November 24, 2023

 

 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

 

The Sulphurous Attraction of Nikki Haley Leads Back to Big Brother and the Globalists

Friends,

Leading MAGA pundit and former Donald Trump administration official Steve Bannon calls them “the Keebler Elves.”  I prefer the term “Munchkins,” or maybe “the Five Dwarfs”—No, it’s now just four dwarfs with Tim Scott bowing out: they are the Republican candidates participating in the charade, AKA “the GOP debates,” and desperately hoping—grasping—striving to displace Donald Trump as the frontrunner to oppose brain-dead Joe Biden in the 2024 election.

The Never Trumpers, the Establishment “conservative” think tanks and their journals and groupies, many among the Republican congressional leadership and office holders, have, for the past year, frantically beat the drums for someone—anyone—who could credibly challenge Trump, someone with the bona fides and a glossy resume, someone who could rein in rising MAGA populist traditionalism which threatens the once thought unassailable perch of the Managerial globalists.

At first, spearheaded by the powerful Murdoch media outlets, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and Fox News, the buzz among them was centered on Ron DeSantis. DeSantis would be the “giant killer.” DeSantis, it was argued, could enunciate the major popular Trumpian themes, even at times apparently go around to the Donald’s right, but without the verbal and personality “baggage” (according to them). And even more importantly, although he could sound a lot like a church deacon version of Trump, the Florida governor would not in reality threaten the essential control by the elites, at least not like Trump would.

But somewhere along the trail to Neverland, DeSantis fell flat, in no way denting President Trump’s unsurmountable lead in the polls. And the elite makers and shakers began to cast about looking for a new giant killer.

And their increasingly desperate gaze settled upon none other than the former governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, nee’ Nimarata Nikki Randhawa, perhaps the most ambitious and the most flagrant political chameleon the American nation has extruded in many a year.  

Once considered a potential running mate for GOP standard bearer Mitt Romney and a determined opponent of Donald Trump, Haley then sidled up to him after his election to secure appointment as US Ambassador to the United Nation. Prior to the June 2015 Dylann Roof massacre she was a self-proclaimed defender of Southern heritage (and the flag representing it) in South Carolina, but then becoming a zealous detractor, stating: "These grounds [the State Capital] are a place that everybody should feel a part of. What I realized now more than ever is people were driving by and felt hurt and pain. No one should feel pain."

The list of changes in her positions and posture are dramatic even in the context of American politics. A catalogue of Haley’s calculated swervings and apparent course alterations could fill a plump briefcase. And all blatantly supporting her extremely, overweening ambition.

Her latest maneuver is to become the anointed champion of the DC Republican elites, the ensconced GOP establishment which fears the Great Disruptor Donald Trump even more than a senile and controlled Joe Biden. She is making all the acceptable cooing noises, the appropriate stands on issues so dear to conservative and Neocon elites, those forming “Conservatism Inc.”

And the elites of “Conservatism Inc.” have noticed approvingly.

It’s no secret that Haley has plied her wares with the big corporate donors, and she has raked in huge amounts of cash from financial moguls who distrust and dislike Donald Trump’s increasing anti-corporatist rhetoric. One Trump operative suggested that Haley was a “perfect 2008 Republican,” but "180 degrees away from where the party is today" (Washington Examiner, May 9, 2023). The departure of Sen. Tim Scott from the race has opened even more fat cat pocketbooks, with one major donor adding: "[Haley] is our last best hope to defeat Donald Trump and then take back the White House."

And now (November 20, 2023) Mitt Romney's former Senior Advisor and Finance Chair Spencer Zwick has joined her 2024 campaign election fundraising. The headline in the story reads: “Nikki Haley Gaining Support From Voters, Donors: Could Landing Mitt Romney's Former Senior Advisor Help Momentum?”

Zwick declared:  "Nikki Haley has the vision, the record, and the campaign apparatus to win both the primary and general election….I'm proud to support her efforts and help her build stronger relationships with donors and business leaders around the country."

A recent report from the Financial Times also links Haley to  such backers as  BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, former Goldman Sachs President Gary Cohn, billionaire investor Stanley Durckenmiller and more who are supporting or nearing support for Haley.

Can the military-industrial complex be far behind?

