and the board were undertaken, a total of nearly nine months of discussions.

Last November 2019 the SCV, acting also for the UDC, and the board announced an approved settlement: the SCV would take possession of the monument and move it to a new location (not in proximity to a UNC system campus); in turn, $2.5 million, from donor funds, would go to a trust to administer and properly display the monument in its new location; $74,499 would eventually go to the UDC.

Although the social justice radicals were outraged and immediately launched a plethora of lawsuits and media attacks intended to reverse or halt the settlement, and some members of the SCV also felt the arrangement was a surrender of sorts, “Silent Sam” was saved and preserved from uncertainty and probable obscurity (which would have assuredly happened otherwise). In the future it will once again be proudly displayed with appropriate curation and protection, for all North Carolinians to see and understand what it symbolizes.

Was this an ideal solution to what had happened seventeen months ago in Chapel Hill? Is this the model that should be followed elsewhere? No, it was not: the situation—the circumstances of this particular case of “Silent Sam”—was unique. But the result is that the monument has been saved. And that is critical and significant in an age where every monument, every symbol, every marker to “inconvenient history” is met with hysterical outcries for removal, banning, or destruction.

Our civilization—our inheritance—is perishing for lack of stouthearted defenders who are prudent and think strategically. Too many of those supposedly on our side are fainthearted and fear for their reputations and media attacks, or perhaps possess little understanding of the powerful forces we face. A particular battle, a specific case, may not always be won immediately, completely and outright; sometimes strategic success, even a strategic (if temporary)  redeployment may be necessary—to permit us to survive when greatly outnumbered and to allow us to fight, and win, another day.

I use the example of the Seven Days battles outside Richmond in 1862; General Lee did not win a complete victory over George McClellan, but he did save the Confederate capitol. Strategically, he and his small army lived to fight another day.

So will defenders of our heritage.

Monday, January 27, 2020

January 27, 2020

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
Latest Essay Published by LewRockwell.com: The Impeachment Charade

Friends,

The LewRockwell.com Web site has published another of my essays, a slightly edited version of a column I offered back on January 25 via my blog site. I offer the LewRockwell version this morning:

LewRockwell.com  anti-stateanti-warpro-market

The Impeachment Charade and Monty Python



By Boyd D. Cathey   January 27, 2020

Most of us…at least most of us of a certain age…will remember Monty Python and their series of televised sketches and then films (e.g., Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 1975; Life of Brian, 1979; The Meaning of Life, 1983). I will admit that when they were in vogue their brand of surreal, over-the-top comedy, did not for the most part attract me. My preferences were for, say, a Peter Sellars/Inspector Clouseau movie, or, even better, some good ole’ bare-bones humor, the type you could find on that classic and long-running “country” television series, Hee Haw(e.g., Archie Campbell, Junior Sample, Roy Clark) or maybe the Carol Burnett Show (or its spin-off, Mama’s Family), and earlier with Abbott & Costello or Laurel & Hardy: true classics of the genre.

But watching snippets—that is all I could stomach without retching—of Representatives Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler lecturing the United States Senate this past week, reminded me of Monty Python at its most mad… incredibly ridiculous, almost insanely wild…but at the same time, severely and eerily serious. Serious, in the sense that those House impeachment managers take themselves so very one-dimensionally, so solemnly. They do not or cannot see or understand what others see and understand about them and their supposed “case against the president.”
For them even a funny jibe or joke proffered by Donald Trump at a public rally before tens of thousands of people (e.g., “Russia, if you hear me, can you help us find the thousands of emails that Hillary Clinton ‘lost’,” or, “I could walk down 5th Avenue and shoot somebody, and I’d still have support”) is terribly ominous. The resemblance to Monty Python comes specifically because they take such eminently silly, throwaway lines meant to be funny, and hold them up in the utmost seriousness and solemnity, in what are monumental deliberations about the very future of the American nation.

I sat in front of my television set, with a bored cocker spaniel beside me, and imagined Schiff intoning: “if it floats, it must be a witch,” or some such line from Monty Python and the Search for Holy Grail.
CNN and MSNBC literally oozed with praise and encomia for Schiff’s “incredibly brilliant” and “boffo” “performance.”
Was this real? Were these men and ladies people that citizens of our country actually elected to be our representatives? Were we thatstupid, were we that mesmerized by insanity? Here was Adam Schiff telling us all that “the Russians are getting ready to invade America,” that if we don’t defend poor little Ukraine, well, then not only is our “democracy” down the tubes, but we will have lost the “new” war with those vile and vicious Russkies! Oh, my! It sent shivers down my spine, and I clasped my defenseless spaniel close to me: need I prepare for bloodthirsty Cossacks at my door? Would my little community out here in rural eastern Wake County resist those sword-wielding hordes when they came, as Schiff predicted if Donald Trump is not impeached?

