Category Archives: BAB’s A List

Vulgarity And Vanity Come To The Ancient St. George Chapel, At Windsor Castle

BAB's A List, Boyd Cathey, Britain, Christianity, Conservatism, Culture, Hollywood, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Nationhood

By Dr. Boyd Cathey

… IN DECEMBER 1936, King Edward VIII abdicated as King of England, basically over his love for an American divorcee, Wallis Simpson, something deeply frowned on and disapproved of back then—yet scarcely forty-five years later the heir apparent to the English throne, Prince Charles, married Lady Diana Spencer, a disastrous matrimony that would assist immeasurably in discrediting the House of Windsor, which had already begun a decline many years earlier.

But like most current ruling monarchies today, the catch phrase is “relevance,” getting “with it,” so to speak, with all current fads, breaking with tradition, basically turning a backside to the past and its critical importance in the survival of the nation. And if that means inviting a whole slew of remarkably disreputable Hollywood types, not to mention pseudo-celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, into the great halls and chapels that once beheld the noble figures of a King Charles the Martyr or Victoria Regina, then so be it.

And then there was the ungracious spectacle of the “Presiding Bishop,” Michael Curry, of what is called the Episcopal Church in the United States. Curry, a few years back, was the Episcopal bishop in North Carolina, and distinguished himself for his left-wing social and religious views—he would much rather preach the gospel of “Saint” Martin Luther King than St. Paul: too many inconveniences and prohibitions in the Pauline message!

And he did not disappoint in St. George’s Chapel: jumping around like a jack-rabbit, pretending he was sermonizing to a group of illiterate Yazoo bayou dwellers in Mississippi, he brought, as admiring Fox commentator/airhead Ainsley Earhardt fawned, “a wonderful and inspiring American element” to the wedding. [Where, pray tell, does Fox get all these brainless blondes from?]

For thirteen minutes he basically said just one sentence: “How great is love!” But he managed to mix in bits of MLK (yeah, cheater King was an expert on conjugal love!), civil rights, and a social gospel totally extraneous to the supposed occasion.

The Windors, for the most part, set stony-faced, enveloped by the tide of nonsense and relevance that has overwhelmed them. Oh, certainly, it was said that the ceremony
“combined the best of British tradition with a new and fresh ‘American’ approach.” But what it actually did was point out sharply the truth … about monarchy and monarchs in the modern world:

“They are increasingly a ‘sign of contradiction’; this must be their role in our world. If they fail in this—if they embrace all the tawdry excesses and excrescences of our times—they will forfeit that historic role, and rightly so.”

Our world is perishing for the lack of heroes, for the lack of those Don Juans of Austria, for those new and courageous Stonewall Jacksons and King John Sobieskis who would stand manfully against the onrushing tide of Modernity and decay in our civilization. The awe and reverence, the understanding that the past is never really “past,” that it is always potentially within us, and that it can inform our steps and continue to inspire us and anneal us in its grace, is a precious legacy, an invaluable gift from our ancestors and Christendom. We forfeit it, and the blackness of despair and death awaits us.

When the traditional champions of our culture and civilization quit the field, as the Windsors have done, only Evil—the “rough beast”—smiles.

… READ THE REST. The complete commentary is “That Royal Wedding, Reverend Michael Curry, and the End of England.”

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~ DR. BOYD D. CATHEY is an Unz Review columnist, as well as a Barely a Blog contributor, whose work is easily located on this site under the “BAB’s A List” search category. Dr. Cathey earned an MA in history at the University of Virginia (as a Thomas Jefferson Fellow), and as a Richard M Weaver Fellow earned his doctorate in history and political philosophy at the University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain. After additional studies in theology and philosophy in Switzerland, he taught in Argentina and Connecticut before returning to North Carolina. He was State Registrar of the North Carolina State Archives before retiring in 2011. He writes for The Unz Review, The Abbeville Institute, Confederate Veteran magazine, The Remnant, and other publications in the United States and Europe on a variety of topics, including politics, social and religious questions, film, and music.

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The Conservative Cult Of Dr. Martin Luther King, Communist, Plagiarist, And Worse

BAB's A List, Boyd Cathey, Communism, Conservatism, Cultural Marxism, Ethics, History, Intellectualism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Morality, Republicans

I almost lost my lunch listening to a radio rerun of Sean Hannity’s odes to Martin Luther King Jr.  To declare the schmaltzy, sub-intellectual fare of  King Jr.  to be the greatest thinking ever is to kill one’s intellectual credibility and affront the history of thought. I read Plato—yes yes, he was a statist—and I think, “Just wow,”and “what genius.” I listen to the “I Have a Dream” speech, and I think, “Oprah,” and “what kitsch.”