In the Murdoch flagship, the Wall Street Journal (October 19, 2023), columnist Daniel Henninger, advertised this attraction to Haley. In attempting to link the war in Ukraine with the conflict in Israel, he scribbled: “The next U.S. president should be able to explain in detail the country’s national-security needs, including the trade-offs…. Ms. Haley has shown she can do that.”  

And the New York Post, fresh from a series of articles blasting Trump, signaled the shift on November 12 in a story, titled: “Nikki Haley knocks Trump’s chances of winning 2024 election: ‘Drama and chaos follow him’.” Columnist Ryan King, quoting the ex-governor, suggested that Americans are “tired” of Donald Trump, looking for new and younger leadership. Trump would lose to Biden (despite most recent polls which show him beating Biden), and, most importantly, Haley would continue, even strengthen, American support for the corrupt Ukrainian regime: “If we do this right in Ukraine and Israel, we won’t have to deal with China,” she reportedly said—which was music to the ears of our zealous globalist foreign policy elites.

But not only that, the Leftist punditry has also noticed and has chimed in glowingly as well.

You see, Haley would be for them a far better opponent, far less threatening to their control of the apparatus of governance, their growing control over the direction of this nation, not just in foreign policy, but also domestically. With her as the GOP standard bearer, either win or lose, the Managerial Deep State still wins.

That should have been apparent from just a quick survey of the Leftist media. Leftist pundit, Rex Huppke, writing in USA Today (November 5, 2023) opined that Haley is:

…the GOP’s only hope for finding a candidate not named Trump, and quite possibly the only Republican candidate with a solid chance of beating Biden. ...I would honestly be glad to see you come out on top in the primary. The reason? I don’t think Trump can get elected again, but I also cannot say with certainty he won’t get elected again. Biden is absolutely going to be vulnerable, and if that’s the case, I’d rather have someone on the Republican ticket who at least seems marginally sane, given that person could wind up running the country. Again, I don’t like you politically. But I would not fear for our democracy [sic!] if you became president….

And The Washington Post came out a couple of weeks later, suggesting that Haley would be a stronger GOP candidate in the general election: “Haley appears significantly more palatable to middle-of-the-road voters…her polling strength would at least offer some support for the idea of running a more standard-issue Republican — the kind who has routinely over-performed Trumpian candidates in recent elections.”

Repeating this major Haley campaign talking point, USA Today ran a fawning article (November 23, 2023), stating she would win over moderates, while Trump might scare them away. Haley is, they purred, “the common sense candidate.”

Finally, the “grey lady,” The New York Times, evaluating the November 8, 2023 debate among the Munchkins, declared “She Certainly Beat All the Boys”: “Crisp and confident. She refused to let her opponents’ attacks go unanswered…. Neoconservatism made its comeback tonight, and Nikki Haley led the charge.”

The round-table at Politico came to the same conclusion.

Leave it to fearless Glenn Greenwald to sum up the ongoing process we see before us:

…[that] corporate media – not exactly in step with the sentiments and priorities of Republican Party primary voters – views Haley in such a positive light should tell you most of what you need to know about her candidacy: she exists to serve establishment interests and to rescue the Republican Party from the anti-corporate, anti-militarist and anti-establishment sentiments that have driven it since the emergence of Donald Trump.

The requirement for being seen as a serious national security expert in the eyes of the corporate press is clear and obvious: you must cheer U.S. wars every time one is proposed, and certainly every time one is being fought. By that metric, there is no greater foreign policy sage in the United States than Nikki Haley, with the possible exception of Lindsey Graham. That's why the U.S. media adored John McCain so much: he cheered every U.S. war. Last night [the November 8 debate], Haley let her warmongering and neocon colors fly more proudly than ever and that's why she got such universally high marks from the GOP establishment and the corporate media that ordinarily has nothing but scorn to keep on Republican candidates. They want Nikki Haley to be the nominee for Americans to have no choice on foreign policy when they go to the polls next year to vote: two candidates, two parties that represent the warmongering neocon ideology.

One unforced error that Haley made, itself very revealing, says volumes about her imbibing the Big Brother Deep State kool aid. And certain pundits did catch it. In an appearance on friendly Fox News, in response to a question on what she labeled hate speech, she responded: “…when I get into office, the first thing we have to do — social media accounts, social media companies, they have to show America their algorithms. Let us see why they're pushing what they're pushing. The second thing is every person on social media should be verified by their name. First of all, it's a national security threat. When you do that, all of a sudden, people have to stand by what they say.”