But that stalwart champion of madness from Burbank, California, then added: elections are not the answer. You see, you can’t trust’em. Any election where a Donald Trump is elected is bound to be bogus and—the word he and others like him use—“illegitimate.” Ah, now we know! Schiff’s understanding of that much-abused term “democracy” has room for only his desired ballot box result. For him and the vast masses of “woke” progressivists, Millennials, Black-Lives-Matter types, Hollywood flakes, Never- and anti-Trumpers, and indoctrinated, brain dead Zombiefied students churned out by our educational establishments each year—for these folks 2016 was illegitimate, somehow a “rigged” election. The lumpen proletariat—we deplorables—did not follow orders, did not listen to our “betters,” rejected the instructions of those who fancy themselves the managerial and administrative class enthroned by God (whom they mostly don’t believe exists). We did not follow their implicit directions.

And since President Trump’s inauguration they have mused, dreamed, conspired, and feverishly worked to rid themselves of him. Nineteen minutes after the president was sworn in, the infamous “whistle-blower” Eric Ciaramela (a hold-over CIA analyst from Obama) “was overheard in the White House discussing with another staffer how to remove the newly elected president from office, according to former colleagues.”

Sources told RealClearInvestigations the staffer with whom Ciaramella was speaking was Sean Misko. Both were Obama administration holdovers working in the Trump White House on foreign policy and national security issues. And both expressed anger over Trump’s new “America First” foreign policy, a sea change from President Obama’s approach to international affairs.
Ciaramela later went to “work” for Adam Schiff and House Democrats.
The faked FISA applications enabling surveillance of the Trump campaign, the rogue FBI attempts to entrap low level Trump staffers, the spate of manufactured indictments, the totally unsupported charges of Russian interference in the 2016 elections—thus was born the “Russia Hoax,” an utter fabrication which even Robert Mueller with a battery of Hillary Clinton-supporting attorneys could not affirm.
Then came the Michael Avenatti affair; the Kavanaugh caper; Michael Cohen and his “revelations”; accusations aired on both MSNBC and CNN that the president was “mentally unfit” and should be removed (replete with titled psychologists speculating on his mental state); and now the present charade. And the progressivists have now “produced” perjured witness Lev Parnas. No doubt, this succession of revelations and accusations will continue on until November…and probably afterwards if Trump is re-elected.
Of course, the more unleashed of those “woke” progressivists have descended into vicious character assassination, fraudulent “news” creation, censorship and harassment of those with opposing views (especially on college campuses), and physical violence and threats against anyone who would dare dissent from their narrative.  It is a campaign of intimidation and shaming, insults and defamation abetted by the zealous friends of Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler in most of the media, aimed at silencing our voices.
Tragically, fifty plus years of media indoctrination, ideological educational abuse, and the collaboration, active or implicit, of the dominant Neoconservatives—the supposed opposition to what has happened and is happening to our society—have had results. The explicit rebellion against what is natural—against the laws of nature—against what is and has always been considered “normal,” has had its deleterious effects.  As late as 1972 a large majority of American voters would have rejected out of hand, scornfully and with disdain, Adam Schiff’s foul and inane rhetoric, indeed, laughed him off his decorous stage.
Not so in 2020. And that says a lot about the country we inhabit today, about our academic establishments, our media and entertainment, and our politics. And most infuriatingly about those so-called Neocon “defenders” of our culture and our way of life. Where have they been as our colleges and schools were infiltrated progressively by Marxist revolutionaries? Where have they been, what have they done, to thwart the infiltration of our entertainment industry, or the domination of political correctness in everything from our speech to what we are supposed to think?
A few conservative pundits—given the idiocy and ridiculousness of the Impeachment “insaniacs”—believe the president will win a landslide come November. If we were dealing with “normal” people and not a nation filled with “insaniacs,” I would concur. It might happen. But consider: those insaniacs have had fifty-plus years to put their template in place and to establish their narrative as dominant.
Thus, the extreme necessity that those not touched by this madness act forcefully and resolutely, starting with the ballot box and by extreme vigilance regarding voting and who has the right to vote (already a recent report declares that two of North Carolina’s most liberal counties have more registered voters than voting aged citizens). The elections this November will be perhaps the most important in our history. “Normals” may still outnumber the insaniacs, but this year may see the last real opportunity to deter the contagion.
Or, to quote Monty Python once again:  “There are a great many people in the country today, who through no fault of their own, are sane.”

