Category Archives: The South

NEW BOOK REVIEWED ON RECKONIN’ By Dr. CLYDE WILSON

Argument, Business, Capitalism, COVID-19, Economy, Free Markets, Government, Healthcare, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, libertarianism, Nationhood, Outsourcing, Paleolibertarianism, Political Economy, Pseudoscience, Republicans, Technology, The South

The Paleolibertarian Guide to Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & the Aberrant Economy” by Ilana Mercer: A RECKONIN REVIEW by ~ CLYDE WILSON, distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at the University of South Carolina. He is the author or editor of over thirty books and published over 600 articles, essays and reviews. Dr. Wilson is also is co-publisher of Shotwell Publishing, a source for unreconstructed Southern books.

LIBERTARIANS rightly understand that economic freedom goes along with individual liberty and prosperity. But American libertarians have become, it seems, advocates of a solipsistic individual will and license. The sovereign individual is an imaginary beast that does not exist. Paleolibertarians like Ilana Mercer understand that man lives in a community, the virtues of which are necessary for capitalism and which is his best protection from intrusive government. And such virtues do not fit any and every society.

In this incisive chapter-and-verse exposé of the current American regime, she argues that the state, which now represents a merger of government and large corporations, is presiding over the destruction of American civil society. That is the nature of the touted global economy and global politics.

Mercer’s description of the American economic and social condition will not find disagreement from any Reckonin’ reader. “The business of life,” she writes, “one’s livelihood, and the locality in which one lives and loves – these are the property repositories for conservative loyalties.”

Living standards of the middle and working classes are falling. You would think this would bring the attention of public leaders. Instead, they are busy promoting ethnic chaos, genocide, and sodomy here and abroad. The Covid lockdown killed 3.3 million small businesses; the homeless now include more and more families; Deep Tech claims to need to import foreign talent (Republican boilerplate) while firing Americans. Differences in wealth distribution are higher than ever seen in history.

Our leaders don’t seem to see any problem with their ways. They don’t notice catastrophic debt and overextended, wasteful, and incompetent military as problems, despite their contribution to the “aberrant” economy.

Mercer’s treatment of health tyranny, immigration, and outsourcing is informative and hard-hitting. “The free flow of goods across borders is not to be confused with the free flow of people across borders…. The very stuff of life has been contracted out. Not mere jobs, but careers; not just some products, but entire production lines; not one or two manufacturing plants, but the means of production.”

The author advocates and illustrates a preference for good old common sense. Common sense was long the undergirding of our Anglo-American law and way of life. Why have so many abandoned it, as in the Covid fraud, for the authority of phony “expertise”?

Mercer is always a fun read because of her creative labelling: castrati Republicans, Washington wokerati, FixNews, ConOink, Learjet liberals, bafflegab for bureaucratic and progressive discourse, ‘Walmart with Missiles’ for the present U.S.

Trump Nullifies Republican Debate, AGAIN; Wisely Courts Trump Democrats

Democrats, Donald Trump, Labor, Media, Republicans, The South

I won’t be watching this make-believe Republican Debate, led by intellectual pygmies like Dana Perino, Bret Baier and at least 4 of the wannabe candidates

I do LOVE how Trump, in meta style, has made the latter—as well as all panelists on the other Fake News channels—irrelevant, white noise.

For the second time. On August of 23, some major dummies–Karl Rove (an architect of the war on Iraq), Ms. Perino, and the scintillating Trey Gowdy convened to sell something, for a change. They were trying to engineer a parallel reality for Deplorables.

As they say in the hood: Talk to the hand; the face ain’t listening.

So speak up, Ms. war-forever-more Nimrata Nikki Haley (who was empowered by Trump during his presidency), I can’t hear you. You too, Tim-something-or-another. Did you say something, Mr. anon on the upper-left of the screen?

It is an excellent political move, by the way, for Trump to be supporting labor. (I’m obviously not saying here that I support the United Autoworkers’ case.)

In this, Trump acts like a Southern Democrat (the good kind, once-upon-a-time)—and like RFK, Jr. might. Or, Trump deploys something similar to the Sailer Strategy.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is, come to think of it, a Trump Democrat (my new coinage).  The term mirrors the positive elements of a Southern Democrat.

Dixiecrats was the derogatory name the Media Ministry gave to what was really the States Rights Democratic Party. Considering that the Constitution consigns law enforcement to state and local governments, the position the Dixiecrats took was hardly subversive.