Barley A Blog correspondent Dr. Boyd Cathey fills in the blanks:

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 Martin Luther King Jr. 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 plagiarized as much as 40 percent 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-age children) [cf., Cooper Sterling, 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 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 paleolibertarians 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 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—are all swept under the carpet or carefully ignored.

In this, in fact, the dominant necons 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 becomes, 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 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 Dr. Martin Luther 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 slobbering Mainstream Media or the media mavens on Fox News. 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.

THERE IS MORE HERE.

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~ DR. BOYD D. CATHEY is an Unz Review columnist, as well as a Barely a Blog contributor, whose work is easily located on this site under the “BAB’s A List” search category. Dr. Cathey earned an MA in history at the University of Virginia (as a Thomas Jefferson Fellow), and as a Richard M Weaver Fellow earned his doctorate in history and political philosophy at the University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain. After additional studies in theology and philosophy in Switzerland, he taught in Argentina and Connecticut before returning to North Carolina. He was State Registrar of the North Carolina State Archives before retiring in 2011. He writes for The Unz Review, The Abbeville Institute, Confederate Veteran magazine, The Remnant, and other publications in the United States and Europe on a variety of topics, including politics, social and religious questions, film, and music.

UPDATED II (12/6): The Kate Steinle Verdict: A Nation Of Laws? What Laws? Cui Bono?

BAB's A List, Boyd Cathey, Ethics, IMMIGRATION, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim

By Dr. Boyd Cathey

After the decision by a San Francisco jury in the Kate Steinle murder case and the acquittal on all murder charges of the five times illegal immigrant and seven times felon, Jose Garcia Zarate, American citizens—at least the ones who still care about the rule of law and about the future of this country—should be rightfully outraged. Not even found guilty of the lesser murder charge, involuntary manslaughter, which given Zarate’s defense should have been what he might have hoped for—the California jury found him innocent on all counts of murder, with a slap on the wrists for possession of a purloined firearm. That’s it. And the jury was not even permitted to take into consideration the illegal Mexican’s history of criminality—repeated felonies and multiple illegal entries (each time returning across the porous California border to commit more crimes).

Here is how Ron Woodard, of NC Listen, an immigration reform organization, characterized what happened:

Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, the illegal immigrant who murdered Kate Steinle in San Francisco, was acquitted of murder and manslaughter charges but found guilty of being a felon in possession of a firearm.  San Francisco has in effect urinated on our Constitution and the rule of law as Kate Steinle’s parents grieve again as the murderer of their daughter will likely serve only 2-3 years in California prison.  Assuming California does not turn Zarate lose yet again after serving in their prison, Zarate may serve a couple of additional years in federal prison for having been deported so many times, but again the total prison time given the crime is a slap on the wrist.

“I actually met Kate’s Mom in Washington, DC this past September while attending a FAIR event along with meeting with staff members of Republican members of Congress from North Carolina and Senator Richard Burr.  Please pray for Kate’s family as they suffer again due to today’s gross miscarriage of justice.

“Garcia Zarate had been deported five times and the federal government was seeking to deport him a sixth time when he was instead released by San Francisco authorities under their sanctuary policy restricting cooperation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.  Kate Steinle’s death was totally preventable and a stain on our judicial system.  This is another sad day for our nation.” [November 30, 2017; ronwoodard@ncisten.com]

As he has been in jail for nearly two years awaiting trial and the minimum he can get for the firearms violation is two years, possibly in a month Zarate will walk free—once again. True, the federal immigration authorities will probably deport him one more time, but, who is to say that within a month or so he won’t be back in Sanctuary City San Francisco, or at least back in Sanctuary State California, which have become like illegal immigrant Meccas in horse pastures to swarms of nutrient-seeking flies? And which new victim will die needlessly next time?

San Francisco and California have made it very clear to any and all illegals, whether violent criminals or not, that they are welcome, and that the state and municipal governments will do everything in their power to protect and coddle them, including providing top drawer legal counsel for the basest of criminals—if they are illegal immigrants.

Yet, the simple fact is this: Zarate and others like him are not American citizens. How can they—how does he—merit attorneys paid-for-by-American-taxpayers, indeed, the very best lawyers that most Americans could never afford? What kind of “justice” system is that? And what kind of system is so degenerate that, with passion and zeal, it basically drops all other concerns to spend its time, efforts and money on defending a murderer who, had he been a regular white male citizen, would no doubt have been thrown to the dogs?