Boyd Cathey writes a regular column, MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey.

Copyright © Boyd D. Cathey

Saturday, January 25, 2020

January 25, 2020

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

The Impeachment Charade and Monty Python

Friends,
Most of us…at least most of us of a certain age…will remember Monty Python and their series of televised sketches and then films (e.g., Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 1975; Life of Brian, 1979; The Meaning of Life, 1983). I will admit that when they were in vogue their brand of surreal, over-the-top comedy, did not for the most part attract me. My preferences were for, say, a Peter Sellers/Inspector Clouseau movie, or, even better, some good ole’ bare-bones humor, the type you could find on that classic and long-running “country” television series, Hee Haw (e.g., Archie Campbell, Junior Sample, Roy Clark) or maybe the Carol Burnett Show (or its spin-off, Mama’s Family), and earlier with Abbott & Costello or Laurel & Hardy: true classics of the genre.

But watching snippets—that is all I could stomach without retching—of Representatives Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler lecturing the United States Senate this past week, reminded me of Monty Python at its most mad… incredibly ridiculous, almost insanely wild…but at the same time, severely and eerily serious. Serious, in the sense that those House impeachment managers take themselves so very one-dimensionally, so solemnly. They do not or cannot see or understand what others see and understand about them and their supposed “case against the president.”

For them even a funny jibe or joke proffered by Donald Trump at a public rally before tens of thousands of people (e.g., “Russia, if you hear me, can you help us find the thousands of emails that Hillary Clinton ‘lost’,” or, “I could walk down 5th Avenue and shoot somebody, and I’d still have support”) is terribly ominous. The resemblance to Monty Python comes specifically because they take such eminently silly, throwaway lines meant to be funny, and hold them up in the utmost seriousness and solemnity, in what are monumental deliberations about the very future of the American nation.

I sat in front of my television set, with a bored cocker spaniel beside me, and imagined Schiff intoning: “if it floats, it must be a witch,” or some such line from Monty Python and the Search for Holy Grail.

CNN and MSNBC literally oozed with praise and encomia for Schiff’s “incredibly brilliant” and “boffo” “performance.” 

Was this real? Were these men and ladies people that citizens of our country actually elected to be our representatives? Were we that stupid, were we that mesmerized by insanity? Here was Adam Schiff telling us all that “the Russians are getting ready to invade America,” that if we don’t defend poor little Ukraine, well, then not only is our “democracy” down the tubes, but we will have lost the “new” war with those vile and vicious Russkies! Oh, my! It all sent shivers down my spine, and I clasped my defenseless spaniel close to me: need I prepare for bloodthirsty Cossacks at my door? Would my little community out here in rural eastern Wake County resist those sword-wielding hordes when they came, as Schiff predicted if Donald Trump is not impeached?

But that stalwart champion of madness from Burbank, California, then added: elections are not the answer. You see, you can’t trust’em. Any election where a Donald Trump is elected is bound to be bogus and—the word he and others like him use—“illegitimate.” Ah, now we know! Schiff’s understanding of that much-abused term “democracy” has room for only his desired ballot box result. For him and the vast masses of “woke” progressivists, Millennials, Black-Lives-Matter types, Hollywood flakes, Never- and anti-Trumpers, and indoctrinated, brain dead Zombiefied students churned out by our education establishments each year—for these folks 2016 was illegitimate, somehow a “rigged” election. The lumpen proletariat—we deplorables—did not follow orders, did not listen to our “betters,” rejected the instructions of those who fancy themselves the managerial and administrative class enthroned by God (whom they mostly don’t believe exists). We did not follow their implicit directions.

And since President Trump’s inauguration they have mused, dreamed, conspired, and feverishly worked to rid themselves of him. Nineteen minutes after the president was sworn in, the infamous “whistle-blower” Eric Ciaramela (a hold-over CIA analyst from Obama) “was overheard in the White House discussing with another staffer how to remove the newly elected president from office, according to former colleagues...."

Sources told RealClearInvestigations the staffer with whom Ciaramella was speaking was Sean Misko. Both were Obama administration holdovers working in the Trump White House on foreign policy and national security issues. And both expressed anger over Trump’s new “America First” foreign policy, a sea change from President Obama’s approach to international affairs.

Ciaramela later went to “work” for Adam Schiff and House Democrats.

The faked FISA applications enabling surveillance of the Trump campaign, the rogue FBI attempts to entrap low level Trump staffers, the spate of manufactured indictments, the totally unsupported charges of Russian interference in the 2016 elections—thus was born the “Russia Hoax,” an utter fabrication which even Robert Mueller with a battery of Hillary Clinton-supporting attorneys could not affirm.