That was too much for even some observant establishment conservative pundits, including Byron York in the Washington Examiner (November 15, 2023) who sharply criticized her, declaring: “Haley's approach would throw much of [First Amendment Constitutional] protection out the window, with the president of the United States pushing for the identification of every anonymous poster in America.”

Haley’s attempted clarification fell flat, and York speculated that maybe she actually meant what she had said, and that, indeed, her subinfeudation to the Managerial Big Brother colossus was showing. Maybe she had not spoken mistakenly, but rather what was really in her mind?

The question is, then, could Haley, running in most polling 40 points behind Donald Trump, actually catch and even surpass him, that is, without the kind of shenanigans that we know the Managerial State apparatchiks are capable of?

Not likely, you say; but…and it is a very significant “but”…the current state of American politics no longer offers the safeguards it once may have had to prevent such skullduggery. The last few elections have abundantly proved that, and the operations of the Managerial class confirm the concerted and at time seemingly inevitable lurch into totalitarianism.

The major obstacle for Haley (as it is for the hysterically-fearful Democrats, weighed down with a demented Joe Biden) is the millions of Americans who have come to recognize, even if only obliquely, that something is dreadfully, perhaps fatally, wrong…and that although an imperfect vessel for recovery, Donald Trump, far more disciplined and better organized now than in 2016 or 2020, may be their last practical hope.

Columnist and writer Mark Steyn summed up the conundrum in stark and vivid language this way (September 8, 2023):

Half the country knows the real problem is that the system no longer provides for any meaningful course correction. You can vote for an end to open borders, but you won't get it. You can vote to bring home the jobs that got shipped to China, but China owns all the politicians, all the "big guys" with the "ten per cent". You can vote against two-decade wars that end with the world's hyperpower losing to goatherds with fertiliser, but back at the Pentagon they just take a twenty-minute tea-break, throw a dart in the map, and start it all up somewhere else.

The Trump presidency was undone by Joe Biden's signing pen about ten minutes after inauguration. But that wasn't enough for the Uniparty. Like Oliver Cromwell, he has to be dug up and beheaded, over and over and over, and all his allies too….

Why pretend that's "normal" and meekly fall in line and move on to Neoconized Nikki Haley?.... [Y]ou might as well take a stand with Trump against the "normalization" of a system determined to criminalize you.

You can't have "normal" politics in a country where one side gets endlessly indicted and the other never is (notwithstanding the latest fake-o headlines about the not-so-Special Counsel promising to throw the book at Hunter on gun charges). America is dying before your eyes. Why pretend that's normal?

Nimarata Nikki Randhawa as president and a return to “normalcy?” Never!

The land my ancestors settled on these shores over three centuries ago and the heritage they left me are far more precious to me than any demonic drivel spouted by the amoral dwarf from South Carolina.

                                      October 31, 2023

 

 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

 

Standing Against the Totalitarian Horde at Home and Abroad

Friends,

A few weeks ago a close acquaintance of mine wrote an impassioned letter intended for publication in a South Carolina newspaper. Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, his letter was not printed by any media source in the state….Not because it was crude or appeared to incite violence; not because he employed foul language or insulting attacks against opponents. Indeed, the letter was well-written, well-argued, and based on widely-available facts.

But in the contemporary USA, intelligent, well-expressed presentations, even those factually based are no longer guaranteed a hearing if they come from someone who is not suitably “woke” or who does not buy into the constantly-advancing and society-altering Leftist tsunami. In fact, what we see and have experienced here in America in the last several decades has been a dedicated, largely successful effort to shut down, neutralize, or buy off any dissent from or disagreement with the actions and goals of the DC elites, the entrenched Managerial State and its engorged tentacles which now extend inexorably into the lives of nearly every American. The First Amendment be damned, if it doesn’t support those ideological aims.

Richard Hines, the author of the letter, is a long-time political player, not only in the Sandlapper State, but also on the national level. Over the years he has served in the South Carolina legislature, co-chaired a Ronald Reagan for president campaign, and was then appointed to various White House administrative posts in the Transportation Department and General Services Administration. After Reagan’s tenure, Richard formed a consulting firm to represent a diversity of clients in Washington.