But it goes further than this. After the verdict was reached and defense attorney Matt Gonzalez and his co-counsel went to the microphone to comment, they could not resist turning this judicial circus into a vicious ideological attack on President Trump and anyone who believes in protecting our borders. Indeed, instead of a case which should have been about justice for the murdered Kate Steinle, both men attempted to convert it crassly into a political circus, which undoubtedly for them it was. They launched into a defense of illegal immigration and an assault on the president and his agenda as “racist” and “bigoted.” In other words, if anyone raises even the slightest question or doubt, not just about the verdict but about illegal immigration, itself, then ipso facto, that is a manifestation of the now unforgivable sin of racism.

The jury verdict and the comments by Zarate’s attorneys were an affront to millions of hardworking, law-abiding citizens, and one more illustration of the nature of this nation’s immigration system. But they also clearly indicate the ideological significance of the country’s growing illegal population and the uses to which that population is put by America’s political elites. And it is not just limited to manipulation by Leftist Democrats searching for “replacement” voters to take the place of former blue collar Democrats in places like Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania who have finally figured out where their essential interests lie, but it embraces much of the Republican establishment and “conservative” movement and their inability to actually deal with the problem (or if they do, to basically cave to Open Border zealots or to the enticements from Big Business).

Thus, it is no exaggeration to state that the blood of Kate Steinle and thousands like her does not just weigh down on and indict the legal system and leaders of San Francisco and California, it also is an indictment of culture traitors like Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake, and the reprehensible Thom Tillis from North Carolina, securely snuggled away in the deep pockets of the Chambers of Commerce and big agri-business, with their reassuring belief in “universal equality and human rights” as somehow conservative values. Their misplaced “humanitarianism” and their subservience to their major donors is both shameful and potentially fatal to the very existence of the American nation.

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~ DR. BOYD D. CATHEY is an Unz Review columnist, as well as a Barely a Blog contributor, whose work is easily located on this site under the “BAB’s A List” search category. Dr. Cathey earned an MA in history at the University of Virginia (as a Thomas Jefferson Fellow), and as a Richard M Weaver Fellow earned his doctorate in history and political philosophy at the University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain. After additional studies in theology and philosophy in Switzerland, he taught in Argentina and Connecticut before returning to North Carolina. He was State Registrar of the North Carolina State Archives before retiring in 2011. He writes for The Unz Review, The Abbeville Institute, Confederate Veteran magazine, The Remnant, and other publications in the United States and Europe on a variety of topics, including politics, social and religious questions, film, and music.

UPDATE (2/12):

UPDATE (12/6):

UPDATED (11/7): America’s Embracing Cultural Marxism; Putin’s Reviving Russian Traditionalism

BAB's A List, Boyd Cathey, Christianity, Communism, Conservatism, Cultural Marxism, John McCain, Nationhood, Neoconservatism, Russia

By Dr. Boyd Cathey

The unrestrained Russophobia of a John McCain or a Bill Kristol or Max Boot is grounded in their essential belief in such concepts as international “human rights” and America’s role as the global “enforcer” of those rights, which impels them to condemn Russia’s “persecution” of homosexuals, its institution of mandatory Christian religious instruction in its public schools (which neoconservatives condemn as “religious intolerance”), and its refusal to accept the economic and political straightjacket of the EU or other “international organizations.”

Additionally, as many of the leading Neocon pundits and writers are of Russian Jewish descent and Russian nationalism and Orthodoxy imply for them various forms of historical anti-semitism and the pre-revolutionary era anti-Jewish pogroms, Putin’s Russia is seen as symbolizing a possible recrudescence of those evils (despite the strong support he has received from Russia’s native Jewish population).

So, thus, the conjunction and harmony of Max Boot’s and Romney’s view, with George Soros’s view that Russia is now globally, “enemy number one.” And thus, also, some of the reasons for that unseemly ideological “marriage”….

Back at the beginning of 2015 (December 29, 2014), I wrote a long, heavily documented article about Putin and Putin’s Russia, attempting to shed some light on his past and the various largely spurious accusations leveled against him. It was reprinted by over thirteen web sites, both in the United States and overseas, and translated into Italian, Russian and a couple of other languages. I won’t reproduce it today, although it may be accessed at: http://www.unz.com/article/examining-the-hatred-of-vladimir-putin-and-russia/ (I have revised and updated it since then and can send that newer version to anyone requesting it.) Rather, today I will offer some details of what the media, in its near entirety, does not report, or, if it does, it does with a pronounced and virulent anti-Putin bias.