Then came the Michael Avenatti affair; the Kavanaugh caper; Michael Cohen and his “revelations”; accusations aired on both MSNBC and CNN that the president was “mentally unfit” and should be removed (replete with titled psychologists speculating on his mental state); and now the present charade. And the progressivists have now “produced” perjured witness Lev Parnas. No doubt, this succession of revelations and accusations will continue on until November…and probably afterwards if Trump is re-elected.

Of course, the more unleashed of those “woke” progressivists have descended into vicious character assassination, fraudulent “news” creation, censorship and harassment of those with opposing views (especially on college campuses), and physical violence and threats against anyone who would dare dissent from their narrative.  It is a campaign of intimidation and shaming, insults and defamation abetted by the zealous friends of Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler in most of the media, aimed at silencing our voices.

Tragically, fifty plus years of media indoctrination, ideological educational abuse, and the collaboration, active or implicit, of the dominant Neoconservatives—the supposed opposition to what has happened and is happening to our society—have had results. The explicit rebellion against what is natural—against the laws of nature—against what is and has always been considered “normal,” has had its deleterious effects.  As late as 1972 a large majority of American voters would have rejected out of hand, scornfully and with disdain, Adam Schiff’s foul and inane rhetoric, indeed, laughed him off his decorous stage. 

Not so in 2020. And that says a lot about the country we inhabit today, about our academic establishments, our media and entertainment, and our politics. And most infuriatingly about those so-called Neocon “defenders” of our culture and our way of life. Where have they been as our colleges and schools were infiltrated progressively by Marxist revolutionaries? Where have they been, what have they done, to thwart the infiltration of our entertainment industry, or the domination of political correctness in everything from our speech to what we are supposed to think?

A few conservative pundits—given the idiocy and ridiculousness of the Impeachment “insaniacs”—believe the president will win a landslide come November. If we were dealing with “normal” people and not a nation filled with “insaniacs,” I would concur. It might happen. But consider: those insaniacs have had fifty-plus years to put their template in place and to establish their narrative as dominant.

Thus, the extreme necessity that those not touched by this madness act forcefully and resolutely, starting with the ballot box and by extreme vigilance regarding voting and who has the right to vote (already a recent report declares that two of North Carolina’s most liberal counties have more registered voters than voting aged citizens). The elections this November will be perhaps the most important in our history. “Normals” may still outnumber the insaniacs, but this year may see the last real opportunity to deter the contagion.


Or, to quote Monty Python once again:  "There are a great many people in the country today, who through no fault of their own, are sane."

Wednesday, January 22, 2020

January 22, 2020

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

Passing Along Recently Published Articles:
 At Reckonin.com and Identity Dixie

Friends,
Today I pass along two recent essays, both edited slightly, which have appeared at two online venues (one of the two essays is published on two sites). Both appeared earlier on my blog site.

The first is “As Year 2020 Begins, Southerners Take Stock,” which first appeared on January 13, and is now published at Reckonin.com. It has been very lightly edited:
------------------------

As 2020 Begins, Southerners Take Stock

By Boyd D. Cathey   January 13, 2020


------------------------------
The second essay to find other venues is: “Normals v. Insaniacs,” originally put on my blog on January 18, and now slightly edited, available online at two venues: Reckonin.com and Identity Dixie. The access information for these sites is:

“NORMALS” VS. INSANIACS: THE STRUGGLE FOR OUR COUNTRY INTENSIFIES


By Dr. Boyd D. Cathey  January 19, 2020 

----------------------------
And:


By Boyd D. Cathey     1/20/2020
-----------------------------------------

Thank you for reading! More to come.

Monday, January 20, 2020

January 20, 2020

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

Martin Luther King Day and the End of America

Friends,
Today, Monday, January 20, 2020, is an official Federal holiday, MLK Day. And, as I promised last year (January 21, 2019) I am re-issuing a longish research essay I originally published in THE UNZ REVIEW on January 16, 2018. It was intended as a strong cautionary note on the ongoing and mindless canonization of Martin Luther King Jr. (whose actual birth date is January 15), and whose symbolic, political and cultural uses in completing the revolutionary transformation and destruction of the United States cannot be overstated. From the far frenzied Left to the dominant “conservative movement inc.”, King is now the salutary, untouchable, indeed, indisputably holy and magical American talisman—an Icon—whose legacy cannot and must not be questioned. To do so, of course, means you are by definition a “racist,” a “bigot,” probably a “fascist,” as well. And from the usual Progressivist voices to almost the entirety of the pundits on FOX (can you find an exception?) and in the Establishment conservative media, King is the newest Founding Father who confirms the imposed narrative that “America was founded on the ‘proposition’ of Equality.” The problem, however, is that this historical template is false, undone by a serious and thorough examination of history and the documentation available. But it is used by both the Progressivists AND the elitist Movement (Neo)Conservative advocates—whose philosophies emit from the same essential foundations, only differing in variations of application—to advance an agenda that in the end heads irreversibly Left…and the destruction of our Western civilization.