The issue of segregation or racism, moreover, is intellectually independent of states’ rights. The reason for the mistaken conflation of states’ rights and segregation resides with the same propagandists who successfully equate, for the purposes of discrediting, the right of secession with an alleged support for slavery.

* “LANCING THE LOTT,” Ilana Mercer, December 25, 2002

Harry Crews’ ‘Wildly Precise And Violent’ Excellence

Culture, English, Literature, Pop-Culture, Relatives, The South

What any good reader and writer will notice first about Harry Crews is his style, his English. Not a bit of the Yankee taint to it—that hackneyed idiom that predominates in our country ~ilana

Having stumbled on Harry Crews’ books recently, I think of him as perhaps our greatest novelist, story-teller, and stylist, who writes exquisite English; a disturbing genius, but that is what good literature does. It disturbs, rivets,  inspires, wows, and above all, it avoids the cardinal sin of boring.

Good writing is, moreover, wicked hard. Yes, the gifted few are born with The Gift. But the truths that jump out at me from this interview are these:

Gift or not, you have nothing unless you hone it, practice, know how bad you are and watch the best like a hawk. A really good writer knows exactly what is remarkable.

The other thing Crews, an ungainly man, says which is immutable truth is that the champion is in competition with the self. I can’t count the times a pompous older (always white) male wrote to put the Little Woman down for her English (“$5 dollar words”) something that, I venture, would never have been suggested to a male writer. My reply, of course, was:

“First, fuck off. Next, just to be safe, stay away from the Federalist Papers, the Anti-Federalist Papers, too.”

I can recommend “A Childhood: A Biography of a Place” (1978) and “The Gospel Singer.”

Just the title of the first!!!! Obviously: There is no home without a place, without kin. That’s Harry Crews. Straight to the truth.

What any good reader and writer will notice first about Crews is his style, his English. It’s what struck me. Not a bit of the Yankee taint to it—that hackneyed vernacular and idiom that predominate in the country. Nothing but exquisite English, idiosyncratically used.

Tennessee writer Kevin Wilson, professor at Sewanee, wrote the introduction for “The Gospel Singer.” He has similarly observed the following about Harry Crews’ style:

The novel is “horrific,” … — and yet “the sentences at times are just unbelievably beautiful.” Building on this contrast, Wilson debunks any rumor of sentimentality in the work: “Crews doesn’t have nuance regarding race or gender or religion or really anything, but the one place he is nuanced is his language.” By being “wildly precise and violent…”

The best of fiction is similarly unencumbered and thus endowed. “Wildly precise and violent” with one’s language is the way to be. If you can.

NEW COLUMN: 2-Party Pox: The Republicans Suck AND The Democrats Want To Kill You

Argument, Conservatism, Democrats, Government, Morality, Politics, Republicans, The South

NEW COLUMN IS “2-Party Pox: The Republicans Suck AND The Democrats Want To Kill You“. It is currently featured on WND.COM, The Unz Review and The New American.

Excerpt:

The Republican Party has never stood up for you, will never stand up for you and is not going to do what it takes. Past is prologue.

As Dr. Boyd Cathey has observed, the “party which never conserves anything” had been exposed as such as far back as 1875. “The great Southern author, Robert Lewis Dabney, writing a decade after the end of the War Between the States … expressed presciently this tendency of dominant, post-war Northern conservatism”:

The history of the Republican Party is “that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is to-day one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will to-morrow be forced upon its timidity, and will be succeeded by some third revolution, to be denounced and then adopted in its turn.”

A point of philosophy arises. From the progressive perspective, society—civil and state—are what shape the human being and account for his conduct. To the extent our world is filled with perverts, grifters, and deviants—they were propelled into misbehavior by societal forces often beyond their control. Or, so goes progressive-style social determinism.

Libertarians, for their part, also often err on the side of a structurally similar social determinism. The State, their reasoning goes, accounts, for the most, for deviance in society. Remove the State and you remove the incentives for people to behave badly.

This Hebrew takes the biblical view tested by time. It is that, as stated in Genesis 8:21 (with thanks to my editors), the instinct of man is evil from his youth. (Or, wackily mistranslated: “the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.”) …

READ THE REST. New column is “2-Party Pox: The Republicans Suck AND The Democrats Want To Kill You“. It is currently featured on WND.COM, The Unz Review and The New American.