But it is his role as a steadfast and outspoken defender of the old South, its history, its culture, and its symbols and monuments which has strongly characterized his subsequent years. As a fearless champion of Southern heritage he has expended tremendous energy and his own fortune in support of those ideals. He and I were both contributing editors to the old, and much-lamented, Southern Partisan Magazine. That is where we first met forty years ago, and our friendship since then has been based on our shared commitment to the traditions and culture of our native region.

Indeed, he has been bitterly attacked precisely for his positions and effective activity. In 2005 The Nation, perhaps the country’s pre-eminent far left journal, launched a vicious attack on my friend, terming him “Lobbyist for the Lost Cause,” parading its shoddy attempt at opposition research before its fanatical readers. But such assaults have not deterred him or his efforts.

Most recently Richard co-authored with Dr. Paul Gottfried in Chronicles Magazine an eloquent piece on the historic and artistically impressive Confederate monument in the Arlington National Cemetery (“The Fate of Moses Ezekiel and His Memorial to the Confederate Dead,” Chronicles, November 2022). The monument is surrounded by the graves of hundreds of Confederate veterans, buried with honor on the grounds of what once was the home of Robert E. Lee. No matter that the sculptor, Moses Ezekiel, was an internationally famed sculptor and that the monument is intended as a symbol of national reunification. The Feds, with bi-partisan support, decided that symbol of reunion and honor to the dead was a symbol of racism and “white nationalism” and had to go.

But Richard is also keenly aware that issues such as the survival of a Southern culture and heritage are inextricably bound up with the direction the American nation seems to be taking globally. Not only in the United States with its grassroots MAGA movement, but also in most European and other countries, there is a rising tide of popular opposition to this increasing control by unseen, unaccountable elites and bureaucrats, whether in the myriad of offices and agencies in Washington, DC, or in faceless buildings in Bruxelles and Geneva.

One uniting position for the various popular opposition movements is the return of power and authority to the people and, as well, to the historic regions which compose those countries—the application of the old principle of subsidiarity—that what can be done on a lower level of society should not be the responsibility of a higher level of governance. The modern state has become a Behemoth, unanswerable to the populace, incapable of being dislodged, as if an unapproachable cocoon of wealth and privilege. This “new aristocracy”—or better said, oligarchy—is far more venal, far more vicious, far less visible, and far more effective in forcing its iron will on society than any older form of aristocracy based on inheritance and family and rooted in service to the commonwealth.

Not just the various attempts to remove the leading Republican candidate for president, Donald Trump, from the ballot in several states—all in the name of “our democracy”(!)—but recent calls by members of this elite that perhaps we have too many elections, illustrate that the intentions of the ensconced Managerial Class have far more to do with a globalist “great reset” and the retention power than with their hollow paeans to “democracy.”

In the United States the enablers of this Leftist march towards totalitarian globalism are the “neoconservatives” and a coterie of Republican “insiders” who have traditionally controlled the party and dominated GOP politics out of Washington. Their blinkered internationalism and desire to impose a Pax Americana on the rest of the world fit comfortably with the zealous Leftist goal of bringing “our democracy” (by force if necessary) to the most remote desert and the furthest jungle in the world.

Richard Hines understands this. He understands that if this country shall survive we must return to the wisdom of the Fathers of our country and to the constitutional, America First principles that once made this country great: decentralization, respect for our inherited rights, non-intervention globally, and the defense of our borders and not those of some faraway land that no one can find on a map.

Here is his letter:

To the Editor:

Our neo-conservative elites [who are not really conservative at all], as epitomized by Nikki Haley and Lindsey Graham, obviously think our election every four years is for a “President of the World” instead of a Chief Magistrate of the American Republic. Lindsey’s presidential ambitions ended in complete failure and are now happily forgotten. Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, you name it – Lindsey never met a war he didn’t like. In calling for an attack on Iran last week, Nikki Haley breathlessly repeated the mantra “Finish them! Finish them!” as if the annihilation of 92 million Iranians was the final round of a boxing match.

Sadly, much of the current chaos we find ourselves in is of our own making. Clearly we have learned nothing from Afghanistan, which was an unprepared and ignorant “lunge to defeat” in the words of one diplomat. The Washington-manufactured conflict in Ukraine, which helped create our current proxy war with Russia, is much the same. We turned a blind eye to the pre-existing ethnic conflicts which were fired by fictitious borders created in the years of the Soviet Union. The result, which should have been obvious even in the 1990’s, is that millions of ethnic Russians were trapped in a country whose regime outlaws their language and their religion.