I will continue to run this piece each MLK Day as a reminder and challenge to think again, more critically and historically, about what this day actually means and continues to become.
-------------------------
Martin Luther King Day and the Perversion of American History
BOYD D. CATHEY • JANUARY 16, 2018
For the past thirty-five years (officially since 1986) the third Monday in January has been celebrated as a federal holiday, Martin Luther King Day. Federal and state offices and many businesses either close or go on limited schedules. We are awash with public observances, parades, prayer breakfasts, stepped-up school projects for our unwary and intellectually-abused children, and gobs and gobs of over-the-top television “specials” and movies, all geared to tell us—to shout it in our faces, if we don’t pay strict attention—that King was some sort of superhuman, semi-divine civil rights leader who brought the promise of equality to millions of Americans, a kind of modern St. John the Baptist ushering in the Millenium. And that he stands just below Jesus Christ in the pantheon of revered and adored historical personages…and in some ways, perhaps above Jesus Christ in the minds of many of his present-day devotees and epigones.

It seems to do no good to issue a demurrer to this veritable religious “cult of Dr. King.” There are, indeed, numerous “Christian” churches that now “celebrate” this day just as if it were a major feast in the Christian calendar. In short, Martin Luther King has received de facto canonization religiously and in the public mind as no other person in American history.

Mention the fact that King may have plagiarized as much as 40 % of his Boston University Ph.D. dissertation [cf. Theodore Pappas, Plagiarism and the Culture War: The Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr, and Other Prominent Americans, 1998 and Martin Luther King Jr Plagiarism Story, 1994], or that he worked closely with known Communists throughout his life, or that he advocated American defeat in Vietnam while praising Ho Chi Minh, or that he implicitly countenanced violence and Marxism, especially later in his life [cf., Congressional Record, 129, no. 130 (October 3, 1983): S13452-S13461]—mention any of these accusations confirmed begrudgingly by his establishment biographers David Garrow and Taylor Branch, or mention his even-by-current-standards violent “rough sex” escapades which apparently involved even under-agers (cf., Cooper Sterling, VDare.com, January 13, 2018) and you immediately get labeled a “racist” and condemned by not just the zealous King flame-keepers on the Left, but by such “racially acceptable” Neoconservatives like James Kirchick and Dinesh D’Souza who supposedly are on the Right.

Indeed, in some ways Establishment “conservatives” such as Jonah Goldberg, Rich Lowry (National Review), D’Souza, Glenn Beck, the talking heads on Fox and the furious scribblers at The Weekly Standard, and many others, not only eagerly buy into this narrative, they now have converted King into a full-fledged, card-carrying member of “Conservatism Inc.”—the (contemporary) “conservative movement,” a “plaster saint” iconized as literally no one else in our history.

Celebrating King becomes a means for these ersatz conservatives to demonstrate their “civil rights” and “egalitarian” bona fides. The Neocons, with their philosophical and ideological origins over on the Trotskyite Left of the 1930s and 1940s, when they made their pilgrimage towards conservatism in the 1960s and 1970s brought with them a fervent believe in a globalist New World Order egalitarianism that characterized Trotskyite Marxist ideology, and the determination to redefine and re-orient the traditional American Rightwing, and to re-write, as well, American history.

Thus, the purges of the old conservative movement in the 1980s and 1990s—there was no room for Southern conservatives like Mel Bradford, no room for traditionalist Catholics like Frederick Wilhelmsen or Brent Bozell Sr., no room for paleo-libertarians like Murray Rothbard, no room for Old Right anti-egalitarians like Paul Gottfried, and no room for “America Firsters” like Pat Buchanan…And those traditional conservatives who were too significant in the “pantheon of greats,” like a Russell Kirk, they attempted to simply whitewash and give them new, cleaned up images and identities (part and parcel of their “rewriting” of conservatism). Thus, Kirk’s opposition to the civil rights bills of the 1960s and 1970s, his staunch arguments against egalitarianism, his willingness to debate cognitive disparities between the races (publishing, for example, reviews of Dr. Audrey M. Shuey’s study, The Testing of Negro Intelligence, in his publication, The University Bookman—I know, as I was there in Mecosta when it happened) are all swept under the carpet or carefully ignored.