Over the past few months Russia has been commemorating the 100th anniversary of the bloody Bolshevik Revolution (1917), the results of which included the violent and horrible deaths of approximately 100 million human  beings (according to the authoritative Black Book of Communism). Vladimir Putin has repeatedly traveled to various sites of infamous Communist murder and criminality from that era, and has dedicated memorials—“walls of grief”—and newly-erected and rebuilt Christian churches to memorialize and honor those victims. Russian cinema has, likewise, joined this effort of memory and correcting the Marxist view of history, with numerous (and popular) films that portray a frankly, very open anti-Communist viewpoint.

You would think that the Western media and our Western political leaders would welcome this—that after the life-and-death struggle with Communism for over seven decades our leaders would celebrate this turn of events.

But, no, rather Putin’s praxis is seen as nothing more than “calculating,” the “insincere use” of those anniversaries to consolidate his “dictatorial” or “neo-Stalinist” rule, and, more grievously, his refusal to fully accept all those wonderful fruits of Western-style globalism and, yes, his unreasonable rejection of the triumph of that other variant of Marxism, the dominant Cultural Marxism which pervades the West.

Is this not, then, Leon Trotsky’s revenge? Stalin’s legions were incapable of bringing down the Christian West, and Soviet Communism of the doddering Kremlin commissars ended up on that “ash heap of history.” But Trotsky, whom Stalin had murdered in his Mexican exile in 1940, now, with his millions of ideological descendants and godchildren, appears well on his way to actual and ultimate triumph.

Today, then, I ask your indulgence at the length: I pass on four items that offer a somewhat impressionistic view of what has happened in and to Russia since August 1991, when Vladimir Putin—that ex-KGB bureaucrat—was largely responsible for thwarting and defeating the KGB coup against the incipient anti-Communist Russian republic. (Yes, that is just one fact most of our Neocon pundits like to omit.) First, London-based Professor Paul Robinson’s examination of how the establishment Western media continues to ignore Putin’s open and vigorous rejection of Soviet Communism and his exhibited desire to memorialize its victims.

Second, I pass on a short article that appeared in The Washington Post back in 2008, shortly after the death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in which he praised Putin’s efforts to revive Russia’s traditional Christian and moral heritage, and, equally, Putin’s praise of Solzhenitsyn’s valiant opposition to Godless Communism.

Third, from that epitome of Establishment Deep State “high” journalism, I reproduce a 2013 article from The Atlantic monthly, worryingly suggesting that Putin was becoming the head of a “worldwide traditionalist conservative crusade” against the progressivist and modern West. It literally sent shivers down their secularist spines. Yet, the article is fascinating for offering a view in not only the minds of the cultural Marxist Left, but, with a certain irony, found also in much of basic Neocon thinking.

Fourth, from the large collection of Putin’s speeches that I have archived, I pass on excerpts of his “State of the State” address to the Russian people, December 16, 2013—this is representative of the rhetoric and imagery, and the historical references that he employs in most of his addresses, and also exemplifies the type of conservative legislation his political party, United Russia, has enacted in the Russian Duma. (The UR party hold 340 of the 450 seats.)

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~ DR. BOYD D. CATHEY is an Unz Review columnist, as well as a Barely a Blog contributor, whose work is easily located on this site under the “BAB’s A List” search category. Dr. Cathey earned an MA in history at the University of Virginia (as a Thomas Jefferson Fellow), and as a Richard M Weaver Fellow earned his doctorate in history and political philosophy at the University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain. After additional studies in theology and philosophy in Switzerland, he taught in Argentina and Connecticut before returning to North Carolina. He was State Registrar of the North Carolina State Archives before retiring in 2011. He writes for The Unz Review, The Abbeville Institute, Confederate Veteran magazine, The Remnant, and other publications in the United States and Europe on a variety of topics, including politics, social and religious questions, film, and music.

Related:

“Examining the Hatred of Vladimir Putin and Russia” By Boyd Cathey.

“Wall of Grief” BY PROFESSOR PAUL ROBINSON.

“Toward end, Solzhenitsyn embraced Putin’s Russia,” Boston.com.

“Vladimir Putin, Conservative Icon,” By Brian Whitmore.

TRANSCRIPT: [Putin] Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly.

UPDATE (11/7):

Comments Off on UPDATED (11/7): America’s Embracing Cultural Marxism; Putin’s Reviving Russian Traditionalism

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