Whether you like him or not, Donald Trump told the unvarnished truth when he said he could stop that war in twenty-four hours by turning off the dollar spigot in Washington which fuels the conflict. Not only would it end the war there, but this would have a beneficial effect in the Middle East. Former intelligence officer Scott Ritter has argued persuasively that Hamas terrorists are armed in part with American weapons obtained on the black market which we originally supplied to the Ukrainians.

The leaders of our young Republic, especially George Washington and John Quincy Adams, were prophetic when they warned Americans to beware of foreign entanglements. As Secretary of State, Adams said that “America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy… She is the champion and vindicator ONLY OF HER OWN… She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom…. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force…. She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”

This statement is not a mere anachronism. Should we not return to a rational America First foreign policy, coupled by a return to Christian morality in our society, America as we have known it will certainly cease to exist.

Wise counsel, indeed.

 

 

October 13, 2023     MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey   The Passing of Zippy: Who Was He, You Ask?

When I first met Zippy he was a mature, chestnut-colored and very friendly male equine who had come to live with my neighbors. They had created an ample fenced-in, grassy pasture next to my property, plus a neat horse-shed where Zippy could both sleep or take safe refuge should the weather turn bad.

Earlier this year Zippy reached the admirable old age (for a horse) of thirty, and he had begun to show his years. But neither I nor any of my neighbors were prepared to see him leave us, for him to die. Yet, in recent weeks he had been beset by several severe conditions. Perhaps we should have suspected, perhaps we should have known.

A couple of weeks ago, the vets’ diagnosis of cancer seemed serious. But Zippy had survived earlier infections and illnesses, and somehow he had come through them okay.

But not this time; the cancer was far too advanced, the vets said. And Zippy was too old and too infirm, and in pain.

Thus it was that a couple of weeks ago my next door neighbor contacted veterinarians whose specialty is equine care and medicine. Their role was to inject Zippy with a serum which would stop his heart and end his life.

That afternoon was sunny; it was a temperate late September day. A number of neighbors, including several children who had known and loved Zippy gathered to comfort him and…say good-bye.

I had ventured over earlier in the day to say my farewells; I did not wish to be there when the vet had to put him down. Several other neighbors were there, too. I embraced his beautiful head and patted him, then planted a light kiss on his forehead. I looked into his eyes; he seemed to know that something was going on—so many human beings attending him. What indeed was happening, he must have thought.

At that time my neighbors were expecting the vets soon. But it was much later when they came, and at the very moment I opened my front door to walk my cocker spaniel Jasper after his supper, I cast a glance towards the adjoining pasture just in time to see the fatal injection and Zippy fall that one last time, his heart stilled, to the ground. It is and was a vision which remains with me as I close my eyes—it was a vision I wished to avoid, but could not.

My cocker Jasper somehow noticed it, also. You see, Jasper and Zippy had one of those special animal friendships that is unique in the animal kingdom. Ever since Zippy came to live with my neighbors, my cockers, both Robert before Jasper, and Jasper alone since 2018, have befriended him. Each morning and evening when I would walk Jasper, he would urgently pull my leash in the direction of Zippy’s corral. Then, he would scoot under the fence as Zippy galloped over excitedly, and the two would touch noses. It was one of those regular events which convinces you that God’s Creation is good and that animals do sense goodness in other creatures.

Seeing Zippy brought down by the injection I walked Jasper towards my neighbor’s fence. Jasper was whining as we went and pulling hard on his leash. I think he knew something was amiss.

One of my neighbors had dug a grave for Zippy in his familiar pasture, where his human companions plan to plant flowers and perhaps erect some type of memorial. That afternoon I couldn’t stop Jasper’s whining; he desperately wanted to approach the body of his dead friend, but I would not let him get that close.

Every morning since then, when I first take Jasper out for his accustomed jaunt, he heads directly for that pasture. Now, there is a small mound of freshly-turned dirt over the plot where Zippy is buried, but that doesn’t seem to deter Jasper. It’s as if he is looking for his friend in the last place where he saw him. And he accompanies his search usually with a muted whine: “Where is my friend? What has happened to him?”