In this, in fact, the dominant Neocons have joined with their cousins on the “farther Left,” to the point that Bush consultant guru and Fox pundit, Karl Rove, could boast that hardcore Marxist/Communist historian Eric Foner (who lamented the collapse of Soviet Communism) was his favorite historian (when examining Reconstruction) (See Dr. Paul Gottfried’s incisive critique of Foner and those “conservatives” who have praised him, “Guilt Trip,” The American Conservative,” May 4, 2009, pp. 21-23).

King Day has become, then, for the Conservative Movement an opportunity for it to beat its chest, brag about its commitment to civil rights and the American “dream”, the unrealized idea of equality (that is, to distort and re-write the history of the American Founding), and to protect its left flank against the ever increasing charges that it could be, just might be, maybe is—“racist.”

And for the “farther Left,” that catapulting cultural Marxist juggernaut that continues to move the societal and political goalposts to the Left, King Day becomes as a major ideological blitzkrieg, a weaponized cudgel used to strike down and silence anyone, anywhere, who might offer the slightest dissent to the latest barbarity and latest “advance” in civil rights, now expanded to include not just everything “racial,” but also same sex marriage, transgenderism and abortion on demand. Martin Luther King–that deeply and irredeemably flawed and fraudulent figure imposed upon us and our consciousness—has become an icon, a totem, who serves in martyred death the purposes of continuing Revolution.

The heavily-documented literature detailing the real Martin Luther King is abundant and remains uncontroverted and basically uncontested. During the debates over establishing a national “King Day” in the mid-1980s, Senators Jesse Helms and John East (both North Carolinians) led the opposition, supplying the Congress and the nation, and anyone with eyes to read, full accounts of the “King legacy,” from his close association and collaboration with the Communist Party USA to his advocacy of violence and support for the Communists in North Vietnam, to implicit support for Marxist revolution domestically. Ironically, it was Robert Woodson, a noted black Republican, who highlighted in a lecture given to honor the “conservative virtues” of King at the Heritage Foundation on November 5, 1993, the difficulties in getting black advocates of the older generation to respect King’s role as a Civil Rights leader. According to Woodson, as quoted in an excellent essay by Paul Gottfried,

“when Dr. King tried to bring the Civil Rights movement together with the [Marxist] peace movement, it was Carl Rowan who characterized King as a Communist, not Ronald Reagan. I remember being on the dais of the NAACP banquet in Darby, Pennsylvania when Roy Wilkins soundly castigated King for this position.” [Paul Gottfried, “The Cult of St. Martin Luther King – A Loyalty Test for Careerist Conservatives?” January 16, 2012]

But not only that, behind the scenes there were voluminous secretly-made FBI recordings and accounts of King’s violent sexual escapades, often times with more than two or three others involved in such “rough sex” trysts; and of his near total hypocrisy when discussing civil rights and other prominent civil rights leaders. It is, to put it mildly, a sorry record, scandalous even by today’s standards…Indeed, King makes Harvey Weinstein look like a meek choirboy in comparison.

But you won’t hear any of that mentioned by the falling-all-over-itself Mainstream Media or the media mavens on Fox. In fact, such comments will get you exiled to the far reaches of the Gobi Desert and labeled a “racist,” quicker that my cocker spaniel gobbles down his kibble.

Rather than rehash and restate all the various accusations, backed up with substantial and overwhelming documentation, let me offer something of an annotated bibliography and history of MLK Day. Almost all the material is now available and accessible online, including material from the Congressional Record.

First, essential to understanding the background of just how we got King Day, the late Dr. Samuel Francis’s account is critical. Originally written to preface the publication of voluminous testimony and documentation placed in the Congressional Record by Senator Helms, Francis’s essay and the Helms’ dossier were eventually published in book form (I have a published copy, but I’m unsure if you can still find it on Amazon). A few years back Dr. Francis’s introduction and his detailed background essay and the lengthy Congressional Record material (which he prepared for Helms) were put online. For a complete understanding of King’s association and cooperation with American Communists and his endorsement of Vietnamese Communism, as well as his putative endorsement of Marxism here in the United States while condemning the free enterprise system, these two items are essential reading:

Dr. Samuel Francis, “The King Holiday and Its Meaning,” February 26, 2015.


To fully understand the serious plagiarism charges leveled against King and the academic and politically-correct skullduggery that surrounded Boston University’s decision not to rescind his doctoral degree, Theodore Pappas’s two detailed studies, cited above, offer fascinating and scandalously revealing details. But other writers, also, upon cursory examination, have found numerous other instances of his plagiarism.

Remember the “I Have a Dream” speech? Well, as Jim Goad wrote in Takimag back in 2012:

“…the immortalized in MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech in the part where he beseeches God…to “Let freedom ring from the Stone Mountain of Georgia.” King stole that passage about Stone Mountain from a 1952 oratory delivered by another black preacher at the Republican National Convention. He also allegedly plagiarized parts of the first public sermon he ever delivered back in 1947.” [Jim Goad, “I’m So Bored with MLK,” Takimag, January 16, 2012]

But, say the Neocon scribblers at National Review and the pundits on Fox, wasn’t King really a conservative at heart, an old-fashioned black Baptist who believed in the tenets of traditional Christianity? Shouldn’t we simply overlook these all-too-human foibles?

To answer that Dr. Jack Kerwick penned an essay several years ago that addresses these futile attempts to sanitize and “conservatize” King on the part of “conservatism inc.,” in its efforts to shore up its leftward flank and, through sanctifying him, to defend the template of egalitarianism as central to the American Founding.

I take the liberty of quoting Kerwick at length:

“In honor of African-American History month, let’s take a quiz. In each of the following statements, a famous African-American is quoted. Identify that person among these answer choices: (a) Jesse Jackson; (b) Jeremiah Wright; (c) Al Sharpton; (d) Louis Farrakhan; (e)Barack Hussein Obama; and (f) Martin Luther King, Jr.
(1)George Washington was undoubtedly valorous. “But to the end of his days he maintained a posture of exclusionism toward the slave,” and he “was a fourth-generation slaveholder.” Washington “only allowed” blacks “to enter the Continental Army because His Majesty’s Crown was attempting to recruit” blacks “to the British Cause.”
(2)The black American is “the child of two cultures—Africa and America. The problem is that in the search for wholeness all too many” blacks “seek to embrace only one side of their natures.” Blacks in America are “Afro-American [.]”
(3) “Colonialism could not have been perpetuated if the Christian Church had really taken a stand against it.” For example, “the vicious system of apartheid in South Africa” had among “its chief defenders…the Dutch Reformed Protestant Church.”
(4) “If the Church does not participate actively in the struggle for peace and for economic and racial justice” future generations will look back upon it as “one of the greatest bulwarks of white supremacy.”
(5) President Lyndon Baines Johnson had a “comprehensive grasp” of the problems of poverty and civil rights that he faced. He had “sincerity,” “realism,” and “wisdom” in how he approached them.
(6) Blacks, like everyone else, have “a right to expect the resources of the American trade union movement to be used in assuring” them “of a proper place in American society.” Young blacks especially “need to think of union careers as earnestly as they do of business careers and professions.”
(7) America maintains “a continued alliance…with racism and exploitation throughout the world.”
(8) Both Marxism and “traditional capitalism” are partially true and partially false. The former may fail to “see the truth in individual enterprise,” but the latter fails to “see the truth in collective enterprise.”
(9) Communism was “a judgment on” the “failure” of “Western nations…to make democracy real and to follow through on the revolutions that we initiated.”
(10) The “potential explosiveness of our world situation is much more attributable [than anything else] to disillusionment with promises of Christianity and technology.”
(11) America “is still behind European nations in all forms of social legislation.”
(12) “Our children are still taught to respect the violence which reduced a red-skinned people [the American Indian] of an earlier culture into a few fragmented groups herded into impoverished reservations.”
(13) “The misery of the poor in Africa and Asia” is the “result of years of [Western] exploitation and underdevelopment.”
(14) “We in the West must bear in mind that the poor countries are poor primarily because we have exploited them through political or economic colonialism. Americans in particular must help their nation repent of her modern economic imperialism.”
(15) If there is to be “peace on earth,” people’s “loyalties must transcend” not only “race,” “tribe,” and “class,” but “nation.” This “means [that] we must develop a world perspective.”
(16) “There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we now have the resources to get rid of it.” What this implies is that the time is now “for an all-out world war against poverty. The rich nations must use their vast resources of wealth to develop the underdeveloped, school the unschooled, and feed the unfed.”
(17) The United Nations is to be applauded, for it is the product of “the fear of war.”
(18) Since “the destructive power of modern weapons eliminates even the possibility that war may serve as a negative good,” those “who sincerely feel that disarmament is an evil and international negotiation is an abominable waste of time” are sorely mistaken.
(19) “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
(20) America “must not only radically readjust its attitude toward” blacks; it “must incorporate in its planning some compensatory compensation [“Affirmative Action”] from the handicaps [blacks] inherited from the past.”
(21) What’s necessary for combating poverty is “a broad-based and gigantic Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged, our veterans of the long siege of denial.”
(22) Because America was “born in genocide,” “racial hatred,” and “racial supremacy,” nothing less than “a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values” is demanded. After all, “a nation that put as many Japanese in a concentration camp as” America did during World War II will think nothing of putting “black people in a concentration camp” as well.
(23) America needs a “revolution of values”—i.e. “socialism.”
(24) The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were “at best surface changes.” Only a “redistribution of economic power” could rectify the injustices inherent in “the system” of “capitalism.”
(25) The Vietnam War was “senseless,” “unjust,” and “racist [.]” In truth, it is America that is “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today [.]”
*Bonus Question: Which of the foregoing famous African-Americans said this about Ronald Reagan?
“That a one-time “Hollywood performer” who lacked “distinction even as an actor” could “become a leading war hawk candidate for the presidency” had to have been due to a most “melancholy turn of events [.]” In fact, “only the irrationalities induced by a war psychosis” could explain it.
If you selected “(f),” Martin Luther King, Jr., as your answer to ALL these questions, then you achieved a perfect score! That’s right: Though some word tenses were changed so as not to date the quotation in question and give away the answer, the hard truth of the matter is that, contrary to what contemporary “conservative” commentators [in the GOP and on Fox News] would have you believe, King was obviously about as much of a conservative, to say nothing of a “Reagan conservative,” as any of the other famous black Americans mentioned at the beginning of this article. His statements, in fact, reveal a man of the hard left, and certainly to the left of Barack Obama. “The truth,” as Friedrich Nietzsche so simply, yet powerfully, put it, “is hard.” [Dr. Jack Kerwick, February 2015]