I will admit that witnessing Jasper’s response has only heightened my own sadness. Zippy was part of my little rural neighborhood and had become a dear friend of my cocker spaniel. Certainly, horses usually only live between twenty-five and thirty years. And Zippy had lived a good, long life, appreciated and loved by us humans, as well as by at least one canine denizen.

Many years ago, when I was in my teens, my sister begged my parents for a horse. It seemed back then that many children desired horses as pets. After all we were raised when equine companions were prominent both in film and on television. I still remember Trigger (Roy Rogers’ stallion) and Champion (the graceful stead of Gene Autry), and who can forget “My Friend Flicka” or Silver, the extremely intelligent solid-white beauty who accompanied the “Lone Ranger” everywhere?

Those horses were almost human, or so it seemed to us. They knew what we were thinking and were always there if the human hero needed assistance that only his trusted mount might offer.

So, my father acquired a handsome pinto, named Patches. Like my neighbor, Dad built a small horse shed for him. And I can remember that one thing Patches would do is let one of our small cocker spaniels ride on his back (well, maybe with a little help from one of us children!). My sister has photographs, all taken about sixty years ago, which capture those memories.

As I bade farewell to Zippy and observed Jasper’s own special reaction, those thoughts of long-ago came back to me as in a reverie.

Back in 2019 I conducted a round-table discussion with two well-versed academics from England, and one from the United States (plus myself), on what happens to animals after death. It was a topic addressed by writer Dr. John Warwick Montgomery thirty years ago in 1993, and published in the New Oxford Review as “Fido in Heaven?” Our more recent symposium, titled “Do Dogs Go to Heaven?,” was later aired in the New English Review in April 2020. After ample back-and-forth and various objections addressed, we came to the conclusion that animal souls as they are not human do not enjoy the Beatific Vision promised to those who die in God’s graces. But as they are His creatures and are called by Him “good,” and they act according to their created natures (and are incapable of sin), that neither do their animal souls disappear into nothingness. Rather, even not experiencing the blindingly joyous vision of Beatitude, yet their animal souls are somehow present on some level glorifying the God who created them and surrounding the human companions for whom they provided such delight and comfort when on earth.

I like to think that is Zippy’s happy fate, just as it is for the several cocker spaniels who have allowed me to keep them company during their short lives and who have provided immeasurable and invaluable comfort, devotion and love to me over the years. They are and were, as I call them, God’s barking angels, just as Zippy was that elegant and handsome equine companion for my neighbors.

We shall, I believe, feel their presence once again.

(The photograph above is of Zippy in happier days)

                               September 27, 2023

 

 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

 

Armageddon or Separation? 

Chronicles Magazine Offers a Symposium on the Future of America

Friends,

Increasingly it has become evident that the American nation, founded with such high hopes and aspirations in 1787, is expiring, dying a prolonged, painful but also virulently infectious death.

Those words are very difficult to write, especially for someone whose American ancestry goes back to Virginia in 1646, and whose ancestors helped settle other Southern states, who served honorably in both state and local elected offices, and who fought in every major war in which my state North Carolina and this country have been involved, including for the Confederacy in 1861-1865. Indeed, I think it quite conceivable that had the Confederacy been victorious in its efforts at peaceful separation in 1861, much of the later calamities and putrefaction which afflict this country might have been avoided.

Admittedly, such a statement is counterfactual. I recall at the beginning of the “Civil War Centennial” in 1960 that author MacKinlay Kantor authored a serialized work, “If the South Had Won the Civil War,” chronicling a “what if” history of America after a Southern victory in that war for Southern independence. Kantor’s scenario first appeared in instalments in Look Magazine, and then in book form in 1961. And there have been others since then.

But it has been largely in the past decade that such alternative histories seem no longer in the realm of fantasy, but actual precursors of events that could very well occur here in the USA.

Over the past five years I have written seven essays suggesting some form of national separation of the American states, perhaps even within states, that might well be the most peaceful, least violent way to alleviate the increasingly unbridgeable, implacable, and vicious divisions tearing this nation apart. Just a cursory read of the “establishment” Leftist press (e.g. The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Salon, etc.) should convince anyone of this—anyone, that is, whose mind has not been thoroughly possessed by the demonic “woke” infection that can only be described as satanic.

The great Russian novelist, Feodor Dostoevsky, 250 years ago (in The Possessed, 1872), understood clairvoyantly both the foul and evil character of such poison, as well as the truly theological nature of such spiritual inversion. In a very real sense, he foresaw the coming not just of the Russian Revolution but also of the successive waves of what is essentially a continuing revolt against God and His Creation. (See my essay, “The Devils in the Demonstrators,” in the November 2022 issue of Chronicles magazine.)