Finally, I should also mention Peter Brimelow’s superb essay that offers additional insight on the King Day holiday and which summarizes much of the information, ideological uses, and controversy surrounding the day. It was originally published in 2015, but he has republished it each year to coincide with this annual national paroxysm: “ ‘Time To Rethink Martin Luther King Day’–The 2017 Edition.”

I can think of no better summation of the real meaning of King Day and its bare-knuckled ideological use to deconstruct, dissolve and obliterate American traditions and heritage than to cite, again, Sam Francis:

“[T]he true meaning of the holiday is that it serves to legitimize the radical social and political agenda that King himself favored and to delegitimize traditional American social and cultural institutions—not simply those that supported racial segregation but also those that support a free market economy, an anti-communist foreign policy, and a constitutional system that restrains the power of the state rather than one that centralizes and expands power for the reconstruction of society and the redistribution of wealth. In this sense, the campaign to enact the legal public holiday in honor of Martin Luther King was a small first step on the long march to revolution, a charter by which that revolution is justified as the true and ultimate meaning of the American identity. In this sense, and also in King’s own sense, as he defined it in his speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, the Declaration of Independence becomes a “promissory note” by which the state is authorized to pursue social and economic egalitarianism as its mission, and all institutions and values that fail to reflect the dominance of equality—racial, cultural, national, economic, political, and social—must be overcome and discarded.
“By placing King—and therefore his own radical ideology of social transformation and reconstruction—into the central pantheon of American history, the King holiday provides a green light by which the revolutionary process of transformation and reconstruction can charge full speed ahead. Moreover, by placing King at the center of the American national pantheon, the holiday also serves to undermine any argument against the revolutionary political agenda that it has come to symbolize. Having promoted or accepted the symbol of the new dogma as a defining—perhaps the defining—icon of the American political order, those who oppose the revolutionary agenda the symbol represents have little ground to resist that agenda.” [January 16, 2006]

I will not be celebrating this day; rather, it is for me a mournful reminder of what has happened and is happening to this country.


Dr. Boyd D. Cathey is the retired State Registrar of the North Carolina Division of Archives and History. He holds an MA degree in American history from the University of Virginia (where he was a Thomas Jefferson Fellow) and a PhD degree in history and political theory from the Catholic University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain (where he was a Richard M. Weaver Fellow). In 1971-1972 he served as assistant to the late Dr. Russell Kirk. He has taught university level courses in Argentina and in the United States, and has published works in French, Spanish and Italian. His volume on Southern history, The Land We Love: The South and Its Heritage, was published in late 2018 by The Scuppernong Press.

                                    February 11, 2024     MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey Descent into Madness: Dostoevsky and the End of...