My little essays include: “Is Secession the Answer?” at the Abbeville Institute; “Is It Time for America to Break Apart,” at The Unz Review, the Abbeville Institute, and The American Freedom Union; “Is Political Separation in Our Future?” at the Abbeville Institute; “The Future of the American Republic—How Do We Survive?” at LewRockwell.com; “The End of America? Hope Amidst the Ruins,” at The Unz Review and Reckonin.com; “National Unity is A Mirage,” at the Abbeville Institute and The Unz Review; and “The Oncoming Second American Civil War,” at LewRockwell.com and The Unz Review.

Now, in a major contribution to this much-needed discussion, Chronicles Magazine, the paramount journalistic voice for traditional conservatism in America, certainly in print form, offers a critical symposium in its October 2023 issue, titled, “The Future of the American Union.”

Featured authors include: Michael Rectenwald (“The Two Nations”), William Lind (“When the Center Does Not Hold”), and  David Azerrad (“Against the Black Pill”)—and most notably, Editor-in-Chief Paul Gottfried, whose detailed contribution, “The Future of the American Resistance,” frames the October issue.

I have written about Chronicles in the past, essentially praising its critical role in any future restoration (or recreation) of the old American republic, or, perhaps better, American republics, plural. Like any national publication with a variety of writers, there will occasionally be a piece with which I disagree; but overwhelmingly the magazine offers critical essays, reviews, and columns which should be required reading for anyone concerned by the Leftist venom which now seems destined to finally murder the Framers’ dream, imprison dissenters, destroy the nuclear family, pervert our children, and engage us in never-ending global war for unobtainable peace to establish some dystopian world “reset” worse than anything George Orwell envisaged in his classic novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

What is our future? What would happen if, indeed, somehow Donald Trump would manage to get past all the voter manipulation and outright dishonesty and win the 2024 election? Would there not be extreme violence, even rebellion in Blue States and in major cities? Would not states like California push harder for secession or separation?

Or, let’s suppose that the hysterical Leftist manipulators, the Deep State and their loathsome conservative/GOP collaborators, manage once again to pervert election laws and voter totals, and insure the re-election of the brain-dead puppet Joe Biden. Would those who witnessed this remain idle and simply let it happen—again?

Paul Gottfried’s essay (along with the other contributions), while diagnosing the pressing problem, also provides a potential solution. Certainly, it raises serious questions as well. But it should—it really must—be our point of departure as we sink deeper into the cesspool, the “slough of Despond,” from which there is no escape, only spiritual slavery to the powers of Darkness.

Here are Professor Gottfried’s final paragraphs which bring his essay to a close and suggest what concerned, “normal” Americans” should be considering:

The best solution, given the circumstances, is peaceful separation, a solution that can be undertaken in stages even if it cannot be achieved all at once. If Americans committed to opposing the tyrannical left can be induced to settle in common areas and if they can control local and regional administrations, then their living situation should be far from hopeless. The regime’s opponents will be in an optimal position to respond to unwelcome directives from the central state. They can simply avoid enforcing them. If this practice spreads to enough places, it will be hard for the administrative state to impose its unitary will without facing multiple challenges.

It may also be necessary for the survival of enclaves of resistance that the decision of those who choose to live under the regime be treated as irreversible, providing their decision has been reached without provable coercion. It would be foolish for those who opt for freedom to share their hard-won autonomy with those who have opted for the opposite side but who then decided to change their place of residence. Even more suicidal would be to extend full citizenship rights to those who took this step. There is no guarantee that those would-be neighbors would not be carrying with them the views and values of the place they left.

One should not confuse these hypothetical asylum seekers with former Communists who eventually fled Communist rule. Most of those refugees were staunch anti-Communists by the time they defected. Blue State residents who decide to move into Red States, by contrast, usually carry their leftist politics with them. There is no reason to think leftists will behave differently if they move into more conservative regions in the future. Regulating who settles in woke-free areas will be necessary to protect these outposts of freedom from infiltration. Therefore, any attempt by the central administration to tamper with this situation (probably by invoking the Fourteenth Amendment) must be doggedly opposed. (p.11)

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